#236: The Alien of Extraordinary Ability

Murray Carter (@CarterCutlery https://twitter.com/CarterCutlery) is a Canadian craftsman like no other. At eighteen, he fell into an apprenticeship with a sixteenth generation Yoshimoto bladesmith that lasted six years -- and was asked to take the position of number seventeen in the Sakemoto family tradition (perhaps the only Caucasian ever to have had the honor and privilege of this position). Murray continued forging blades in Japan for twelve more years and in June 2001, he was awarded the rating of Mastersmith by the American Bladesmith Society, thus proving the highest degree of competency by Western standards. In 2005, he moved to the United States (as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability, no less) to start Carter Cutlery https://www.cartercutlery.com/; he has continued forging blades in Oregon since. This is a fascinating episode on many levels, so please enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim, the world's most popular meditation app (with more than four million users). It's used in more than 150 countries, and many of my closest friends swear by it. Try Headspace's free Take10 program https://www.headspace.com/tim — 10 minutes of guided meditation a day for 10 days. It's like a warm bath for your mind. Meditation doesn't need to be complicated or expensive, and it's had a huge impact on my life. Try Headspace for free https://www.headspace.com/tim for a few days and see what I mean. This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now -- this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  What did you have for breakfast?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  For breakfast, I had the same thing I eat every day, which was a wonderful egg omelet, including chopped up jalapeno peppers, onions, mushrooms, and spinach.

• 0:11Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds delicious. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:20Speaker 02

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:22Speaker 03

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:35Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Headspace, the world's most popular meditation app. I have it on my phone. I use it all the time when I'm in Ubers, when I'm in airplanes, when I'm in those in-between spaces and I want to do some good for myself. Across all of the guests that I've had on this podcast, more than 80% have the common behavior, the common habit of some type of meditative practice. It does not have to be complicated or expensive. Headspace is meditation made simple. I've used it for hundreds of sessions myself. It provides guided meditations that you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, whether on your phone, computer, or tablet. They have sessions that focus on everything from decreasing stress and anxiety to eating healthier, sleeping better,

• 1:19Tim Ferriss?

  and even being more creative. But I suggest you keep it simple, simple, simple. This has had a huge impact on my life. Try their Take 10 program. It is fantastic. 10 minutes of guided meditation a day for 10 days. It costs you nothing. Try it out and I promise, and I don't do this very much, that you will see a significant benefit from it. Download the Headspace app and train your mind for a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/tim. That's headspace.com/tim.

• 1:57Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish folks, young entrepreneurs, very talented, after an acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which is mushroom coffee. The specific one includes chaga and lion's mane. And it knocked my socks off. I highly recommend if you try it, you start with half a packet. It's very strong and lights you up like a Christmas tree in the best way possible. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect

• 2:42Tim Ferriss?

  and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water and oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option.

• 3:26Tim Ferriss?

  And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner in my kitchen. You can try something, you can try a sample pack, which is great also, right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That's four Sigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim. And use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive, anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them.

• 3:58Tim Ferriss?

  Hello ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview world-class performers and tease out the habits, routines, tactics, etc. that you can use and apply in mediate, inmediatamente, that's what he says, in español, si se habla español. Okay, so, moving on, why am I in the language vibe? Because I've got a Japanese treat for you guys. This time, it's not military, it's not entertainment, it's not chess, it is not business per se. We have a master Japanese bladesmith, and it is a very fascinating story. I have, since day one on this podcast,

• 4:38Tim Ferriss?

  wanted to have the chance to have a long, in-depth conversation with a bladesmith. I love knives, I collect knives, and now we have Murray Carter on the podcast. I'm not going to give you his full bio, because it unfolds in the process of this conversation, but I had an absolute blast. If you want to get into knives, you want to get into Japan, you want to get into martial arts, if you have even a passing interest in someone with a high degree of, I'm not going to say OCD, but attention to detail that nearly boggles the mind, someone who went from class clown to doing an 18-year stint in Japan, then

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  this is the podcast for you. I really am so excited to provide this to you guys, because it exceeded all of my expectations. Murray Carter, he is @cartercutlery on Facebook and Instagram, definitely check out the Instagram, was raised in Nova Scotia, and that's in Canada, our fine neighbors to the north, and came in contact with Japanese culture when he attended a karate competition at the age of 15. And I'm going to save a lot of his story for the actual conversation, which leads to a chance encounter with a 16th generation bladesmith.

• 5:56Tim Ferriss?

  Then 18 years in Japan, then being declared an alien of extraordinary ability. Those words are capitalized by the INS in the US when he was granted immigration status to relocate, is now in Portland, Oregon. This is, for me, a really, really fun podcast to finally publish its one. I have dreamt of having since the very first episode, even before recording the first episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. So, without further ado, please enjoy, actually, I'm going to have some ado, but without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Murray Carter. And I would also, just as a quick reminder and suggestion, if you are not subscribed to Five Bullet Friday, this is one of the most popular things that I do. It is completely free.

• 6:39Tim Ferriss?

  Every Friday, I send out a short email with bullets of the coolest articles, purchases, movies, hacks, experiments, et cetera, that I have either been dabbling with, or enjoyed, or had referred to me by all of these various experts I have in my life and that I've spent time with. So, Five Bullet Friday, it's free. It has a 60-plus percent open rate, and it is a lot of fun. So, if you haven't checked that out, go to tim.blog/friday, and you can sign up. tim.blog/friday, and there's all sorts of exclusive stuff, private Q and A's, events, and so on, things from various guests. It's fun. So, check that out, Five Bullet Friday, tim.blog/friday.

• 7:24Tim Ferriss?

  And now, Murray Carter.

• 7:28Tim Ferriss?

  Murray, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Tim. I am very excited to connect for many reasons. And number one, from the very outset, one of my fantasies for this podcast was at some point having on a master bladesmith. And we can get into why that's the case, but I wanted that to be one of my objectives and fantasies realized, in a sense. So, I'm checking that box, number one. Number two is that I felt like you were somehow brought to me, not to get too woo-woo, but just in the last few months, I've had a close friend who's former special operations tell me that I had to take a class of yours, at the very least, to make a neck knife or some

• 8:13Tim Ferriss?

  other type of knife. To try to learn the craft and then also spent time last week with a well-known film director whose son has become a huge fan of yours and is studying the craft. So on many levels, I think that this was in some form destined to be. And I would love to start with just a little bit of background. And I think that maybe the easiest way to jump into it is to say, cover where you grew up and how Japan entered the picture.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to share that story with you. I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and at a very young age, I became very interested in martial arts and military history and kind of the outdoors and watching movies like Jeremiah Johnson and so on gave me a great fascination for tools and knives and weapons and so on. And when I was 15 years old, I was lucky to attend a regional karate competition as a guest, as an observer, and that really piqued my interest. And so I actually enrolled in a karate dojo and did that for several years.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And that started my real fascination with Japan. And then, of course, I kind of coupled that that interest with reading books about the martial arts and ninjas and so on, and of course, you know, samurais and samurai swords and the blades that they they used. And that's kind of where the fascination with Japan started.

• 9:50Tim Ferriss?

  When did that become and how did that become an opportunity to go to Japan? And in terms of age, you were, what, 15 or so at the time?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Well, I started karate when I was 15. That would be in high school. And I graduated high school when I was 17 and then turned 18 that summer. And I worked for a full year. Uh, well, I worked for, I don't know, several months and then the spring of the following year while I was still 18, I, I did travel to Japan. And the, the destination within Japan was kind of predetermined for me. That was the prefecture called Kumamoto Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, the, the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan. Because that's where the karate dojo was located that I was going to attend to further and continue my studies in karate.

• 10:42Tim Ferriss?

  What type of, what type of karate was that?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  It's a, it's called chito ryu. It's spelled C H I T O hyphen R Y U. And it's a, it's a, a, a version of shito ryu, which is a, a little bit more well-known. I guess it originates from Okinawa. And one of the main features of chito ryu was a higher, more mobile stance than a lot of the other traditional forms of karate like shodokan or goju-ryu, which have very low, very, uh, like, uh, low center of gravity stances for, for kind of solidity, but lacking maybe a little bit in mobility and, and flexibility.

• 11:27Tim Ferriss?

  So when I first came across a few of the snippets of your bio, I thought to myself, okay, this is, is really a conversation that has to happen because one of the most life-changing events in my life was 1992. I was in high school, 15, and I had the opportunity to switch out of Spanish class because I'd concluded I was bad at Spanish into a different language. And my friends were in Japanese class and I was always fascinated by martial arts, ninjas and so on.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Ah-ha.

• 12:00Tim Ferriss?

  And went to then Japanese class. Six months later, had the opportunity to leave the US on my first extended trip overseas to a sister school, which was in Tokyo. So at 15, went to Tokyo and stayed there for a year in a Japanese school with a Japanese family. And At that time, just, I'm gonna, not really a digression, because I feel like I want to share this with you, so there's a little bit of common ground. I remember the first time I went to a karate school in Japan to take a class, and I went to a seido kai kung, I went to a seido kai school, and that was my first introduction

• 12:43Tim Ferriss?

  to leg kicks, and mainly on the receiving end, and I remember-

• 12:48Speaker 01

  You were the punching bag.

• 12:49Tim Ferriss?

  I was the punching bag, and I remember I came in, and they're like, "Oh," you know, they're like, "Oh," this was like former, or at the time, current wrestler, foreigner, I was the only one in the school, they're like, "Okay, well, like, let's see, let's see how you move around," and no head contact, and so I'm punching this guy in the chest, and every time I punched him in the chest, he would kick me in the leg, and I said, "Well, that's a great trade, I'm just gonna punch you in the chest all day, you can kick me in the leg as many times as you want," and I couldn't go to school the next day.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And your leg was all swollen.

• 13:18Tim Ferriss?

  Because my leg was ruined. How did, how did you then go from, I guess, two questions. Number one is, how did the opportunity come about for you to travel to Japan to further your studies? And then, secondly, where did, where did blades come into play?

• 13:40Speaker 01

  So, you know, when I was in high school, I really caught a travel bug, and that kind of fed into my fierce, kind of independent spirit, and although it wasn't really popular at the time, I started hitchhiking when I was 14 years old, and I, and I found the wondrous joys of being able to hike out to a highway and stick my thumb out and get to places I wanted to get to without having had to save up money to buy my own car, pay for the insurance, or pay for the gasoline. It was a wonderful experience, and I traveled all over the province of Nova Scotia doing that, and, you know, the more I did it, it kind of, the more obsessed and compelled I felt to do that.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  So, by the time I was 16 years old, I actually traveled to Europe by myself over the school Christmas vacation, and spent three weeks in Europe, visiting some acquaintances, and also, you know, venturing to places I had never been by myself before. So, uh, after high school, you know, I was very keen to travel. And I, although I, uh, had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that, uh, you know, studies were awaiting and that there was, uh, an expectation both self, uh, incurred and, and, and, you know, through my family to attend higher education. I couldn't ignore the, uh, the overwhelming desire to travel.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  So after high school, I started to put this trip together that really was supposed to be a round the world tour. When I was still in high school, uh, one of the seniors that graduated two years before me had done, uh, a round the world tour. At the time, I believe you could, through some different airlines, you could purchase a very special, uh, plane ticket where so long as you kept moving in the same direction around the globe for one set fare, it was something like $6,000 or something at the time, you could continue to keep flying to different destinations so long as you kept moving, uh, in one direction so that eventually you would end up, uh, in the same place that

• 15:49Speaker 01

  you started from and then your ticket would expire. So it was, it was around the world airfare, basically. And, uh, I, when, uh, this senior came back from his world trip, his story was featured in the local newspaper and I read it in its entirety and became very inspired and thought, wow, that's exactly, uh, what I want to do is emulate this round the world tour. And so I concocted a, a plan that would have me hitchhike across North America. And then from, uh, the west coast, depart to Japan and stay there for six months where I would continue and further my education in karate and hopefully have some sort of cultural experience while I was there, but I didn't know what that was going to look like.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  And from there, I was going to travel around the rest of Southeast Asia. Uh, I had planned to take a cargo ship, I think, from there to India and then another cargo ship from India to Africa and travel through Africa and up through Europe and back to Nova Scotia, my hometown. And that was the plan. And, uh, I had budgeted time for it. I had budgeted money for it. And you know, I had, I was in the process of actively trying to establish connections and links and leads, you know, so that I would know people at some of these destinations I was hoping to get to, but I probably had thirty or forty percent of it figured out and the rest I was just going to wing, you know, wing it as I went along.

• 17:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's a, it's a good ratio. I think that's actually a very good ratio.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Well, just like your friends in, in certain communities, the high speed, low drag, you know, there's, there's a beauty in not being, you know, chained down with too many plans or promises, so.

• 17:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, as a, as a friend of mine, Rolf Potts, who wrote a book that had a huge impact on me called Vagabonding, who is a long, long time, long term traveler, ultimately the ability to improvise is more valuable than the, a lot of the planning you do on the front end, which you put differently. And, and so you get to Japan, you have this, you have this forty percent figured out. What happens?

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So as fate would have it, so I immediately enrolled in the Karate Dojo, the, what they call the Honbu Dojo, which is like the headquarters for our style of Chitoryu Karate. And I did, I just want to say, I want to put a plug in there that, that they were very, very kind to me and it was a great experience and I can't say enough kind things about that, about the people that I met there and the, the sensei who was there. But I digress. I, I was very keen and every morning started at six o'clock where we would meet and go into a special tatami mat room and light incense and kind

• 18:43Speaker 01

  of give homage to the ancestors of the, of the Karate Sensei's family who, you know, kind of who started the whole thing, who had passed on. And then we would go to each corner of the room, each, each one of the participants and sit in zazen or basically sit on your knees, you know, with your feet kind of tucked up underneath your buttocks for thirty minutes. And it was absolutely excruciating and your feet would fall asleep and you were wondering why in the world you traveled across the globe to, to find yourself sitting in this excruciating position for thirty minutes every morning, but. After that, 6:30, the bell would ring, much to our relief, and then we would go off

• 19:22Speaker 01

  and we would meet in the karate dojo at 6:45. And we had practices every morning like that, and then we'd have practices three times, I think it was Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, in the evening. And, you know, I was just in karate heaven. And, you know, I was practicing with some guys who would progress on to be world champions. So I really was amongst some great skill and talent and dedicated folks. But what happened, the connection to knives was this. Roughly around the fourth week of practicing karate, it was one of those evening practices, and we were doing, let's see if I can recall what is called,

• 20:03Speaker 01

  a jumping flying sidekick. And so you would kind of run up, you're gonna do the triple jump, and launch yourself into the air, and do a sidekick at some imaginary target. No one ever taught you that if you actually made contact in that position, what you would do next, but mostly it was just flying through the air. I think we were very ill-prepared for actually kicking anything in that manner. You certainly wouldn't want to go running up and jump at a wall and try to kick it, because I don't think the outcome would be very favorable. But, anyway, when I was coming down to land from that position, I didn't quite have my feet and knees in front of me. And so I very much had one of my legs,

• 20:47Speaker 01

  I think it was my left leg. I was kicking with my right leg, and my left leg, when I came down and landed, I dislocated my knee. So it was, fortunately, it was kind of a mild dislocation, but it was a dislocation nonetheless. And I had to go to the hospital and get a bunch of liquid removed from somewhere in the knee joint. And the doctor there put a cast on my leg that basically went from my left ankle all the way up to my, you know, top of my thigh, my left leg. And he said I had to keep it on for three weeks. And, you know, that's the curse of being an 18-year-old. You think you're invincible. So, of course, I convinced them to take it off, I think, after one week. And I never

• 21:29Speaker 01

  ever fully recovered. In fact, it turns out I've got a completely torn ACL, and I've been living with it and managing just fine for all these years, ever since, almost 30 years later. I'm 47 now. So...

• 21:45Speaker 01

  So now I'm immobile and I'm in the karate dojo, kind of in there, in the barracks, we'll call it, and not really able to practice. And the karate teacher comes in, Chitose Sensei was his name, great man, great man. And he kind of threw a Japanese language textbook at me. And I couldn't tell like, if it was an aggressive throw or a kind toss, but either way, it really was an amazing gift. And up to that point, I had acquired no Japanese language ability. And here was a textbook that was a very well-written textbook, and I started to read it and work through the problems and started to study the language. And that changed everything.

• 22:31Tim Ferriss?

  And what was, what was the consequence of adding some Japanese speaking ability to your skill set at that point?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think you're aware, because I could tell from the way you've spoken some Japanese words that you've acquired quite a level of proficiency in the language. But, you know, it opened up a whole lot more doors to me. And of course, it opened up conversation, it opened up friendships, it opened up the possibilities of travel, pursuing hobbies outside of karate. I, you know, I thought that I had a very kind of open mind when I went to Japan, but in hindsight, really, I was just, I was just bonkers for karate, and I really wasn't seeing much outside of that world. But once I started to learn the language and made some friends who were outside of the karate circle, that's when

• 23:27Speaker 01

  everything really opened up for me and a lot of doors opened. And that's what opened up the possibility to start studying bladesmithing.

• 23:34Tim Ferriss?

  So I had a very similar experience, different domain, but not too dissimilar. I went to a school in Tokyo called Seikai Koto Gakuen, which is in Kichijoji. So for those people in or eager to visit, say, Tokyo, the Inokashira Park is right next to or very close to where this school is located. And as a student, I had to wear the uniform. It looks like a Chinese Mandarin collar, odd-looking seifuku, as they call it. I'm glad they had your size. Oh, yeah, they needed to do some special, some special work to get a first-year

• 24:19Tim Ferriss?

  high school student to fit this jacket. So it was, I was actually very fond of having a uniform. It simplified things dramatically. So I had this uniform. And as part of the school, it was very much Where's Waldo in the sense that I could easily be spotted as the only American in this school, 5,000 Japanese. And everyone had to do bukatsu. So bukatsu is- After-school activities. Exactly. You have to choose a club. It is mandatory, or was at least at Sekai. So I had to choose between, well, the, the clubs that were eager or interested in potentially having me were rugby, so like, alright, you're bigger than most first-years, so that'll be an asset. Kendo, which I was interested in already, and that's where I thought I was headed.

• 25:03Tim Ferriss?

  And then judo approached me. And judo, I thought, at the time, was very much like, say, aikido, where it's some guy comes at you with this very exaggerated faux-knife thrust, and then you whip him around and Steven Seagal him to the ground. I was like, well, it's not terribly interesting to me because from all the wrestling and so on that I've done, I'm more interested in a resisting opponent. And I was like, okay. And then the judo guy has taught me or showed me very quickly that judo is very much full contact and really similar to wrestling. And when, at the time, I couldn't read a single kanji, so the Chinese, for people who are listening, Chinese characters adopted by the Japanese, had a basic grasp of the

• 25:47Tim Ferriss?

  syllabaries of Japanese, so the hiragana and katakana, but otherwise was really at a where is the bathroom, thank you, good morning, level of Japanese. And it was, it wasn't until- I had the motivation to get better at judo and realized that the best textbooks were all in Japanese at the time at least. And then had friends support me by pointing me to comic books that I could use to learn dialogue, that all the doors opened up, like you said. And I just want to speak in defense of Japanese people for a second here, which is to say that a lot of non-Japanese who visit Japan come back and they're like, "Oh, the inscrutable Japanese, they're so xenophobic and they're so hard to connect with."

• 26:31Tim Ferriss?

  And I don't think that's, I don't think that's actually a fair assessment in most cases. The Japanese, uh, this is a bit of a rant, so bear with me, but when they were, when, you know, the, uh, the gods of the universe were handing out phonemes and sounds, the Japanese got a pretty short hand. They didn't get a lot of sounds. So Japanese are very insecure about their ability in other languages and have trouble, as most people know, distinguishing between L and R and so on. And they're, they, as a result, have a very, uh, rote-driven approach to memorizing, say, vocab, but they shy away from speaking or trying to speak English. And I think that is, at least in my experience, the main barrier.

• 27:16Tim Ferriss?

  As soon as you speak, even, you can hold a two-minute conversation or you have a dozen phrases memorized, I mean, they will literally clap their hands. I mean, you've seen this. Oh, sure. And go, "Wah, houjozous desu ne." Yeah, exactly. And like, the, the, the, the response that you get is so exaggerated, uh, but wonderful in Japan, that as soon as, as, as you make the effort, like, all of the doors open. And it's just, and, um, so that's, I'm gonna shut up now, but the, uh, I just, I hate to hear...

• 27:55Tim Ferriss?

  The Japanese described as so arms distance and so on from people who have not taken the time to learn even 10 words in Japanese.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 28:07Tim Ferriss?

  But I so I get very excited when and I feel like there's someone who's had a similar experience. So how did the blades then come into the picture?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Well, I just just before I get into that, I just wanted to comment on your experience in Japan. And it's cool that we were in Japan at the same time because I've been there since 1988. So in 92, you know, I was I was up to my eyeballs in bladesmithing and all sorts of other things. But I just wanted to say that your astute observations about the Japanese culture and the way you picked up the language and the unique experience that you had, it's commendable really because I think I think you you understand that of the 10 other thousand people who've

• 28:56Speaker 01

  had a similar experience to you, your your understanding and appreciation and comprehension of what you actually underwent and the Japanese heart and the Japanese psyche, the Shimaguni Konshin, you you it's really commendable, your level of of appreciation for what you underwent.

• 29:22Tim Ferriss?

  I appreciate no, I appreciate that. It was a complete life changer for me and fundamentally changed my entire trajectory. And I'm still in touch with my my host family. I had dinner with them about a month ago in Japan.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, that's wonderful.

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  25 years later.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  But I don't know if you know that the day after tomorrow, I'm actually going to Japan.

• 29:43Tim Ferriss?

  I did not know that.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Going over for for nine days.

• 29:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's exciting.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  An appointment to buy a new power hammer and going to visit with some steel manufacturers and then do the regular rounds of Osaka, Sakai, Kyoto, Fukui Prefecture, up to see my teacher, Mr. Yasuke Sakamoto in Nagano, and then back down to Tokyo. So that's that's just around the corner for me.

• 30:07Tim Ferriss?

  So jealous, so jealous.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  This is a nice warm up.

• 30:12Tim Ferriss?

  And so you mentioned your teacher. Your master. So your knee is taken out. You have a book kindly or aggressively tossed at you, not sure. But nonetheless, is the Tinder for getting you to dip your toe in Japanese communication?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Sure, well, I like the Tinder. I like the Tinder example because it certainly ignited quite a passion in me. And it certainly ignited that fuel. So what happened was, I think, the first day I was at the Karate Dojo, one of the fellow students there, Chikahiro, I think his name was, he had a little scooter. And of course, ubiquitous scooter all over Japan, the little 50cc scooters. And he was kind enough, since I had an international driver's license, I was licensed to drive it, even though I didn't have much experience on two wheels. He let me borrow that scooter for a day, you know, in between karate, the morning and the evening karate class.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  And I just, you know, bravely, it's kind of crazy because I have no sense of direction. And it was prior to the days of GPS. But I just intrepidly took that scooter and started driving around. And I was probably into the third or fourth hour of my adventure, wondering if I was ever going to make it back to the Karate Dojo. That I drove past a very intriguing and interesting building. And I only caught it at the corner of my eye because I was probably driving too fast. And it inspired me to put on the brakes and kind of think, what did I just see? And then I, you know, checked both ways and did a U-turn and drove back to this building. And it was kind of like a, it was kind of like a mohn.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  It was kind of like a gate, an archway, where there was an entrance, a driveway entrance into an inner courtyard. And beside the gate was a display window with this huge, it's what they call a kujira bocho. So it's like a huge. Whale meat filling knife. And it was a display piece because of its monstrosity, because of its size. And so it was pretty clear to me that hmm, there must be some knives beyond this gate. So I I kind of curiously went inside the courtyard and parked the the little scooter. And and then there was these glass doors into a building.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And I kind of peered through the glass doors and I can see more knives on display shelves. And so I think I probably knocked and then I and then I it was one of those squeaky, you know, those squeaky doors on the on the rollers, the sliding glass doors. Yeah, of course, they're all squeaky because they say that the squeaky hinge gets the grease, but that's not true in Japan. They just leave them squeaky. So I so I I ventured in and I just kind of became just mesmerized by all of these wonderful blades in three directions. There was this knives everywhere and two or three shelves all the way up to the ceiling. There was sushi knives and there was deba bochos for, you know, for breaking apart the fish.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And there was thin filling knives and there was vegetable knives and there was paring knives. And then there was all sorts of agricultural tools. There was kamasikles and there was axes and there was different hatchets and and different types of hose for like digging up the the yamaimo and and, you know, all sorts of fascinating things, tools I'd never even seen before. I couldn't even identify. And kind of I was always there looking at all these blades and I don't even know how much time passed by. I'm guessing it was probably only a few minutes, but I mean, it could have been hours. I was so lost in thought and just kind of just trying to absorb everything I was experiencing.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  A man came in from the other side of the building and he he looked at me and he he saw I was a guy Jin and he said, hello. And and I guess we we we talked for a few minutes and I tried to communicate. Because at this point, you see, I hadn't had the textbook tossed to me yet. This came before that, this was before I injured my knee. It was literally the second day I was in Kumamoto. And uh, and we talked for a few minutes and his wife brought out a couple of glasses of cold mugicha. Oh, it's my favorite thing in the world. Oh, you like mugicha? I'm not too, I'm not too fond of mugicha. I'm a huge fan, yeah, but okay. This was in the summer?

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Buckwheat, yeah, buckwheat tea because it was summer, so they serve it cold. And this was literally, uh, this was literally in, uh, June, yeah, the late part, late part of June, so very hot. Uh, and after a few minutes of dialogue, because he could speak a word or two of English, and I think I asked, hey, can I come back sometime? And I think he said, dozo, dozo, it's a demo, Russia. He said, come back whenever you want. So, uh, so that was like one of my first impressions of Japan. And so weeks, then I didn't visit him for many, many weeks. Uh, and then when the textbook was tossed to me, I think something must have clicked

• 35:33Speaker 01

  because I thought, that's the kind of person that if I could have deeper conversation with, I think it could be really rewarding. And so that was one of the, you know, the, the, as I said before, it was the Tinder that fueled this desire and passion to, to be a communicator. Of course, the irony is, having grown up in, uh, Nova Scotia, Canada in the seventies, uh, we were all, uh, spoon-fed the French language as Canada's second language, basically from grade one. And, uh, I had developed quite a, quite a, uh, what can I say, a, a, a complex about the French language because I never really learned much because I was the class clown

• 36:16Speaker 01

  and I was always standing down in the hallway while all the other kids were in the class actually learning something. So I managed to get myself, uh, kicked out of, uh, so many French classes that I, I really didn't, uh, pick too much up. So when I was headed to Japan and people said, oh, Murray, you know, you should, you should really try to learn Japanese when you're over there because when you come back, you could get any job you want. And of course, that was in an era where everyone thought Japan Inc. was going to take over the world and Japan was the focus of all the movies. And of course, Die Hard was all about the Nakatomi Building and the decadence and opulence of these rich Japanese corporations where they had lifelong employment. And it was really quite an enigma and the world was fascinated by Japan.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  And everyone thought that, you know, Japanese was going to be the, it was when everyone had a Sony Walkman, right? And they thought that Japanese was going to be the trade language in the world. So people said, oh, you're going to Japan? Learn the Japanese language, you'll be set for life. And I would agree with them, but it went in one ear or the other because I'm mumbling to myself under my breath like, yeah, right, I can't even speak a word of French and I've been exposed to it for 12 years. You expect me to learn Japanese? That's such a foreign language with a different alphabet. I mean, come on, get serious. So, so I really didn't have any expectations of learning the language and that turned out to be the blessing in disguise in so much that I just thought, well, if I could just

• 37:41Speaker 01

  learn one word today, just one word, just, just how to say thank you or, or to say, actually, no, thank you. I remember when someone tried to feed me raw fish liver and I, and I couldn't say no, thank you, so I had to eat it. And I thought, I'm going home tonight, I'm going to open up that textbook and find out where it says how to politely refuse raw fish liver. So, and it was from a fugu nonetheless.

• 38:04Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God. Yeah. So, yeah, blowfish, you got to be careful with the blowfish.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So because I didn't have any preconceived notion of what I should or shouldn't be able to achieve in the language, I just literally took it one word at a time and took great delight and great pleasure in the new word that I would learn each day.

• 38:27Tim Ferriss?

  And so you now, flash forward, you have this textbook. When did you go back to visit the knife shop again? Or what happened when you went back?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  It's a great question. And of course, I ended up spending a lot of time there. So that's a question I should be able to answer. I'm just going to, I'm just gonna make it up because I can't remember exactly. But I stayed in Japan that first stint for nine months. And first it was with karate. And then I met the Japanese bladesmith. And then I delved in a whole bunch of different things. And then I went back to to North America and enrolled at Advanced Reading and Writing Japanese at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. And I took four years of study in 12 academic months. And then I went back to Japan. And that's when I immediately went to Mr. Sakamoto and said, I'm back.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  I speak the language now and I really want to learn about bladesmithing. I may or may not have met him a couple of other times during that first nine month stint. But honestly, I don't remember.

• 39:33Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I want to hit pause to dig into one thing that you just said because it's fascinating. Did you just say you took four years of academic course load in 12 months?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:46Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so just, so former class clown. Is that a superhuman feat? Did you just go to class all day, every day? How did you go about? What were the keys to getting that done?

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So when I went for an interview with the dean of the Japanese Studies Program, Mr. Hiro Soga at the time, who had actually also written most of the textbooks in the day. I immediately took my interview with him in Broken Japanese. And I said, please, please, please, let me take the 200 level classes, both the reading and writing and the conversation. And as I was, as I was trying to have a conversation with him, he was correcting every second word I said. He said, he kept telling me grammar is everything. I said, come on, you understand what I'm saying? He says, yes, but, but the big difference between I want to eat and I've eaten. And so tense is everything.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  So we came, so he was very gracious and he said, listen, if you study through. The first year or hundred level textbooks in the next month and bring me evidence that you've done all the exercises and and and and passed some verbal examinations, then I'll also let you enroll immediately in the second year classes. So for the so I immediately enrolled in 200 level classes while on the side I was also completing all the course material for the hun- hundred level or first year classes. So by the time if I enrolled in September, by the time the end of October came along in two months, I had finished all of those hundred level class, you know, workbooks

• 41:24Speaker 01

  and passed his his his expectations and I was getting A's in my 200 level classes. So I took, you know, the reading and writing and then the conversation class from September until probably April, when the university academic year ends. And then I enrolled in the spring six weeks intensive 300 level classes. And then when they finished, I took the six week intensive 400 level classes, which was, you know, reading Japanese newspapers and, you know, conducting business in Japanese and honorifics and so on. So that's that's how I managed to do all four year study in 12 calendar months.

• 42:05Tim Ferriss?

  So this was before you really took a deep dive with the bladesmithing.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 42:14Tim Ferriss?

  So what was driving that that motivation to do so much and to really get after it? Was it the, hey, Japan's going to take over the world? Was that an element of it? Was it an inexplicable having caught some type of idea virus that you just couldn't kick related to Japan, but you was, did you know how you were going to use it? I know there's a, I'm throwing out a lot here, but what was driving that studiousness? Because that wasn't, that that isn't how it sounds like your academic career started. So what what was driving that?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Well, I want to be cute and say that Japan had taken over my world. I wasn't so concerned about it taking over anybody else's. When I went to Japan, something very magical happened. You know, the advice or the adage for youngsters for decades or even centuries has been, you know, go it on your own and find your own fame and fortune, you know. You know, I certainly hadn't found fame nor fortune. What I did find in Japan was a part of me that I never knew existed. As I mentioned before, you know, I had grown up with a tremendous complex when it came to languages. I had never really excelled at sports.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  I felt in many ways that I probably hadn't lived up to my own father's expectations as the only boy because, you know, I wasn't doing baseball or soccer or any of the other things that all the other boys were interested in. I spent most of my childhood inside, watching TV and playing with Lego and just wanting to do things with my hands. So, when I went to Japan and then found out I had this latent skill for languages and I made all sorts of new friends and nobody was judging me based on what I had accomplished thus far in my life and it was just all new, fresh relationships. I really was in many ways able to reinvent myself and it wasn't so much that I was reinventing

• 44:13Speaker 01

  myself as I was discovering parts of myself that I never knew existed. And I think that for any young person, you know, whether it's a musical instrument or a language or a sport or really anything that they dedicate themselves to and gain a certain proficiency in, that that kind of skill can give a young person so much confidence and open up so many other doors for them and really be one of the greatest stepping stones from which, you know, to launch the rest of your life, you know, to step out into life on. So, as I was learning the Japanese language and getting tremendously positive feedback, as you mentioned, from Japanese people because they were just so...

• 44:58Speaker 01

  and this is in the 80s before... You know, foreigners had really penetrated every corner of Japan. And I was down in Kyushu. And I remember if I saw a foreigner on the street, I would go, ah, Gaijin da, Gaijin da. Because I never saw them there. I mean, now you see foreigners everywhere. But back in those late eighties, it wasn't so common. So, you know, I got tremendously positive feedback from the people around me. I started new friendships and they encouraged me in my language study. And I think for the first time in my life, I remember having feelings like, wow, you know, I've got some skills. I could really be somebody. This is great. I really want to see how far I can take this.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And it gave me drive and kind of passion and dedication that I never knew I possessed before. In fact, I thought I was kind of a quitter growing up because, I mean, that's whatever all the adult influences around me said. I was a quitter and that I'd amount to nothing. So I was quite delighted to find out that might not be true.

• 46:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what a great story. I, I think, I'm not gonna say the exact same, but a very, very parallel experience. And I really shudder to think what my life would be like had I not had that year abroad, which is very uncommon, or I should say, less common in the US than many other places where a gap year is encouraged. And I've thought, I don't have kids, but I've thought about if I would have any non-negotiables that I would insist on, if I had kids, and the only two that I've really been able to come up with in terms of experiences are sports of some type and could be something that is thought of as unathletic, but let's just call it sports.

• 46:43Tim Ferriss?

  And then a gap year or a year of traveling in a foreign environment. Because of everything that you just said, I think it's just such an incredible opportunity to find yourself and find your own confidence. So let's, I'd love to jump to, now, you mentioned honorifics. So for people who don't know what that is, there are many different levels of

• 47:10Tim Ferriss?

  Many different ways to speak or write or communicate with another, I was gonna say another Japanese person, but let's say a Japanese person depending on how old they are, depending on where they rank relative to you, even in say a school environment. You would have senpai, like the upperclassmen above you, and then the kohai below you and so on, and it determines what type of grammar in some cases you use. And I was going to ask you, could we, I'd love to hear when you then came back to Yoshimoto san. Some people have heard san before, S A N. And then above that, you would have, let's say, sama, right? And then below that, let's say you're talking to a friend or a younger kid.

• 47:54Tim Ferriss?

  You might say kun, or you could even use chan, which is kind of similar to that. What is the proper suffix for a master bladesmith? Would you formally refer, is there sort of a master suffix that you would use for Mr. Yoshimoto? Or is it simply Yoshimoto san?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Well, most commonly, we just use the word sensei.

• 48:20Tim Ferriss?

  Sensei, okay, Yoshimoto sensei.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  That's right, so schoolteacher, or politician, or professor at university, or, you know, master in the forge is sensei.

• 48:34Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who are language nerds, just because I don't get a chance to explore this very much on many of my podcasts. So, sensei is a really interesting word to look at, or suffix to look at literally, because you have sen, which is before, and then se, which is born, in effect. But in Chinese, it's totally different. It's literally, it means mister. So, you would say like, Chang Xian Xiang, xian xiang is mister. So you don't use it for, say, a woman.

• 49:12Tim Ferriss?

  In the same way that, oddly enough, like tegami, which is kind of hand paper, means letter in Japanese, but in Chinese or in Mandarin, shoujer, shoujer is toilet paper. So, there are a lot of things that are the same in both, and a lot of things that are very, very different. So, how did Mr. Yoshimoto sensei, how did he re-enter the picture for you?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, yeah, I want to clarify one thing, that I am 17th generation Yoshimoto bladesmith, but my teacher's name is Sakamoto.

• 49:45Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, okay, got it. All right, so I need to...

• 49:48Speaker 01

  And just for your listeners' pleasure, if they're interested in the content of this podcast, they can go to YouTube and see the history of the Yoshimoto bladesmiths on Carter Cutlery's channel, and you can see how Yoshimoto became Sakamoto, because that in itself is a very interesting story. But my teacher's name is Sakamoto Sensei.

• 50:14Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Okay, so Sakamoto Sensei, within the umbrella, or later than becoming, or how that became Yoshimoto, we might delve into that, but so Sakamoto Sensei.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:26Tim Ferriss?

  Could you tell us more about, like, when it clicked? What happened? Like, when did, how did you, because ultimately, I don't want to give away the punchline, but we're talking about, I want to say, see if I can get this part right, 18 years in Japan?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:42Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was 18 years. So I apprenticed with Mr. Sakamoto for six years, and then basically, I was asked by him to take over the family business. He had two daughters and no sons, and no hopeful apprentices, apart from myself. And I guess I had demonstrated a certain attitude and aptitude for the, you know, for the family trade, that he asked me to assume the position of 17th generation Yoshimoto bladesmith. He was a very, he is, because he's in Nagano, I'm gonna see him next week,

• 51:21Speaker 01

  he is a very extraordinary human being, and very untraditional in the way we had a relationship of apprentice and sensei.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And he was not strict, as you would imagine. People think of, you know, the Karate Kid, wax on, wax off, and standing there for hours on end, doing things that, menial tasks that the apprentice thinks must be meaningless, and he's just being tested, and he's just having to sweep the floor, you know, to do the grunt labor for the teacher, and starting to feel unappreciated, and abused, and so on. That was not my story. Mr. Sakamoto was very gracious, and he would share with me all of his skills up front. And of course, I could only comprehend so many, so I would go and practice things he showed me, and then he would show me more things. But once we got to a certain point where he felt he had shared

• 52:22Speaker 01

  all of the essential bladesmithing and sharpening techniques with me that he regularly practiced, he did something out of the ordinary. He said, Murray, you know, if you really want to learn about forge welding, you know, I'm going to arrange for you to go down to Kawashiri and spend some time down there, because that's their area of expertise. And so I would go down to Kawashiri, and in fact, I kind of went off and on down to Kawashiri for a couple of years and mastered the technique of forge welding. And then, and I would always come back to Sakamoto's forge and use it as my home base, and always apply and put into practice what I had learned there and elsewhere at the home forge. And then he would say, you know, you really need to learn about

• 53:06Speaker 01

  about the traditional Japanese fishmonger's knives, the kataha, the deba bocchio, and the sashimi knife, and all those two-layer special kind of chisel-ground blades. So you should go to Osaka, you know, a little special place called Sakai, where they specialize in that skill. And so off I went to Sakai for several weeks, and I would be hooked up with some very, again gracious bladesmiths there, and I would learn their trade, and I'd come back to Kumamoto, to Sakamoto's shop. And and then light the fire and try to emulate or put into practice the things I'd learned and I'd show them to him. He's okay. You know, you're you're now you're getting

• 53:46Speaker 01

  somewhere. And I think now you you need to learn a little bit about marketing and the overall, you know, financial aspect of running a business making knives. So you need to go to Seki City, Japan, because those guys are really savvy businessmen when it comes to the cutlery industry up there. So if I would go to Seki City, Japan and learn what I could up there and then again, always come back to Mr. Sakamoto and then ply what I had learned. So he he was, he taught me many important things, but he also coached me. And he was a very gracious coach and never cruel or strict or punitive, even when he

• 54:24Speaker 01

  probably should have been. But very, very kind and the most tolerant and understanding and patient sensei you could ever have asked for.

• 54:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's such an amazing opportunity. Just incredible. What what for people who are listening, and I'll be honest, I would say I'm in this group as well, who don't don't know the steps involved with, say, Japanese bladesmithing, don't even know what forge welding is, which I would certainly raise my hand, as it relates to that. Could you describe what makes Japanese bladesmithing, Japanese bladesmithing? So people, people,

• 55:12Tim Ferriss?

  there's a wrote, there's a certainly a a sort of prized quality that goes along with Japanese knives. I wrote a book related to cooking and learning sometime ago called The Four Hour Chef, and I spent a lot of time with with high end chefs around the United States in San Francisco, New York City, and so on. And they and almost every single one has at least one Japanese knife that they treat like a Lamborghini. It's only taken out for special occasions. It's meticulously cared for. Could you describe?

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  The steps in making a knife in the Japanese style and what is unique about it?

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Sure, you know, there's so much to say on that topic. I'll just try to keep it concise and interesting for your listeners. First of all, there's kind of a fundamental, kind of philosophical difference between what I'm just going to loosely term Western cutlery and Japanese cutlery. And, you know, everybody knows from movies like Kill Bill and so on, just how revered the Samurai sword can be. People even know that often they were christened with their own names and, you know, considered by their owners to have legendary qualities. Some of the big philosophical differences are that, you know, Western culture puts

• 56:33Speaker 01

  a high value on something being kind of durable and strong and tough and robust. And as a result, as that kind of extends to cutlery, we end up with a lot of Western blades that are kind of sharpened tools and they're robust and they're durable and you can use them for a multitude of different things. But fine cutting implements, we would not call them. We would call them sharpened tools. By contrast, the Japanese blades, at least the best Japanese blades that come from Japan, are considered to be precision cutting implements.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  And they're designed and built and forged and quenched and tempered with cutting performance utmost in mind at the cost of everything else. So because of that philosophical difference, there's a lot of mechanical differences in how the blades are made and the mindset of the bladesmith making them. From the materials that are chosen to forge the blades, from the fuel, fuels in the fire that's used to heat the steel to forge it, the manner in which it is forged, the medium in which it's quenched, the dimensions to which it's ground,

• 57:52Speaker 01

  the effort to which it's, the final cutting or primary edge is honed, is all affected or influenced by this philosophical ideological difference between what the blades are supposed to be able to do in the end.

• 58:10Tim Ferriss?

  And could you describe some of these steps? Like, for instance, I don't actually really know what forging is or involves, or quenching, or tempering. I really don't know what that looks like. Could you describe the process from ground zero when you're considering making a knife? What does the process look like?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I'll try to share with you what I've learned in having forged and completed over 24,000 blades in my career. A lot of the things that I've realized have come about at certain times of my experience. And I'm sure by the time I've made 50,000 of them, I might have a slightly different outlook altogether. But, so, one of the primary differences between a Western blade and a Japanese high-performance blade is the use of laminates. Most Western blades are homogeneous in construction, meaning they're either all carbon steel from the spine all the way down to the cutting edge of the blade, or they're all stainless steel. But throughout, they're the same kind of steel.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  They're all manufactured from one solid billet of homogeneous steel. In contrast, the Japanese blades are almost always a combination of two or more different kinds of steels. And so, you've heard the expression, "Have your cake and eat it too." Well, if you combine a hard and a soft steel together in the same package or in the same blade, the hard steel can be really hard and contribute to superior cutting performance, and the soft steel can be left soft so that it's super tough, shock-absorbing, avoiding breakage, and also easy to sharpen.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  It's very difficult to get the qualities of soft steel and hard steel out of a homogeneous blade because it's all the same. So... Right away, we're starting with a different blade construction, and that's a laminate. The most common blade construction in Japanese cutlery is a three-layer blade construction, often referred to as a sanmai, which means three-layer or three-sheet style construction, where the center of the laminate is the hard steel that's going to become the sharpened cutting edge, like the lead in a pencil.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  And the outer laminates are a softer, either mild steel or a soft stainless, and they strengthen, toughen, cushion, and make the blade easy to sharpen, and very much act like the wood on the outside of the lead inside of the pencil, and they support it. That's the most common. There's two-layer construction, and then there's a sword construction, which is where the hard steel wraps around a soft center core, and then you can have Damascus-style construction, where you've got hundreds of different layers, all in different kind of constructs for either visual effect or metallurgical effect. But the laminated blade does give you the best of both worlds.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  It does allow you to have your cake and eat it too, because you can have a really high Rockwell hardness core, that means it can take a razor-sharp edge and hold that edge for a long time, but avoid the pitfall of being brittle, because the outer softer laminates support it and keep the whole blade from fracturing.

• 1:01:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And how does one make such a knife? What are the steps involved?

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you achieve a laminated blade through a process called forge welding. And, you know, everyone knows if you hear the word welding, you think of like a MIG or a TIG or an inert gas welder, and a big spark and bright light. But there's literally, you know, there's lots of different types of welding. There's ultrasound welding, there's welding with explosives, welding through friction and so on. But forge welding is the oldest form of welding known to mankind, and that's when you take two metals that have similar temperature ranges, and you heat them up until the molecules on the surface of each metal start to liquefy.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  And then you join the two, you, you, you, you press the two together. And if you're at the right temperature and you have clean surfaces, you can actually get the molecules from each surface of the metal to intermingle and fuse together. Uh, in layman's terms, it's like taking two candles uh, that are cold and hard and you would heat up each end over a flame source until the, the, the end of the candle just started to liquefy. And then if you touch the ends of both candles together at the same time, uh, in an ideal situation, you would end up with one big, long candle once it cooled down because the, the, the wax would, would intermingle and mix.

• 1:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  It's different than melting or it's, it's fusing is different than melting the metals together where you would basically uh, make the two melt, the two dissimilar metals uh, molten and basically, uh, mix them up in a pot like you would stir, uh, chocolate milk powder into, into a glass of chocolate milk. It's not that kind of mixing. It's, it's fusing them together in such a way that each unique layer still maintains its original characteristics.

• 1:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  And, and so that's done in a forge, uh, and a forge is, uh, a source of heat. We have gas forges, we have electric, uh, forges, and then we have what I use, which is a solid fuel forge.

• 1:03:57Tim Ferriss?

  What does solid fuel mean?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  So, uh, I, I burn up coke in my forge, spoonfuls at a time. Uh, and as funny as it sounds.

• 1:04:07Tim Ferriss?

  What is coke? Were we talking Coca-Cola, cocaine, something else?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I just purchased four tons of coke the other day. Uh, coke is, all joking aside, it's, it's coal as they dig it up from the ground. And then it's heated, uh, once in the absence of oxygen. And it drives off all the impurities, namely phosphorus and sulfur, which are combustible gases, uh, but that are very undesirable when it comes to heating steel to make knives. So, so coal, uh, excuse me, coke is to coal what charcoal is to wood.

• 1:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  I see. Got it.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  It's just, it, it's purified, uh, carbon because all the volatile gases have been driven off.

• 1:04:52Tim Ferriss?

  How is that spelt? Coke?

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  C-O-K-E.

• 1:04:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it is. All right. I was gonna say a couple of tons of coke. Unless you have a very sophisticated drug smuggling operation and a huge budget, it's probably something else.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Tim Ferriss?

  So that is solid fuel.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  That's solid fuel forged. So you're fusing these different layers together and maintaining the integrity in the sense that the separation of these layers. So you can design a knife that allows you to have your cake and eat it too. What happens after that?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  So, once you've successfully forged welded your different layers of steel together, then you need to forge that billet, which is what is called, into a blade shape. And some blades are wide and short and some are narrow and long. In the case of a slicing knife, some are thicker and some are thinner. And you can set out from your billet to forge really any kind of blade you desire, providing you've got enough material to make the blade you're setting out to make. And it involves heating the steel to a plastic state, which is usually around 800 degrees Celsius.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  And I always, because I was in Japan and I was in Canada, for me, everything's Celsius.

• 1:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's okay.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  I don't translate to Fahrenheit very well, but I think it's something like 1350 degrees Fahrenheit. But it's what steel, it's what, when you're at a campfire and you see the orange coals down at the very bottom, they're not bright yellow, they're just kind of like a really bright orange color. That's about 800 degrees Celsius and that's the color we want the steel to be when we start hammering it. It's very pliable in that state. You don't want to heat the steel hotter than that because you can literally burn the steel and ruin it. And you start hammering it and if you have enough force with a hammer, you can force it into different, you can coax the steel into different shapes, obviously.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  I mean, blacksmiths have been doing that for millennia. The big difference is, is as a new bladesmith...

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  One is overly focused on getting the right shape. Somewhere along the line, somewhere between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand blades, I realized that something more important was happening when I was forging the steel. And that was grain refinement. As it turns out, that if you heat your steel, your laminate, your billet of steel to that eight hundred degrees and then hammer the steel as it's cooling, you're actually refining the grain in the steel, which can result in a higher performing blade. So even if you start out, if you make two different blades, even under the same steel,

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  how you heat the steel and how you hammer it and how sequentially you heat the steel will result in two entirely different quality of blades.

• 1:08:00Tim Ferriss?

  And when you say grain, I'm thinking of cutting against the grain or with the grain in, say, cutting steak. Is it a direction of fibers in the steel itself? Or what's the best way to think of refining grain?

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you've ever fractured a piece of metal and looked at it, it's quite likely, even if it was aluminum or whatever, you look at the metal fractured surface and it looks like little grains of sand. It looks granular. And sometimes it looks very, very finely granular and you have to look very closely to discern like different bumps in the fractured surface. And sometimes it's very coarse. And basically, steel has grain, which you can think of like marbles or BBs or grains of sand.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  And the finer they are and more evenly dispersed they are throughout the steel matrix or throughout the billet, the finer of a cutting implement will result.

• 1:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  The reason is, is it's not the grains themselves that make steel strong, but the grain boundaries, so where one grain touches another grain, there's something about that boundary complexity that that increases the strength of steel. So the finer grain you can achieve in steel, the more grain boundary that results and therefore a better end product.

• 1:09:36Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you have, as you said, forged or produced somewhere along the lines of 24,000 blades and you spent 18 years in Japan. And yet, this is, this is another part of your story or life that really grabbed my attention. You hold classes or workshops where people can come in and over the course of a week or a few days, walk away with a blade. Is that, is that, is that fair to say?

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've been doing that for five or six years now.

• 1:10:08Tim Ferriss?

  So after putting in the amount of time to master your craft that you've put in, what does the curriculum look like for, say, a two or three day class? Because you've clearly put so much thought into this. How do you, how do you teach this? Like what, and I always think about sequencing, right? When you're learning a language, how you provide positive feedback, but balance that with some kind of logical progression that is, that is graspable. What is, what does such a class look like when you're, when you're teaching it?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. Fair enough, because the way we've talked about 24,000 blades in 18 years, it sounds daunting and impossible to learn anything important in such a short timeframe as one week. But fortunately, that's not true. Bladesmithing is not rocket science. And a lot of the mystique and lore of bladesmithing is simply because a lot of the obvious things about blades are, are hidden in plain sight and not often revealed and not often taught. Now, what I mean by that, let me quantify that.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  The main skill that I teach or confer in a short amount of time is I teach students how to use their eyes. And how to see what's actually there. Now, obviously, we were talking earlier about grain and steel and so on, and we don't actually get out microscopes and look at that. But I teach them to see if blades are straight. I can teach them to see if the blades have the profiles that they're looking for as they grind the blades. I teach them to to pinpoint area, trouble areas, and then pinpoint the the remedy for that, like with grinders

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  or a hammer or a file or whatnot. But I teach them, and through repetition, I teach them to start to rely upon their eyes and to trust their eyes, so that when they actually see something, they know what they're really looking at. And in terms of the metallurgy, after we forge and and anneal and quench and then temper blades and then grind them, I teach them simple things like how to test to see if an edge, if the edge of the blade or if the whole blade actually hardened by cutting into other metal objects. I teach them to to do a rudimentary test to see if they've got fine grain and if they quench at the right temperature and tempered it properly, when if they push a thin edge against

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  an object like a brass rod, they should be able to see the edge flex. And then when the pressure's removed, they should see that flexed portion spring back to a true edge again. And then, last but not least, you know, part of what we do is we always we place a lot of emphasis on hand sharpening of the knives on sharpening stones. And I teach them to pay attention to how the blade that they forged and heat treated, how it feels on the stone when they're sharpening it. So between a sense of touch and feel and using one's eyesight.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  It's actually a remarkable testament to the human condition to report just how much the average student can learn in the space of a week. It's really remarkable.

• 1:13:40Tim Ferriss?

  And if you were looking back at the students you've taught, the people you've encountered in the process of teaching and making knives, certainly, if you were in charge of talent scouting, let's just treat it as like the Oakland Athletics moneyball type approach, your job is to put together, slightly different, but you're trying to put together a team of people who have the potential to be great bladesmiths.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  What are the attributes that you're looking for to put together that team? How would you try to spot the potential for someone who can be great at this? What are the patterns you've noticed or things you've observed?

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Well, that's a very timely question, Tim, because we actually are actively growing Carter Cutlery and as we spent the last week hiring our 10th employee. So, very timely question, I look for two very specific things. I look for aptitude and attitude. And the aptitude is, you know, somebody's ability to acquire new skills or to use the skills that they already have. And I look for attitude, which is a willingness to learn, a willingness to be humble, a willingness

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  to stick to something once you've decided that that's what you're going to do, so stick to itiveness, and a willingness to work in a team environment. So, those two qualities specifically are what I'm looking for.

• 1:15:19Tim Ferriss?

  So, on the, I suppose, the aptitude side of things, the ability to learn, the ability to be humble, the ability to stick, so the stick to itiveness and the teamwork, how do you test for that? In other words... How do you determine if someone has that or not?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  The attitude, the attitude.

• 1:15:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, exactly. Any of those things. In other words, if you're looking at it as a hiring process. So some people use interviews, some people use test projects for hiring for many different skills. How do you determine if someone has the capacity to learn, the ability to be humble, stick to something and work in a team?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, I found that the only accurate way to make that assessment is to put the candidate in the actual work environment. Because two things can happen.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  People who claim to have great aptitude and attitude will reveal that they actually aren't that equipped for that position.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  And conversely, people who think they might be, once they get into that environment and are encouraged in the right way and surrounded by the right kind of people

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  and with the right, can actually develop a healthier mindset than they even came into the interview with. That can be nurtured. So I think the best solution is to get the applicant in the working environment and then just work with them as closely as possible and encourage them in every way you can and be in constant, you know, communication with them. And I think usually within a week or two, you have a much better idea than just simply an interview or viewing a portfolio or reading a resume alone can provide.

• 1:17:29Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. Yeah. And for those people listening who would like to explore this aspect of business, meaning hiring or even more specifically auditioning.

• 1:17:39Tim Ferriss?

  People, Matt Mullenweg, who's been on the podcast, CEO of Automattic, thought of as the lead developer of WordPress, has a very, very fascinating process for auditioning people, whether they are the entry-level customer support or a CFO. The process is remarkably similar, so that's worth digging into. I have a couple of questions that are really not organized by any particular theme. I'm just curious to know the answer. So the first is, in many knives that are supposedly Japanese-style, that you can buy easily in the West, you find these dimples on the sides of the knives. And sometimes they're called santoku, sometimes they're called something else. What is the function of, what are the

• 1:18:24Tim Ferriss?

  functions of those dimples? Do they matter? Are they done well? How should, how should someone think about those if they really have no familiarity with knives?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I think what you might be referring to are kind of like hammered texture into the upper surface of the blade. And sometimes what you might be referring to is, I think is what's called a greaton edge, where the steel is actually scalloped out.

• 1:18:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. Yeah. So it looks like a, I think it's concave. I think I'm getting this right. Say, ellipse or a semi-circular carve-out.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Tim Ferriss?

  And Henkels.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Henkels is well-known for that. They put out a kind of a Japanese-style santoku-shaped blade that has a greaton edge, where right behind the primary cutting edge of the blade are these scalloped-out depressions.

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the concept is, is that when you're cutting something that has a high moisture content, like cucumbers or tomatoes or whatnot, rather than sticking to the blade and then being pushed up by subsequent slices to the top of the spine of the blade and then being bopped off the blade and rolling off the table and onto the floor, the idea is as you're cutting, the cut material will separate more easily from the, from the secondary edge of the blade. In concept, it can work. I don't like it for several reasons. First of all, if you have a blade that is thick enough behind the cutting edge to grind in scalloped indentations, for me, that means the blade's simply too thick. Right.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Because the thicker the blade, the more resistance it is to push the blade through things. Many people need to understand that when we think of the word "sharp" and "blade", there's actually two phenomena. There's the primary edge, which is the part of the blade everyone thinks of when we think of "sharp", that initiates the cut. It's the part that goes into your finger first before you see the blood. And then there's the secondary edge, which is the geometry of steel behind the primary edge. And the secondary edge is what becomes consequential when you're actually trying to push the blade through things, whether it's an acorn squash or a big, thick rubber stall mat,

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  you know, like that you might be standing on in your shop to say, "wear and tear on your feet", if you're trying to... or thick shoe leather. If you try to push a blade through things, then what's going on in the secondary edge is absolutely important, as much, if not more important, than the sharpness of the primary edge. And in cooking, we often need to push the blade all the way through things, whether it's cucumber, carrot, apple, potato, whatnot. So, the thinner the blade, the better. So, if you've got a blade that's got gration edges on it, your blade's simply too thick. And one of the first things we do to remedy that when blades like that come into our shop for sharpening, refurbishment, or repair, is we grind the blade down, you know, by a certain percentage, and remove some of those gration edges.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  But the resulting thinness of the blade greatly enhances the cutting performance.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  The other thing I don't like about those is they they're not necessarily sanitary. You know, that's that's an area where bacteria and food particles can hide out in. And in an ideal world, a blade for culinary use is very clean on both the primary and secondary surfaces, so that once you're finished using it, you simply put it in a cloth and with one swipe, you can get the blade completely clean. So it's very low effort to keep it clean and sanitary.

• 1:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  Makes perfect sense. Okay, so having spent so much time in Japan, I would love to know if you have any favorite, any Japanese sayings or mantras or anything that have really stuck with you. And I'll give people just a few examples of proverbs, for instance, like Kotowaza. So there are some great ones, in English as well, of course, but you have Sarumokiikaru ochiru, right? So even a monkey falls from a tree, which means it doesn't really matter like how how good you get, you can still fall on your face. In effect, there are other uses also. But then you have something that is actually pretty similar

• 1:22:53Tim Ferriss?

  to tall poppy syndrome in, say, New Zealand and Australia, where people who stick out too much can be pulled down. And that's Derukuiwa utaredu, right? So the the steak that sticks up gets hammered down. So if you stand up, you could be criticized. One that is great that I really like also is Shiranu ga hotoke. So the not knowing is Buddha, literally, but it's ignorance is bliss, basically, or what you what you don't know can't hurt you. Is there anything, are there any sayings in Japanese or principles that have really stuck with you?

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  You know, Tim, you and I are really two birds of a feather. So we share so many similarities and kotoazas was one of my areas of, I was kind of considered a nerd during Japanese language study at University of British Columbia because I loved coming in with new kotoazas to share with everybody. But one of my favorites is isogaba maware.

• 1:23:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  Meaning, meaning when you feel yourself in a great hurry and a kind of a panic to get things done, that's the time to take a moment and regroup and take a deep breath and really get your footing to make sure that you're making good decisions. So I really like that one. I like isibashi o tataite wataru.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  Being very proceeding so cautiously as to tap with a stick every single stone in the stone bridge as you cross it, just to make sure the stone bridge isn't going to fall down while you're on it. So it's, it's used often to, to illustrate an extreme level of caution and prudence.

• 1:24:37Tim Ferriss?

  And do you apply that in your life to knife making, to other things? Where would you, where does that come to mind for you most?

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Making business decisions.

• 1:24:47Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Okay, right. So definitely measure twice, cut once.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Except that would be, this would be like measure 10 times.

• 1:24:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's used to sarcastically for someone who's so cautious as they become petrified from doing anything, you know? I also like awatezu aserazu isoge. It's, and this is a special one in the cutlery industry, which is, you know, don't, don't panic, don't be in a rush, but get the job done.

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  What was the, what was the first one that you mentioned? The, uh, when, when you feel-

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Isogaba, isogaba maware.

• 1:25:32Tim Ferriss?

  Isogaba maware. That's such, that's such a good one. Yeah, when you feel rushed, when you feel like you have to get everything done this instant, that is a great time to was, to hit pause.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  And, uh, and lastly, sometimes, uh, when we're in the blades shop and you think you've, just when you think you've seen it all and done it all and, and suffered every single setback that you, there ever could be in the blade shop, sometimes we, we, uh, become, uh, ki kara ochita saru, which is a different version of your, uh, saru demo ki kara ochiru, meaning that anybody can fall. Ki kara ochita saru is, is, uh, is, uh, when you become kind of bereft by some kind of unexpected setback, you know, such as being, uh, run off on, uh, by your wife or something like that. So when, when, uh, when something in

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  the shop goes awry in such a way as no one ever saw it coming, we can be the, uh, ki kara ochita saru.

• 1:26:33Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I love it. Uh, well, I, I, I know that, uh, we are coming up on time shortly, so I'm not gonna ask, uh, too many more questions, but we, we could talk for days and days and days, I am sure. Uh, so maybe we'll do a round two at some point, but-

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Maybe we'll actually get to talking about blade smapping and knives.

• 1:26:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, yeah, I think that, uh, I think that the people who are with us at this point in this conversation are already converted and fascinated. They're interested, more interested in knives now than they were when they turned this on. So I, I think we've, we've, yeah, we, we could talk for, for days about many different, uh, aspects of knife making and the, the shared DNA that we have through Japan. But let me ask just a, just a handful more and, uh, and I'll be, um, I'm already happy with the conversation. Uh, so I'll, I'll use this to round it out. What books have you gifted the most to other people or reread the most yourself?

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a child, I was fascinated with the book Ivanhoe. And I love this, the, the story of, of knights and, and kind of heroism and altruism and fighting for a great cause. So I kind of have a romantic notion of right and wrong and good and evil. But in terms of the book I've given away the most, of course, that would be Bladesmithing with Murray Carter, of course, the book that I first authored. It was the first of three books that I've authored. And it's, it's a great instructional book on bladesmithing techniques in general, but more specifically, the application of traditional Japanese bladesmithing techniques.

• 1:28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Besides your own books, which I also recommend people check out for sure, any others that you've gifted to people that come to mind?

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  I would say I'm probably delinquent in the fact I've not given many books as presents in my lifetime. I should, thank you for the, for the idea. I now, I now have next year's Christmas presents figured out.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, all right. Well, what, let's, let's look at it differently. When you gift, are there any items that you routinely gift to people? And if the answer is knives, what is your go-to gift knife? What type of knife? What characterizes it?

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  I have, probably most noteworthy is the fact that I wear a knife daily, usually in the form of a neck knife. It's a kind of knife that we hang around, hang from our neck, inverted upside down very securely in a thermoplastic sheath called Kydex. And it's a really handy blade to have. It's, it's the alternative to a folding knife in, in the pocket. And there's no mechanism to break and it's easy to sharpen, easy to maintain and very strong for its size and excellent cutting potential. So I've been carrying neck knives. Uh, for my whole career as a bladesmith. And I typically will meet some uh, person who inspires me in some way.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  They might be a young child, uh, might be the son of a good friend. Uh, it might be a housewife who I think would could could could use some protection while walking in the park. But I have given more knives off of my own neck that I've used for several weeks or months or years that I know are really good, high performing, uh, and great cutting knives. I've gifted a lot of those away.

• 1:30:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great answer. I love, yeah, neck knives. This is, this is also something that I've been somewhat obsessed with in the last few weeks. And so that's, that's a to be continued.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  So when are you gonna come and, and take a class?

• 1:30:18Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, you know what? When we, when we hit stop on this recording, I want to talk to you about that because it's something I would like to do ASAP, ideally before the time that this episode comes out. Or at least get a reservation in. And uh, so the last two questions, this one is if, if you had a gigantic billboard, and this is more of a metaphorical question, but you could put a short message on that billboard to get it out to millions of people that is non, non-commercial. What would that, or what might that message be?

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I could put something cliche on there, like, don't give up. I could put, stick to the plan. I had written on my walls over in my, my Japanese shop, stick to the plan. And the other one under that was concentrate on the task at hand. You know, it's so easy to get distracted, uh, you know, from new stimuli that focusing and concentrating on the task at hand uh, i- i- is often, even though it's a simple concept, it's difficult to, to execute. So those are some, those are some kind of like truisms or sayings that I live by.

• 1:31:27Tim Ferriss?

  What does stick to the plan mean to you most often? Why, why is that one of the two that you chose?

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  Well, in quiet moments, we always sit down either alone or with loved ones or people we trust. And we, we, we, we say, we, we plan, humans plan. They say first, maybe we, of these three things that probably need to happen, we should do this first and then this second. And then lastly, we'll achieve this. And as is so common in life, people sabotage their own plans. They get to a certain part of the plan and it becomes monotonous, or tedious, or difficult, or challenging. And all of a sudden, instead of sticking with the plan and seeing it through to completion, they think, oh, what I need is a new plan.

• 1:32:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  And so you have people who habitually, chronically are in the process of making new plans and never actually execute a single one of their existing plans.

• 1:32:24Tim Ferriss?

  Is that something that you've struggled with? Or is that, it sounds like you have that pretty well handled. So I'm wondering, is it more a reminder for your employees? Or what is, how have you used that reminder in your life or for other people?

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  You're right. I am, I've been lucky to have stuck to most of my plans and achieved the goals I've set out for myself because I've constantly reminded myself to stick to the plan.

• 1:32:54Tim Ferriss?

  Good answer. Very good answer. All right. Do you have any parting, and I'm going to also ask you before I wrap up, of course, where people can find out more about you and so on. And I'll put those links in the show notes for everyone. But any parting comments or requests, thoughts for the people who are listening to this?

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'd like to thank everybody for listening. And of course, I can find out more about our knives at CarterCutlery.com. C-A-R-T-E-R-C-U-T-L-E-R-Y.com. And, you know, we do strive to make the finest knives in the world, high-performance blades that are also very easy to maintain. And we've encouraged, we've successfully encouraged and mentored tens of thousands of people to learn the very easily attainable skill of sharpening knives.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  And we've kind of revitalized that essential skill and given great people, given a lot of people the great feeling of mastery and satisfaction.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Uh, over their cutlery and, and being able to maintain it and sharpen it and, uh, and use it to their heart's content.

• 1:34:10Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give, just with that teaser, could you, could, could you name one thing you wish more people did related to knife sharpening or one thing you wish people would stop doing?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Well, I, I'll, I'll give a little freebie out there for everybody and that is that when they get a new piece of cutlery, especially one for the kitchen, if they will just, uh, keep that cutting edge from touching anything other than food, uh, meaning don't drop it in your kitchen sink, don't let it touch other plates and, and pans, don't let it touch the other silverware in the drawer, uh, and that will preserve the cutting edge, the primary edge of that knife far longer than they ever thought possible. It's the clanging around of the knives, the, the, the, the, uh, misplacement of the knives in the kitchen that really dulls them. So that's a little freebie for everybody.

• 1:35:01Tim Ferriss?

  So they shouldn't use their kitchen knives for opening boxes from Amazon, in other words?

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  They can, they can do that after they master sharpening and then what they use their knife for, cause they know it's only a couple of minutes until they can refresh both the primary and secondary edges of their knives.

• 1:35:18Tim Ferriss?

  All right, well, Murray.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Freedom, that's the real freedom.

• 1:35:21Tim Ferriss?

  That is the freedom.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Mastering skill.

• 1:35:22Tim Ferriss?

  When you can, when you can maintain and master your own tools and everybody listening, you can also find Carter Cutlery on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash Carter Cutlery, Instagram, fantastic Instagram, Instagram, uh, also Carter Cutlery. And I will put all links to everything we've discussed in the show notes as usual, so everybody listening can find all of that as well as more resources and so on at tim.blog/podcast for this episode and every other episode. And Carter, uh, Carter, I always want to call you Carter. I have a good friend named Carter Murray. Thank you so much for taking the time. There's an expression in Japanese, uh, which I'm sure you've heard before, which is saisho de saigo.

• 1:36:05Tim Ferriss?

  So when you do something and you never want to do it again, that's saisho de saigo. I have the exact opposite feeling with this conversation. I hope we have many, many more. So thank you for taking the time.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Hajimatta bakari.

• 1:36:16Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. Hajimatta bakari nanda. So. And, and as my, some of my Japanese friends said to me with this bewildered face in high school, they were saying, "Oi, omae ni honjin da yo." So I have that feeling with you, which is that you are secretly part Japanese, which I mean is the highest compliment. So to be continued. And, uh, thank you again. And to everybody listening, as always, thank you and continue the experiments. Be nice and be safe.

• 1:36:54Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with

• 1:37:34Tim Ferriss?

  my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish folks, young entrepreneurs, very talented, after a acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which is mushroom coffee. The specific one includes chaga and lion's mane. And it knocked my socks off. I highly recommend if you try it, you start with half a packet. It's very

• 1:38:17Tim Ferriss?

  strong and lights you up like a Christmas tree in the best way possible. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement and for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all. My house guests, it is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect, get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine.

• 1:39:02Tim Ferriss?

  So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find Shaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner in my kitchen. You can try something, you can try a sample pack, which is great also, right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim. And use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order.

• 1:39:48Tim Ferriss?

  And they're not that expensive, anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out. This episode is brought to you by Headspace, the world's most popular meditation app. I have it on my phone. I use it all the time when I'm in Ubers, when I'm in airplanes, when I'm in those in-between spaces and I want to do some good for myself. Across all of the guests that I've had on this podcast, more than 80% have the common behavior, the common habit of some type of meditative practice. It does not have to be complicated or expensive. Headspace is meditation made simple. I've used it for hundreds of sessions myself. It provides guided meditations that you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, whether on your phone, computer, or tablet.

• 1:40:33Tim Ferriss?

  They have sessions that focus on everything from decreasing stress and anxiety to eating healthier, sleeping better, and even being more creative. But I suggest you keep it simple, simple, simple. This has had a huge impact on my life. Try their Take 10 program. It is fantastic. 10 minutes of guided meditation a day for 10 days. It costs you nothing. Try it out and I promise, and I don't do this very much, that you will see a significant benefit from it. Download the Headspace app and train your mind for a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/tim. That's headspace.com/tim.