#1168 - Mareko Maumasi

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Four, three, two, one, boom!

The lost of knife making. It's still alive. How are you, man?

Mareko Maumasi (0:11)

I'm doing good, man.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Thanks for coming down here. I appreciate it.

Mareko Maumasi (0:14)

It's fucking huge. I really appreciate you having me down.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Hey, listen, man, you've made two awesome, well, four awesome knives for me, but this one is one I use all the time that I've posted on Instagram that people freak out as we were talking about before the podcast. It actually has meteor in it.

Mareko Maumasi (0:29)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Meteorite. Meteorite is a big one. Meteorite is a little one. Is that the idea?

Do you know?

Mareko Maumasi (0:35)

I guess. You should know.

Joe Rogan (0:38)

You're the knife maker.

Mareko Maumasi (0:39)

So I didn't actually make, so I made the knife, I forged the knife, but the steel is a very special kind of steel that very few people can actually manufacture on a small scale in the world.

And that was made by my shopmate, Peter Swartzberg, and so the meteorite is kind of a small element in the whole matrix because most meteorite is all nickel or all iron or something like that. And this one particularly is a lot of nickel and some cobalt. And if you're going to make an actual usable steel out of it, you can't really use a whole lot of it in the overall mixture.

Joe Rogan (1:21)

So, is there any meteorites that are made out of all iron?

Mareko Maumasi (1:24)

Yeah, definitely.

Joe Rogan (1:25)

You just have to find them?

Mareko Maumasi (1:26)

You just got to find the ones. Yeah, and there are impact sites all over the world. They're hitting the world all the time.

Joe Rogan (1:34)

Can you just take them? When they land, is it yours if you find it?

You don't have to report it to NASA or anything, right?

Mareko Maumasi (1:40)

No.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

Hey, bro. Found some space junk.

Mareko Maumasi (1:42)

Most of them are so small that by the time they would hit the actual Earth's surface, they've completely disintegrated or burned up. So it's the really massive ones. And this was part of an impact, I think, in South America.

I can't remember where exactly.

Joe Rogan (2:02)

It's just crazy to think that there's a piece of space in there.

This dope pattern. I'm really into craftsmanship, man. I always have been. I love handmade pool cues and this desk, which is a handmade desk. And I feel like it's one of the things that I really appreciate in this modern digital world. And I also feel like, unfortunately, it may be one of the things that's slipping away.

Mareko Maumasi (2:28)

It definitely is slipping away.

I think with technology, it's been great for us in a lot of different ways. We couldn't be fucking talking into a piece of metal and it's recorded on a computer.

Joe Rogan (2:40)

It's going through a wire, flying into the air.

Mareko Maumasi (2:43)

It does a lot of great things. But in doing all those great things, it actually has taken us away from really creating and working with our hands. And so even this whole farm to table movement, or people even growing their own vegetables, you got your own chickens, they're laying eggs for you.

Knowing where this stuff is coming from, having firsthand contact with that, just having that relationship in general with it, brings so much more value to the overall experience of eating those eggs, or using that knife, or sitting at this table right here.

Joe Rogan (3:19)

It seems like a fairly recent movement in that direction, right? Things got so digital that people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, with the Facebook and the Instagram. I want a wood table. I want to saw this bitch myself. Put your hands on it, and get your hands dirty. Yeah. I want real stuff.

And there's something about handmade things, whether it's a handmade pair of boots, or a handmade bag.

There's something about things that are made by hand that people get a deep appreciation of from.

Mareko Maumasi (3:53)

For sure.

Well, and I think it also goes back, like I was saying, as technology has advanced, we've grown away from these what's considered blue collar work and craftsmanship kind of work. But I think people really are driven by a sense of achievement. And when you're doing data ad entry that literally millions of people, fucking monkeys, can be trained to do, not to diminish anything that anybody's doing, but literally to be able to go into a craft and have a hands on experience is very, very, very, very different. And that sense of achievement, even when somebody comes out of something, and maybe I taught a lot of class on how to make a knife, and it looks like a fucking turd, they're going to think it looks like the most beautiful fucking knife they've ever seen in their life because their hands and their creativity, their energy, their sweat, and probably some of their blood is put into creating that thing, and that brings that much more value to it.