The Knife Junkie Podcast is the place for knife newbies and knife junkies to learn about knives and knife collecting. Twice per week Bob DeMarco talks knives. Email Bob at theknifejunkie@gmail.com; visit https://theknifejunkie.com.
©2025, Bob DeMarco
The Knife Junkie Podcast
https://theknifejunkie.com

Transcribe Your Podcasts and Videos: https://theknifejunkie.com/magic (affiliate link)

Announcer [00:00:03]:
Welcome to the Knife Junkie podcast, your weekly dose of knife news and information about knives and knife collecting. Here's your host, Bob the knife junkie DeMarco

Bob DeMarco [00:00:15]:
Welcome to the Knife Junkie podcast. I'm Bob DeMarco. On this edition of the show, I'm speaking with martial artist and edged weapons specialist Bryan Cannata. Brian is a lifelong martial artist with expertise and knowledge in a variety of martial arts, all of which, from what I can tell, are blade focused. He's codified his take on the bladed arts to form a style he calls palisamericano. He's a master and teacher of Filipino martial arts, and his knowledge and skills with both American weapons, the Bowie knife, which really drew me in, and that's what got me hooked. Just watch his YouTube videos on the back cut, the snap cut, and mountain man style, and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Bob DeMarco [00:00:59]:
We'll meet Bryan in a minute and talk all about Bowie and other types of knife combatives. But first, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, hit the notification bell, share the show with a friend, and download the show to your favorite podcast app. That's a lot of homework. And, if that's not enough, if you wanna help support the show, you can do so by going to Patreon. Quickest way to do that is to scan the QR code on your screen or go to the knifejunkie.com/patreon. Again, that's the knifejunkie.com /patreon.

Advertisement Announcer [00:01:28]:
Adventure delivered. Your monthly subscription for handpicked outdoor, survival, EDC, and other cool gear from our expert team of outdoor professionals. The knifejunkie.com/battlebox.

Bob DeMarco [00:01:41]:
Brian, welcome to the Knife Junkie podcast, sir.

Bryan Cannata [00:01:43]:
Hey. How you doing? Good to be here.

Bob DeMarco [00:01:46]:
I'm doing great, and thank you. And before we get into this heady conversation of knives and, knife martial arts and all that stuff, I just have to say that, my daughters, my wife, and myself were huge fans of your dog.

Bryan Cannata [00:02:01]:
He is right outside the door sitting there chewing on one of his favorite toys at the moment. If I, if I let him in here, he would be all over my lap, all over everything. And since we're gonna be talking about edged weapons with, a little bit of show and tell, I don't want his overeagerness to get in the way and, get hurt.

Bob DeMarco [00:02:24]:
So Well, he he seems like a a super cool dog, and, he's got beautiful eyes too.

Bryan Cannata [00:02:30]:
Yeah. He he's a hoot, man. He really, really is. I got him after my last dog passed away. He's a rescue. He, just kind of, oh, really the story is several people from all over the country that I'm good friends with sent me the link to his rescue page, and the owners were, like, 2 hours down the road, or the people that found him were trying to home him. And, you know, I was like, alright. Let's go get him now.

Bryan Cannata [00:03:01]:
So, he's been a happy addition to the house since then.

Bob DeMarco [00:03:05]:
Awesome. Well, I I wanna find out about how you got started in martial arts in this kind of, blade focused martial arts. But when we first, got on the line here, you said you just got back from teaching. Right? What what what are you teaching?

Bryan Cannata [00:03:22]:
Right well, I teach a bunch of stuff right now. At the gym, I currently teach at I teach, 2 classes a week. One is an open Filipino martial arts class, and we tend to focus in that class on the art much more so than the combat, because it's an all ages class. I let everybody in that class, from, you know, kids to 60 year old men. It doesn't it doesn't matter. My Wednesday night class is what I jokingly call my patayang class, because, there we cover deadly force and, you know, everything from Filipino styles, African styles, you know, American styles. If it's got an edge, we're talking about it, and the students are exploring it.

Bob DeMarco [00:04:15]:
Oh, that's so cool. So tell me how you got into martial arts and what, you know, what's your background with it, and how did you get involved in the bladed arts in particular?

Bryan Cannata [00:04:27]:
Long convoluted story, but, you know, essentially, I was a horrible, horrible child, during the seventies, and my grandparents, who I was fluent with at the time, put me in a local martial arts school. Well, I was living in Virginia Beach at the time, and it was one of Chuck Norris' early schools. And, yeah, so one of my favorite jokes is I'm one of the few people that have punched Chuck Norris in the lids. But it started a lifelong passion. And, you know, my parents moved moved around a lot. And, now, so I ended up just exploring all sorts of martial arts because whatever town we moved into, I would go sign up at whatever the local martial arts school was. Asian martial arts drew me into European martial arts. European martial arts actually drew me into Filipino martial arts because of the supposed Spanish connection.

Bryan Cannata [00:05:30]:
And when I finally got to Filipino martial arts, I just loved it. I I I fell in love with it, and it's kinda become a lifelong passion. I've been a practitioner now going on 30 plus years. Wow. So, and, over the last couple of years, I've been kinda really more short blade focused. Been, looking at criminal systems and how people can modify those and use them for personal protection as opposed to a fault, you know, it's a I liken it to a hammer. You can kill somebody with a hammer or you can build a house with them. Them.

Bryan Cannata [00:06:17]:
So we shouldn't disregard the tools that the criminals are using because they're using them every day and they're using them successfully. So even if you don't want to make a real practice of doing a criminal martial art like Medusa or, Piper, it's a good idea to study them at least academically, just to have an understand this, have an understanding of the sort of assault you might actually encounter, and the way you are going to be assaulted.

Bob DeMarco [00:06:55]:
Okay. I'm I'm gonna ask you about Medusa and Piper in a minute because I'm fascinated by those. Piper, as I mentioned before, Piper is something I only just heard of through you recently, and same thing with Medusa. And I'm I'm totally clueless as to what Medusa is. I wanna I wanna ask you that in a minute, but first, would you say that, Filipino martial arts, Cali, I guess, is is that your home base martial art and off of which everything spins?

Bryan Cannata [00:07:23]:
Yeah. Yeah. Just through time of having done it, it's the thing I've done the longest, so it bleeds into everything I did. And this is kind of a good segue into those prison systems. Filipino martial arts is a lifelong study. You get to sit there and, you know, develop these incredibly beautiful and subtle techniques of range and timing and, you know, disarms and all the beautiful things within that art, and make them functional to protect yourself. Sure. You can simply say angle 1, angle 2, and run away.

Bryan Cannata [00:08:05]:
Great. Great. But, there are other systems that are more practical for people that need immediate tools to defend themselves. Medusa was put together, I'm I'm not even gonna give you the date because it's relatively modern and it's not older than 5 years. But, what the founders of the system, Mike and Seth Raymond, did is they, they were looking they were getting frustrated by the fact that most blade systems take a long time to develop usable transferable skills. And they came up with the question, well, who's actually using bladed weapons today? Who's really going out there and doing harm to other people? My only obvious answer is criminals. So they started correspondences. They interviewed police officers.

Bryan Cannata [00:09:05]:
They interviewed inmates. They scoured over, you know, closed circuit camera TV. They, you know, de dove into the, you know, bajillion videos you can find on YouTube. And they started graphing out tactics and methodologies and and basically rules of thumb that it seemed every inmate was doing, that every criminal knife assault followed. And, they started putting it together into a system. And they gamed it out for a number of years and within a small private, you know, woodshed group. And then, a man named, Jason Schultz got involved with him, and, he wrote the manual. And he looked at it from a World War 2 perspective because he's a he he's a combatives guy in a very big umbrella, but, one of the things he I don't wanna say specialize because I don't wanna pigeonhole him.

Bryan Cannata [00:10:12]:
But one of the areas he's very, very knowledgeable about is the World War 2 OSS programs and the way they were put together for, fast dissemination in a short period of time, giving these people the bare skills that they could go out there in the hostile territory and hopefully survive. And he took that mindset and took all that information and boiled it down into the Medusa manual, in in the Medusa program now. And, that's the syllabus we follow, and it essentially gives you a road map to do violence. It gives you a plan that is all birth motor. There's no subtlety, nothing. It's really meant to be taught in, like, a 6 hour block of time. You know? 2 or 3 hours of instruction, about 4 hours of drilling, and off you go.

Bob DeMarco [00:11:15]:
You you say gross motor, it makes me think immediately of, like, Libra fighting with the Pecal style, gross motor kinda stuff.

Bryan Cannata [00:11:24]:
Libra has much more subtlety than Medusa. If you you look at prison in Medusa's baked on 3 pillars. 1st pillar is shot, the second pillar is latch, and the 3rd pillar is strike. Now that strike can be anything. It could be a stab. It could be a strike with, like, a kuvotan, a a palm stick, cell phone, whatever. Yeah. It's it's terrible.

Bryan Cannata [00:11:53]:
But the idea is when you look at all these assaults in prison, what happens is they generally first unarmed strike somewhere vulnerable, eye, throat, groin, something like that. That creates a shock. It disorients your opponent. It allows you to latch onto them, to grab them. And, this is one of those things that, like, when, BJJ guys get start playing with it, they really don't understand that Medusa wants to be wrapped around you. They want you to hold on to me. Great. Because every time I'm moving that knife, I'm putting it somewhere in your body.

Bryan Cannata [00:12:37]:
And the idea is to overwhelm with extreme violence. When I teach it, I like to make the comparison to the basic lesson they teach everybody in basic training, that you don't hide from the ambush, you dismount, and you attack the ambush. So you're attacked, fine. You attack back, and you attack with overwhelming aggression. And it could be you're using a knife, could be and preferably and hopefully it's more something like a flashlight or, you know, attack light or a palm stick, something that's not deadly force. But you have to understand the roots of where it comes from and how it's being used. So, I mean, that's Medusa in a nutshell. It's shockwatching stat, super compact, lot of drilling, lot of force on force.

Bryan Cannata [00:13:28]:
And, you know, we don't get into subtleties. We teach just a couple of simple, like, overhook, underhook, you grab onto their shirt, pull yourself into them, make that contact, and, fill in full of holes. But I got to oh, I I have to emphasize this. Please. We're not teaching people to murder people. Right. We are looking at only the most extreme of circumstances.

Bob DeMarco [00:13:57]:
It seems like a scalable template. Like, it's like you mentioned, you can use it with a flashlight. You can use it with your fist or your elbows, but it's you know, if someone is assaulting you, this is a strategy.

Bryan Cannata [00:14:08]:
Mhmm. And and let let's look at that for a moment before I go on because that's that's exactly what it is, and it's exactly why we have it laid out in those three stages. As a civilian taking this idea for your defense, at each point, shot. Did that stop the fight? Okay. Breakaway. Latch. Did you get them under control and they can no longer harm you? Okay. Breakaway.

Bryan Cannata [00:14:35]:
If you have to go to striking, what are you doing? Yeah. You know, that that is the point where you have you have crossed that line into you're using deadly force. Yeah. Unless you're using some sort of false, force multiplier. Yeah. So that's that's a very big part of it. And, yes, it is very scalable. You can use it for every for whatever you want.

Bryan Cannata [00:14:59]:
One of the places I find this really fits into in in the modern world is the active shooter scenario. You know? Uh-huh. All of the paperwork that comes out is always, you know, run, hide, fight. That that's the thing. They tell you run to your nearest exit, how to hide and barricade yourself, but they really don't go into fighting. And, you know, everybody in the world thinks they know how to fight. But martial arts, we know that's not the case. But what happens with a lot of people is they panic because they have no plan.

Bryan Cannata [00:15:39]:
You know, I don't really wanna sound sexist here, but Becky from accounting doesn't know how to fight. And if she finds herself and a couple of people trapped in a room, she has no plan. So she just knows that all she can do is fight. So with something like Medusa, now she has a road map, she has basic understanding of what to do, and she can pick up an object in her office and apply that as a force multiplier and apply that to that person coming through the door in conjunction with other people. And, you know, not saying it's gonna save your life, but what I am saying is it gives you a heck of a lot better chance than just sitting there and doing nothing. So it's it's a great seal in for those sorts of scenarios.

Bob DeMarco [00:16:26]:
I'm glad you mentioned that because, something I get, in comments on my videos, I I have a personal taste. I love, fighting knives. I did, some collie for a number of years, and, yeah. I like the application of the blade and I just I have a giant collection of mostly martial blades that I love. And, a lot of people, will comment, you know, especially if they're not fans of the show or, aren't interested in knives. They just come across the video. They're like, well, I carry a gun and and, you know, don't bring a gun to don't bring a knife to a gunfight. And I always think that that is such a stupid thing to say, because, yeah, I I've got guns too.

Bob DeMarco [00:17:08]:
That's not the point. The point is, that these are useful skills. It's like you're not gonna bring a gun to a fist fight. You know?

Bryan Cannata [00:17:15]:
Right. You know, the, whenever I get those comments, because I get them all the time. Oh, that's great. That's real fancy. I'll do shoe shippings. Number 1, it's awesome. Number 2, if you see me walking down the street, you assume that I don't know how to drive a car. You know, just just the assumption that because I happen to have and and happen to share

Bob DeMarco [00:17:41]:
I get what you mean. Yeah.

Bryan Cannata [00:17:43]:
You know, a a a a very small niche of my overall interest in self defense. You know? And, heck, I live in Georgia, man. I think they issue you a Glock when you get your driver's license. I I mean, come on.

Bob DeMarco [00:18:02]:
Yeah. Yeah. It I always think it's, it it sounds like a slightly defensive and threatened, perspective. You know? Well, I just, I don't need to learn how to use these other things. You know? People have only been fighting with knives for, you know, the past 100000 years. I don't need to learn that because I've got a gun. Before we get on to what's that?

Bryan Cannata [00:18:22]:
I was gonna say, in their places in the world I mean, like like, I put a lot of stuff out on YouTube and, you know, social media. That goes all over the world. There are places all over the world that you cannot own a gun. Mhmm. So there are other options, and it kinda leads in the Bowie knife because kitchen knives and Bowie knives are all very close to the same weapon, to to the same tool. And it's just how they're applied and how they're made, but size, reach, all that stuff, it's about the same when you get down too. So, you know, these ideas of looking at things like buoy knives for your self defense complete and total package is not a bad idea.

Bob DeMarco [00:19:07]:
You illustrate that in a snap cut video where you show, how to do several different snap cuts, With the dagger, I love that. I never thought of that. I like the snap cut. I like the theory of it. I like, I like the way it feels. It's kind of intuitive. If you've ever played the drums, it's kind of a natural extension of that sort of motion with your hand. Mhmm.

Bob DeMarco [00:19:31]:
But also, you you show off in that video, the fact that your chef's knife is the same size, about 10 inch blade, and

Bryan Cannata [00:19:39]:
you do

Bob DeMarco [00:19:39]:
a lot of the same things.

Bryan Cannata [00:19:41]:
Yeah. I had a dear friend of mine from high school, and this this was years years ago. With after high school, we had gone our separate ways. But one afternoon, I found out she was murdered in her kitchen down in Florida. She was a nice, quiet lady, went to work, came home, didn't do anything. Some literally crazy homeless dude broke into her house and stabbed her to death with her own kitchen eyes. And, you know, she had zero idea of how these things were used, you know, how they could be used as a weapon. And so I think understanding kitchen knives through the lens of the Bowie knife is a very important thing that a lot of people don't really key in on.

Bob DeMarco [00:20:33]:
Let's let's talk about I'm sorry. That's a that's a terrible story, and, no one should have to suffer that. Terrible for that to happen to a friend. Let's talk about Bowie knife fighting. We hear a lot about, Filipino martial arts, I love them, I've, but I've always, always loved the Bowie. Bowie is, like, my favorite knife out there, and it feels like up until recently, or maybe I wasn't looking in the right places, you didn't hear much about, the specialized use of the Bowie, and, here's an example. I remember the first time I watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they're about to square off for a knife fight, and the big dude has his knife, and I'm like, he's holding it backwards. What's that guy doing? He has no idea.

Bob DeMarco [00:21:21]:
Like, they didn't know to turn the knife around properly on that film set, and, that's because I didn't know, you know, and and I've been watching a lot of, Bowie videos, a lot of them are yours, and there are a lot of complexities to it. Tell me about the the styles of knife of Bowie knife fighting and where they come from.

Bryan Cannata [00:21:43]:
Well, I I I like to break down Bowie knife fighting into basically two schools. You have the educated military trained or fencing school trained person, usually somebody rich, that learned how to use a Bowie knife as a weapon as taught by some fencing instructor. Alright? Let's call it educated, for lack of a better term. And then you have what I like to call vulgate bowtie knife fighting, which is what your average cowboy, what your average, you know, riverboat gambler, or what your average person who needed a big knife because the firearms were so unreliable would have picked up. You know? Maybe his older brother showed him a few tricks. Maybe his dad showed him something. Maybe his friends showed him something. Hey.

Bryan Cannata [00:22:51]:
This is a trick that works for me. And that's when you look at the bowie knife in period. Now in modern day, we have really 2 again, another 2 schools. We have the James Keating, Bill Bagwell, Comtech, where all of that came from. And that also includes Steyers, John Steyers and the K Bar. His Cold Steel book, teaching a possible method of teaching, large knife fighting to, the marine corp. So you you you've got that kind of lineage there. And then you've got people like me that are doing actual historical research.

Bryan Cannata [00:23:57]:
And when I teach, I only teach things that I can document from newspaper articles and periodicals, descriptions of the time period and say, this person did this thing. I try to leave out as much, as a good friend of mine put it, frog DNA. Because what a, you know, for you Jurassic Park fans out there. The big thing is that because we don't know a lot, a lot of people will take things like, well, we do this in the Filipino martial arts, so it kinda makes sense that we might do this because a knife is a knife and a thing is a thing. And to a certain extent, yes, you can do that. But I really, really try to stick to the purely historical. And what I cannot say this came directly from this newspaper article about this fight, I'll look at a military manual of saber use from the time period and fill in the blank from period's forces that are not necessarily Bowie knife. The main drill I teach, the Hutton flow, is a molineux from Alfred Hutton's manual on military saber.

Bryan Cannata [00:25:23]:
But the reason I use that is because it is the perfect platform for teaching that large knife use, just from that one little nugget. So, you know, but that's what's different about what I particularly did. And, that's what I'm teaching. Now, personally, I'll take a Bowie knife and do anything with it that seems to work at the moment. A constant exploration and expanding of, you know, my personal expression of, you know, how to use a 2 foot long knife, you know?

Bob DeMarco [00:26:00]:
Well, so so, Bowie knives, you'll have to forgive me, I'm a yank, I can't help but say Bowie, but but Bowie knives come in a number of different varieties. Some of them are here here's a trainer for the Laredo Bowie from Cold Steel. Some of them are long and slender like this. Some of them are wide and heavy. It seems like they have a number of different uses, and I'm I'm sure there's a lot of crossover with many of them.

Bryan Cannata [00:26:26]:
Here's the thing, and and this is something that, like, I preach from the mountaintops. Jim Bowie was probably not a knife fighter. Jim Bowie was a strong, violent, aggressive man. And you take a big piece of steel and you put it in his hand, and he's gonna be a nightmare to deal with. He wasn't doing, in all likelihood, he was not doing any kind of, you know, oh, I'm going to, you know, parry 6, Lasada down a blade and no. He's not gonna do that. He's gonna wade in. He's gonna block the arm, and he's gonna smash you.

Bryan Cannata [00:27:03]:
When we look at the sandbar fight, you know, what did he do? He pulled his knife and he stuck it out to the side. And, Major Norris just threw himself down on the damn blade, basically. So, you know, there's there's so much legend associated with Bowie knives in general. And what I'm trying to look at personally, and the only reason I use the term Bowie knife, is because it immediately brings about an idea in your head. And it tells you 2 things. I'm looking at it from an American perspective, and it's a big knife. The reality is big knives existed way before that sandbar fight. People used them all over.

Bryan Cannata [00:27:51]:
I often say the Bowie knife is America's knife. And by America, I mean North and South. North and South America, not just the United States and its frontier. You know, so you'll see different things described the further west you go compared to what you see on the east and, the southeast as far as methodologies. But that only makes sense because you've got so many different cultures blending, people with different backgrounds, that you get this wonderful amalgam of edged weapon techniques and dirty tricks. So to me, you know, on that, I I I like to think of the Bowie knife as America's sword. You know, the Japanese have the katana. You think katana, you think knights, or or, you think samurai.

Bryan Cannata [00:28:56]:
You you you think of feudal Japan. You see a cruciform arming sword, and you think king Arthur and knights of the round table and all of that. You see a Bowie knife, and, you know, you'd be thinking New Orleans, Texas, jimbuoy, riverboat gamblers, all that Americana wrapped up in that symbol of a weapon.

Bob DeMarco [00:29:21]:
So show show us the Bowie knife that you designed, and tell us about that. Tell us about the design of it because it it seems to incorporate a lot of different aspects of a lot of different, styles of blade.

Bryan Cannata [00:29:36]:
Yes. It does. So this is the knife that I, had condition from, Jim Bensinger, the Vermont knifesmith. It is purely a dueling weapon. This is not a tool, although it could be used as one. This is not, in any way, shape, or form, a period Bowie knife. I have a real nice version of one of those, and I can show you that next too. It's not an actual period knife, but it's, it's very close to what somebody then would have cared.

Bryan Cannata [00:30:14]:
Number 1, I really like the Mexican style of lei, this sweeping points. The point's still in line, but with the deep belly and the sharpened swedge, the ability to back cut with this thing is just amazing. It's it's got enough of a deep belly that you can really slice with it well. The guard on it, I took an inspiration for that. The if you look at the Bagwells with their blade catcher guards, they're they're much wider. If you can see, these are much narrower and they're integral. So in theory, this gives a stronger connection. But, the shape is based on European parrying daggers, the shape of the coins.

Bryan Cannata [00:31:05]:
So that's where I got that, from. The handle here is a little bit longer, and it's a curved coffin handle. But the reason it's curved and the reason it's longer is so that I can easily do a number of Filipino techniques because it gives me a solid punyo if I'm in a forward grip, but it's also long enough that I can neck up and take a full on point position. It's heavy enough that you can easily go through a limb or bones with it. Somewhere on my YouTube channel, you'll see me doing, snap cuts against a rack of ribs with this, and it just glides through them. And, you know, I'm not going between the ribs. I'm cutting the ribs through the ribs, which is little snap cuts. So, yeah, that was the idea of this, and it's kind of a traditional length as far as doing weapons.

Bryan Cannata [00:32:12]:
It's, the blade's basically the length of my forearm. So, yeah. If I were to design, and I did, but, yeah, this if I were to design, you know, my perfect iron mistress as the stories go, this is it. This is literally my favorite knife in my entire collection. This thing, it, you know, it was made for me to my specifications by an amazing blacksmith Yeah. That really understands Bowie knives. And not only that, he is, also a Southeast Asian martial arts practitioner, so understood the things that I wanted that related to that.

Bob DeMarco [00:32:54]:
I've been I've been following Jim for a while. Oh, don't put it away, please. I've been following, Jim for a while. I love his knives. I absolutely love I think you also got a gununting from him, if I'm not mistaken.

Bryan Cannata [00:33:07]:
And I've got that sitting right beside me.

Bob DeMarco [00:33:09]:
Oh, I wanna see that in a minute too.

Bryan Cannata [00:33:11]:
But before you get this

Bob DeMarco [00:33:12]:
away, I I just wanna comment on, I love the curved coffin handle because I'm a I'm a huge fan of the coffin handle in general. Not just how it feels in hand and how sure it is because it widens out, but I love the way it looks. And to have that curve, it's a really I don't know. It's clever, in terms of how it looks, but I can tell that it's gotta feel great in hand. And it and like you said, it gives you all this versatility.

Bryan Cannata [00:33:40]:
Mhmm. You can

Bob DeMarco [00:33:41]:
use the punyo, but it also gives you that sort of, heel for for sort of snapping, chopping motions. I love the quillons. I'm a big sucker for for, Bill Bagwell's, you know, knives and, that evokes that for sure. And then that deep, deep diving belly is reminds me of some of the Filipino blades, like, behind me, and and then that long Spanish clip sharpened. I mean, this thing is a, it's a masterpiece. I think it's so beautiful. Yeah. He,

Bryan Cannata [00:34:16]:
to date, he's sold one other. Oh. A lot of people like the design, but they get a little twitchy when they hear the prices. So he's actually trying to figure but here's the thing. Because of that, he's trying to figure out easier ways to make them so that he can sell them at a price that he would sell one of his normal buoys or one of his ruinations.

Bob DeMarco [00:34:43]:
I love that ruination. Oh.

Bryan Cannata [00:34:45]:
Oh, yeah. I have, it's not really a ruination. It was something he made on a lark for a show, and it never sold. And I put it up online after the show, and I was like, I want that. I want now. And this is it. Oh, I love this bird handle, bird head handle. The handle's walnut.

Bryan Cannata [00:35:17]:
You know, it's got a much it's got a much shorter clip, and it's it's definitely a shorter blade. But this is something you can easily see somebody in the early 19th century walking around stuffed in their, sash, you know, as they walked around the streets. As much cool as it is weapon as opposed to the other one, which is purely a a dueling weapon, and I love this thing. This too is just super quick in the hand. You can and like all his stuff, it's razor sharp when it gets to you. Scary sharp, actually.

Bob DeMarco [00:35:56]:
And if I'm not mistaken, just from drooling and and, over over the pictures of his knives, I'm talking about Jim Benzinger, if you're just tuning in, They all seem like they have sharpened swedges, which makes makes me, I love that.

Bryan Cannata [00:36:11]:
I love that. Sort of. They are either zero ground or they're sharpened. There's a little bit of a difference there. Like, I I I believe when you were talking, Lynn Thompson, he was talking about how the edge is designed so that, the the the reason his wedges are done is to reinforce the point. With Benziger's knives, they're distally tapered. And one of the wonderful things about having a handmade knife versus one you buy off a production line, And and I'm not saying that production line knives are not good to own. I own a bunch.

Bryan Cannata [00:36:55]:
But the Smith can push more metal to a point and still achieve a uniform grind all the way through and give you that stronger reinforced point, and then you can have that sharpened sledge, fully sharpened sledge. Right. Right. So if you want that, if you want a fully sharpened sledge that's just as sharp as the knife edge, you can request it, and he'll do work and make you a good, wonderful, solid knife.

Bob DeMarco [00:37:28]:
But in terms of, back cuts and that well, in terms of back cuts in particular or using the swedge forward, it really doesn't have to come to a a slicing edge, does it? That zero ground edge seems adequate.

Bryan Cannata [00:37:45]:
This is this is the trainer made by Volpis, and, he sells a good number of these. People like to buy the trainers. They just don't like to buy the actual knife. But as a demonstration of the power of the back cut, just a second here. Sure. As I step them off of the camera and grab this big cardboard box here. This is a dull trainer, but with the power of the physics behind the backpack, that out of the way, you can still put massive holes, engines with a blunt trainer with an edge that's just over a quarter of an inch thick. So it's the physics.

Bryan Cannata [00:38:41]:
It's not necessarily the, shape or or the the sharpness of the back clip.

Bob DeMarco [00:38:49]:
It's the physics of that flick. Show people show people what you're talking about when you're talking about a back cut.

Bryan Cannata [00:38:57]:
Well, the easiest way to conceptualize back cut is stick your thumb up, turn it down. That's the first step. Now we reach out as though we are cutting with our blade, and then we roll the tip over so that this becomes your cutting surface. An easy way to think about it is if I cut into my target here, it stops. So if I were aiming at somebody's arm and they move their weapon in to intercept, it would block it. But if I roll over, I'm now able to cut to the forearm around the blade without them being able to pair without a lot of extra work.

Bob DeMarco [00:39:48]:
It seems like it's very, very quick, and it's elusive too, especially if you're coming in with that sort of angle one slice or, cut that you're doing, and you roll it over. It seems like it's happening over here.

Bryan Cannata [00:40:01]:
To the best of my knowledge, this comes out of and this is supposition. I can clearly say that it is directly related to saber fencing and use of military saber because you would cut, and as they would block, you would roll the saber over around their block and still be able to hit them in the chest. But interestingly enough with European 2 handed swords, they have what's called a false edge cut where you literally roll the sword over and hit with what's done as the false edge or what you and I would call the secondary or back edge. And you'll see that in a lot of long short stuff, particularly great for hitting the hands because even the Europeans do that. These are great targets.

Bob DeMarco [00:40:55]:
So what is mountain man style?

Bryan Cannata [00:40:58]:
Mountain man style, you know, really delves into that whole Vulgate thing. I first heard of it when I was a kid, and and, like, way before I was ever really interested in a lot of edged weapons. At that point, I was still really focused on, you know, traditional martial art. And, my parents knew these Mennonites in Pennsylvania, and we'd go visit them. Because we lived in New Jersey at the time, so it's, yeah, not a huge trip. And, hey. He's a Mennonite creature, and he was fascinated with the fur trapper trade all up there all along, you know, the Canadian border. And, in some random discussion about, you know, Daniel Boone and and and all that mountain men type stuff, he's the first person that ever told me about them fighting with their knives in that reverse grip with the or I really shouldn't say reverse grip.

Bryan Cannata [00:42:10]:
I I I really should say edge in grip. And how they used it to rush in, grapple in, stab hard, and rip out. And, you know, you you talk to a lot of people, that do this, and and you you read articles and stuff. And what what you end up seeing is that, again, this is, you know, educated versus vulgate. Yeah. The the educated guy is just as likely to go to first blood. It's a duel of honor. We are we are, expressing our manliness and nobility and and all of that stuff.

Bryan Cannata [00:42:54]:
Whereas the, you know, the mountain man, the trapper that just came out of the hills and wants his drink, you know, he's gonna stick it in you and gut you as quick as possible. So you have 2 very different approaches. And you'll see that a lot of the same techniques, but once you get into you you really start delving into, okay. You know, can you do a snap cut in the revert with the edge in? Why? Yes. You can. Can you do a back cut with? Why? Yes. You can. Yeah.

Bryan Cannata [00:43:22]:
Pretty much you can do everything you can do with the knife in the, edge ingra. And one of the things that's, been pointed out to me a lot by, friends and associates about it, especially here in the south, with the, civil war, you're not gonna block the cavalry saber coming at your head with your edge. That that would ruin yeah. Yeah. I I mean, you do what you gotta do at the moment. I'm not saying this never happened. But if you have the knife turned around with that big heavy seal bat to meet their edge, then you can flick out. It's all right there.

Bryan Cannata [00:44:17]:
And then when you stick it into something, like you said, you can use all of your your large muscles to successfully pull this knife out and leave a giant gaping wound. And fascinatingly, there are documented photos of Confederate guard buoys where the blade would be turned backwards to our Oh. So you have the knuckle bow along the spine of the blade and the edge in, very clearly designed to, fight within that grip.

Bob DeMarco [00:45:01]:
That is wild. I I haven't seen that, but that that makes sense. You're so you have that. You're dedicated to that fighting style because, you can't turn it around, you know Right. Really effectively. I guess you'd have it against your wrist, in a you know, if you really needed that front edge for something. But in in a dynamic situation, you're not gonna want that or, or what have you. Now I've heard that, that edge in style called the Randall fighting method when talking about Randall made knives during World War 2, and, you know, they always have the sharpened swedge.

Bob DeMarco [00:45:39]:
And so I've I've heard it, but I've never seen it anywhere other than YouTubers talking about it, with with spurious, backgrounds, as to whether that was really taught, that Randall fighting method, during World War 2 to soldiers and marines.

Bryan Cannata [00:45:56]:
That I do not know. There are much more knowledgeable people than I on the World War 2 knife methods. I know enough, but not enough to give you, oh, colonel so and so taught at such and such camp. This is gonna there there are plenty of people out there that are way more academic about it than I am.

Bob DeMarco [00:46:20]:
So I wanna ask you, some philosophical questions about escalation of force and and those things, but before we get there, I I really wanna see that gununting, if you don't mind, that Jim Benzinger gununting. Oh, yeah. Yikes. That is gorgeous. So is this a new acquisition for you, or or am I just seeing it? Yeah.

Bryan Cannata [00:46:42]:
It's a couple years old.

Bob DeMarco [00:46:45]:
That is so beautiful.

Bryan Cannata [00:46:47]:
Oh, this thing's amazing. I have a traditional, Filipino guanang from the whole blades. I love it. You know? It's forged out of a leaf spring that from who knows what. It's got a beautiful caribou handle on it. You know? A little brass knuckle guard. I take it out and show people, but here's a traditional one. Here's a modern one that, you know, I would be happy to take to war and and have no fear of it ever breaking.

Bryan Cannata [00:47:22]:
And, yeah, if you've seen some of the cutting videos I've done with this, it just goes through stuff like it's not even there. And it's I cannot tell you how much Jim really knows his business when it comes to making weapons. I have said for years that Jim is the next Bill Bagwell. He just hasn't gotten the reputation yet. And it's getting harder and harder to place orders with him nowadays because he is just going very his his books were just getting filled, and and delivery dates keep getting pushed further and further out. And, eventually, he's gonna get to that, yeah. Put your order in now. I'll contact you in 3 years when it comes up.

Bryan Cannata [00:48:11]:
And he just keeps getting better and better and better. And and one of the things I love about him personally is he makes real weapons. He doesn't make things that are wall hangars or I could give that to a a Filipino marine and he'd go, so throw the issue on a blank. I mean, it's just Yeah. No good. Amazingly good. You know, I joked at my zombie apocalypse or So, you wanna talk about Yeah.

Bob DeMarco [00:48:49]:
I wanna talk about escalation of force. I I wanna talk about, you know, the the realities of using a knife in self defense. It almost seems to me, and this is based on, I don't know, just maybe stuff I've read, but it seems like people are almost more accepting of guns than they are of knives, because knives are so personal and they require a certain amount of brutality. Guns kind of give you a standoff range that makes it a little more acceptable. So what's your philosophy of of how you escalate the force needed to defend yourself?

Bryan Cannata [00:49:28]:
Alright. One of the things I tell all my students is that if you find yourself in a situation where using a knife is your only option, understand that using that knife is the exact same thing in the eyes of the law as using a gun. It's a tool for deadly force. You know? It's not, I'm gonna shoot him in the leg and hope he lives. I'm not gonna minimize my damage by stabbing him in the leg. There are plenty of stories, running around the, FMA community about somebody going, oh, I'm just gonna pop him in a leg and teach him a lesson, and it nicks the other guy's femoral artery, and he's dead in a few minutes. So I really drill that into my students. This, the knife is the last resort.

Bryan Cannata [00:50:22]:
It is to be used in the same situation that you would be using your firearm. And I also tell them I'm not a lawyer. I tell them to skip a seminar sometime and go spend, you know, a $100 with a self defense lawyer for an hour and learn about the laws and escalation of force in your jurisdiction, in the jurisdictions that you typically travel. Like, I live on the border between Georgia and South Carolina, so I kinda have to know both. You know, what's acceptable here, what's acceptable there? Now, general rule of thumb is, you know, use the amount of force necessary to stop the threat. And that doesn't mean to kill the other person. It means use the appropriate amount of force for the given situation.

Bob DeMarco [00:51:17]:
Yeah. I think, I think that can be confusing if someone isn't, putting the the brainpower behind what they're learning, because you can learn an awful lot of, very dangerous stuff, very dangerous techniques, and youth first opportunity you have to bust them out and use them, you could find yourself doing something very, very regrettable. No one I mean, I I don't wanna say no one, but most people don't want to hurt someone that badly.

Bryan Cannata [00:51:46]:
Right.

Bob DeMarco [00:51:47]:
And, it all it takes is, you know, a punch, someone could fall down, hit their head. So, I mean, you start bringing weapons into it, and it changes it changes everything.

Bryan Cannata [00:51:59]:
And, like in both Medusa and Piper, we are, I should clarify, Western Piper, which is a separate faction of the, schools out of South Africa. We really emphasize alternative weapons. We'll teach the art, the style, the techniques, whatever you wanna call it, through the blade because that's where they become from, that's where they come from. But, Medusa has no levels. It's just it is what it is. We teach you the thing and say, here, you can do this with a cell phone. You can do this with a flashlight. You can do this with a Sharpie.

Bryan Cannata [00:52:38]:
In fact, that's probably what you should be going to first and not thinking about it immediately as an ace weapon. In level 2 and Western piper methods, we immediately start the students translating the mechanics we taught them in level 1 into using things like flashlights, screwdrivers, Sharpies, stavelers, you know, something you can pick up and put in your hand. We're really big on the flashlight for a number of reasons. Number 1, you can carry a flashlight anywhere. Number 2, they make great impact tools if you buy a decent one. If you buy a good one, they're bright enough that it might stop the entire encounter altogether. And, the way Piper focuses on striking and power development immediately translates over into something like a Flash. Well, you

Bob DeMarco [00:53:38]:
know, we we haven't defined Piper. Tell us a little bit about it. You mentioned South Africa.

Bryan Cannata [00:53:43]:
Okay. So, there are gangs in South Africa. They are called the number gangs, and I'm not really gonna get into that because a lot of it's really discussed. But if you wanna find out about it, you can absolutely hit up Wikipedia. There's a pretty decent article there on the evolution of the numbers gangs. But they are the big gangs in South Africa and they run many other gangs. So, bear that in mind, hyper developed out of traditional Nguni stick and spear fighting. That's, the, the word Nguni comes as the the all the tribes in South Africa.

Bryan Cannata [00:54:32]:
The one everybody knows most commonly is Dzuzu. We've all seen the movie, now with the round shield and all of that. So that has been a that type of combat has become well, it's it's the African tradition of that way of fighting, but it's also something, that has become, almost wanna say, a sport or a tribal ritual, and you'll often see it done at weddings and, like, the groom will challenge all the groomsmen to show his virility, that kind of thing. But because of that, that style of movement, people learn from childhood. And they learn this idea of weapon back, which is very different than most of, what most Eastern and Western martial arts for that matter, weapon back and the live hand, although in Piper we call it the shield hand, forward. And it creates a very easily identifiable way of moving. It also brought in boxing because, you know, nobody punches like a western boxer. You know, simple fact.

Bryan Cannata [00:55:59]:
And, surprisingly, some Dutch Indonesian salat kinda crept in there as well. But the criminals kind of amalgamated all of these things, and through trial by fire, they developed, let's call it, a style. And I like to differentiate between style and system. System is when somebody takes a style and codifies it and creates a curriculum to transfer that to you. Style is what's done indigenously, naturally within the area. Not necessarily going to school to study something, but again, it's that older brother, father, cousin, whatever, showing you tricks that work. And and over time, that amalgamates into, you know, a a regional style. There's a I think it's Demicks.

Bryan Cannata [00:57:01]:
I know somebody was talking about Deming. But you combine that whole thing with the fact that South Africa is very, very poor and they're not going out there buying very, very expensive knives. My Spyderco knife could probably, my, you know, Spyderco Endur could probably pay for somebody's house, you know, when you look at things in proportion. But the okapi is the knife of choice of the South African criminals. Cold Steel makes the kudu, which we use here in the States because it's built much, much better, and they're cheap enough that we can turn them into trainers relatively easily. Piper has some very unique aspects about it, probably about 10, 15 years ago. A man named Nigel February started to collect all these various techniques from the criminals and, information passed to him via relatives and observation and another man, Boy Du Yong, got involved in it. And the original intent of the hyper system was to, they called it the criminal simulator, so that you could take your martial art that you were studying and figure out how to use it against somebody that was doing these street techniques.

Bryan Cannata [00:58:48]:
Well, it kinda grew from there and grew on. And eventually, Nigel and Lloyd parted ways. Lloyd moved to Europe, to Africa, and he began teaching Piper there. And eventually, he started coming over to the states and teaching people in the states and doing some virtual lessons and all of that once he went back to Poland. And he had a group of people here, Dean Franco, who's the head of Western Piper Methods. They were trying to create a syllabus that taught these principles of Piper to a culture that didn't understand the movement, and that's that that's really a big deal. Piper uses a lot of falling and and and I don't really want to use the word falling, I hesitate. Lloyd described it best one day as weaponizing the stumble.

Bryan Cannata [00:59:59]:
And it's it's really about barring your opponent's balance. It's about creating this incredible chaos around your opponent, creating executive overload, and you just had no idea what to do because it's so rapid, and it's coming from so many different angles. And, you know, again, this is originally, basically, an ambush system or a dueling system inside the prisons for, you know, dealing with gang business and all. But, there's a lot of really good lessons you can learn from it. And especially, especially if you're a Filipino martial artist, because the focus on rotation is, body rotation, power generation, is, as much as I hate to say it, better defined than it is in most Filipino martial arts. And I will say most because, let's face it, there are, you know, a 1000 guys out there that are amazing, but nobody will ever know their name. Alright? The other thing it does is outside of perhaps Balintawak, I've never seen a Filipino martial art that actually really used the live hand in sparring. 99% of the time, we'll see a little bit of batting.

Bryan Cannata [01:01:35]:
You know? Like, they're just holding him back here. Well, there no. Whereas Piper very actively uses it. And part of that comes all the way back to the shield work and using a shield to intercept your opponent, to blind your opponent, to strike your opponent. And, they just translated that without the shield.

Bob DeMarco [01:02:01]:
Well, Brian, we're, we're coming up to the end here, but I wanna ask before I let you go, and we're gonna continue this conversation, for our patrons. If you wanna know more about Piper and these incredibly interesting, it's amazing how, you know, fluid all of this is from culture to culture. We'll be talking about this in an interview extra coming up. But before I let you go, if someone's listening, they don't have, any training, but, you've piqued an interest, what's the best way for someone to start just in any sort of martial art, whether it's bladed or non bladed? How do you suggest they go about that?

Bryan Cannata [01:02:42]:
Honestly, if you're just starting out and and, you you know, well, bladed martial arts are really cool. Find a local BJJ school. Find a local judo school, often near the same place. Do one of those. Get your start there. Is, you know, edged weapons are a thing, but it's only a very small part of the entire being able to defend yourself. And when it comes to being able to defend yourself, a good BJJ school or a good judo school, you know, you can either choke somebody out or hit them on the planet. They are both Yeah.

Bryan Cannata [01:03:22]:
No. They they they are both very, very useful skills and a wonderful place to start. And if you've got kids, I highly recommend BJJ over judo simply because it is much more controlled in the beginning and you are less likely for your child to be injured, but they will still develop amazing skills that will help them if they no matter what martial art they choose to continue with.

Bob DeMarco [01:03:49]:
Awesome. Bryan Cannata, thank you so much. I feel like we could talk for hours. Thank you so much for joining me on the Knife Junkie podcast, sir. It's been a pleasure.

Bryan Cannata [01:03:59]:
I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Advertisement Announcer [01:04:02]:
The Shockwave tactical torch is your ultimate self defense companion, featuring a powerful LED bulb that lasts 100000 hours, a super sharp crenulated bezel, and a built in stun gun delivering 4,500,000 volts. Don't settle for ordinary. Choose the shockwave tactical torch. The knifejunkie.com/shockwave.

Bob DeMarco [01:04:23]:
There he goes, ladies and gentlemen. Bryan Cannata of Calis Americano. That is his, handle on YouTube. On Instagram, I believe he's Southern Calis, but, we'll have that all in the liner notes below. We are gonna continue this conversation, so, check out Patreon. You can hear all the very interesting, after interview interviews. They're always a lot of fun, so, be sure to do that. For Jim working his magic behind the switcher, I'm Bob DeMarco saying until next time, don't take dull for an answer.

Announcer [01:04:55]:
Thanks for listening to the Knife Junkie podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review at review the podcast.com. For show notes for today's episode, additional resources, and to listen to past episodes, visit our website, the knifejunkie.com. You can also watch our latest videos on YouTube at the knifejunkie.com/youtube. Check out some great knife photos on the knifejunkie.com/instagram, and join our Facebook group at the knifejunkie.com/facebook. Facebook. And if you have a question or comment, email them to bob@theknifejunkie.com, or call our 247 listener line at 724-466-4487. And you may hear your comment or question answered on an upcoming episode of the Knife Junkie podcast.