SPEAKER_02 0:21

Mike Gannett is probably one of the most influential knife designers as it relates to the practice of practical knife defense within martial arts. If you haven't seen his body of work in these areas for knife designs, you actually probably have. Mike is a practitioner of edge weapon self-defense, the special projects coordinator for Spiderco, and a pioneer of Martial Blade Concepts, an edge weapon system designed to meet the needs of today's concerned citizens and armed professionals. He's also a many time published author in both book and magazine. What's more, Mike is a very knowledgeable and articulate person who has his hands in a lot of different areas of the craft of knives. It can't be overstated how much the industry as a whole has benefited from his deep research and frankly, his life's work on edge weapons and techniques. But I think you'll gain great insight into just how smart this dude is as the time ticks away on this great conversation. Mike, it's an honor to have you on the Good Old Place podcast. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. Absolutely. Um so I I think you're probably the first interview I've had, um, or you know, first guest rather, uh, that fits within a lot of different categories of knives. So you have a knife practitioner, um, a knife designer, um, and uh and uh a knife maker, right? I mean, that that that process of designing to completion and being able to test it and send you know send it out uh in the world. Uh all of those are unique because there's lots of people who do that in a um a micro uh chasm or whatever of um you know a handmade knife maker perspective, but you're um you know big time and have a lot of influence and a lot of uh data feeds to uh you know to I guess evaluate your designs and uh and techniques and whatnot. Um what I'm interested to know with your real pro uh the proliferation of your style of thinking and and and using blades as uh as as weapons and for self-defense and everything, where did that all start? Like can you give me a the backstory of kind of how you progressed from you know, I don't know, early childhood or what was interesting to you from like the first time you actually thought about this stuff to where you're at today?

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Sure. Um basically I grew up uh just outside of Chicago. So a place called Cicero is literally half a block outside of Chicago, and it was kind of a uh a grungy blue-collar area, and um um having self-defense skills was um kind of a useful thing in that environment. And this was also the early 70s, so uh height of the Bruce Lee era, all that kind of stuff. Uh you know, so the popularity of martial arts, uh desire for self-defense, got interested in in training in the martial arts. So, you know, asked my parents about that. Um, we really didn't have a whole lot of uh financial resources and stuff for me to study in a traditional sense. So I ended up with um kind of a uh for lack of a better word, kind of a budget martial arts approach. Um there was a uh martial arts club uh at the high school that I was getting ready to go to. So this was like um I was I guess I was in eighth grade at that point, and uh had been buying some books and magazines and all that kind of stuff, trying to learn what I could. But uh hooked up with the instructor and he said, Hey, we've got a uh a school that we operate. It's kind of a storefront dojo, which was a typical thing back in the day. And uh it was a system called American Self-Protection, so it was kind of a hybrid system, uh, elements of judo, aikido, sabat, and western boxing. And um got into that the summer before going into high school and just threw myself into it, was training six days a week, just loved it. And um as I progressed through that process, we got to the point of learning how to defend ourselves supposedly against knife attacks. And uh that was something that was a a particular fear of mine, and uh we started learning the techniques, and I'm like, hey, I'm gonna really jump into this stuff hard because again, it was a a uh a very personal thing for me, and um I was not impressed with what we were learning. Um it was impractical techniques, I didn't think they would really work, and there were a few other people in the class who were also, you know, pretty serious about the self-defense aspect of what we were doing, and they ended up being my training partner, so we really tried to, you know, tune things up and uh and turn up the intensity of what we were doing, and uh the techniques fell apart. So I went to the instructor and uh being the indignant teenager that I was and basically said, you know, hey, why do all of our counter knife techniques suck? And uh he was a former army ranger, and uh he said, you know, if you want to learn how to use a weapon or learn how to defend against a weapon, first learn how to use the weapon. Because that's the only way to understand its capabilities, understand its its strengths and limitations and everything else. I said, Okay, fine, let's let's learn a knife. And um, you know, back then the only training knives you could find were uh the wooden tantos that you would get from the martial arts supply stores, the traditional Japanese style things, and we started beating the snot out of each other with these and um really started exploring uh what was available as far as knife fighting stuff. So a friend of mine, one of my training partners, gave me a copy of Killer Get Killed, Colonel Rex Applegate's book. Um looked at that, really didn't see uh a whole lot of detail in there, you know, some very basic information. Um he also turned me on to Soldier Fortune magazine, which led me to my interest in Paladin Press. Um Paladin was kind of uh at that time uh almost sole source as far as offering um any kind of substantial information on on knife fighting. So they had uh William Cassidy's book, Complete Book of Knife Fighting, one of the first things I ordered. Um I got other kind of World War One and World War II era stuff, so A.J.D. Bettle's book, Do or Die, uh got uh Steyr's book, Cold Steel, and basically just tried to buy every book I could possibly find on uh knife-related stuff. And uh again, the original thought was, hey, I want to learn, you know, the the knife fighting side of it, um to learn how to defend against a knife, because I've you know, my instructor said those two go hand in hand, and as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized it was a a true statement. But I also started to realize that um for my purposes at least, carrying a knife as a defensive weapon uh was a pretty powerful tool. Once you understood um kind of what its potential was, the fact that it was something that you could carry with you every day, um, and uh you know, no special permits required or anything of that nature, uh it was something that I started to embrace uh based on the idea of having something that gave me uh the capability to defend against lethal force threats. So that was kind of what what launched the whole thing as far as the the initial my initial interest and uh literally just became kind of a uh a lifelong pursuit.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Yeah, I uh in previous conversations, um I I really identify with that because I I don't know what it is about the the like the practicality of of certain um things, right? It's like when you when you play like when you role play uh situations out when it comes to self-defense or certain types of technology or like these these concepts of you know security and safety and whatnot, what in practice a lot of times they they fail out because they don't really take into account real-world you know practical use cases. And um, I've been a well previously a practitioner of Shitoryu, um, uh like a more of like an Okinawan style of uh martial arts. And something that was always drilled into us as you know kids and uh early on in that is uh to try to ev avoid conflict, uh, but then being you know fully prepared to you know to to take it to the next level or to defend yourself if uh if the need arises. So you have to be able to uh you know spar, you have to understand like those basic concepts of of fighting uh both hand to hand and with weapon. But I really did feel like the instruction side of of um of the art style or you know the fighting style was pretty lackluster because it was kind of like kendo. It was very um proceduralized, very formal. And I never really felt like with that, with the technique and everything that we were learning, that it really did prepare me for what I knew about confrontation, where it's kind of it's kind of crazy. It happens at the drop of a hat um when it gets to the point where you're starting to use deadly force and having to protect yourself. And um I think that's one of the the pitfalls uh that we see in modern America, especially, is that you have all these keyboard warriors that sit there and say this thing is practical or that thing's not practical, with actually very little basis for um how to evaluate whether something's effective or not.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

That's absolutely true. And uh that also, as I got more and more into martial arts training, and especially uh one of the unique things about the my early training, uh the ASP stuff, American self-protection, was a lot of the instructors who gravitated toward that particular system uh were also uh in many cases instructors of other systems. So we had guys who were black belts in Taekwondo, black belts in judo. Um our head instructor was a black belt in Kyukushinka karate. And uh so we had uh for me it was interesting because I had these guys who were kind of older mentors, and I was kind of curious once I realized what their backgrounds were. It's like, well, you are you know are very high speed in this other system. What brought you to ESP? And one of their uh consistent responses was it was more self-defense oriented, there was a lot less of the uh the cultural uh regimen where you're you know you're experiencing more of kind of a cross-cultural experience with uh an Asian martial art some sort. Um and they said that it was not only uh a friendlier environment as far as a training environment, but it was also a lot more practical as far as the mindset of approaching self-defense. And they were the first ones, you know, to talk about the idea of awareness and avoidance and uh essentially, you know, avoiding a fight at all costs, having the confidence and having the ability to defend yourself if necessary, but ideally having the intelligence and the wisdom to never have to use it. Um, and that was a a lesson that was, you know, very different than, you know, again, kind of the uh the dramatized application of of you know the martial arts stuff where it's like, you know, hey, go out there and kick ass and be a badass and all this other type of stuff. Um they were the first ones who really kind of talked to me about that idea of, you know, hey, there's there's consequences to everything you do. And in some cases they can be consequences of just having um, you know, if you had to hurt somebody very badly, having that on your conscience, or the the legal ramifications go along with it, uh the financial ramifications go along with it if you have to defend your actions in court, uh, and just all those those aspects of what real self-defense is all about. And it's like, okay, this is a much different and much, you know, deeper topic than I thought about. The physical skills and and that aspect of it were just a very small part. Um like everything else in life, you look at it and you take textbook learning, you put that into the real world, and suddenly it opens up, hey, what are all the other dynamics of this of this topic that I'm exploring and and how does it really work? Um and that was again a big eye-opener. And especially when it came to as as my pursuit of uh knife-related skills uh kind of proceeded, um, did a bunch of reading, uh, did as much research as I possibly could, and I heard about the Filipino martial arts. And the Filipino martial arts, you know, back then, when you look at like the the mid to late 1970s, were not a big thing. They were they were still very um very much held within the Filipino uh cultural community within the uh uh within the US. And um you just didn't have a whole lot of um access to the Philip Filipino martial arts. And um it really intrigued me that you have this, you know, really high speed um its weapon culture. I wanted to learn more about it, but didn't really have access to it. Um and when I finally started to see some of the Filipino martial arts stuff come out when it's when it's you know started to become uh more available, if you will, uh what I realized was there was a lot of aspects to the way that the traditional Filipino Age weapon tactics were used that was really serious overkill. And when you start looking at that um element of it and then weighing that against responsible self-defense, there was a serious disconnect. Um from a battlefield standpoint, it made perfect sense. You know, you basically uh a lot of Filipino martial arts tactics, when you look at knife tactics, the idea is I'm gonna disarm this guy and then I'm gonna kill him. So from a self-defense standpoint, that's an absolute no-go because once you've disarmed him, you've eliminated a lethal threat, and you're no longer justified unless there's a severe disparity of size and strength, or you've got multiple attackers or there's disparity of number. The idea of you continuing to use an edge weapon on somebody who's unarmed, uh, at that point you become the aggressor and you lose your claim to self-defense. Um but literally the Filipino martial arts, when you look at their knife tactics, that's the way just about every one of the techniques was played out. And what I saw was it's like, hey, this stuff is really effective, but it's also something that's gonna land me in prison if I ever had to use it, self-defense.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

Yeah, I mean that that that makes a lot of sense. Um I I think that there is like a an aspect of like the the I don't know what you if you call it like posturing or if you call it um like like well, I mean the it's like you know that the fighting style, then you have like the everything else, uh like the the legal ramifications and um like the I guess it's the philosophy, right, of of how to appropriately use yourself as the weapon and control weapons um for uh mitigating threat, right? And um like that's something that's interesting to me when it comes to what um like this this this the earlier writings of yours uh with Paladin Press is because even if you look at a modern day proliferation of information, um there there wasn't like a lot of other avenues for you uh for people to go through in order to be able to gain this experience or to have uh reference material, right? It was like you know, some is you know, somebody's using like Five Rings or Sun Tzu's Art of War or something to learn some tactics and then maybe books that were written um fit in in kind of like niche markets in order to um uh share that. But when you get to the like your Paladin Press days where you're starting to really um apply these uh concepts to writing, then it actually starts to um shift some of the industry in a way where we're we're talking more about you know um American-based uh legality and concepts of self-defense. Um, do you feel like the the avenue that you took with uh being able to write for Paladin Press and publish that way um helped to define this in the American market?

SPEAKER_00 16:53

I think it did, and it also for me was a huge um both a reality check and a turning point for me. So uh like I wrote the book Knife Fighting a Practical Course, um and that was back in I wrote that mostly in like 1991, I believe it was published in 92 or 93. And what it was was you know, everything that I was able to kind of gather from uh other sources and then through my own training with my own training partners and everything, I felt that I had um kind of taken uh the available information and um analyzed it and compiled it into something that was a usable system, kind of what I was looking for at the very start. Um you know, so if you went to you know back to my teenage years, if I could have had an opportunity to learn what I was doing in the early 90s, that would have been great because it would have given me uh a huge turnkey solution to something that was otherwise, you know, uh very much uh uh a tedious, long process trying to get useful elements together into a system. Um but even that book, when I look at it now, uh where I've come from there since that time uh is night and day. Uh so that book really represented a lot of um kind of uh again trying to take what was available at the time, taking the military training, taking what little I could find of the Filipino martial arts stuff that was available at the time, and kind of distilling that, but maintaining kind of the same um uh attitude, if you will, as far as its application. And it really the the aspect of really um putting that into uh a full self-defense context context hadn't gelled with me yet. I knew that there was, you know, the um the elements of responsibility as far as use of force and self-defense, and I knew that you know that had to be um you had to temper your technique or or be able to apply your technique in a way that is legally justifiable. Um, but still there was a lot of uh echoing kind of the bravado and everything of of the military-style knife fighting stuff, um, and and the the Filipino battlefield-oriented stuff. That's really what that book was. And one of the big turning points for me, um, I had written that book, it was reasonably well received, you know, was selling fairly well. Um, and I was actually the first person from the kind of the paladin time frame and everything. I was the first person who started off as a customer, became an author, and then became an employee of Paladin. So that progression was pretty rare. Most of the people that Peter Lund, uh the founder of Paladin, hired, he wanted people who were um technical experts at editing uh words or uh graphic arts or whatever else it might be. He did not want people who were um really into the subject matter, uh, which was seems kind of weird, uh, but that's the way he preferred it. He didn't want to have uh a lot of people who were um for whatever reason, you know, really actively interested in the subject matter, uh, because he didn't feel that they could stay objective and be able to objectively look at what other authors might have to might have to offer. Um and when I was working at Paladin, uh I was their video production manager from 1994 to 2004, so I literally established their in-house video production stuff. And I got a uh a phone call one day from a guy and he said that he had uh been attacked by his boss. He was attacked with a knife, he was able to disarm the boss, take control over the knife, and use the knife to defend himself. He ended up killing his boss, and now he was being um basically tried for first-degree murder. And um he had seen that I'd written Knife Fighting a Practical Course. Um he saw that it was more self-defense oriented, even though it was still falls way short of you know where I am now. But he saw that it was more of a self-defense-oriented approach to using knives, and he wanted me as a technical expert for his legal uh legal team. And uh long story short, I got access to all of the um coroner's information, all of the police reports, everything else, and um you know, prior to that, my in during my military career, um, I was basically an intelligence analyst trained by National Security Agency, so I had pretty good analytical skills from uh the nine years that I served in the military, and basically took that analytical process and applied it to his incident. And in the process, what I realized was um he had about a six inch blade. The boss had attacked him first, he was able to deflect the blade. Um boss fell down, dropped the knife, and grabbed this guy by the throat and was choking him to death. This guy reached over, grabbed the knife, and started defending himself with it. The boss continued to try to kill him empty-handed. The boss was significantly larger, weight outweighed him by probably 60, 70 pounds. Um, and this guy was using the knife to defend himself. And going through the autopsy report in detail, what I saw was that many of the knife wounds that this guy inflicted as individual wounds were potentially lethal and ultimately were lethal collectively. Um, but they didn't stop the boss from trying to kill him. They fought, according to the neighbors, the boss lived in a an apartment complex. So there were neighbors on both sides, top and bottom. Uh so when the police interviewed the neighbors, they said, Yeah, we heard this commotion, and it went on for a good three to four minutes. And then you look at the crime scene photos and everything else, and you see that they literally fought through just about every room in the apartment. And in the end, the boss was stabbed or cut over 50 times, uh, many of them full depth penetration with a six-inch blade, and he didn't stop. And that for me was a huge game changer because when I looked at it, what I saw was that lethality and stopping power were two very different things. So you can have somebody who ultimately ends up dying because of the wounds that you inflict, but if you don't stop them quickly enough and decisively enough, then basically you don't keep yourself safe. And you may end up with, you know, at best, a mutual slaying. You end up dying and killing, killing your attacker, but you really didn't accomplish the goal of self-defense. And for me, that was a huge paradigm shift. Um, a lot of the stuff that I thought I knew, you know, you take this knife, you stick this guy in the torso, he bursts into flames, and you're done. Um, it doesn't work that way. And um for me, that really um what ended up happening at that point was I stopped stopped looking at so much at the martial arts side of things, and I really started looking much harder at the medical side. Um, so essentially looking more at what types of wounds do knives inflict, um, what types of um injuries do people um suffer that are immediately debilitating? And then how do I take essentially those two bodies of knowledge and combine them into a system that focuses on stopping power and instant debilitation to come up with something that is much more self-defense oriented? So it was it was really uh a very, very important paradigm shift as far as my approach to self-defense.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Yeah, and um well, I I I understand that um, especially from a uh from a gun perspective, because you know I spent a long time hunting, and I'll tell you, nothing is is more frustrating than going out and you know hunting game, and then you shoot something knowing that you got a good shot, and that animal runs off and you have to track blood, right? A lot of people don't understand that from a a physio a physiological perspective, that uh adrenaline and other dynamics play a vital role in in the immediate survivability of of an interaction, you know, that fight or flight. And then later on they succumb to uh their wounds. And I, you know, that's something that um there's a concept uh it's like a s a survivorship bias that was uh applied during uh World War II to uh fighter uh you know planes and whatnot that are you know were downed versus returned. And I think that we have this um you know traditionally we look at things like if something um if we're focusing too much on a single type of problem, we lose sight of uh of what the downstream effects are of a certain action or a certain uh behavior or variable, right? And I mean this this the survivorship bias is basically that all these planes were uh uh going down, and the ones that came back, you know, had all these holes in them. So they started patching all where the holes were at, and somebody came along and said, Hey, maybe we should patch all the places where there were not holes, because those areas are probably the vital areas that you know you can't survive if they were hit. But where the holes are at, we could we have proof that that is um a non-fatal um area of a plane. And I think that that concept uh applies very similarly to us as you know, bleeding organisms.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Yep, that's exactly right. And it's I see that as you know applying that type of mindset um because again, what you have um you know, that particular analogy I think is very useful when it comes to applying that back to uh kind of the knife side of things. What's what's interesting about it is you'll see in the Filipino martial arts, one of the tactics they'll use is what they call defanging the snake. So they consider the the weapon-wielding limb to be the the snake, and then whatever weapon is held in the hand to be the fang. So the analogy is if you could take the fang away from the snake, the snake may still be alive, but it's not dangerous because it's been defanged. Uh, but what they would do in their application would be okay, this guy swings at me with whatever weapon it might be. I'm justified in having a knife in my hand because he has a contact distance lethal weapon. Uh, I cut the flexor tendons or the flexor muscles on the inside of his wrist, and he drops his weapon. From there, the Filipino methodology is okay, cool. Now, as a battlefield application, application of lethal force, if it was a Filipino uh warrior fighting a conquistador, you know, if it was a Filipino warrior fighting a Japanese soldier during World War II, it's like, okay, this guy's no longer dangerous to me. Now I kill him, and essentially all the follow-ups become lethal strikes. Um again, from a self-defense standpoint, you're done after the first cut. So that tactic by itself, um, still extremely useful. And ideally, that solves your problem right off the bat. Uh, but then from there, the idea of trying to shut down somebody by going to life-supporting organs, um, that ends up focusing exclusively on lethality, and it's also something that is um not as efficient as it could be. Especially one of the other things as far as self-defense goes, when you compare um, you know, traditional Filipino weapons or uh military fighting knives or whatever it might be with a six-inch blade, and then you compare that to what you could legally carry in your pocket, which may be a three-inch blade, um, again the the performance is very different. And then the targets that you can successfully go after also change simply because of their depth in the body. So what I looked at was if the defanging the snake aspect works as far as the grip on the weapon, what other aspects of the person's ability to be dangerous to me could I target in the same way? So essentially looking at uh initially targeting the mechanical structure. So essentially muscles pull on tendons to move bones. So if you can cut the muscle deeply enough, you take away its ability to flex properly and it can't uh achieve whatever mechanical function it's supposed to provide. So again, the the inside of the forearm, if you think of your forearm muscles pulling on the tendons that attach to your fingers. If you cut them the forearm muscles deeply enough, you can't grip the weapon. If you cut the tendons, that's what connects those muscles to the bones. Again, instantaneous response. Well, if that wasn't successful, then what I did was I started looking at again at what other uh mechanical components could we look at. And you look at if somebody still had a weapon, if they're trying to strike you with that weapon or trying to stab you or cut you or whatever it might be, the tricep muscle at the the back of the upper arm is what extends the elbow joint. The bicep is what bends the elbow joint. And cutting those muscles would have a similar effect to defanging the snake. What you're doing is you're now focusing more on disabling and crippling than you are trying to kill somebody, but you're also in the process, very importantly, achieving instantaneous results. Uh and then the ultimate uh targeting uh or ultimate target that I came up with uh was the idea if somebody has a contact distance weapon, they have to be able to basically stand up and have some type of mobility to deliver that violence to you. So when you look at the quadricep muscle at the front of the thigh, that is what extends your knee joint and allows you to support weight on that leg and achieve mobility. If you cut just above the knee and severed that muscle, took away the that leg's ability to support weight, you create what's called a mobility kill. And with a mobility kill, essentially the person will drop to one knee or at best, they're going to be hopping on the other leg, which will severely impede their mobility. They can't uh again uh achieve enough mobility to be able to catch up with you. You'd be able to create distance, create safety um just by being able to back away from them. And this mindset of, you know, again, let's look at uh uh an in-depth analysis of targeting and figuring out how things work. Um that again was a a big uh paradigm shift for me. I started looking at more the medical side of things, taking that concept of defanging the snake, and you know, as kind of a parallel process. One of the interesting things um when I was working with Paladin Press, um, and especially once I had this uh this opportunity to be a uh a legal consultant for the case in which the the guy used the knife as a uh in self-defense, one of the things that surprised me was reading through the um the autopsy report was the number of major blood vessels and major organs that were punctured uh on the attacker, but he didn't stop. And this uh, if you go back to the World War II era stuff, one of the most famous things as far as knife uh knife fighting culture, if you will, uh was W. E. Fairburn's book, uh Get Tough, previously published as All Infighting. And in that book, it had a thing called the Timetable of Death. And the timetable of death was basically a drawing of the human body, showed all the major arteries. So going back to you know basic uh basic anatomy, basic biology, arteries carry oxygenated blood from the heart to the limbs, delivers that oxygen, and then the veins carry it back to the heart, pumps it through the lungs to be reoxygenated. The process repeats. Um, so arterial bleeding arteries always have higher blood pressure, uh, and the loss of oxygenated blood is obviously going to be something that is gonna affect your um your health or or your survivability uh have much more impact on it. And according to Fairburn, uh things like you cut the carotid artery in the neck, and five seconds later the guy's unconscious, 12 seconds later he's dead. Um reading through this autopsy report and reading all this stuff, it's like, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. Um so one of the the greatest things about working with Paladin Press was I actually got to work with Colonel Applegate for about the last five years that he was with us. Um and he, because I was actually interested in the subject matter, unlike everyone else he'd worked with at Paladin Press, um, he really liked me and took me under his wing and mentored me for those those last few years that he was with us. So I asked him, hey, what was the deal with the timetable of death? And his basic analysis of it was that during World War II, one of the most critical things they had to do was to instill confidence in people. Um so they often had very, very brief periods of training that they had to work with people before they sent them off to war. So you might have some guy who last week was an accountant, and this week you're trying to teach him to be an OSS agent and convince him that you know he's gonna stab that Russian or that uh that German in the neck and kill him. Um he basically felt that what Fairburn came up with with the timetable of death was um institutionalized lies uh to basically create the impression that you could get uh better results than you actually could. And that was done to instill confidence in the people that they were teaching. There was no medical basis for it whatsoever. So when you look at uh again, the uh you'd mentioned before kind of the uh the keyboard warriors out there looking at stuff and saying, well, you know, this is what you need to do, and they're again regurgitating what they think they know. The common belief is that the way knives stop people is to bleed them out. Bleeding people out takes too long. So again, as part of my process in uh developing the targeting system for what is now Marshall Blade Concepts, uh I took defanging the snake, uh, extended that to other body parts to focus on being able to disable people, disable the key mechanical components that they had to be able to deliver violence uh effectively to me. Um, and then basically really downplayed the uh the bloodletting portion of it, if you will, uh, because I realized that blood loss is not an effective way to create stopping power.

SPEAKER_02 35:34

Yeah. Um and you know, um a lot of morbid concepts here, right? Um, especially probably for my listener fair that's uh uh you know wants to talk about uh knife knife design and and and making and whatnot. But I think it's important because um I I've I've for a long time uh been uh espousing the fact that you know violence is brutal, right? Um uh trying to end somebody's life or trying to um stay out of danger when it gets to a place where uh physical confrontation and and like you know contact is a is an element of defense, it's very brutal. And uh, you know, everybody sees on the media now like somebody like you know, law enforcement officers using uh, you know, I mean using quote unquote like lethal force, right? And what I mean by that is like somebody who's on bath salts, you know, you shoot them like 15 times and they don't stop. And then people are you know questioning, well, if that didn't work, like did you, you know, all these number of things, like you know, the hypothesis, everybody is an expert analyst when it comes to these things that are just being shown for public um um you know, because of like the the legal public requirement to to uh disclose them, right? But they don't really understand how um in in a situation the the outcomes sometimes don't uh match the means of lethal force. Yet at least here here we have like all these different scenarios where lethal force was used, even with with firearms. Um the outcome wasn't that somebody died instantaneously, right? I mean, it's you can't just look at something at face value. It requires it does require the kind of uh analysis and uh whole brain thinking that you've been applying to this. And that's why I I really am interested in uh the the full spectrum analysis of uh these dynamics of of personal defense and um and you know lethality and everything like that as it as it relates to that, because I think people need to understand that the the Fairbear and Sykes you know dagger, like the those types of um knife designs do are not necessarily analogous to um to a a great tactical knife or a great fighting knife, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

That's true. And and yes, this this stuff is it does get gritty for sure, um, because you're you're talking about somebody trying to kill you and then you doing you essentially delivering lethal force strikes, uh potentially lethal um you know counterattacks to stop that person. Um and that really is you know, we can look at fighting knives, we could look at tactical knives, if you will, um, as pieces of art, as you know, uh the elements of craftsmanship and everything that that create them. But if you really want to appreciate um their real intent, um then understanding the tactics with which they have to be wielded or which which with which they're they're most effective, um, that plays into it as well. Because again, people will look at something and say, oh, you know, it's a great fighting knife. And it's like, well, is it really um and does it lend itself well to the tactics that would be necessary to be able to um stop somebody effectively, or in a military context, if you are applying lethal force because it's it's justified and appropriate based on those rules of engagement, um, does it function well in in that in that realm? So um again, and this part of it can can be unpleasant for some people to think about that aspect of it. But if if you're at all interested in the the aesthetic value or the design value of of tactical knives, then this actually has you know pretty pretty significant bearing on it. Um but if you're if you're interested in the self-defense side of things, what it comes down to when you look at um the legal requirements for self-defense. So essentially if somebody attacks you and you defend yourself, you can only really respond with a commensurate level of force. Okay, so if somebody's punching you, you can strike them back with empty hands or whatever. Once you get to the point to where you are using excessive force based on the force they deliver to you, you become the aggressor and you lose your right to self-defense. Um and that becomes something that that a lot of people never never really think about. And especially people who are into firearms, if they if they look at it as, you know, I'm just gonna get a concealed carrying permit and carry a gun, you know, we go back to the cliche of to the man who only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Uh so if somebody wants to, you know, punch you in the face and you decide, well, I'm gonna draw my gun and shoot him, or I'm gonna draw my gun and threaten to shoot him, you become the aggressor, um, and basically you are now legally at fault. Um so when you look at the realities of self-defense and and the messiness of the entire thing, um, what I what I really tried to look at as far as the knife side of it, um another one of the the turning points for me, if you will, um toward the end of my military career, um, I was picked up, uh I was a Vietnamese linguist. I was a Chinese man or in a Vietnamese linguist, basically working in support of uh NSA and their collection efforts. Um I was pretty good at Vietnamese. I was picked up to uh essentially do uh work for the organization that was looking for POWs and MIAs in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Uh so I did a at first a six-month tour uh in Bangkok, traveling to all the Vietnamese refugee camps uh throughout Asia, interviewing people who claimed to have information about POWs and MIAs. Well, a lot of those refugee camps um were not just legitimate refugees, but they were also um Vietnam had a purge uh where they basically decided to get rid of get rid of a lot of uh the ethnic Chinese that they had in North Vietnam, and especially the ethnic Chinese that they had uh who were part of uh criminal element in North Vietnam. And they basically walked them across the border into China, and a lot of them ended up in in refugee camps, and they would basically languish there because they had no legitimate claim to to resettlement status. Uh they were basically criminals who had been deported, if you will. Um so there was some very active gang activity going on, and um I had no security. I was basically on my own, walking around in these camps and everything, traveling. I was uh later on ended up working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, doing a similar uh similar function. Lived in Hong Kong for about two years and traveled to the Philippines on a regular basis. Uh during that time, the NPA, National People's Army, uh, they were very active uh as far as targeting Americans. Um so I found myself living overseas, assigned to diplomatic posts, uh the embassy in Bangkok or the consulate in Hong Kong, but I couldn't own a firearm, I couldn't carry a firearm, I had no uh dedicated security that was out there to protect me. And it's like, okay, if something bad happens, I'm I'm on my own. And that was again a real turning point as far as my motivation to embrace the knife as a defensive weapon. Um so you look at something, I could actually carry a knife on a regular basis. I was uh working with a diplomatic passport, so it was good because I had a get out of fr get out of jail free card, if you will, um, as far as being able to travel with knives. Um, but it became something where um, again, that focus, the the reality behind it, where it's like, okay, if something bad happens, if I'm attacked by somebody, what I have in my pocket is what I have to defend myself with. And that's that's a real reality check. Um and again, it's one of the you know when you look at all the kind of things that um affected my approach to what ultimately became the the development of Marshall Blade Concepts or MBC, um, all of these were kind of important stepping stones along the way. Um, where it's like it wasn't just a casual pursuit uh pursuit. At first it was I want to learn how to defend. Against a knife attack. Then it was like, hmm, a knife might be a useful defensive weapon. Then it became by necessity, it's the only one that I would have available. And I need to take this more seriously. So those um again, it's it's unpleasant to think about that stuff, but by necessity, um, you have to work through that.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

Yeah. And I mean, in in de facto, as part of your job, you were basically dropped into different localized prisons, as it were. I mean, it's the idea is you have a a criminal underbelly or a a situation where you uh you do have no protection except for yourself, and you have to figure out the the rules of engagement or the dynamics of uh of you know the culture and of the people that you're around and do it all by yourself. And that to me is like a humongous trial by fire because you know, in in every locale that you go to, like how like how are you supposed to figure out and quickly uh and with language barrier what situations you're you're actually in? Like that that situational awareness becomes like compounded and way more difficult.

SPEAKER_00 45:11

Exactly. Um, and it also, again, going back to you know your original comments about the idea of of avoidance. Um you have avoidance from the sense of, okay, I don't want to be involved in a situation if I don't have to. I want to, you know, from a righteousness standpoint, you want to be, you know, avoid conflict if at all possible. Well, you also very quickly realize that, you know, when you're on your own and it's one of you, um you, like you say, you turn up, tune up your awareness, you pay attention to what's going on, and you trust your gut. Uh so if something starts to go south, it's like I don't like the way this thing looks. Um, you're not going to take chances and say, well, I'll just fight my way out of this thing. Um, you're gonna pop smoke and get out of there as quickly as you possibly can. So the the ability to, like you say, uh read an environment, that also for me was um a lot of the the non-martial arts stuff, the the more street-oriented or streetwise elements of uh awareness and avoidance, being able to position yourself in such a way that you had good fields of view, uh position yourself so that you had access to an exit all the time, uh, having physical barriers that you can use as obstacles, um, all of those things that are not, you know, they're they're it's interesting because they're actually when you go back to true martial arts, if you go back to, you know, uh the the more nuanced elements of um Japanese martial arts, when you look at the way the samurai fought and everything else, they were in a culture that was a warrior culture, and um they would look at things like, okay, if I'm seated in a kneeling position and I happen to be in this position position in the room and I were attacked at this point, what would I do? And a lot of uh those fine details, if you get into the you know uh the nitty-gritty of the Japanese martial arts, you would see that type of stuff and you think, wow, these guys really overthought this stuff. Well, they were living it. Um, and it was something that they were they were applying on a daily basis in that environment. Um, and then once it was no longer relevant and the martial arts became practiced for their artistic expression and the cultural expression and you know all the other stuff where it's removed from the practical application, then everyone focuses on, you know, hey, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, and they're they're focusing on technique, but they don't understand the many of the driving factors behind the technique. And that's actually one of the fascinating things about martial arts when you circle back and you start looking at it, it's like, well, why is this little motion being used here? What what's the real significance of this? Um, you may see something like the uh prior to drawing a sword, for example, you may see something where uh they extend the handle of the sword and then they draw in the second motion. And it's like, well, why would they extend the handle of the sword? Well, they're striking with the butt of the sword to hit their opponent in the hand to keep him from drawing, and then they're drawing their sword. So you would see these little movements like this, and it's like, oh, okay, I'm doing this because my instructor told me to. And often the the real meaning behind them gets lost. When you go back and rediscover that, again, the depth of knowledge behind it is is fascinating, and it also kind of motivates you to take that same mindset, same mindset, that same attention to detail, and apply it to modern self-defense.

SPEAKER_02 48:41

Yeah. Um something that I uh I've always appreciated about um uh you know defense styles like that is the the overwhelming understanding of energy and of physics, right? Because I mean, if we if we think about like efficiency in motion and kinetic energy and all of these things that you know we live in every day, geo gravity, right? Um the the known world of how we hyper like are hyperpositioned in in a place and how you affect that uh to another, it's it's like the the philosophy um and even sometimes the religious um um I guess uh like the theology of of the universe or the world that you live in is intrinsically um uh uh intertwined within how how you manipulate that. And what I found is that uh there's lots of things that people don't think about in motion, especially and how to um manipulate it, that uh early, you know, in in the samurai culture and in fighting styles that use you know another person's energy or whatever, that you you have to think about it holistically, but it really comes from a very deep philosophical uh understanding of the world around you and how to manipulate it.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

Yeah. And then also, you know, you look at some things, like in in the karate side of things, you look at trying to interpret the forms. You know, when you look at the bunkai of the form, the application of the form, um, many people they'll they'll look at it and it it makes it uh I was never good at forms because they never made any sense to me. Um I guess I've always been very logical and analytical in the way that I approach stuff. And if I didn't know what I was doing, um, it was really hard for me just to copy somebody else's motion. And later on, especially once, uh again, fast forwarding to when I was working for Paladin, I started to work with some authors who specialized in that side of things, and they started explaining the bunkai behind it, and in many cases, not just the application, but the environmental context. Uh, for example, Teki Shodan, uh, one of the kata that you'll see in the Japanese martial arts, where there's a lot of walking sideways. So they're actually kind of crab walking sideways. Um, and it's like, why would somebody ever do this? It makes no sense. And then you go back to the purpose that the kata was developed and you look at the context in which it would be used, which is protecting the Okinawan royal family in the Okinawan palace. And it was basically set up almost like bleachers. So you had the entranceway that would come into a courtyard, and then you would go up these stairs. Well, if the bodyguards for the Okinawan royal family were using this technique, they would be standing on a higher step than their attacker, and they would be moving sideways because there was no forward and backward motion without going up or down the stairs. Um so again, when you look at putting the stuff into environmental context, it's like, wow, that suddenly that makes perfect sense. Um, and all these movements also make sense, their application. Um, and it just really, again, it gives you that holistic look where it's like, okay, I can't, I can't look at everything as if I'm you know standing in the middle of the mat and um you know, I've got perfect freedom of motion, perfect traction, and I can move everywhere, you know, with uh with equal ease. Once you put that into an environmental context, especially with environmental constraints, um the whole world changes.

SPEAKER_02 52:27

Yeah. And I I I think that that's something that a lot of people just don't really think too much about. Uh like kind of going back to the brutality uh uh conversation. Uh, you know, I I know that you're a fan of uh of uh Kira Korosawa, uh, you know, your jimbo uh um you know m movie uh and namesake for uh you know a pattern that you've designed right. Um but uh something that I really actually do appreciate about uh Kurosawa's films is that he kind of um set like separates the veil of what is the mystique and the art of uh the culture uh in Japan at the time, right, during samurai, uh and and really shows more of the uh I don't know, pell-mell, like the the uh the mortality, the attrition uh component of of the culture and fighting and whatnot. You know, you have people like you know scared to use their their sword and you know feigning that they're going to attack and whatnot, and then they ended up you know getting into a tussle where their their weapons are not even available to them and they're just you know uh fist fighting and whatnot. Like all of that is a very clear picture of what actually happens in in altercation. And uh it's something that we have a lot to learn from because I've looked at that and said, you know, that is actually very similar to the way that I've seen a lot of um um altercations uh unfold, is that you start in this position where you think that you have power, and then very quickly you can become um a victim to the circumstance. And it's like, how how do you try to avoid that thing by you know by thinking through those those scenarios and trying to find ways to not be a a victim either be because of the scenario or because of attrition and mistakes?

SPEAKER_00 54:25

Yep. It gets very dynamic and it's never you know, the the way that that I approach it with my students um is you know, I basically tell them we aspire to achieve this perfect technique because what we want to do is to have our technique be wired as tightly as possible. But then one of the the key sayings we have is when in doubt, lower your standards. And they're like, Well, what does that mean? And I said, What it means is that the technique is not important. What you're trying to achieve with it is the ultimate uh importance, that it's outcome-based. So you have to be able to keep your, you know, minimize danger to you, minimize injury to you, and then stop your attacker decisively, and then create distance, create the opportunity for escape. But those are the performance criteria we're looking at. And we start with something that is pretty clinical, pretty textbook, and then as we get better and better in our training, what we do is we start to change the dynamics to where it's like, okay, so this is no longer going to favor your perfect execution of the technique. We're gonna make it messier, we're gonna make it less predictable, we're gonna make it more dynamic as we go on. And we do this in a progressive way. So as people get into it, you find some folks who are have a strong martial arts background, and they're like, Oh, yeah, I don't feel really good about the last technique I did because it wasn't that clean. And I said, Did you get hit? No. Did you were you able to basically make the technique work to where you if you had a real weapon, you would have stopped the attacker? Yeah, okay, you win. Um, it's not going to be an aesthetic uh victory, it's going to be a functional victory. Um, and being able to to always focus on the the outcome aspect of it, uh, I think is what's critically important. And a lot of people who train in the martial arts, they think, oh, I'll learn martial arts and I'll learn self-defense as a byproduct of it. Um they can be very, very different things. And people who focus on the uh the athletic expression of it and the aesthetic expression of it, um, they might be in for a really rude surprise if they ever had to use their skills in real self-defense.

SPEAKER_02 56:35

Oh yeah. Um you know, I'm I'm kind of reminded, and it's not uh a knock on uh the military or service members, um, but it is a realization that um, you know, I mean, since 9-11, uh we've been, you know, in some form of conflict. And so a lot of uh a lot of the younger population now have grown up in in times of war, right? And I think that there is a it's kind of a misnomer to assume that if you uh if you were in the military that you're uh a killing machine. Uh and I've uh I've seen this uh in my own experience with uh uh my my my wife, uh, you know, we were both divorced and um married each other, but her uh ex-husband was uh a Bradley commander uh in 11 Bravo. And what's interesting to me is that entire marriage, um like there was never a like a an osmosis of self-awareness and defense or any any practical um self-defense knowledge that was transferred to my wife. Um she spent a long portion of time kind of doing the military thing, um, but there wasn't any real like knowledge transfer. Like there wasn't uh nobody was uh you know trying to uh make sure that her you know her children or herself were um were converse on on uh you know risk management or uh you know threat management or anything like that. And we all think that every single militar like person who's in the military is a killing machine. And I have not really found that to be the case. Like the most people in the military don't have to do hand-to-hand combat. They're not really converse in in marksmanship and things, maybe for a very brief period of time. But then every like culturally, we look to them as subject matter experts on how to, you know, how to defend themselves, how to use weapons, everything like that. And to me, it's a it's it is a humongous misnomer. There is no there are people who excel at that because that's what they want to do, but it it's the the military complex is not developed um to ensure that those people are, you know, uh fighting machines when they get out of the military either. And that rarely gets imparted in the in the the the lexicon of of self-defense or the culture as it would seem.

SPEAKER_00 59:06

That's exactly right. Um, you know, one of the things to, you know, I served nine years active duty in the army, uh, and then was a DOD civilian for five years after that. Continue to work in a military environment. And um, I mean, that entire time I was a technical expert. I was a linguist, I was an intelligence analyst, um, and you know, I served proudly, but I never uh when I went through basic training, we had absolutely zero hand-to-hand combat training. Uh I mean, and that kind of ebbs and flows, and it depends a lot on whether you are actually in a combat arms uh MOS, military occupational specialty. So when you look at infantry soldiers, they're going to go through, you know, uh some type of hand-to-hand combat training. They might get some type of knife training. Um, whereas the vast majority of folks who are doing other jobs in the military, I mean, they're doing a great job doing what they're doing, but their specialty is vastly different. Um, and you know, kind of circling back to the the knife side of things, because that's why we're supposed to be here. Um, but um when you think of military knife fighting, uh, a lot of people, you know, will again say that, you know, well, the military, you know, they fight with knives and therefore they're the smartest. They know that they have the best techniques, the best tactics, and everything else. If the average soldier is fighting with a knife, he's having a really bad day. Uh, because all of the other weapons, which are much more capable and much more applicable, um, for some reason he's not using those. So he should have a rifle, he should have a sidearm, he should have, you know, um grenades, you know, even an entrenching tool or something like that is gonna be a more capable weapon than a knife. Uh so the idea of again, we have this romanticized notion of, you know, uh war movies with people fighting with knives and sneaking up behind sentries and all this other kind of stuff, that really is not a um a strong skill set in any kind of modern military training. Um, and even when you go back to the times when it was more of uh an integral part of military training, it still was pretty basic. Uh the World War II era stuff, uh John Steyer's book uh Cold Steel and the Marine Corps uh methods that he developed were probably the most advanced for their time, uh, and they were still pretty basic and they didn't get a whole lot of practice out of them. Um but you know, there's there's a lot of misconceptions, and you know, and the media of course feeds that. We have you know so many movies with everybody you know is uh an ex-special forces operative, everyone is ex-CIA and they have this, you know, this fantastic skill set and everything. Um again, there's the the number of people who are actually trained to that level, uh and especially trained to that level to where they would have any knowledge of any kind of edge weapon use uh is very, very small. Um the vast majority of the people out there are again serving proudly, supporting uh whatever military efforts we might be be making, but they're doing so by doing their specific jobs, which are not necessarily directly related to combat.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:13

Yeah. Yeah. And um I know I know it might seem that uh like it's a little bit uh tangential talking about military and talking about, you know, uh firearms and things like that. But I'm kind of um veering us into a location where I want to talk a lot more about like the the practical side of uh your fighting style and everything. But I think that we have to dispel some of these um the the notion that we we really collectively understand uh self-defense, right? Because it uh to me, culturally, uh there is a lot of misinformation about you know the brutality, about the effectiveness, about the uh you know technique and things like that. And so we're we're a lot of people that are bolstered with confidence, the same way as you're talking about um uh uh Fairbairn writing you know that book to try to b bolster people's confidence so they can go out and you know do their duty and think that they're not going to die in the process, right? Um and that is the same way culturally. Like we um we have a very false sense of security and a false sense of of ego because we're being fed by media, because we're being fed by you know the the perception of the industrial uh military complex and everything. And it it really does come down to you probably know very, very little. I mean, a person knows very, very little collectively about how functionally edged weapons are going to be used and how to use them in order to make decisions on um on aesthetics, you know, things things that we'll talk about uh in a in a little bit, about you know, uh the the ideal fighting knife, the the ideals of technique, um balance and things. Everybody makes tactical or fighting knives in the in the industry now, but I'm going to say there's probably less than a percentage of those people that actually have either used one or know the dynamics of how uh to use one or how it's going to be applied, and and that be the a deciding factor on how they're developing it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:25

Yep, that's exactly right. And that, you know, uh again, there are lots of myths and misconceptions about um the military, about realistic self-defense, and all of that also extends in today's culture uh when we look at the expectations we have of law enforcement officers, um, security personnel, all that type of stuff. Um understanding the unpleasant side of violence and what it really takes to stop somebody effectively um really is sobering because it kind of takes you away from this again, what we see is the the the clinical theatrical application of the martial arts. Okay, he got this guy in a wrist lock and took the knife away from him. Um, you know, there's that's practical knife technique. No, it's not. Um, you know, all the all the stuff we see in the movies with uh these clinical solutions to very uh dynamic problems, um, it leads people to believe that stuff is actually achievable, especially for somebody who you look at the average law enforcement officer and the amount of defensive tactics training that they get on an annual basis and it's counted in a matter of hours. Um they're recertifying. Um they they focus more on all the other things that they need to know as far as like firearm use, taser use, baton use, everything else. Uh defensive tactics is a very small part of what they do, but we have these high expectations of their skill level, and it's unrealistic. Um so the more that you You understand the reality and and the the brutality of it. Um the more realistic you could be in your expectations and also the the more detail oriented you could be when it comes to assessing uh both technique and tools.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:16

Yeah. Well, um before we move on to the next portion of questioning and everything, um uh like I there is uh life is like onions, and I find this uh analogy um useful in a lot of different senses, especially what we're talking about. Um there I I had um I'd gone down a route of uh wanting to go get my NRA basic pistol instruction um certification so that way I could teach uh a license to carry classes in in the state of Texas, right? And and I was fortunate that there was a place in in Fort Worth called uh uh Defender Outdoors that um brought in a uh a gentleman from Colorado, his name is uh Judson Crosslin. And um he uh he had taught some some at something or other is his is his school, but um he operated a a podcast and a um a methodology called the after action project. And and what he did is in he taught all of the rules, I guess, that would um be required for uh basic pistol instruction, uh, but he tempered that with this after action project methodology where a lot of the things that you might think are novel about like dry firing or about uh controlling adrenal dump or things or a basic um like IFACS and first aid within the context of uh firearms, um, was actually one of the most helpful things that I've taken away from his class in learning basic basic pickle p uh basic pistol instruction and um and marksmanship, right? And what I learned is uh uh through that is uh it is very difficult to um to handle an adrenal dump in a in a confrontation or in a situation where you know there's there's an accident, maybe somebody gets shot or whatever, right? And then what do you do after that uh from a first aid perspective and everything? And I I I think that again, it goes back to like the ego where we think that we are you know hot shit. And then when it when it acts actually tried and when it is actually uh proven out, you really realize you know very little. I mean, I'm I'm speaking from personal experience that in in the context of this uh class, I was fully prepared that I was gonna go in and be a great marksman and I was gonna handle every situation appropriate to kind of what I do when I think through everything. But he put us into situations where uh we didn't know what was going to happen next. It was a lot of like psyops type of um uh um preparedness where I realized very quickly that I was not prepared in any way, shape, or form to actually uh uh teach self-defense. And and it's been a process since then to uh to try to understand those those limitations of myself, the inability to handle um high uh adrenaline situations and whatnot. And like I I feel like even in my experience, I'm a um a part of a very few people uh collectively in percentages that um that realize just how susceptible I am to being victimized, and that I've I've actually tried to take some steps in training uh to prepare for that contingency. Um and so like I when I'm talking to you about these things, and I want everybody to listen, is that um you being a subject matter in this expert, you're really somebody who everybody should listen to. And you have a lot of credentialing and a lot of thought that goes into this. I mean, you spent your life in this discipline and talking about this, and this is very important to me uh that that is uh that that entire world and life of um analysis is rationalized because people should be looking at uh somebody like you uh to be um a ballast for what you know, what is logic and what is uh analysis and the depth at which uh people think about you know different scenarios. And you've come up with a lot of answers, but you're also continuing to mature um as you as you refine your processes and everything uh continuously, like the the 1993 uh published book is not the same as what your uh tactics are today, and you have a lot of philosophy uh that goes along with that. And uh to me, that's a very important underpinning to this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:00

Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate the kind words and and uh and also in in that regard, you know, I've mentioned several of the kind of stepping stones that I've had as far as as my approach to self-defense. Uh one of the the greatest opportunities that I had, and and I think one of the greatest contributions that I've made, um uh Michael Bain. So Michael Bain uh is longtime journalist, uh longtime uh gun rights advocate. And uh he was doing a show um for the outdoor channel uh a number of years ago, and I ended up uh actually writing some stuff for for Michael back uh uh during the Y2K time frame, and um got to know him and he had heard about um Marshall Blade concepts, he'd heard, you know, I had this knife stuff and everything, and he's you know very much a shooter, uh, but he decided to take one of my classes when I first started teaching for Spiderco. Uh was impressed with my teaching knowledge, uh pressed impressed with my teaching approach, and he got an opportunity to do a show called The Best Defense. So it ended up running. We did 11 seasons of it on the Outdoor Channel, and as soon as that show was green lighted, I got a call from him and he's like, I want you to be involved as a subject matter expert. And I'm like, you know, hey, I'm I'm honored to to be able to do this. Um, you know, my forte is mostly the the edge weapon stuff, but I also do, you know, unarmed tactics and everything. He says, and I said, you know, as far as the firearm side of it, I'm not nearly as high speed as as some of the other folks that you might be considering. And he's like, that's exactly why I want you involved. Uh he said, what impressed me the most about you when I took the classes with you and the discussions I've had with you is your analytical approach to self-defense and your focus also on uh catering to individual physical attributes. And he's like, I've never seen any other instructor that did that, and certainly not anyone who did it as well as you did. Um, so the best defense again became an 11 season run that we did on the outdoor channel. And um the basic context for the show, what we would do is we'd have some kind of scary scenario. So it could be a carjacking, it could be you're getting, you know, uh robbed at the pump at the gas station, a home invasion, uh whatever it might be, date rape, you name it. We we tried to cover the full spectrum of self-defense um situations and scenarios. And we did a lot of research uh as far as um trends when when the knockout game was a trend for a while there, we made sure that we did episodes that were devoted to that. And what we would do is we would do a scenario and show it several times. So we show the first version of it, did a dramatic scenario, uh, where it's worst-case scenario, you see the victim being victimized, and it's designed to scare the viewer and and draw them in. Uh, the next one, we might show a little bit better version of it where the person fights back. It might be fighting back with a firearm if it's appropriate, might be fighting back with some other type of weapon. Uh, the third one, we might show another version of it. And always in the fourth one, what we would try to do is focus on uh providing some type of solution to the problem that is based on um recognizing pre-incident indicators, being more aware, being more avoidant, and essentially avoiding the situation uh as much as possible without being involved in any kind of a physical conflict. And that um 11 seasons of working on that show um again really kind of fine-tune my approach to self-defense, not just in a technical aspect, but kind of a practical, holistic aspect, in the sense of, you know, the what I say when I teach is the m the operative term in self-defense is self. So what you have to do is look at your uh individual situation, uh look at your individual physical attributes, uh, what resources you have, what uh commitment you've made to carry a weapon, um, and take all of those things into consideration, and that becomes your your toolkit as well as your set of limitations. So we did uh a number of episodes, for example, self-defense for people with physical disabilities or physical limitations. They have just as much right to defend themselves as an able-bodied person, but they have less capability. So how do you use weapons, how do you use other things to be able to compensate for that to give them an effective plan? And like you said, with with your uh with your personal experiences where you thought, hey, I've got these technical skills, I'm gonna walk into this situation and I'm gonna excel in this class because I feel that I have these technical capabilities. And then suddenly what you're confronted with is a dynamic situation that requires more brain than bullets. It's like wow, this is a this is a very different challenge, and I need to prepare myself differently. Um, I can't just be a good shooter, I can't be a good marksman, I can't have a fast reload, my split times, you know, that's not the ultimate arbiter of success here. What I need to have is um a good brain, a good set of tactics, uh a high level of awareness and and a real grasp of all the skills that I need to keep myself safe, not just the fighting skills. And um for me being able to work on the best offense was was huge because it really just um forced me to um dig deep as far as the the full scope of of that uh of the problem and then also um how to tune the solutions to that problem to individual capabilities.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:52

Yeah. Um you know, kind of talking about uh you know, able-bodied or disability, right? Like um, I I think that's also one thing that I notice in the industry is that you know, if if you're uh obese and you're walking around with like a um you know a fighting knife or something like that, or if you're all like geared up and stuff, people marginalize um you know individuals by body, uh like I mean physique and everything. They think that the the ideal example of a warrior is is the um the you know super cut, you know, 205, 6'5, you know, like the I guess like the military image of a super soldier, right? And and something that I've uh learned kind of in this juxtaposition of um, you know, I'm very humbled to the fact that I at any point in time uh can be victimized. And I I you know, again, tools in your toolkit, they they're personalized to me. I mean, I've I've gone from you know very fit and agile to not so fit and a little bit older to back, you know, back again to fit uh at different areas of my life. And I think about um the the fact that, you know, a a lot of people uh marginalize information and technique and things um because they're the same people that look at like the fat person in the gym and make fun of them instead of cheering them on because they're trying to change their life and they're trying to, you know, learn a a different skill set to fix a situation that they have a problem with, right? And uh that's something that I really think does have to be a a dynamic component of somebody's intelligence and their ego and everything, is that um we're not static creatures and we have to be able to adapt to different scenarios. I mean, today I'm you know walking on two legs, tomorrow I could lose one in a in an automobile accident, right? Uh today I don't have a stroke, tomorrow I might. And and we have to be willing to adapt our our um our self-preservation techniques, our our fighting styles and our you know our self-defense styles to accommodate those. And that really is a it first starts at the mindset of we're really just subject to um the violence and the brutality and the and the animalistic nature of you know the universe. And then once we kind of come to those ego terms, we can build upon those things and try to come up with solutions, um, like your your tactics, right? Um, that really do apply to us and we can use in a lot of different modalities, um, depending on what life throws at us.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:42

Yep, absolutely. Um, you know, we're all individuals and we uh like you say, the analogy with the gym, I was thinking the same thing. You go there and you see somebody who's, you know, you know, heavyset at the gym, and you think, oh, this person's not in shape. Okay, well, if you want to put it into perspective, take a look at your body weight and you know how much weight you can you can lift and then do the same with them. Compare them on equal terms. You know, take a look and see, you know, uh what is your endurance? Get both of you on the treadmill and see, you know uh you can't judge a book by its cover. And um, like you say, also in the grand the grand scheme of things, what we should be doing is uh trying to empower people, trying to encourage people, not trying to to discourage them or judge them. And that becomes another thing with the way the world has evolved, many people would say devolved with uh especially with social media and everything else. We get used to making snap judgments based on minimal information. And uh it's a it's a very dangerous and in my opinion, disrespectful habit to get into. Um you know, you need to to look at the full picture and uh also take a look in the mirror in the process.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:54

Yeah. Well that and that that comes uh that comes to um a head with this conversation about sizing up your opponent, right? Like, I mean, be uh situational awareness really does come um uh from uh the like the totality of an analysis, right? Where we're uh we're looking at everyone in the room or everyone in a given situation and trying to size up uh not not our ability, I guess, to uh to mercilessly kill everyone, but to um but to figure out what uh what tactics we have in place to neutralize threats and to avoid uh attrition, right? And and that's an important uh component to me. Like, yes, spatially we have to be aware of things, but we also have to be able to size up um people. And you know, I've been actually really surprised in in this, you know, in the martial arts world that there's there is so many different body types and there's so many different technique types and everything. And uh it is uh very difficult to be able to walk into a room and to know what threats actually exist and to be able to walk through those scenarios and figure out what you would do as a as a precursor to um you know a conflict.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:12

That's absolutely true. And that's one of the things um it's interesting when people get into martial blade concepts, my my system of knife self-defense. Um, we start going through the the teaching process and we'll say, okay, uh we break it down like most of the Filipino martial arts, which um MBC is basically my analysis of the Filipino martial arts, um, taking some of their core concepts and then molding them into what I feel is more appropriate for modern self-defense. Uh, but FMA stuff is based on angles. So when you look at you know a high forehand attack from a right hand or it's attacking the upper left hand portion of your body. Okay, so I may teach, I say, okay, here are the defensive responses that you have for this. So here's an option, here's an option, here's an option. And the martial arts people will look at this and say, Oh, these are all the things that I need to learn in order to be, you know, if I want to be an instructor in NBC, I have to learn all this stuff and be able to do it. And I said, No, what you need to learn is why we teach all these different options. I said, because each one has um specific contextual application and a lot of it is based on uh relative size. And they're like, Well, what do you mean? And I said, Okay, what you need to do as you're learning these techniques, start off learning with somebody of comparable physical size. So if you're both, you know, same size, then basically all the techniques will work reasonably well. Then go work against somebody who's shorter than you are. And in the process, not only see how your technique has to adapt, but also look at how they um behave differently, especially if you are uh of larger size. See what uh adaptations they make and see what uh techniques they tend to favor because there's a disparity of size now. They may not be as strong, they may not have arms that are as long as yours. So they favor different techniques. Then grab somebody who's bigger. Ultimately try to work your way around the room, work with people of all different sizes, and use that as a way of figuring out kind of where you fit in society as far as your general physical attributes. Are you smaller frame than most of the other people out there? And therefore you need to have techniques that maybe rely on the structure of two hands instead of one when it comes to blocking. So that becomes something that uh just because where you fit in society as far as your physical stature, you tend to be smaller than most people. Well, if you get attacked, then odds are your attacker is going to be larger, and you're gonna need to take the techniques that stack the odds in your favor as far as physical structure and air toward using those. If you're bigger and stronger, then you can get away with using more strength until you run up against somebody who's even bigger and stronger than you are. So you need to have have that perspective. And uh it's it's always interesting because it also, I do have an instructor certification program, but we have some people I can tell right away that are going to get weeded out because what they'll do is they'll we may have, you know, okay, for this particular angle, you need to learn five different techniques, and they'll say, Well, this is the best technique because it works like this. And it's like it's best for you because it fits your stature, it fits your physical attributes best, but what you need to do is understand why the other techniques exist and how they might better serve somebody of of a different size. And they're like, Well, no, you know, this one works best. And I said, Okay, you're not gonna be an instructor. Well, what do you mean? Well, you can't be sensitive to the needs of your students. What you're doing is, you know, it's like when you look at certain martial arts, when you look at taekwondo and stuff like that, taekwondo, you're gonna excel most at taekwondo if you're kind of tall and lean. It's not an absolute rule, but you know, if you want to be throwing head-high kicks and everything, you need to have physical attributes that that support that. If you're short and stocky, not a good choice for you. And it's not not a knock against taekwondo, it's not a knock against short, stocky people, it's just it's not a good fit for those two. It's the same thing when it comes to you know individual techniques within MBC. But the idea is we have those different techniques so that our instructors can look at it and say, okay, cool, I want you to try all these, I want you to learn all these, and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna put it into context, and I'm gonna pair you up with people that are um more likely than not to be the size of the people who would attack you. If you're of smaller stature, you're gonna be working against larger people, and I want you to focus on these techniques that are more appropriate for defending against that particular attack. So it's it's interesting because you look when you look at other martial arts, you go back to Okinawa and Karate and everything, you'll see sometimes in in the history of martial arts, you'll have a particular master who you know devised this martial art, and he'll have you know senior students. And when he dies, there's a split in the system. And it's like, okay, this guy went off and he ended up doing all the striking components of the art, and this other guy ended up focusing more on uh grappling aspects of the art or the pressure point striking or the joint locking or whatever it might be. Um, and historically it becomes a split in that art. Realistically, when the founder was still around, he understood that his two senior students might have had totally different sets of attributes, or they might might have had different aptitudes. So the art as a whole included all those techniques. When he died, they rather than realizing that together they were both the the keepers of the entire system and needed to present that on a unified front, instead they argued over it and they split. And now what you had was A system that was really good and really complete that then became less so because the two people who were carrying it on couldn't appreciate the totality of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:10

Yeah. Well, and and I think that's a cultural uh norm in our society too, is tribalism, right? Where we uh you know, we we like what we like and we and if it's a uh confirmation bias, it you know, it it jives well with uh with the way that we think about things.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:26

Um but but as soon as but as soon as you take something that is complete and you choose, you know, I'm going to eliminate things from it because they don't fit my needs or what I want it to be. Um you do a disservice to the, especially as an instructor, in my opinion, you do a disservice to the people you teach because you're no longer as sympathetic or as responsive to their needs.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:51

Well, yeah. And and I think that uh that that's something that we um collectively have to be able to get around is the uh the the balance of empathy and sympathy while we address um other people, right? And ideas and things like that. Um we're we're very quick to judge and we're very quick to uh uh uh delineate value based on very little information. And I think that like can contextually um as people, I mean, it's like the the philosophy and the I guess theology of of things is that uh when we really um try to understand um a person from their perspective, we really can um understand a lot better how to connect with them and to I mean even even use common ground as a as a defense uh a defensive mechanism uh for avoiding conflict as well. I mean, I it doesn't it doesn't take very much for me to only see things through my worldview. Um, but if I practice a little bit of tolerance and sympathy uh towards other people, uh it very quickly um I found diffuses situations where otherwise might have escalated because we're just two, you know, um uh strong-headed people, unwilling to compromise and unwilling to see things from each other's perspective. Um so I'm interested. Um I want to talk about um Marshall Blade concepts uh like in in totality, like uh holistically what you're doing. I know that we've uh we've talked about that um uh throughout this uh interview so far, but uh I want to talk uh a lot more about some of these um individual concepts that people can um expect to see um as part of the discipline and then also uh talk a little bit about uh the you know the instructors and the locales that's available. So, you know, not everybody gets the chance to train directly with you, but there's still options. And then I want to go into um uh a little bit of like your uh the this the I guess this the not not just uh the the training element, but then how that applies to knife design through your work with uh Spiderco and what you've been doing um uh with all of that. So um does does all that sound good so far? That sounds great. All right. Um, so you know, your website uh um marshallblade concepts.com is actually a wealth of information to me. I've been able to uh dig through that quite a bit. And you know, in these uh in these conferences or uh seminar schedules, you have, you know, a really great um outline of the things that you'll be talking about through course instruction. Um some of the things that uh that uh ring true to me are things like dispelling the myth of the 21-foot rule um and doing guarded draws and um, you know, uh yeah, handgun retention and things like that. Can you talk a um at I guess at a high level of some of the things that you think are the most important um elements uh uh of Marshall Blade concepts and some of the things that you want to drill into uh the the population about um, you know, kind of what what the tenants are and and ways that you think they're important?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:09

Well, everything in in Marshall Blade Concepts comes back to the logic. So when I uh teach uh an MBC seminar, the very first thing that I do is I do a PowerPoint presentation, usually runs about uh 30, 45 minutes. And uh what I do is I walk people through the logic of what we're going to do and um essentially get them on board logically and philosophically first. Um a lot of times when uh people start to train, they'll get out there and start doing physical technique. Um, and then you're trying to impart logic along the way. Uh, we try to really get people to understand the concepts. And the first, the elements of logic, the key ones are uh first of all, you're gonna fight with the knife you actually carry. Uh so it may be fun from a martial arts perspective to do, you know, buoy knife dueling or to fight with, you know, hey, let's play with uh Wakizashi or Tonto or something like that, or whatever uh martial artsy type edge weapon you might prefer. But the bottom line is you have to look at the legalities of what you can carry and the practicalities of what you can carry. Um, and whatever you have in your pocket that is practical for you to carry and legal for you to carry based on the laws in your area and the areas where you travel, that's what you're gonna fight with. So that becomes a huge defining factor. Um and we we start with that because that should also define the the limitations of all your tactics right from there. Umce you understand you're gonna fight with the knife you actually carry, then you have to quantify the destructive capacity of that knife. So what we do is we do a demonstration called pork man. With pork man, I take about a five-pound pork tenderloin uh butterfly down the center, wrap it around a wooden dowel rod, tie it on with a bunch of butcher's twine, and then wrap it in about 30 layers of saran wrap. So what you have is something that is a good analog for uh something that's about the size of a human arm or the lower portion of the thigh. Uh, and then we cover that with with denim. We take an actual carry knife, something with a reasonable, reasonable size blade, say three to three and a half inches, which is again from a legal standpoint, uh most of what you'll find across the U.S. would be a a good uh baseline for for what you can legally carry. And uh we actually cut that uh to show what type of damage you could cause, so that people can see, okay, this knife with this blade size, as long as it has a good sharp blade and you're using you know reasonably good technique, this is the amount of damage it can cause. And then what we do is we take that mental image and we start translating that to, okay, what if this were a human arm? What if this were a human leg? How would this translate? What depth of cut could we uh achieve? And then what are we trying to do? And we emphasize the next element of logic is that all self-defense is about stopping power. So the idea of lethality, uh, we're not trying to kill the other person. We're justified in using lethal force because he's presented a lethal threat threat to us. That's what justifies us in drawing the knife in the first place. But the idea is not lethality, it's stopping power. You have to stop him as quickly and decisively as possible, because the longer you let him try to kill you, the more likely he'll be successful. So stopping power ends up being the key. So based on the the elemental levels of you're going to fight with the knife you actually carry, you understand its destructive capacity, you have to achieve stopping power and the visual image that we've created with the cut on pork man, then we dive into human anatomy. Um, and we say that basically what you have to do is understand human anatomy and to take the first three elements of logic that we outlined and figure out how to make the human body stop reliably and effectively. So we dig into the the details of uh what we call the three levels of stopping power in in MBC. The first level is mechanical, which is basically the muscles and tendons, as I described uh a little bit earlier. The second level is neurological. So when you're cutting muscles and tendons, there's typically co-located nerves, and basically the nerves allow the brain to control the muscles. So the nerves are the the uh the wires, if you will, that uh connect them to those muscles. Once you cut the nerve, then the brain can no longer give the muscle stimulus and the muscles are functionally crippled. And then the third level is um uh blood loss. But we consider that very much to be an ancillary aspect. It's something that we have to acknowledge, and it's something that um we also have to quantify simply because there are so many misconceptions about blood loss and stopping power. Uh, but essentially we focus on um the two most important levels of stopping power, again, the the mechanical or muscular aspect of it, uh, and then the uh the neurological aspect. And then what we do um when I do in-person training, uh, one of the advantages I have is I have kind of a controlled environment, controlled audience. Um, it's one thing, we'll have some people, the skeptics out there, who will look at the pork man demonstration and say, well, yeah, that's not really a human arm, it's just a piece of pork, and it doesn't really, it's not a good analog for that. Uh, first of all, I've I've spoken to medical professionals, I've had a lot of uh medical professionals, including trauma surgeons, who have taken MBC training. And I always will ask them, hey, if they're if I'm off base on anything, as far as my knowledge of um anatomy, physiology, and also the mechanics of cutting human flesh, by all means let me know. Uh and the one comment they'll always make is the only difference between pork men and uh an actual human limb, the the primary difference is blood pressure, because it's no longer live meat, it no longer has blood pressure, uh blood coursing through it that creates basically a springiness to the tissue. But um what I do when I when I actually have a captive audience, if you will, teaching a seminar, um one of my students a number of years ago was a very high-speed uh tactical medic. So he basically uh taught uh SWAT medics, taught people who are in various uh tactical capacities, uh trauma medicine, so immediate uh immediate aid, TCCS, uh tournament uh tourniquet and blood uh wound packing protocols and things like that. And um every year when he would teach his uh biggest class, he would have a human cadaver to work with. And um when he was done, he's like, you know, I have to, this cadaver will be destroyed. It's already, you know, we've used it for our applications for medical science. Is there anything that I can do to help support MBC's perspective? And I said, Yeah, if you can do the same cuts that we do as far as our targeting, but do them on an actual human cadaver and then take photos to quantify that, that would help validate um step two of the logic, quantifying the destructive capacity of your actual carry knife. So what I have are photos of the same types of cuts that we would do in our MBC tactics, the same cuts that we demonstrate on Porkman, but those actually done on various human cadavers to show that even with you know, with pork men, you have basically contiguous muscle. Uh, when you look at all of the different tissues that are involved in the structure of a human arm, uh as far as you know, tendons, muscles, ligaments, uh, blood vessels, etc., um, it shows that pork man is indeed a very good analog as far as quantifying destructive capacity of a knife. Um so that focus on stopping power and understanding human anatomy, that becomes another key element of the logic of MBC. And then finally, what we do is we focus on the idea that um you're not going to be walking down the street with your knife in hand. You're not going to be carrying your knife as if you were a samurai drawing a sword. You're typically going to have a folding knife in your pocket. So the idea of having practical weapon deployment skills is also critical because you'll probably be attacked suddenly and unexpectedly if you had to defend yourself. Otherwise, again, you're relying on awareness, avoidance, uh, de-escalation. Uh, but if you had to produce your knife quickly, you need to have the capability to draw it and open it quickly. Uh, and in many cases, what that means is you're gonna have to use some type of empty hand skill to mitigate the threat, earn your draw, and then bring the knife into play. So those elements are not only the first things that people learn, but those are the things that we reinforce throughout the process of their training. So as we go through and we're learning various techniques, uh, as we go through the techniques, we're reinforcing that and saying, okay, you're cutting here to achieve this. So we're you know, bringing them back to yes, you can take a three-inch blade and be able to cut this person's arm to the bone. What targets are you cutting? What physiological effect will severing those targets have? Uh, when we get to the point of learning weapon deployment uh and earning your draw, it's like, okay, you're being attacked, you need to mitigate the threat, do some empty hand stuff, you need to create distance, create safety. Now you need to get your knife out, get your knife open reliably. Now you need to, you know, if necessary, progress to the point of using the knife as a defensive weapon and integrating all those skills into uh a smooth flow. So it becomes something that um, again, we lay the groundwork, we get people to wrap their heads around the key elements of that logic and how we approach the process, and then we reinforce those throughout the entire learning process and we just make those even more challenging. People who are training at high levels, like my private students here uh in Colorado, um we just keep taking those same elements of logic and the same realities of self-defense to higher and higher levels to to challenge them to bring their skills up as high as they possibly could be.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:03

Yeah, I mean, all that makes sense. It's uh very very articulate. Um I'm I'm interested to know as as we kind of um uh segue into knife design, right? Um a common a common, I guess, theme inside of the custom knife building world is that there is a lot of value put on large blades, right? Like everybody uh is making fixed blades and they're making large, uh large knives in this context. And the the smaller blades, like um, I don't know, like seven, seven uh approximately inch overall, and maybe like a three and a half to four and a half inch blade, uh, a lot of people look at that like um like they're they're lady knives, air quotes. Um but um when you when you're finding like with the data that you're collecting, um what what is the actual optimal blade length uh for uh uh for self-defense? And does it matter um whether it is a folding knife or whether it is a uh a fixed blade?

SPEAKER_00 1:43:16

Great question. So what what it comes down to is blade length and tactics need to go together. Um and um you can certainly, if you can get by with carrying a larger blade, um you know, then then certainly it it has certain advantages because you can change your tactics um to access different targets. But um with the NBC approach, again, because it's because of the logic that I explained and also the focus that uh that we have on modern self-defense, again, emphasizing stopping power and being able to do that with knives that are legally permissible, NBC's tactics have evolved to um really favor um smaller blades. And when you get to a point of having a blade that is about say five to six inches or so, um at that point, some of MBC's techniques actually are harder to perform because we cut um we really focus on proper cutting mechanics. So when you think of cutting with a blade, uh with any blade, the most effective cut is going to be starting with the heel of the edge closest to the handle, and then using the full length of the edge as you apply constant pressure throughout the entire cut. So, what that allows you to do, whatever you're cutting, uh you're starting the cut using the full length of the edge, so you're using you know the maximum uh edge capacity, if you will. But also what you're doing is you're applying consistent pressure all the way to the tip. And what that does when you have a longer blade, uh, we get used to cutting very efficiently with the heel of the edge and the first, say, uh three to three and a half inches of blade. Once you get beyond that and you have a much longer blade, and we're used to cutting up close and cutting with really good leverage, um, you kind of finish your technique, but you haven't run out of blade yet. So it ends up kind of dragging and making the finish of the technique even a little bit more difficult. Um, and what you end up with, in my opinion, is kind of a no-man's land when you look at um blades that have long enough uh that are long enough to offer uh chopping capability. So if you have a blade that once you're up around, say nine inches or so, um what you can do is use the weight and momentum of the blade in most cases uh to be able to create kind of a ballistic cutting or chopping capability. When you get down, say in that five to seven inch range, the blade really isn't heavy enough to uh provide any chopping capability. Um, and uh than being able to thrust deeply, um you end up with not any more cutting capability than what you would have with a blade that's five inches or less. So you get this kind of no man's land in the middle where it doesn't really accentuate uh your tactics. Um and if you're using tactics again in NBC, we default to to smaller knives by necessity. Um, it just makes performing those techniques more difficult. So uh to answer your question, you know, what is the optimal blade length? Um, if I could choose, I would say three and a half to four inches would be what I would prefer for uh maximum efficiency in NBC techniques. Uh but uh in Colorado, for example, I live here in Colorado, it's a three and a half inch blade length limit. So when I designed the Yojimbo 2, I made sure that it was under three and a half inches so I could carry it on a daily basis. Uh when I travel to places like Boston and Chicago, uh, what I use is a uh essentially a customized version of the Yojimbo 2. I call a Chicago Jimbo. I ground the blade down to two and a half inches to be compliant for Boston and Chicago, because that is their legal blade length limits. The handle is exactly the same size. The blade started off the same length and actually shortened it to be legally compliant. Um so that two and a half inch blade length limit currently is the worst case scenario, if you will, as far as um municipal laws in the United States. It's also the limit that you'll have if you're a federal employee working in the U.S. federal building, you'll be limited to two and a half inches. So uh NBC technique is really kind of evolved around that as our worst case scenario. Um, so our techniques will still work with that blade length limit. Uh if you have a choice, I would say um up to about four inches or so. Uh over that length, it actually makes our techniques a little bit harder to perform.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:57

Yeah, that makes sense. Uh so uh um I want to go over uh real quick um MBC instructor um locales, right? Because I was looking on your website and you actually have a pretty impressive um uh roster of authorized MBC trainers. Uh I'm surprised uh uh a little bit that the uh the Texas market uh for instructors is uh you know located mostly in the DFW Metroplex area in Houston. Uh, but you have like a a ton of instructors holistically across the United States and then in uh what eight other countries, including Canada.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:40

Um I've been very fortunate that that you know we've had uh a lot of people who have embraced MBC and sought out instructor certification. Uh to be very honest with you, I'm currently in the process of um going through the instructor locator. So, first of all, for people who are looking for that, if you go to the MBC website, marshallbladeconcepts.com, and you uh look under instructors, you look for the instructor locator, and that is going to be your tool for finding somebody, hopefully in your area. Um but what I'm doing is I'm actually going through and um updating that to make sure that um it focuses on people who are still active practitioners and active instructors of MBC. Um so one of the things um NBC always continues to evolve. I'm always trying to make it better. And we've had some significant evolutionary stuff. Actually, COVID, um, the whole COVID time frame um being locked down kind of forced me to backtrack and go through the entire MBC system from start to finish and uh figure out what holes uh were in it, what inconsistencies it might have had, and and really try to fine tune it and bring it up, uh bring it up to speed. Um also during that time uh I had a lot of students that I worked with by Zoom, and it forced me to be a better instructor as far. As explaining structure and explaining the details of what we do, and that led to a lot of refinements in the system. So what that means is some of the instructors who became instructors before we had that refinement, they're not fully up to speed. And if they haven't remained active in the MBC system, if they haven't trained with me through a seminar or come to my annual Marshall Blade camp or worked with me through the distance learning program or online private training or anything of that nature, that means that they're behind the curve as far as the currency of their knowledge. And because of that, they are not going to be recommended sources of MBC until they catch up. Which is, again, one of the big differences we have with the NBC system versus a lot of traditional martial arts. Traditional martial arts, once you get your black belt, you're an instructor and you're good to go forever. There is no ongoing training, there is no ongoing requirement to be able to maintain that qualification. That's not the way it works with NBC. So when people are looking for NBC instructors, first of all, we have different levels of instructor. We start off at the very bottom level with study group leader. What that means is it's somebody who has done hands-on training with me. They've shown me that they're earnest in their pursuit of NBC. They've got some good basic skills, but they really haven't achieved enough in the system to really be considered an instructor of any level. They are still a student. They just happen to be a more advanced student. And the reason we list them is because if somebody, if they're looking for training partners, first of all, or if there are people in their area looking for a resource at MBC and there are no uh more qualified instructors available, essentially what they do is create a training group, and that person becomes the the leader of that group because they have the benefit of having had uh hands-on experience. So that's the kind of the lowest, the first, the first level of instructor or authorized trainer, as we call it. The next one would be an affiliate instructor. And an affiliate instructor could be somebody who uh is an instructor of another martial art, so they have uh uh experience working with students and teaching students, and they have also trained with me um enough to where they've developed uh a really solid understanding of MBC and a good solid skill set in MBC. So they they have uh some skills as an instructor, really good basis in in MBC. Uh so recognizing them as an affiliate instructor, and that allows them to uh teach more actively uh at a higher level than a study group leader would, but they still haven't gone through a formal testing process. They've gone through an assessment process, my personal assessment process to earn my trust and confidence to teach. The first level of uh real true instructor that would achieve um kind of standalone credentials, if you will, through a testing process is an associate instructor. And for that, basically, they have to be familiar with the entire MBC system and also its parallel system of CBC counterblade concepts, which is the empty-hand defenses against knives. Uh so those two systems, they have to be thoroughly conversant in all the skills of those systems, and then they have to come to my annual Marshall Blade Camp and go through the testing process. So we hold the camp here in Colorado. Uh it's typically uh at an altitude of eight to nine thousand feet. So from a cardiovascular standpoint, it's pretty challenging. Um and they literally have to validate their knowledge of the system, both in being able to perform skills on demand and to perform them to an adequate level on demand, and also if they want to be an associate instructor, they go through um concurrent with the physical testing, they go through a um, for lack of a better word, uh, the intellectual testing side of what we do, essentially an NBC Jeopardy type of thing. So I ask them questions, uh, key uh elements of the NBC knowledge base, elements of uh like the logic that we discussed a moment ago, uh the levels of stopping power, they need to be able to articulate those and answer those questions on demand. Because if they want to teach MBC, they need to understand NBC. They can't just be proficient at it from a physical basis. And sometimes what we'll have is people who aspire to be an associate instructor who will go through the testing process, perform well physically, but don't perform well from the intellectual side. What ends up happening is they become uh an associate instructor. They still get a certificate of proficiency for their physical skills, but we actually recognize them as an affiliate instructor instead of an associate because they didn't perform well enough as far as the knowledge elements of MBC. And then if you want to be a fully certified instructor in NBC, what you do is you come back, you go out as an associate instructor, and you start to teach. Uh, ideally, you create your own group, uh, you teach those people, you take them through as much of the NBC curriculum as you possibly can. You teach seminars, um, whatever you can do to actually get out there and earn your chops as an instructor. And then you come back to camp uh and you go through the entire process again. So you go through the physical testing, you go through the knowledge-based testing, but the one other element that we have, we call it the cards of death. Uh, and it's basically a stack of three by five cards with every critical skill uh in the NBC and CBC systems written on these cards. I shuffle the cards, you pick a card, and on demand, you have to teach a block of instruction on that particular skill and then be critiqued by your peers. So you're teaching in front of a group of uh about a hundred people, and you're also being of that hundred people being critiqued by typically 20 to 30 instructors uh who are going to just tear you apart as far as your presentation of that particular skill. So it really challenges people at a very high level. If you want to be a fully certified instructor in NBC, you have to be serious about your desire to teach, and you have to have the capability to teach well.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:58

Yeah, that all makes perfect sense. I mean, um my like the context that I get uh from your website and then from your explanation is just that, you know, uh in order to convey knowledge, um, you have to, you know, you have to understand the importance of it and you have to be very committed towards teaching it. And I think that that's a uh that's a very important component of education is to really be passionate and to be a practitioner of that knowledge. Otherwise, it you know, it really is just theory.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:29

Well, it's you know, there's the old cliche of those who know do, those who can't teach. Well, the question becomes what happens when the do is to teach? So when when the the what you're trying to accomplish is to convey knowledge to somebody else and allow them to develop skill. So what you'll find in a lot of martial arts, um, you know, it's it's interesting because I've seen uh when I I was very interested in in uh the martial art of Penchak Sea lot, Indonesian martial arts, and um I would see videos of uh particular instructors teaching forms. And what they would do is they would stand in the middle of a group of students, they would do the form, and you'd see these students trying to mimic what's going on as the form is being presented. And in some cases, you know, they're turning, so they're looking over their shoulder, trying to see what's going on. And it literally became an exercise in uh mimicry, and it really quickly, in my opinion, defines visual learners. So you'll have some people who have a knack for learning visually, they'll see somebody do something and they'll be, you know, kind of looking at it, analyzing it, and they can replicate the movement because they have that innate capability. And that's just the way they're built, the way their brain works. Um, and that's one group of people. You'll have auditory learners. So with an auditory learner, you can explain to them as long as you articulate it well, okay, what I need you to do, your, you know, your forearm needs to be perpendicular to your elbow, that needs to be a 90-degree angle, and your forearm needs to be parallel to the ground. And, you know, you need to lunge forward, have, you know, one and a half shoulder width between your feet, uh, with your left foot forward, doing a lunging position. And you can walk through that uh that description and they listen to it, they visualize it, and they do it perfectly. They may not be able to do it just by watching it, but once you give them key performance characteristics of what you're trying to accomplish, they do it perfectly. But then you have people who are kinesthetic learners, and the kinesthetic learners are the hardest because they have to feel what it feels like. They have to basically have that body sensation, the proprioception of, okay, this is what I'm I'm feeling when I do this thing right. And they literally have to, in many cases, kind of pose them into position. Um, and they're the hardest ones to teach. And being able to teach these different types of learners, being able to teach people of different sizes and physical attributes, being able to have a critical eye so that when somebody's doing something wrong, you can make appropriate corrections and not just, well, you're doing it wrong. Do it like this. And then you show it, you assume that they're gonna be a visual learner. Those are all the hallmarks of a real teacher. Um, so it's not just getting out there and saying, okay, I'm gonna show you how to do this, do it like this, I'll be back in 10 minutes. Um you really need to empower people to learn, and that is its own skill. That's why we don't we have the associate instructor and then we have a certified instructor. And the number of people who go from associate to certified is is very small because very few people can make that leap to where they actually become good instructors. They they are okay at it, they definitely have the physical skills, they can be helpful. But when you ask them, you know, I'll I'll do exercises with my instructors where it'll be, okay, we're gonna have two guys do some stuff. Oh, stop. Okay, this guy just made a mistake. What was it? And they didn't see it. They didn't have that perceptual ability to identify what that is. If they can't see it, they can't fix it. I may point out what the problem is, and then I'll say, okay, go over there and give them correction. And I'll watch their performance when they're trying to correct somebody. And if they can't articulate it well, if they can't demonstrate it well, if they can't present it in such a way that empowers the student to fix his technique, they're not good teachers and they're not going to become fully certified instructors at MBC.

SPEAKER_02 2:00:32

Yeah. Um, I'm reminded, so when I was uh a kid, you know, I went through uh Shitoryo. And uh, you know, there is a completely different dynamic for uh teaching um youngsters than there is uh adults in a lot of ways, because I think, you know, you know, you can you can condense down certain concepts or core concepts and you know kids could pick up on those pretty easy. Um but then I had left uh my dojo uh for you know quite a quite a few years and then came back as a young young adult. And um I am the the last type of uh you know a kid aesthetic learner. Um I really do find that I have to understand uh from a spic and conceptual basis, but then applying that through um you know physic physiological means and everything in order to uh understand certain types of concepts well. I mean, you know, you're right. I'd have to feel it, right? And and my uh sensei uh pulled me aside one time and he said, you know, I don't know that you have a a knack for this, you know, for the adult um, you know, side of uh Shooteryu. Um, but I will tell you that you try hard, right? And it's like you're going to have to put in 10 times as much effort to get the same thing that other people do intuitively. And right, wrong, or indifferent, um, I took that two ways. One is that I I he did identify that, like the kind of learner that I am and told me kind of a route to get to the knowledge uh set that I was looking for, but then really didn't try very hard to work with me personally uh or set me with somebody who could understand that. And I ended up just, you know, leaving after a while. I was like, okay, well, it's just not for me. And so a lot of my technique and a lot of my self-defense journey has been very biased because now it's just specific to me, because I haven't found appropriate um teachers that are willing to work with my style of learning. And that's kind of plagued me or empowered me to really find my own path, is is probably what it's done. But I also understand now that there are certain things in my life that I have to spend a lot more effort to do if I want to do it well. Whereas in in other ways, I'm I'm very um naturally adept at certain things. Um when it comes to like physical motion and um and uh and the martial arts especially, I have to go through a lot of trial and error in order to get to uh my final form.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:14

And I I honestly believe that um, you know, you you're very articulate. So I believe that you may have categorized yourself as a kinesthetic learner. I think if you had received um appropriate instruction, that the elements of kinesthetic learning and then also the auditory learning would probably um help a lot. Um and you know, I I kind of break down those three categories as, you know, these are the three types. We're not always exclusively one or the other, we're typically combinations thereof. Um, but what it comes down to is a good instructor who really wants to cater to the individual needs of a student and and and really, you know, empower all the students to learn um is to be sensitive to that. And, you know, in my opinion, he you see it very positively, and I think that's great that he did you a service by saying, you know, hey, uh I'm gonna call you aside and uh essentially call you out that this is gonna be hard for you. Um but the greater good would have been for him to then say, okay, when you're learning stuff, how does it come easiest to you? What works best for you? So like if you read a description of something or if somebody explains it to you really well, does that help? Do you need to see it? Do you need to see it maybe over my shoulder so that you have a first-person perspective and it's easier for you to relate left and right side? Um, would it help instead of just stuff on the floor, you know, and you know, here's a nice shiny dojo floor or a mat or whatever it is, if I put down, you know, footprints, so if you're stepping from here to here to give you physical landmarks to work with, stepping stones to work with, would would that help? You know, when I talk about your body mechanics, when you turn, if I moved myself around where I know I know that you need to turn this way, that's a 90-degree turn to your right. If I stepped 90 degrees to your right, so I'm standing at your three o'clock, and say, okay, turn and face me, would that help you learn better? And all of those little nuances, that's what a teacher really is. That's what a martial arts teacher really is. Because they look at the student and say, Okay, this is what I'm trying to get you to do. And I understand you learn a little bit differently, and you've got some different challenges. My job as a teacher is to figure out the language that works best for your brain and your body. And that's what's missing from most martial arts teaching. Most of it is is simply, you know, hey, get good at this stuff, you've got a black belt, and now you're a teacher. And people just have no ability how to they're never taught how to convey information. So, like in MBC, I've I've done a number of instructor uh development workshops where it'll be instructors only, I'll bring them in and we focus on the nuances of how to teach. We focus on the nuances of how to convey information and how to explain things. We focus on uh perceptual ability. So if you're watching two students, you know, how do you scan a room and figure out who do you walk up to to help first? Um, all of those things that really good teachers in in any kind of physical discipline, the in some cases they do it um intuitively, but the trick is to make that intuition um articulable so that you can convey that to people who don't do it intuitively. You want to be a good instructor? Okay, great. Try these things with your student, get them to do these things. Okay, they're having trouble at this point in the technique. How do you segment a technique and just let them do the last half of it? So that way you fix the real problem, then put it back together with the first half because sometimes it's just too much to think about to do the entire thing all in one flow. And just all those different teaching uh tactics that you can use to make people learn better. Um, that's what a real martial arts instructor should be doing. That's what any real teacher ought to be doing. Because the the art of teaching is its its own thing, it is its its own discipline. Uh, it just happens to be built upon whatever the other skill happens to be.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:29

Yeah. And uh you know, uh technology is something I'm actually really good at. I can't say that I've always been good at it, um, but uh by and large, you know, that's what it what the field that I work in is cybersecurity. Um I've done a lot of different things. Um, you know, specialty is in social engineering um and and you know mitigation, right? And um when uh I took a kind of sabbatical from the um, well, I mean, in in technology, there's just a lot of stuff that's pretty dark. Um and I was, you know, in the middle of uh I'm in the middle of it. And so I took a sabbatical and I worked at a charter school for a year teaching technology. Um and something that I found it very difficult to do is to teach a discipline that I knew very well, but I didn't really know how to speak to the complexities uh in a way that a child could always understand it, right? And um what I found was probably the best methodology is you you pick out the the kids in a in the classroom or in the in the the you know computer lab that understood concepts the easiest, right? And then you empower them to be able to teach their peer peers so they they understand what you're trying to convey, and then you empower them to be able to teach others. And I will tell you, in that methodology versus me going and showing each individual child how to do something, I would find those who understood things uh probably the simplest. And then they were uh the instructors, as long as as long as they understood how to do things correctly, right, based on what I was like the spirit of what I was trying to convey. And what I find sometimes is that uh children don't get hung up as much on learning style. They they dynamically find ways to convey things because they're learning communication at a, you know, at a child's level, right? And um and it was very effective. Like I could teach concepts in PowerPoint or um or Outlook or spreadsheeting or um typing or things like that in this methodology, and it was like wildfire. Every single child that came into that computer lab was always successful because they were being um taught by me, but also by their peers in a way that enforced like those fundamentals of technology and whatnot. But I think about that a lot with like children and how tender and uncomplicated um learning is and how how how uh powerful learning through osmosis is. And I've always thought a lot about that as a as a technique for teaching others that um it's not it's not always the most important thing to be the single source of truth. You you proliferate that out and find other people that are passionate about um what you're trying to teach and then allow them to apply their own passion. And and that's a lot of the time as adults, we miss the opportunity uh to uh to educate other people because of a bias towards you know certain types of people being the smartest of the smart. And then, you know, for me, my team my my sense they thought I was like, you know, handicapped, like mentally challenged in some way. He couldn't teach me anything. And so I had to take that on the chin and just figure out, you know, how do how do I think about life differently, uh, which you know in some ways has been good, and in other ways it's kind of been a handicapped until I could, you know, get get my mind around how I can get get away from that bias.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:08

I think it's one of those things that we we all um you know, over time we kind of figure out what we're good at. And sometimes people will um very much as as you did with your sensei, you kind of categorize yourself based on somebody else's assessment of you. Um that can be sometimes accurate, uh, sometimes not. But you know, you'll have people who will say, you know, oh, I'm not a numbers person or something like that. I you know, I'm not good at math. It's like, well, maybe you just had a really bad math teacher who wasn't able to do like what you did with your students and created an environment that allowed you to learn. So it's not that you're bad at something, it's just that you learn differently. And again, you know, kind of kind of circling back to the the overarching theme when you look at self defense, uh I always say the operative term is self. So what you have to do is kind of look at who you are, uh what your what your uh uh advantages and disadvantages are, what challenges you have, and learn how to work work through those. And you know, really good instructors will do that. And that's one of the great things too when you look at traditional martial arts, one of the you know, um the analogy that I'll use um in NBC, uh, if you've ever seen the movie Enter the Dragon, I assume you have. Um the you have the you know the opening scenes where you've got you know all these hundreds of guys out there all throwing punches, you know, screaming their key eyes and all this other kind of stuff. And the goal is for everyone to look exactly the same and do everything exactly the same and create cookie-cutter expressions of um whatever that martial art might be. And what I say in NBC, one of our NBC isms, if you will, is you don't have to fight like me, you just have to fight well. And what that means is you're going to take the principles and the basic techniques that that I present, and you're gonna manifest those through your own body, your own physical attributes and and your own expression. We still want to have, you know, uh the the best um we want to take advantage of the body mechanics as much as we possibly can, but we also have to adapt those to the to the individual. And as I said before, your choice of tactics may vary based on your physical size compared to your attacker. But um ultimately what you want to do is to create the the real art in martial art, in my opinion. Uh art is self-expression. So you wouldn't want to have, you wouldn't want to take an art class and say, okay, unless you paint exactly like Picasso, then you suck. What you want to do is have, okay, we're gonna do stuff in the painting style of this, we're gonna learn these brush strokes, we're gonna learn how to, you know, these colors, this use of, you know, color and shadow and all this other type of stuff. You're gonna learn principles and then you're gonna express them through you. And that becomes the expression of true art. It's not mimicking something else and saying, look, I painted a replica of you know, the Mona Lisa, I painted a replica of this. Um we don't want a cookie-cutter approach, and and that really is not any type of um anything that adds value because you you're you're not achieving anything, you're simply copying something else, and you're expressing something else the the exact same way that somebody else wants you to. The when the institution becomes more important than the individual, um, it's not art anymore. It's it's a cult.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:51

Yeah, well. Um I uh I I think there's a lot uh for listeners to pull from that. Like uh uh I I know again, it's it's a not standard format, you know, because I've talked a lot to uh you know individual custom knife makers and whatnot, but um like these the same um like paradigm as it exists inside of knife making, right? Like everybody wants to make a loveless style blade or everybody wants to do this or that, like that that uh mimics other people. And I I find I find that a lot of uh you know knife makers, and this is not a knock, but it's just an observation, um, lack individuality. And it to me that that kind of becomes boring. Like if everything is a modern art um um exhibit and every every uh piece of art is just a uh you know a black canvas, um, then you kind of lose sight of what does make us in individualistic. And uh that's something that I really like. I like the enrichment of life when it becomes complex because you are the are are the thing that I'm interested in. Not not you doing something in it's in a certain style that is just that other person's style or whatever, but really applying your own self uh to uh you know technique and execution and whatnot. That's where I really see that people flourish is when they get to a place where they do have an artistic eye and can create things that are, you know, they're just not presented to the world in in the way that you can do that thing. And and that's something that I I I I really uh uh admire. And it's the one thing that I really try to nurture in people is you know, d do your own thing and be interesting, I guess is uh, you know, uh the uh analogy I would make.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:47

Yeah, and you know, to circle back just for a moment, when you know, uh when I said as far as like the the cookie cutter approach, if you're doing like if you went to a martial arts tournament and you were doing a kata competition, you are being judged based on the aesthetic and technical execution of a particular form. That's great. Okay. It doesn't mean you can fight for shit. It means that you can express that particular form and do it in a technically accurate way where everyone agrees, yeah, that's what it's supposed to look like. Okay, you can consider that an execution of art. Um but when it comes to that in a from a martial art standpoint, where the ultimate goal should be not, hey, how do I look, but this guy tried to attack me and I stopped him. That's the outcome-based function that we're looking at. Okay. When we take that to the knife side of things, um I agree that there's a a lack of individuality. What I see, um, you know, I'm I'm old school, you know, I've been collecting knives my my whole life and everything. And I also have huge respect for um the history behind the knife industry. And uh it's one of the reasons why I love Matt Martin and vehement knives and everything, because he's uh a younger guy who gets the tradition, gets the the iconic designs and everything. So what you have is he's actually um, I think a great example of walking the perfect line um between um tradition and uh your own style. Um because what you can have with a knife maker, you have the technical execution of something. So he's a craftsman. Okay, so he's gonna take raw materials, he's gonna craft a knife, and the form of that knife, you can you can judge it based on the design itself, and then you can also judge it based on the technical execution of all the elements. Um so again, when you look at a VMA knife or something like that, and you see, wow, this thing has a perfect silver solder bead where the guard is soldered onto the blade. That's beautiful craftsmanship, and that's old school craftsmanship. That, you know, Loveless would have done something like that. Uh Bob Trizola is capable of doing stuff like that. When you go back to all the classic knife makers and stuff, that would be one of the things that you would look for. You look at the grind lines, you look at the polish, um, you look at all those technical elements, and you can say this guy's a real craftsman. If you had a brand new knife maker who set out and said, Hey, I'm gonna make a knife, and he gets all that stuff right, he's an exceptional artist. You know, you'd have to look at the functional elements too, as far as like, you know, heat treat and and everything of that nature, but he could have something that is is technically perfect. But then you ask him, it's like, so what's this design? Oh, you know, this is this is my own design. And it's like, no, that's a loveless drop point hunter, or that's a loveless big bear, or that's you know, um whatever design you might want to, you know, classic design that somebody who has any concept of knife history shouldn't know and appreciate. But when you have somebody who lacks that depth of knowledge and they're like, Well, no, I designed this and I invented it. Stop. Okay. Get some get some historical perspective. Okay, so you may, and it may have been, you know, this was an independent thought. It doesn't mean you were the first one to think of it. And if you want to be a knife maker, you have a duty to the knife making community and to your customers to be educated concerning the history of your craft. So I see it, you know, knife makers not only as okay, you can have somebody who's an exceptional craftsman uh and executes the technical side of it, it's just like somebody who does a perfect shitorukata and it's like, oh guy got out there and he did it perfect. It looked great, but he doesn't know what he's doing. And he doesn't know where it came from, and he doesn't know the history of this design, and he doesn't know doesn't appreciate the um the history that led up to this iconic form. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 2:21:08

Oh yeah, absolutely. And uh yeah, I I uh I I think that, you know, I've talked about about this uh uh previously too, is that the there is an an awful lot of the industry that is rampant with uh uh plagiarism, but in an ignorant sense, right? And um and uh what I've talked a lot about is is design provenance, right? I mean, you have like you have people who are uh let's just say pocket knives and slip joints or whatever. Um, you know, the um the idea of liner locks have been around for a long time. Um Neil Punch Art, I had them on uh the podcast, and we were talking about um early examples in Sheffield of this, you know, sometimes I think dating back to like the you know 1700s or something like that, right? And the like some of these concepts are are around for a long time and have kind of cycled through the zeitgeist, uh, but then they get lost. And I I think that you empower yourself to be uh a much better, more well-rounded um knife maker when you understand you know the the worst case scenario is that your knife might be used uh for self-defense. The uh the the mechanisms that you use might have um it might lend themselves to certain types of uses more than others, like the design and all of these components kind of roll into the more sophisticated you are in in how you perceive the world, the I guess the more uh agile you are and the more perceptive you are about ways that they might not be used for a certain uh purpose. You know, kind of the idea of like, you know, uh fixed blade versus folding knives versus you know um blade length versus you know grip and and all of those things. Like they're they're all factors. And somebody who like like Matt, um who he he really understands his medium and understands it well. Um and I've always really respected not only his artistry and his uh craftsmanship, but it you know, spending any amount of time talking with him, he's just like a an encyclopedia of knowledge and does it in a way that is um is just super intelligent. I mean, he's a super intelligent person, and you can see that in every aspect of what he does with his craft.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:31

Yep. And he's also super respectful of the tradition of his craft. You know, the just the um, you know, I I wrote for knife magazines for a long time. So um started writing back in '92 for Fighting Knives Magazine. Um written occasional articles for Blade Magazine, have been on uh was on staff with uh or on the masthead of Tactical Knives Magazine for most of its run. Um so have had the opportunity to do, you know, articles on uh different knife reviews, different topics, all that kind of thing. And uh, you know, throughout that whole process, you get to interview up-and-coming makers. And it was always for me really gratifying and really reassuring when you'd have a guy who's like brand new to knife making, and he's like, you know, hey, I've been doing this thing for you know two years or whatever, and I'm still a part-time maker, and I'm trying to cut my teeth and do this, and I'm you know, really uh stoked to have somebody writing an article about one of my knives and doing a review. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, who are your influences? It's like, well, you know, I read this classic book and everything, and it, you know, I was really taken with you know Bob Loveless's designs. But then, you know, I saw some stuff like um, you know, Jody Sampson and and looking at his Weehawk design. And, you know, you you start to hear some of these things where this guy did his homework. He's actually, you know, done enough research um to see who came before him, what they accomplished, why they thought that the way they did. And then he wanted to take that and say, okay, I wanna I want to run with that knowledge and then make it my own and try to make my own mark. I loved that. On the the flip side, you would have people who were like, Oh yeah, you know, I I invented this, and it's like, no, you didn't. And it's like, you know, that that design has been around for a long time. Have you ever heard of so-and-so? Well, no. I I remember in interviewing one guy, he had a round hole in the blade for the index finger. And he's like, Yeah, you know, I came up with this design because it, you know, it makes it, you know, more secure and everything. And it's like, um, you ever heard of Fred Perrin? No, who's that? I'm like, well, you know, 25 years before you did, uh, he came up with that, and it's kind of an iconic element of his Lacrief design, as well as a number of his other designs, and that, you know, he's licensed that to other uh, you know, to factory companies and everything who have also produced it. Um it may have been, in your mind, an original idea, but your ignorance prevented you from being able to really present that as uh a worthy idea in the knife industry because you just assumed you were smarter than everyone else and you thought of something that no one else had. Um that's ignorant and arrogant versus insightful and historically aware.

SPEAKER_02 2:26:38

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I and I'm uh I'm guilty of that to some extent too. Um not in as in like I don't really believe there's a lot of original thought out there. Uh, but sometimes, you know, like as a maker, you create things um based on like a perception of what doesn't exist. So like what what do you not see in the industry too much, or pulling from like historical records and saying, you know, hey, like that there was a point in time where um you know scalpels were part of like the cutlery industry um holistically, but you know, mostly in a surgical sense. Um I've developed um um off of some older makers a a kind of a new approach to uh certain scalpel designs. Uh they're very uh very useful inside of you know breaking down animals and things, and I've kind of proliferated that. And I see a lot more of that today than I did you know five, six years ago um when I started doing it. Now, do I think that I'm like the first that created scalpels? No. I pulled from like Clay Clay Gault and uh um um Martin Pullham, uh who are you know early um um you know knife makers guild members and uh and and makers from the 70s and whatnot. Um, do I think that I actually created a design? No. Uh but there are some ideas that, you know, when you proliferate them and you do a good job of executing them, then other people kind of not bite, but you know, attach onto that and start creating their own renditions of it. And it's interesting where uh you see that, you know, in this in this never-ending circle of ideas being re-rebubbled up and and recycled, um, how you know in your immediate circles, sometimes you see that people take ideas, but are are really kind of unwilling to give attribution. Like I I've always thought, you know, hey, I have no problem talking about uh my influences in certain knife designs uh being from Clay Gar uh Clay Gall or Martin Pullen um or Loveless or things like that. I it doesn't hurt my ego to uh say that they had a good idea and and made it great, and I'm just taking ideas from them. Uh but attribution is a really difficult thing for some people. Uh they just they're they're very stingy with um being willing to uh like credit somebody else for ideas when we all know that those ideas are very much not original.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:05

Yep, that's true. And I think um one of the greatest attributes of any artist is humility. Um so when you have somebody who's you can be proud of your work and proud of what you do, but at the same time, when you're humble enough to acknowledge your influences and your inspirations, um, it makes you a lot more human. And it it also um I think makes people appreciate your craft even more because it you don't come off as being arrogant, you don't come off as being a know it all. And I mean, even if you believe, if you honestly believe, you know, hey, I think this is a new idea. Um I don't know of anyone who's ever done this before. It's all in the way you phrase it. I don't know of anyone who's ever done this before. I've done some research, I've read some books, I I can't find any references to it. So it may have been done, but I think I'm the first. That's all you really need. I mean, it's it's not that hard. Uh, and and what it shows is, you know, you're you're in uh an industry where people have been creative for hundreds of years. And it's quite possible that there's there's simply a book out there that you haven't read or a patent that you haven't seen, or whatever else it might be. Uh you're simply acknowledging the possibility that somebody else may have thought of it before you. And as far as you can tell, based on the reading you've done so far, you think you're the first. That's great. You know, uh hopefully press history will prove you're right, and you are the first. And then, you know, you'll inspire other people. But in the way you present it, um, you just come off as a more genuine human being if you do it with a little bit a little bit of humility.

SPEAKER_02 2:30:46

Yeah, I I agree fully. And it it's also we've had we've had the internet uh in existence and as a referenceable um um medium for a very short period of time uh compared to the written word, right? And and uh to me, somebody might like look on Google and try to decide that like like to validate whether they've done something or not and ignore the older and larger breadth of information that exists, which is in book form. And uh to me, if I spend five minutes trying to see if somebody else did something first and ignore the the due diligence that's required to really validate those things, um I've done a humongous disservice just through um accepting ignorance. And and that's something that um I think that we've lost out on because of the internet and social media is just because you haven't seen it does not mean it has not existed. And you know, there's there's people that are experts that have you know come and gone and written about this entire thing and in great detail and have done research and due diligence um that you're totally discounting in your information gathering. And that that's why I think that um books are um a very important component of of learning and and uh and uh researching things uh that I don't know. I I I hope that we never lose that, but um I val uh like value books way more than I do um easy information on the internet because everything's contextualized digitally. It's like how do I actually know that something is true uh based on the fact that it can change so quickly? Like Wikipedia is not a referenceable um um medium uh for any type of uh research papers or anything. It's like I can go in and edit those things actively and it changes the entire uh dynamic of information. Like you really need to be able to use multiple sources and to be able to validate information in order to find out that it's true. The same way as with uh Marshall Blade concepts, where it's about the practicality that binds all of these concepts together. Um and what that's what makes it um more powerful and more useful. To me, uh the fact that you've been able to balance that out with literature and the practical side of the application uh is a is a strong value proposition towards its authenticity.

SPEAKER_00 2:33:14

Well, thank you. And I I I agree completely. As you were saying that, I was I'm in my home office looking up at my bookshelf, which is uh it's actually an industrial bookshelf from Home Depot that I converted into a bookshelf. So I've got a pretty good sized library of probably uh I guess 12 to 1500 books. Um and yeah, I reference them all the time. Um and it's it's also when you look at um uh again the the the book as as a um as a tool, if you will. Um when I worked for Paladin Press, uh again worked there for for 10 years um as an employer. Employee prior to that, uh, had authored several books for them before I applied to work for them. And going through the process of becoming an author or uh querying a magazine to write an article, um as as a writer, you wanted to have your stuff wired tight. Um, and if you submitted something where you had an editor on the other end who looked at it and said, you know, this isn't very well written, it's not an original idea, it's not a compelling idea. Um, no. When you get that rejection, what you realize is, um, hey, I I thought I had a good idea. And somebody else who is in a position to make a critical decision said it wasn't. Um to become a writer back then, you had to work hard. Um, and you had to come up with original ideas, you had to present stuff well, you had to write well, you had to be articulate. Um, and earning that place to have a say, to have a published book, to have a published article, to be featured in an instructional video back when video production was a very expensive proposition back before you could, you know, do videos on your phone. Um the barriers to accomplishing any of that stuff in the old school um were were pretty substantial. And what's interesting now is because technology has come so far, everyone's always had a right to free speech, but they ne haven't necessarily had a means to achieve broad distribution. Now that is democratized to such a point to where anybody with uh a smartphone can have a YouTube channel and have millions of followers. Doesn't mean that what you have to say is worth shit. It just means that you have a venue. And that democratization has really diminished the value of uh information as a whole. Because there's so much stuff out there where it's just people who there's no referee between them and publication. There's nobody to make a critical decision to say, you know what, I I don't think what you're saying is right, or you haven't done your research, or what you're saying doesn't make sense. So there's so much stuff out there now, and this, you know, goes again, since we're when you when you look at the knife world, knife reviews, like a knife unboxing video. In my opinion, if your only skill set is to press record and open a box, I don't really care what you have to say. So you know, the the insightfulness of a lot of the stuff that's out there now, like you say with Wikipedia, it's it's not an it's not a reliable source. Um it it may be the start of your journey as far as researching something, but um when you look at you know, things like books, older school stuff, things that have been vetted, and and there there's some somebody in that process where they say, you know what, this is worth worth distribution, this is worth putting into a publishable form. I I put more value on that stuff than I do most of what you'll see people referencing these days.

SPEAKER_02 2:37:22

Yeah. Well, I'm reminded, um, I I never ended up graduating from college. Um, it was expensive and it would have cost me more to go through my uh line of uh veterinary school than I wanted to spend, um, although I think I had the aptitude for it. But um one thing I learned is that, you know, uh freshmans use Wikipedia as their reference source and um and seniors use their uh Wikipedia's reference section as their reference source. Um, you know, it's the difference between um people who really dig deep into the weeds to figure out what information is is um uh objective and true versus those who are just taking things at face value. And um, for better or for worse, that is a lot of the culture today. Um I'm not really interested in people who buy my knives and just you know throw up a quick review or say something flippantly um uh on social media to act like an authority. I want to see pictures of them using my knives or I want to get feedback from when they've actually used it for something over a longer period of time. Um, you know, I'm I live by the Missouri motto of show me. Um and and that's kind of that that's kind of the way that I operate um and has been a uh a point of maturity where I'm more interested in the quality of something than the quantity of of bullshit, really. Um but you know that that kind of segues um appropriately into the concepts that um I want to talk about with your your work with Spiderco. I mean, so with Paladin Press, you know, you have this um this culture of uh or behavior creating the position that you eventually like work yourself into and and and grow out, right? And that's no different than your experience with uh Spiderco. So can you talk a little bit about um what got you um involved with Spider Co. and kind of some of the work that you've been doing there.

SPEAKER_00 2:39:18

Sure. Um, so um I had always, you know, when Spiderco became a knife company, um definitely became aware of them. I was, you know, well into knife collecting and and uh the tactical side of things. Um and when they first came out, it was like, wow, this is kind of a different approach, the big round hole and all that kind of stuff. And it was, you know, wasn't quite sure what to think of it, but you saw something that was definitely different. Somebody was definitely, you know, innovative. And certainly once you I mean, back then when I when I first started carrying a knife, it was uh always carried it in my right back pocket. And throughout high school, I had a uh Gerber Folding Sportsman 2 uh with a flicket on there for one-hand opening, and clips were not a thing. Prior to 1981, there were no clips on folding knives, and that's one of the things, again, for people who buy knives today. It's like, well, you know, all knives have always had clips and everything except for my grandpa's pocket knife, and it's like, no, no, no, time out. You know, prior to 1981, nothing had a clip on it. So um, when I first saw the Spider-Co stuff, it was like, wow, this is kind of interesting. And I bought myself a first generation endura, um, and I was working the POW Ma thing, um, working in Vietnam and Laos, and I had a serrated Endura, and that was uh my pocket knife through uh a large portion of that time, and I loved it. It was great because I could it was handy. We were constantly, you know, cutting 550 cord, we're cutting rope, we're you know, scraping stuff, uh prying stuff, looking at aircraft wreckage, all this type of stuff. So just a lot of everyday use and having the handiness of being able to draw this thing, open it with one hand. Um, you know, I was already used to one hand opening from the flicket on the uh, you know, my previous carry knife, but it was really a game changer. So um fast forward to the time that I'm uh at Paladin Press, um, and I realized, you know, hey, Spider-Co is just down the road. Um, you know, this is this is kind of cool being so close to them. And um I had written an article for Fighting Knives magazine, and I included um a Spider-Co police model, my personal Spider-Co police model in there. One day I got a letter from them saying, hey, you know, we saw that you featured our knife in your article. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Um, you know, would you be interested in seeing some of our new designs and everything? We like your writing style. Um would would you be interested? And I'm like, wrote them back. You know, this is back in the days when you would actually write letters, uh, wrote them back. And I said, Yeah, absolutely, I would be interested. So um I started becoming um essentially a knife writer because I would get opportunities from time to time to get a sample of a Spider-Co knife and have the opportunity to write an article about it. So I started doing that. That's how I became known to Spider-Co, known to Sal Glesser. Um, and I uh during the same time I did some video work with James Keating. Uh James has always I had started corresponding with him when I was living overseas. Um, and we became friends through letters and stuff like that. We met each other for the first time in '94, um, and he's just been a good friend ever since. And um Sal went to James Keating's Riddle of Steel. He went there with another guy from Colorado, a guy by the name of Bert Locke. And when Sal came back from that, he was all energized that he wanted Spiderco to go in the direction of what he called Marshall Blade Craft. So he wanted to basically produce knives for personal defense, produce trainers, uh, look at the martial side of knife use and everything. And he had Bert Locke essentially set up a training program at Spiderco's headquarters. And Bert ran that for about a year or so. Um, and Bert was also James Keating's assistant when I shot a video with uh with James. Um so I got to know Bert as well. And Bert decided to move up to Montana to do some other stuff. And Sal was like, I need somebody to take over the Marshall Bladecraft program. Can you recommend anybody? He's like, you should talk to Mike Janich. And he's like, hey, I know Mike Janich. He's written some articles about our knives. Lo and behold, Sal gives me a call and he's like, you know, we would like to see about having you teach our NBC program. So I started teaching for Spiderco in November of 2000 and uh um was running classes at the Spiderco headquarters, so hosted by them. They would do all the administrative work. I would come in and teach the classes. And uh from 2000 till about 2003, um, I taught for Spiderco. And during that time, uh got a chance to spend some time with Sal. He went through a couple of the classes that I taught, and he said, you know, hey, I'm curious to know more about your approach to knife design. And uh, you know, if you're gonna be teaching for us, I'd like you to have have you design some stuff for us. So I had already designed one knife for commercial production. That was uh the Masters of Defense Tempest. So because of James Keating's recomm recommendation to Jim Ray, founder of Masters of Defense, I became one of the original five designers for that program. And I designed, I only had a week to design the knife because I was the last guy. And I designed something based on what I thought I knew. So it was the Masters of Defense Tempest, had a buoy-style blade, uh straight clip point, um tapered handle, you know, just kind of a uh tactical folder with a buoy-shaped blade, because I thought a knife had to have belly to the edge, and uh, you know, with that it's gonna slash better. And all the stuff that I thought I knew about knife design, I kind of put into that knife. When Sal asked me to design something for Spiderco, um, it was around that time that I was starting to formulate the logic of NBC and I started doing the pork man demos. So I created this pork man thing and I said, you know, rather than designing something based on what I think I know, let me use this as um a performance uh test. Let me figure out how knives actually cut. So I started pulling out all the knives in my collection, ate a lot of pork during that time, did a bunch of uh pulled pork and various pork dishes because I'd roll a pork man, cut it up, take photos, take notes and everything, and then throw it into the smoker or throw it on the grill. Um but what I found was that the knives that cut best um were actually two Frank Cenefani designs that were produced by Spider-Co. And they were both straight-edged, kind of gentleman's Warncliffe designs. And um that kind of inspired my deep thought process on the mechanics of the cutting power. Because uh again, when when people regurgitate what they think they know, it's like, well, you know, a a knife needs to have belly to the edge uh so that way it'll slash better. And it's like, okay, why does that work? And it's like, well, that's just the way it is. Okay. Well, the Frank Setifane knives disproved that, and they they did it pretty authoritatively. And what I realized was when you have belly to the edge, when you look at a skinning knife, it has belly to the edge so that you have precise control of the depth of cut, because you don't want to cut through the entrails, you don't want to cut through the height of the animal if you don't want to. So a skinner with that belly is designed to give you precise depth of uh precise control of the depth of the cut. When you want power in a cut, what you want is a straight cutting edge. So when you look at like a Stanley Utility knife, when you look at an X-acto blade, they have straight cutting edges because you may want to apply lots of pressure and cut with full power all the way to the point. So that dynamic, when Sal asked me to design something for Spider Co, that's kind of what drove it. And I actually created, I built my first prototype of what I had in mind as a folder, uh, made it myself, first liner lock I ever made, uh, very, very, very rough, but it validated the concept. I showed it to Sal and he's like, eh, you know, not really interested. It's got a thumb stud. Uh, not quite sure. Around the same time, I had written an article about Mike Snowdy when he was an up-and-coming custom knife maker, and uh wrote that for Tactical Knives magazine. And um, short, long story short, um, that article hit, and Mike was instantly three years back ordered, and that was the tipping point for him to become a a full-time custom or full-time custom knife maker. So he asked me, you know, he says, Hey, I want to thank you for helping to propel my career. Um, I want you to design the ultimate neck knife. So I designed, again, I was already on kind of a straight cutting-edge kick. Um, design what became the first generation Ronan, and that was what Mike Snowdy made, and that then became uh Sal liked that one better than the folder. Um, so that became the the Ronan fix blade, which was a very short-lived design, but it was my first Spyderco design. And um what in my research, what I was doing back then was I was kind of looking at blade shapes, and I knew that we had sheep foot out there, um, lamb's foot, a lot of the classic designs and everything. I finally did enough digging in old catalogs and you know, old Sheffield stuff, and I saw the the Warncliffe design, which went back to the early part of the 19th century. And I said, you know, my blade design is comes about as close to this as anything that I can identify readily. Um, I did more of a faceted back to it instead of a long sweeping curve, but I said, you know, this is kind of a Warncliffe design. It's a little bit more tactically oriented, so kind of in loose terms, a tactical Warncliffe, but still categorized it as a Warncliffe. Um ultimately uh Spiderco produced my folder as well, that became the the first generation Yojimbo. Um and those knives, for to Spiderco's credit, they were willing to go out on a limb and produce something that was very different from what was out there at the time. Uh, but they were not commercially successful, they were not immediately embraced by the world, and um they had a fairly short uh lifespan as far as being commercial products, uh, just because people didn't get it. Um as I started teaching NBC more and more, as I started kind of um coining the term tactical Warncliffe and talking about the performance characteristics of it, um the word started to spread a little bit. Certainly, anyone who saw a Porkman demonstration and saw the difference between a bowie-style blade and a Warncliffe-style blade, um, they got it and they started to embrace the idea. But that was really kind of the start of my relationship with Spiderco. Um, and again, I taught for them from uh 99, or excuse me, 2000 to 2004. At that time, I went to work for uh Blackhawk uh products group. So they had purchased Masters of Defense. Jim Ray was looking to retire. He wanted to have somebody who would take over, uh, initially wanted somebody who would design knives for the company, um, and then who would ultimately uh take over his position so he could retire. So since I went to work for Blackhawk, uh I told Sal, hey, I'm gonna be working for a competing knife company. I would certainly like to remain friends, but because we're going to be competitors in the market, um I I'd like to, you know, no longer teach for Spidercone. By that time, I was already teaching seminars on the road as well. So I changed the name of Marshall Blade Craft to Marshall Blade Concepts, still retained the MBC acronym, uh, went to work for Blackhawk and uh continued to kind of pursue um my proselytization of the the Warncliffe design um through a lot of the designs that I did uh did with Blackhawk. Um Blackhawk, I worked for them from 2004 to 2009. 2009 I realized that what they were trying to do was build the company to be able to sell it, which is exactly what they did before they did that. Uh all of us in middle management were kicked to the curb kind of unceremoniously. So I was looking for a job. Uh went back to Sal, went back to Spidercon. I said, Hey, I'm looking for a full-time opportunity. Um, would you happen to have anything? And they said, No, we don't have any jobs, but you're kind of unique in this industry, and we do have um an appreciation for who you are from the time that we worked together on the NBC program. Uh, why don't you come in for an interview and we'll see if we can't figure something out. So went in, did a formal interview, and uh at the end of the interview, they created a position for me. Uh, so I became the special projects coordinator for Spider-Co, which I've been doing for 14 years. Uh, it's a purposely ambiguous term, which allows me to wear lots of hats and do lots of cool things for Spider Co without really having to pin down what I do too specifically.

SPEAKER_02 2:52:19

Yeah, I like uh ambiguous uh job titles like that. Because I I've never in any company I've worked for uh in, I don't think I've ever liked to be tied down to one title or one job position either. It to me it's boring. Like if I just do one thing over and over again, to me, it's like the worst things that I hate out of you know corporate work and whatnot. I like to be dynamic in what I think about. But um that that's really uh cool to me, especially as we talk about like uh Warren Cliff design. You know, um uh going back to the the curved blade uh versus um you know a straight edge, right? Um uh one thing that I think about uh you know, because I've uh done a lot of hunting at this point is the girl the curve blade in uh not only is it depth of cut, but it's also um um motion, right? Because you know, if I'm if I'm skinning something, I'm worried about, you know, pell, I'm worried about being puncturing um intestines and things like that. But I'm also looking at the endurance of cut because sometimes, you know, in larger game, um, you know, it's not a few slices and you're done. It's like you're spending like 30, 45 minutes of rigorous activity uh to try to clean something. And it makes a lot of sense that that curvature follows the the motion that your arm and your wrist naturally follows in order to efficiently clean something. Um, but I've always preferred for uh a lot of purposes uh the worn cleft or uh straight blade uh type of pattern because to me, uh not only is it um easier to sharpen, um, but I also am able to apply um you know uh force regardless of where it's situated on the blade edge and do that um uh uh efficiently as well. So I mean, I think that uh the practicality of of uh how certain um knife uh profiles work, um, you know, whether it's you know the normal uh um you know clip point or drop point or spear point or dagger or American Tonto style or you know, um things like that, that it's important to understand its use case in order to be able to decide on how efficient it is at that thing. And you drawing that corollary uh to um you know your pork man uh on on you know cutting edge and um efficiency of cut to me is uh is a higher order thinking.

SPEAKER_00 2:54:46

Well, it's you know, uh as you say, anyone who actually uses a knife, uh you have more appreciation for somebody who would take one of your knives and use it for a prolonged period of time for them to have an educated opinion. That's exactly what it comes down to. So when you look at critical thinking, um, especially when it comes to self-defense, what I was looking at is okay, I kind of had the the elemental elements of of the NBC logic at that point. It's like, okay, I'm gonna fight with the knife I actually carry. And I'm not going, unlike skinning an animal where I can kind of take my time to do whatever I'm doing, in a defensive situation, um, my cut's not going to be perfect. It may be something where, you know, everything is happening so dynamically that uh I can't guarantee perfect technique, perfect engagement. I can't know that, you know, I'm gonna engage with the heel first and cut all the way to the tip or anything like that. I don't have control over those dynamics. So with all that stuff in mind, I looked at it and said, okay, no matter where this hits on the edge, it's still going to cut with full power all the way to the tip. So it becomes a naturally forgiving element that allows me to achieve the end goal, even if the dynamics of the situation may. my technique imperfect. And um it's like any other blade design. What you're doing is you're saying, okay, in this context, what attributes should this blade have to create the performance characteristics that are necessary for that context? And it's understanding those different contexts and and realizing also there is no one size fits all. There is no one knife that does everything. If you try to design it to do everything, it's going to be you know an abomination. You need to have some degree of specialization or what you need to realize is the more generic you make it, the less the less good it's going to be at specific tasks. It may do all things fairly well, but it's not going to do everything extremely well. And that you know again is why we have all the different blade shapes and everything. That's why they've evolved over time and that's why you know astute knife users understand okay for this job that would be the best blade shape. For this job that would be the best blade shape. And and that depth of knowledge and and and sensitivity to different uh blade designs um that's what really marks again somebody who's astute as far as their knowledge of knives.

SPEAKER_02 2:57:15

Oh yeah. I mean um one really good litmus test for um how good you are at a uh um communicating purpose in in blade profile and everything is knife shows. Um what I found in in the the plethora of knife designs that um I make is that there's always the inevitable um you know very basic understanding of knives like this is a knife but what is make what makes this knife different than um any cutlery that I use like what and they'll they'll pick up a knife and say what is this for and there's a certain portion of me that eye roll is not the right word, but I get this like maybe 80% of the time. An average person at a knife show um has very little understanding of why they're actually there. I think that there's a um you know there's a a mystique with knife shows that pee that draws people but it really when they're when people are picking up knives and things they don't really understand the differences between things. I can have very different uh design principles on my table and yet a person will ask, you know, they'll pick up several different knives and ask what it's for. And I'm a little bit more um uh apt to have a conversation about the the the variability of things that you can do with them. Now obviously my experience comes from hunting and skinning and things like that. I try not to uh feign that I know uh too much about um you know uh self-defense knives or anything is the reason why it's not part of my uh normal uh designs uh that I produce but um it is interesting that there is um there's those like the majority that don't know anything about knives um or knife uh profiles and blade geometries and things and then uh as you kind of go to the smaller percentage of people that really have an awareness most of those people will just pick up a knife and they'll tell you the reasons why they agree that that's a really great thing for some reason. And and to me, like I I try to I try to balance out like the the the people who know um a good knife when they see it um usually have an imagination and an ability to transpose something that they see that's inanimate and not being used for that purpose and and uh pull from life experience and you know you know their imagination to produce like an experience that they could have with that. They're those are the ones it's very difficult um to sell to um unless you're very specific on what it is that you're uh um marketing them to uh but they're also the easiest sells because if they see something that is you know part of part of what they want to buy, they'll just buy it instantly. You don't have to explain anything. It's like the 80% that um or the the the 20% of laymans I guess in some ways that produce 80% of the work and you have to explain a lot of the um the knife knife making and knife design liturgy to them in order to uh get them to a place where they're even receptive towards even buying a knife I have the same experience I do a lot of trade shows for Spider Co.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:22

And uh you know it's it's interesting. My favorite trade shows are um the military shows so it's not a knife consumer show so it's not just a knife geek type of thing we're typically there um you know we're next to Dynecor and you know bunch of military uh people producing m military equipment for very different purposes and we're the odd people out because we've got knives but um you'll you'll get people who at least um in many cases have used knives in the field and they have some basis for evaluation, some basis for comparison um you know at a like going to Blade Show and stuff like that where you've got people where it's more of a curiosity type of thing. Yeah you definitely get a a broad population of people who um don't really have enough experience to really pass uh pass judgment on anything or express an articulate opinion but it doesn't hold them back. You know they certainly will will profess their opinion um regardless.

SPEAKER_02 3:01:32

And it especially when it comes to you know the the self-defense side of stuff um very few people actually train um and um there's just so much myth and misconception um out there as far as weapon design um that you know again people are speaking from what they think they know and uh it's it can be frustrating and it's I think you know for you and I it it uh builds lots of character because we learn we learn to bite our tongues pretty well yeah and I mean you know it it doesn't come from um a place of malice right I mean it it it can be exhausting uh to to speak to the lowest common denominator um but um it does it does make me think uh about uh how how how in design and how in my presentation and how in my making am I um answering questions preemptively right and and I mean sometimes that is in you know providing uh literature or uh some type of I don't know uh juxtaposition to what that purpose is um uh so that you can kind of pick up subliminally what it what it is and I can kind of field some of those you know more ignorant questions uh others I have to get really good and really efficient uh in being able to describe something um um uh to to the multitude of people that don't understand um I'll be honest like there's a lot of um of people who come to these shows that when they see you know something that has like a two and a half to four inch blade length and it's you know you know it's it's a lot of handle and not as much blade or things like that. They they look at it and call them a lady knives or dainty knives or maybe they laugh because they're looking at like forged and fire big old um buoys and machetes and things. And I'm like we're it's just they're not com comparative, right? And um it sometimes it's a little bit difficult on the ego, I guess, to be laughed at by uh consumers because they they have no concept but then you kind of have to put them in that place like that bucket where you know um some some people just s speak out of their ass or out of turn uh out of you know because of ignorance and you really can't um you can't really base a lot of your craftsmanship and whatnot on those type of people because they really don't have any any real understanding of what um makes uh you know a knife in this purpose quality versus you know comparing it to the next table down where they're selling um I I don't know like bigger of something that you're making or bigger of something else.

SPEAKER_00 3:04:22

And it's it's uh it's interesting uh it's like everybody's in the locker room and you have somebody who knows nothing about a male physique uh trying to judge uh judge on uh who's who has uh more value than the next and as I'm sure you know you know you get to the point where you also have to figure out you know um where you cut your losses as far as you know trying to convince somebody or to educate somebody or whatever um regarding you know those details. You know one of my favorite sayings is you know the problem with uh wrestling with pigs is you both get dirty and the pig just likes it. Same thing with talking to people who are ignorant of knives and they're they really don't want to understand what your knife is designed for. They don't want to appreciate its purpose they don't want to appreciate the context of its use. They just want to pass judgment based on a very very shallow knowledge pool um and it's just you know life is too short for that kind of stuff. But you know on the other hand when you have people who come up and are have a genuine desire to learn or to understand it may not be that they're looking for that knife but if they come up and say you know what what's this for? Well you know this blade shape excels at these types of tasks so if you were doing this this is why this would be best oh wow cool thanks for explaining that that's I'll do that all day long. I mean I I have absolutely no problem with that and I I you know that makes for an enjoyable show um even if it's just you know somebody with a genuine question and you provide them with an articulate answer and they appreciate it good enough.

SPEAKER_02 3:06:05

Yeah and there's nuances to that too. You know like with again going back to children there's um the I I like the culture of knife shows um because a lot of you know parents will bring their children to shows and they'll come up and they'll say well I really like this they're they're very um they can be discerning but they can also be very uh forgiving about the way that they evaluate value right and um I've had kids that come up and say you know hey can I look at your knives you know it's like okay there's this this there's this interplayer exchange of this is sharp, you know, um you know be respectful of it. You know, I'll watch you or whatever, um or if their parents are around if they have permission. And um you can have a a really great conversation about the virtues of certain things. And kids uh oftentimes I've found are the most open-minded about different things that they can do. And they always contextualize it based on their own personal experiences and use. Much, much like somebody who has like professional is not the right word, but user experience in something. So that balance is really interesting. But we have this weird paradigm in Texas especially where it's like the the bless your heart category of people where they you know they're kind of like like there's backhanded compliments and things inside of the culture. And um there's some people it's like what what would you even use this for? And that's where I kind of get a little bit like I'm like on the cut cut your loss type of a conversation because they they address your table and occupy your time with some with with vernacular that's uh um adversarial versus wanting to be uh you know genuinely curious about it. So that it is a complexity to um displaying your work and to trying trying to gain market analysis and everything that you you you just got to be there and know that. And shows are the best way to get a ground level view of ignorance and um objectivity on what it is that you're doing. And you have to be able to m um balance that out according to those the people who are saying things to you.

SPEAKER_00 3:08:10

Yeah absolutely it's it's you know it's human nature um and the part of the challenge with that I think you know again is uh we talked about society and and the changes that we've had with social media and all that kind of stuff uh people's interpersonal skills are not as good as they used to be um and just their um their ability to engage other people respectfully um it's not as common as it used to be so that makes things a little bit more challenging because yeah you'll have people who come up and maybe they're not being adversarial about it but they certainly come off that way. And it's just because you know when when they did that as children they didn't get slapped enough maybe I don't know. But you know I remember if I wasn't polite growing up uh you you know I was held accountable for it and you learn to just be cordial and and be respectful. You know it doesn't take anything uh doesn't burn any extra calories or anything else but you're walking up to somebody's table and it's like hey how you doing today uh may I take a look at this knife please you ask permission before you touch it. Sure. This is an interesting design is it did you design this with a specific purpose? Well yeah this is designed for this and this and this and it's like okay cool I've I've never you know I've never done that thing you know I'm not a a hunter or I'm not a whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_02 3:09:37

Um that's interesting that this would you know it makes sense that it excels at at that application or in that context thank you you know it's not that hard and it's just showing a genuine interest and and being polite enough to make make the process um enjoyable for both people yeah um so I I in you talking about Spider Co and your relationship with them and also knowing a little bit about uh your backstory um I I think that it it has to be stated that uh the the people that you're involved with at Spyderco and what you are trying to do there uh to me seems really conducive towards creativity and uh enabling um I guess like the the joy and passion at work because I can't see somebody who's had as many transitionary um um experiences as you staying somewhere so long with like in an organization where you have very little to gain from your self-expression.

SPEAKER_00 3:10:43

To me at least it seems like Spiderco is a really great place to cultivate ideas and to um have some level of discernment uh when they're creating um um uh you know design elements and things like that would you agree um it's it's interesting because Spider-Co um first of all I I have huge respect for for Spiderco and particularly for Sal Glaser uh because when you when you learn Sal's story and you you figure out you know how he made the company how he created the company and all that kind of stuff and for anyone who's interested in that um there's some great stuff on Spiderco's YouTube channel where it presents the history of Spider Co and and uh kind of how Sal got started and all that type of thing. But he really revolutionized the form of the modern folding knife. So it was it was a huge game changer. So being able to know Sal personally and to work for the company um you know I I really consider that to be a privilege. At the same time right now Sal is um he's still very active as far as kind of the man behind the curtain uh with the company but he's uh mostly retired um and his son Eric uh has basically taken the helm uh Eric grew up around the knife industry also very very knowledgeable um you know uh has his own style as far as uh designing knives and everything uh but it is a a family run company so uh it has the the dynamics of a family run company uh sometimes they choose to do things the way they want to do them and it's their prerogative uh because it is their company um so it's it's interesting that we'll sometimes do things when when you talk about the creativity standpoint so as as a special projects coordinator people ask me what do you do for Spider Co. Kind of my standard joke is I'm technical writer and part-time mascot um so because of the expertise that I have from the MBC side from everything else that I've done uh as a writer as uh videographer as you know producing instructional videos on self-defense everything with the best defense all the credibility that I've I've earned through that um that shines positively on Spyderco so that's kind of the mascot side of it um the technical writer part I basically write all of Spiderco's technical information so I write the entire catalog uh I write all of the individual product information guides uh for every every product uh I write any kind of uh instructional manuals and things like that um uh their monthly newsletter uh essentially what I do is I take their products and I communicate the um history the advantages uh the design philosophy uh all those things I basically try to communicate that to the to the customer so the customer can appreciate that find value in it and decide decide to invest in the product so that really is the the primary creative side of of what uh what I do for the company um at the same time I'm a member of the RD team um so um in that capacity um I don't really have um much influence as far as driving design per se um spiderco philosophically what they like to do they're one of the first companies to really get invested in working with custom custom knife makers and adapting custom designs to factory made knives so they were kind of a pioneer in that and they try to be as faithful faithful as they can in uh if they decide to pick up a particular design from a a custom maker or something like that, they want to do that as faithfully as they can. So the idea of stepping in and saying hey we need to redesign redesign this to do this and this and this instead um it's not really my prerogative and it's not part of the philosophy of what they're trying to do. They want um variety and um uh they they want to have a broad scope of product offerings and that's one of the reasons they work with outside designers um so my creativity in that context um becomes more in the communication side where it may be something where it's like okay I I didn't design this knife I don't really know what it's for um but I'm gonna communicate with the designer try to get as much information as I can try to crawl inside his head and and figure out um what the value of this knife is and then figure out how to communicate that to our audience to give that knife its broadest possible appeal. So uh from the creativity standpoint that really it's it's more in kind of the um the informational side and almost kind of intellectual translator if you will.

SPEAKER_02 3:15:58

Yeah and and all that makes sense um you you have several uh different designs that you've worked with uh spider co-d um you know name namely we've talked uh a bunch about the uh Yojimbo too and the uh um what they like what you guys call the micro jimbo so that's that's your uh sh Chicago jimbo um blade length correct yes the micro jimbo is scaled down the Chicago jimbo is just a Yojimbo that is uh a custom grind to shorten the blade um the micro jimbo is literally the entire knife is scaled down but it it achieves a two and a half inch blade length. Yeah that makes sense. One thing that I think um just as a uh you know contextual note so my understanding is that Spyco has several uh trainer folders um the Endura for Delica PCal and uh Yuriojimbo 2 trainer um but the those um I I haven't actually been able to find um find a lot of examples of those is uh is the trainer um market uh for Spyco uh not big enough to pursue uh having having having active trainer um models for all the the different lines of of knives that they make or kind of how do you feel about that um as as we talked about before the number of people who actually um get up and actively train so when you look at the you know um the tactical knife market um first of all tactical knife you know very subjective term um but also what you have even for the people who might buy something where you look at it and say okay that's purpose designed as a weapon or a self defense tool or whatever you want to call it um the act of buying it does not mean that they're going to carry it or if they carry it it doesn't mean that they're gonna know how to use it.

SPEAKER_00 3:17:55

So in some cases it becomes a placebo A talisman where they think, you know, hey, I have this thing, and you know, if I need to use it, if I'm attacked, then out there'll be divine intervention and suddenly I'll have skill. Um in other cases, but again, the the the mere mac the mere fact that they possess it is that's that's all they want out of it. Um the number of people who will actually train in any kind of knife tactics, first of all, the number of people who train in martial arts is a uh minority. Uh the number of people who train in serious self-defense-oriented martial arts, smaller minority. The willing uh number of people who would be willing to embrace the idea of using a knife as a defensive weapon, very, very small. Um and when you look at uh knife products like training knives, that scaling follows suit. So um, you know, people like uh when people come to my seminars and stuff like that, they'll say, okay, what's the best tactical knife? You know, what's the best self-defense knife? I said, okay, look at the entire market, then look at the number of knives that have matching trainers, and then find one of those. I said it'll be a lot easier because it narrows your focus by about 99.9%. Um it's just not commercially viable because it's a very small, uh, small market. Um and that's just the nature of the beast. And it's it's hard. I give Spiderco credit for producing the trainers that they do at the same time. Uh I have people who have been asking me for quite some time, you know, hey, I've been trying to find a Yojimbo 2 trainer and I can't seem to find one. Uh the the reality is they haven't been produced in over two years. Um, so it's still an active product, but it's not commercially available anywhere. The last ones that I got personally, um, I actually purchased from a dealer. Um because that was the only place I could find them.

SPEAKER_02 3:20:03

Yeah. Well, that was my my experience too. I was looking at uh some Yojimbo 2 trainers, and I I was able to find one for almost $200 on Knife Center. Um, but other than that, um, you know, we're talking, I think the Delica is like about $100, Endura is about $100, the PCA is almost $300, and the uh Yojimbo 2 is $200. And not saying that that is a deterrent for me, um, but it's uh it's definitely a a tough price point uh to get into uh the trainer methodology of you know you know having a you know production model knife and then a trainer um and having you know the the price point. Um maybe not similarly. I haven't looked at the uh you know the recent uh price points for Jumbo 2 and whatnot, but um you know the the scarcity of it makes it difficult uh to you know click into that and to try different knife styles because I can have you know a you know a practical sharp knife and then also be able to train with that. So um it's an interesting concept. I don't really see that inside of the custom world uh as much either. Um there's um in inside of like the semi-production or production world, I know with uh you know bala songs, uh uh squid industries makes a lot of trainers because the flipping community um uh with bala songs or butterfly knives is uh is you know a youth-oriented activity primarily. Um but I I thought a lot about um you know, what is the transition period for giving like my children uh knives to be able to s uh to teach responsible ownership and you know, opening and closing it and not um cutting themselves and you know, trainers is like that um it's that that dual purpose where I could use it for, you know, um, you know, the the tactical uh training element of things with self-defense, right? But then I can also see it used uh dually for children and uh educating them on proper blade um you know deployment and handling and things like that before you graduate them to an actual functional knife. Uh but again, mostly the industry is just not producing that um for, you know, I know various marketability reasons, but it seems like there's uh some some niche out there where if you could get licensing for specific uh uh patterns in in the training um category that you could, you know, maybe sub-license those out and provide it to the industry and and make more of them and more affordable in a production sense. But it's just, you know, again, trainers, I I know that they've been around for a long time. You know, again, going back to like the martial arts component that we were talking about, um I don't know how effective I am with a wood Tonto or you know things like that. Uh, but they did exist at one time. They're should be more sophisticated now, but just largely don't exist.

SPEAKER_00 3:22:56

I think it comes down again to just a matter of commercial viability. Um, as far as your your comment with regard to the them being uh perfect training wheels for teaching knife handling, absolutely. I I you know my daughter, when she was younger, she was a Girl Scout, and I actually used Spider-Co trainers. They have, you know, just like Boy Scouts, they have their different merit badges and stuff, and they had one on knife safety. So I taught the knife safety class and I used those. So all the ideas of how do you open and close the knife, how do you operate the lock mechanism, how do you hand it from one person to another, how do you receive it, um, all the knife etiquette. Um, I taught that entire thing. And what I did was use the training knives, and then the next step was okay, I'm gonna take these knives, and I took the what would be the sharpened edge, but it's blunted, uh, coated that with dry erase marker, and then went through it again. And if anyone got careless, it's like, okay, show me your hands. And you'd see, you know, a couple of the girls had little marks on their hands. So, okay, that would have been a cut. Let's try this again because you were careless, you touched the edge, don't do that. And it's they're they're perfect for that. Um the problem with them is, and this is, you know, you you said uh you don't see trainers much in the the custom community either. So you can relate to this. What it comes down to the mechanics of producing a training knife, uh, and the cost of producing a training knife is pretty much on par with producing a live blade. Um so when you look certainly at as far as like a folder, um folding training knives, uh really they kind of started uh the first one that I can remember seeing were actually the first spiderco folding trainers, which um they produced in 1999. Uh so that was the first time that I ever remember seeing those. When I was doing stuff before that, um what you had were uh initially um wooden knives, again, the the old Tonto trainers. Now what started happening was people were you know making stuff that was more uh if they carried a an Endura or something like that, they would carve one out of wood, uh, you know, go to wood class and do that, or they would make some out of plexiglass or whatever, then aluminum trainers started to come along, but they were all non-folding. Um and it really wasn't until around 1999 that um uh uh again, the first ones that I remember, there may have been uh somebody who made it before then, but uh Spider-Co's folding trainers uh were the first ones that I can recall seeing. Right around that time also, uh Recat uh Roundue Knife and Tool, uh Bob Taylor uh produced a couple training versions of some of uh the knives that he produced. Um but uh the cost of producing them, just like a custom maker, for him to produce a second knife, even if it's you don't take into consideration the uh, you know, you don't have to grind the bevels or anything of that nature, but even the idea of um you know putting a handle on it and all that type of stuff, there's still a lot of handiwork, still a lot of time that goes into producing a trainer. And um there aren't that many people that are serious enough to make that investment to say, you know what, I'm willing to pay as much um for a trainer as a live blade. And uh for the people for you know, I've had very serious students in the past, um, and currently as well. I have some guys who carry my larger version of the Yojimbo too, it's called the Yojumbo, and they're like, Is Spiderco ever gonna make a trainer for it? And it's like I've seen drawings, but I I really don't think it's gonna happen. Um, so they're like, you know, well, I I want to train with this. So I took a live blade version, droned the edge, and using aluminum tubing and JB weld, created a thick enough edge that's safe to train with, took the scales off, um, spray painted them red, and essentially produced a trainer. Um, but the purchase price for the trainer was the same as a live blade. Uh, so it's it's definitely uh an investment financially that a lot of people aren't prepared to make.

SPEAKER_02 3:27:08

Yeah. Well, and uh the there's something that I've thought about in um I'm really invested in the um the future of knife enthusiasts, uh, which uh you know happens to be children uh largely. And uh, you know, having children myself, I guess it also um makes some sense because I'm trying to find ways to you know engage uh my to my own children in what it is that we're doing in the knife community uh at large. And I've thought about um the fact that it's almost a fiduciary duty, um, if you really care about the next generation of knife makers, uh, to uh provide a um a segue uh, as it were, into uh you know children understanding uh knife mechanics and uh and um you know training them on safety and whatnot. And so I've thought about, you know, even if it is a cost to me in the fact that I don't make a profit uh taking um, you know, knives that I would traditionally make, um, you know, live edge or um, you know, uh type of you know, user knives, um, and and making those into uh trainers for the youth so that way uh they have them. And then provided at a like an at cost. I mean, how how hard is it for me um in my um in my endeavor to uh pull kids into this world uh that they're you know they're already uh through osmosis getting from their parents and whatnot, but to just do that at my cost and as an investment point uh for those children, you don't always have to um produce a profit off of something in order to make it worthwhile. Uh so I've thought a lot about taking um some of my standard models and making um you know very reasonably priced knives that are appropriate for children so that way they can get their experience in.

SPEAKER_00 3:28:55

Yeah, that's a great idea. Uh one of the other things that Spiderco does, we actually have uh a plastic kit, because uh again, at uh at knife shows you'll have um, you know, parents will bring kids along and you know, the kid wants, hey, buy me something. Uh we actually have a uh glow-in-the-dark plastic kit that assembles without any tools. Uh so you just like a you know, old school plastic model, you buy this thing and it's got the framework on it and everything, you snap the parts out, everything, you put it all together, it goes together literally in about two minutes, and what you've got is an unsharpened plastic knife, but it folds just like uh a Delica 4, uh, glows in the dark, and it it also you know is mechanically identical. So as far as all the knife handling skills and stuff like that. Plus, you know, it's a it's a great keepsake for the kid, and you know, something that they go to go to an event with their parents, and you know, there's nothing there specifically for kids for the parents for them to buy. This becomes kind of the exception to the rule. So we have the plastic kit, we also have some wooden kits that fall into the same category, but the plastic one, uh again, you can do that same thing with the dry erase marker or a little bit of lipstick or something on the edge and make that into a uh a training tool. But um yeah, having educating the youth, you know, creating that next generation, I think is really important, uh, especially since you know we have this society is leaning toward, you know, we can't have anything dangerous. We need to, you know, no guns, no knives, no nothing. Um, you know, by taking everything away, we're gonna make everyone safer. And it's like I don't want my kid eating a steak whole. So learning how to use a knife and learning how to cut things is kind of uh a rite of passage of any well-prepared human being. And it's a tool, you know, it's it's a viable tool, and you need to learn how to use it. So being able to educate them and facilitate that educational process is a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:30:54

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, there's there's no sense in grooming uh society to be victims, and uh that starts with the with children. Um so uh I I agree uh that they need to be educated and they need to, I mean, if it's not their cup of tea, there's always outliers that don't want to be involved with that. But I do think that it's it's the same way with like you know, home at classes or archery or other things that were done in schools um that we we benefited from, but now the next generation doesn't. We allow uh society to kind of dictate how children are educated. Uh yeah. And to to me, it just produces a um more of a subservient type of mentality that, you know, what's what's uh what is appropriate based on society is always appropriate for your kids. And I would just prefer for them to be able to choose for themselves and to um have a lot of different experiences with knives and with weapons and things, uh, so that way they can at least have a at the very least a baseline um uh knowledge on it, to be able to respect it, to understand the cultures around it, and to be prepared in case uh they someday have to use that for their own protection. Uh and I think that that's you know uh a healthy way to educate children is at least, you know, uh exposure to certain things and not to just allow them to um be uh victimized um without um some level of consent or training.

SPEAKER_00 3:32:21

Well, it's also a life skill. I mean, you know, you get to a point where we we uh we coddle our children so much, then you get to the point where it's like, okay, so now you're gonna go off to college and you know you're going to you know be on your own. And uh we had a friend who they sent their son off to college and um they bought him the uh cafeteria cart and all that kind of stuff. Um and they also bought him a gas cart. And what they realized was he was spending lots and money lots of money at the gas station. And they're like, where are you driving that you're buying so much gas? And he was getting all of his meals at the gas station. Um, so of course it was extremely expensive, and they they didn't realize basically he had no life skills, he had no ability to like how do I figure out how to go to the cafeteria, get food there, or how do I figure out how to can I cook food in a microwave? Can I actually prepare food for myself and fend for myself in any reasonable way? And you have a lot of people who, you know, well, you don't don't touch that knife, it's sharp. Okay, well, at some point I might actually want to like learn how to cook and prepare a meal and feed myself and feed my family. And that's a necessary skill that I need to have to be able to do that. And the the earlier you introduce that skill, um, the better they're gonna be at it when they act actually need to use it, the more capable they'll be um just across the board as far as having that life skill. And it just I don't know, it's bizarre the way that uh we've allowed things to to evolve where oh that that's dangerous, don't touch that. No, teach me how to use it, educate me. A lot of things are dangerous if you don't know how to use them well. If you use them with knowledge, they're they're powerful tools.

SPEAKER_02 3:34:18

Yeah, it's a it's a pendulum swing of society. I mean, we'll we'll get to a place where it's a necessity to um have these skills again, and it'll just swing back towards you know proficiency. Um, but you know, uh like the the summation of of our experience here with the with the interview and everything and our conversation is uh um you know you're really doing uh God's work in being able to um articulate um self-defense to be such a um a pillar of you know logic and thoughtfulness and you know sympathy and empathy in in an industry where that that kind of um uh educational prowess is being lost um uh to the uh to to culture. And I I hope that uh people understand that what you are doing with your life's work and the advocacy and passion that you put into uh what you're doing with you know the written word and education and um and you know teaching about self-defense and its ramifications, uh, that that one day we'll realize that it it exists in a in a uh a context that is uh is going to last longer than you and what you're doing is working uh you know, working yourself out of a job um if you do it well enough where you can convey all these things and people can pick them up and actually um um uh use them in everyday life and and um and understand the significance of what you're teaching. So I mean I I I appreciate and recognize uh the work that you're doing. And it's uh you know, it's really great to be able to talk to you about these things uh and get a look behind uh the man who you know uh we get to see represented in you know social media and and things like that. But to to sit and talk and pick your brain about things has been uh an incredible honor for me.

SPEAKER_00 3:36:19

Well, thank you very much. I I really appreciate the kind words. And again, I uh really enjoyed our conversation. Um, you know, it's probably a little bit different than what most people uh expected, maybe as far as a a knife podcast. But um, I mean what it comes down to is um, you know knives have always fascinated me. And uh as I said, you know, growing up in an area where having self-defense skills were it was it was a useful thing to have, and then you know, having the the ability to travel, go around the world and and see that in you know in the vast majority of situations we are on our own. Yes, there is help there, you can call 911. Um, but you know, the help will come, but it's a matter of of timing. Um is somebody gonna get there soon enough to be able to help me? And when it comes to to violent crime, when it comes to um any kind of violent threat, um you know the old saying is, you know, when uh when seconds count, the police are minutes away. Um and that's that's the reality of it. So realistically, if you were to be attacked, you have two choices. One is to stop him and the other one is to let him. And once you embrace that, and then once you embrace the idea that you do, regardless of your your physical attributes, you do have the capability to defend yourself. Um, and with a little bit of of training and diligence and determination, um, you can develop the skills to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. Um, but there's no reason not to. And to be part of the process that empowers average people to be able to do that and come to that realization and to keep themselves safer. Um, if that's that's my life's work, um, I'm proud of it. And I think I did well.

SPEAKER_02 3:38:15

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and and underpinned too culturally by what we have things like, you know, defund the police, where there's you know, there's cultural and societal elements of things that that uh per like perpetuate uh uh you know victimization, right? And so if we cannot really rely on these constructs of other people doing things for us, providing food, providing protection and whatnot, we do have to go back to self, right? What can you do for yourself to empower yourself to be able to protect the things that you love? And you know, that that um that wellspring of uh self-esteem and being able to protect yourself and and love yourself and to love those around you is uh part of why I think so um heavily about um self-protection, um, is because it it really is I I cannot help others if I can't help myself, and I can't help others if I don't know. And um I think that that that philosophy of uh self-reliance so that way you can help uh others is is an important part of society that we need to remember and we need to espouse continuously. Otherwise, we have a a bunch of um a bunch of people who do like cannot do anything for themselves and cannot do anything for others uh as an extension of that.

SPEAKER_00 3:39:32

And they're ready-made victims as well.

SPEAKER_02 3:39:35

Yeah. Um, well, um, Michael, it's been an incredible pleasure. Um, you know, you're welcome back anytime. And uh, you know, I know that there's you know a lot that was said, but there's still still a ton of things that we could have said. Um but you know, it it's you know an honor, and I really do appreciate your time and uh talking through um your your work and what you're doing in the industry.

SPEAKER_00 3:39:57

Thank you again. I I really appreciate the opportunity. Uh take care and stay safe.

SPEAKER_02 3:40:01

It's my pleasure. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Good Old Blades Podcast. Remember that you are loved and God bless.