An Interview with Michael Bane
Interview by Gila Hayes
Perhaps the latest symptom of the deterioration of law and order, is the evolution of what a Los Angeles County deputy chief termed “Flash Robs.” Multiple thieves coordinate to loot stores in a matter of minutes before police can arrive. Two common variations are multiple looter smash-and-grab robberies of smaller stores like 24/7 convenience markets or the neighborhood Walgreens or CVS Pharmacy, often carried out by teens or even homeless recruited shortly before the attack or, as occurred several months ago in the Topanga Mall flash mob robbery in CA, well-organized mob crime targeting high-end merchandise, which can profitably be resold.
In response to Network members concerned about getting caught in flash rob violence, we sought the perspective of a long-time journalist and commentator, Michael Bane. We now switch to Q&A so readers can learn from him directly. Browse to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRoAPqVo2H0&t=107s to view a lengthier video of our interview or click on the adjacent picture.
eJournal: Readers may remember you, Michael, from the Outdoor Channel’s The Best Defense or Shooting Gallery television programs to which you brought a wide range of experience – from journalism, writing magazine features, to extreme sports like cave diving, mountain climbing, competitive shooting, and probably other adventures you haven’t told us about.
These days, I absorb a lot of your programming on video and podcasts (https://www.michaelbane.tv/category/podcast/). For me, much of the value is your perspective on current events. Michael, how does today’s civil unrest differ from the protests that turned violent while you were a young journalist?
Bane: There are a lot of similarities as well as differences. Over the years, I have found civil unrest riots to be absolutely fascinating. If I could put just one description on modern civil unrest, I’d say it is damn well organized. Social media serves, for lack of a better word, as an organizing engine. The demonstrations, the protests, the unrest, the riots are controlled at a level that wasn’t done back in the early 60s-70s. Riots during those periods tended to be more anarchic because there was much less command and control. Social media gives the ability to have a higher level of command and control.
eJournal: The common misapprehension about “flash mobs” is that they’re spontaneous. I listened with great interest to your Michael Bane TV podcast recently on the topic. I have to ask, what motivates flash mobs to hit retail stores? Is it merely property theft – resource predation? Is it tribal violence? “Let’s sack and burn the opposing tribe and obliterate them completely.” Or what else is it? How does that fit in to the violence we train to defend against?
Bane: I think it’s all the things that you just said, and in a sense it’s also a new animal because it is an attack coordinated through social media. Initially, flash mobs were a ritual tribe members all did together. Essentially, we’re in the process of retribalizing the United States. It always ends up badly, nonetheless that’s the track we’re on now.
When the concept of flash mobs started, it was fun. Normal people go, “That’s sick. Destroying other people’s property, shoving people to the ground, beating people up: that’s sick.” You want to find out if violence is fun? Talk to any three-year-old when they’re tearing up every toy they have.
I saw that in major riots in Washington, D.C., including the uber-violent Weatherman above ground action assault on the South Vietnamese embassy, the Overtown riots in Miami, riots in LA and Memphis. I graduated from college the year Dr. King was killed and friends and I broke curfew and went into the riot zone of one of the most hellish urban riots in the United States. I consistently saw in the Washington riots and the Overtown riots that they’re fun.
If the entire police department was there with sticks and beat the people involved in a flash mob robbery into the ground when they come running out, it might not be as much fun. In one of the Washington riots, I was beaten to the ground by a cop on horseback with a long stick, and I can assure you, it isn’t fun.
Flash mobs became organized crime when they discovered they could make a couple of bucks off it. MS 13, Latin Kings, pick a gang, any gang, said, “Hey, when you run out of that store if you grab a handful of small electronic games, we will buy them from you for X dollars and you can do wherever you want with that money.” You’re in, then you’re out, no one person has responsibility. Defunding of the police, the demoralization of the police, the absence of qualified immunity all creates a situation where flash mobs evolved into a very sophisticated armed robbery model. The police aren’t coming, and I don’t blame them.
eJournal: The government used to arrest, prosecute, and jail gangsters for shaking down businesses.
Bane: We are seeing civil unrest that is government-sanctioned violence at a level we have never seen before in the United States. I’ve seen it in Central and South America. I was in a tropical rainstorm in a South American country. It was pouring down rain and a military unit was walking down the sidewalk. A friend said, “Step off the sidewalk.”
I said, “I don’t want to, man. It’s running like a river down there. If I step off the sidewalk, I’m going to be soaked.”
He goes, “You got one of two choices. Step off the sidewalk or die. The military guys will shove you down and kill you.”
I said, “But...” And he goes, “But what? Welcome to our world.” The sanction delivered by the military, which was involved in smuggling drugs, was beyond the civilian authorities or was sanctioned by the civilian authorities.
With the rise of Antifa, we see what are essentially shock troops. I’ve talked with trainers like John Murphy and Ed Monk about this. Watch video of the first Antifa riots. They were very anarchistic, very much like you might see in 1969, 1970. More recently, I was watching one with my girlfriend and I said, “Watch that guy way over on the right-hand corner of the screen.” She goes, “The guy just standing there with the headset on?” I said, “Yeah, that’s command and control.” That was an organized riot. He was moving troops around a prepared battlespace.
That is more sophisticated than we saw in the early days. I got to spend some time with Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman, who were famous figures back then. They wanted that kind of command and control of big demonstrations, because they knew that a big demonstration, like a march on Washington, was going to turn into a riot. The problem in riots is that you light the fuse and run, because it’s going to go off.
Back then, you didn’t have much control over the guys on the frontlines who were going to light it up. You need control or at least communications with those guys. You need communications to be able to bring in med-evac; you need communications to move troops from one area to the other. Unfortunately for us, they have all that now and it does work.
Another thing Ed Monk has talked about is that in this environment, if you have to defend yourself against a politically-sanctioned violent actor, he isn’t going to jail. You are. It’s terrifying.
eJournal: It certainly influences our decisions and makes recognizing and avoiding mob activity a high priority. If I miss the warning signs, I need to know how to get out with minimum damage to myself and my loved ones.
Bane: I remember a bizarre incident in the middle of a riot in Washington D.C. Police are running, sirens are going off, there’s tear gas everywhere and people are screaming. A woman wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase is walking across one of the bridges into D.C. I’ve got a gas mask dangling and she looks at me and asks, “Is something going on?”
Number one: we need to have a level of awareness that begins by understanding what’s going on in our community. We have to be aware of the news. Is there going to be a demonstration? I’m here to tell you, if there is a demonstration, it is likely to become a riot. If it doesn’t, that’s really a surprise because the people behind it want a riot. They’re looking for news coverage, and a bunch of guys walking around with a sign that says, “Peace, love and happiness” doesn’t get news coverage.
We all look at The Weather Channel and stay home if there’s going to be a hurricane. It almost has to be the same. The local newspaper says there’s going to be a big demonstration at the state house. My office building is next door to the state house. I’m going to call in sick. Number one, I’m not going to be there.
Second, if you are there, once you realize what’s going on, you need to get out while you can. As a demonstration or a riot intensifies, a lot of people tend to get pushed together. Your immediate thought should be to get to the outskirts; get to the sides. On the side you have a chance. If you’re in the middle, you’re going to be pushed further toward the middle. I’ve heard people say, “Well, you just push your way back out.” [grinning] Yeah, give that a try! If you’re surrounded by a couple of thousand people and they’re going east; you are going east!
If you try to push your way out, you now become the “other;” you become the enemy because you’re trying to get out. I remember being in one situation where somebody said, “Are you with us?” I said, “Absolutely, smash the state.” What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything you want to not end up beaten or trampled.
Trampling is the big fear. I want to get to the outside. I want to get against buildings because buildings have doors. You need to work to the sides as quickly as you can, then use that environment. There might be an alleyway; there might be a doorway. Do anything you can do to get into it. Even if it’s just a niche, you can push yourself in the niche and wait for the larger flow of the riot to move past you. You want the big crowds to move on past you.
I’ve been in a niche just between buildings and somebody said, “What’s the matter? Are you afraid?” I’m like, “No, just catching my breath, brother.” I was really waiting for them to go by so I could get out of there.
eJournal: Is getting to the outside applicable to the smaller, perhaps more volatile, flash robbery situation?
Bane: Absolutely and those scare me more than anything else. In a larger demonstration, there’s command and control. You may not think it’s there, but it is. They’re not necessarily wanting to give you an instructional beat down. They’re there to get media.
The level of violence at a flash mob or smash and grab robbery is super high. There is less control; it’s mostly, “Go,” “Stop,” “Run.” If you’re in the jewelers or the Walgreens over-the-counter drug section and suddenly people are flooding in all around you and stuffing bags, your move is to get out and you can never get out through the middle.
Ideally, you checked where the doors are when you walked in. Is there an exit, a way out the back? Is there a big sign that says, “No admittance?” That’s great because it’s going to lead to a door. Go there. In his studies, the late Dr. William Aprill found that 75%-plus obeyed signs that said, “Employees Only,” “No Admittance,” “Alarm Will Sound.” You don’t care if the alarm sounds; you want the alarm to sound! Know where exits are.
You need to be aware of what’s happening outside of the venue. If you’re in a jewelry store and look out the window and see a lot of people coming from different directions, homing in on you, leave! You can always come back. You need to err on the side of caution. If I see a bunch of people angling, moving in this direction, I don’t need to be here. I need to be out. I need to be gone.
If I have people under my care, children or spousal units, they have to understand that when I say, “It’s time to go,” it’s time to go. Early on, I had this talk with my sweetie (we’ve been together for 30 years), “Things may happen in our life, when I’m going to say, ‘We have to do X right now.’ If I say that, it’s only because I am aware of a situation that’s potentially developing around us that I want us out of. I will never embarrass or trick you.” That’s a hard talk to have.
You have to be able to move very quickly without thought of, “Boy, I’m going to be embarrassed in the morning.” That’s cool, you get to be embarrassed and alive.
eJournal: Yes, giving ourselves permission and is related to something you talked about in a recent podcast: mental rehearsals. Now, this gets interesting because we’re mentally rehearsing scenarios for things that some have called unimaginable. We’re trying to imagine the unimaginable!
Bane: Absolutely right. William Aprill said that we have to make spaces in our heads for things that can happen, because unless we make a space in our head for it, we can’t plan, we can’t do the modeling that’s necessary.
eJournal: What if our personal biases make us think we know more than we actually know? How do we build realistic mental rehearsals, what I've heard you call “modeling,” so in a chaotic situation we have directions, “Leave, stage right” and we do it.
Bane: Simplicity is important. I learned in high-risk sports like cave diving, mountain climbing, jumping off things and a plethora of “stupid,” that you have to be 100% right, 100% of the time. That’s a phrase that I stole from my primary cave diving instructor, John Orlowski. He said, you have to understand what keeps you alive and then you have to practice until it is “100% right, 100% of the time.”
To do that, you can’t have 50 rules. That’s the genius of Colonel Cooper’s gun safety rules. It’s simple, it’s straightforward. There are four. The Four Safety Rules work. In cave diving, how many rules are there? There are three. You always have a line back to the surface; everything’s redundant like multiple lights; and dive one third in, one third out, one third for when everything goes south, which it will sooner or later.
When we talk about flash mobs, we can’t have a complex plan! I can’t say, “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to tuck and roll and then I’m going to withdraw my AR-15 from the backpack at the same time I’m drawing my Randall attack knife which I’m going to keep in my teeth.” None of that stuff is going to work! What’s going to work is: “Out! I need to get out. Oh, when I stepped into the room, I saw exits on the left and right. Exit on the right is closer, bye.” I want to make every move that I make simple. Have you ever seen the video that came out of the Kenyan mall terrorist attacks? If you study it, the people who survived did simple things.
All violence is a chaos system. A chaos system is defined as so many factors acting on the system that it is not predictable. You don’t know the factors and you don’t know how they’re acting on the system. They are changing as the timeline runs.
We’ve all been in martial arts, right? There’s always that time after being in the dojo when someone says, “Now, if a guy comes into the bar and starts insulting you, are you going to do a round kick? Are you going to do a knee, a snap kick, punch him in the face?”
I say, “I’m going to leave.”
“Well, why would you leave?”
“I’m going to leave because I don’t want to get in a fight.” I’m not looking to get in a fight because in this chaos system, it’s conceivable that is Chuck Norris. Bizarrely, in one of my other lives, I have sparred with Chuck Norris and Jorge Gracie. It’s like being struck by lightning. You think you’re good right up until the point that you’re lying on the ground going, “Wow, that hurts a lot.”
eJournal: In your bar scenario, you spelled out why you would leave, but more importantly, you acknowledged the possibility that you don’t understand everything that is happening.
Bane: Absolutely. I knew that growing up. I grew up in the South, in Memphis. It was different times. A lot of my relatives were casual about their relationship with the law. They might stand with the sheriff or local marshal when he needed help, but on the other hand, they might also run whiskey, which was the family business. My grandfather and my uncles told me, “The problem is you don’t know who the other guy is, and he has a say.” That’s a cliché we all use now: “The other guy has a say.” Well, he also might have a knife or a shotgun or ten friends. You don’t know; you can’t know, so everything that you do has to be predicated on a worst-case scenario.
The direction the training community is pushing in right now bothers me. I understand that you may need hand to hand skills and guns, but after an afternoon or evening in the dojo fighting and you’re with all your buddies in a bar, fighting is the solution all those guys have if a person comes up and insults you. Their solution is to fight because that’s what we’ve been training to do. We have been training to fight and training to shoot.
What’s that great line? When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In your head, you program those responses. You have to be careful that your training doesn’t program you to do something that puts you in the soup.
A lot of my early thinking was shaped by Andrew Branca’s very first book. At each stage in a decision tree, I understand that I made a decision that led me to a branch that maybe I don’t want to be on. On The Best Defense, Marty Hayes and I walked through the entire George Zimmerman event. What could he have done? What other decision would have yielded the results he wanted, which was to have the police find some sketchy guy – without ending on his back having to shoot some dude? My decision tree always, always has the opportunity to exit.
In new-product design, Hewlett Packard used something called “phases” and “gates.” In a project, you work on phase one, and then there’s a gate to phase two. Once you step in the gate, it shuts, and you cannot think about phase one. They wouldn’t let you. That’s a model that I used working with John Shaw with whom I co-wrote the very first book on practical shooting, You Can’t Miss.
I applied it to self-defense situations. When I step through a gate, I am no longer rethinking what caused me to step through because that slows me down. Let’s say I’ve tried escape; I’ve tried evasion; I’ve tried to do this or that but now I have to step through a gate and give some kind of response. I’ve gone from strategic to tactical. I don’t want to think, “Oh, man, should I have turned left back there? Should I have screamed?” No, once I step through that gate, I have to wipe all other thoughts out and only work the problem in front of me.
Is this a shooting situation? If it is, I’ve stepped through another gate. I’m in another phase. A guy’s moving toward me; he clearly has his hand on something in his pocket. Is he an aggressor? I have now moved into a different situation and as I step through that gate, my sole concern is dealing with the tactical situation. Am I going to shoot the guy walking toward me? I know I’m going to yell. There’s a whole series of things that we train to do that work.
John Shaw had a great analogy. Everybody thinks we have unlimited attention spans and can multitask, but we can’t! What we have is one dollar worth of concentration, one hundred pennies of concentration. Your only choice is where you put the pennies. In the course of a day, I’ll find myself with five pennies on my desk wondering why that microphone didn’t recharge and I got three pennies wondering how much coffee is left.
As you move through gates into more and more dangerous situations, all your attention needs to move in that direction. Shoot, no shoot is a hundred pennies, period. It has to be, because the rest of your life, your livelihood, your family all hang on your ability to concentrate one hundred pennies worth.
If we’re in the Walgreens when it gets sacked, our hundred pennies have to be on what to do. Well, best case, escape. Escape is always the best case.
Second-best case? Can I talk my way out of it? Here’s another thing that worries me about training. I was recently reading about verbal de-escalation. I’ve taught verbal de-escalation; you have, too. Well, in the world we’re in right now, does verbal de-escalation work?
If you were mugged in Mexico City would verbal de-escalation work? I think it would not because it’s not your culture; the words have different connotations. The world we’re in right now has a different culture.
If you try to talk down or de-escalate a multiple aggressor situation, do you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to be trying to de-escalate with Joe Bob, who appears to be the warlord, and there’s going to be people on either side of him trying to ramp it up, trying to escalate, saying, “Hit him, hit him, shoot him, hit him, hit him, hit him!”
In this new world, it’s important to understand the limitations of things that we were taught. I’ve verbally deescalated against an aggressor and made it work. I made him laugh and as soon as he laughed, I got to leave because essentially, I had altered the situation. Another thing I’ve used that has been used by a lot of others is the power of apology in bad situations. I’ve said, I am so sorry. I’m just sorry.
If you can do that, do it, but at the same time be aware that when you have a situation like a flash robbery, once they’re flooding in, they’re targeted, and they are going to complete their action. You are not going to be able to turn them from it. I believe verbal de-escalation is closed to you in that situation and every minute you spend trying to do that is time wasted. It’s gone. You haven’t used that time to its best use, which is getting out, being invisible, making sure you don’t somehow stumble into the guy with the sledgehammer.
eJournal: Marc MacYoung wrote a great book about multiple attackers . We should be terrified by what he taught us because there’s not too many wins in fighting multiple aggressors for me.
Bane: There aren’t. People should read Marc McYoung’s stuff. It’s basic reading for what it is we do. One of the changes in the self-defense landscape is the rise of multiple aggressors. If you go back 30-40 years when I took my first self-defense classes, the single aggressor was the overwhelming threat. I remember the very first time I took LFI I back when Massad Ayoob and I were both young. I remember at that point, about 70 percent of attacks were between people who knew each other either intimately or tangentially. Right now, the standard is multiple aggressors. If all you have in your head is how to deal with a single aggressor, well, best of luck!
Right now, I think erring on the side of caution is thinking there are multiple aggressors, I just don’t see the others yet. My movements have to get me clear of multiple aggressors because I know from Marc MacYoung’s writing and my time in the martial arts, against multiple aggressors, you can win only if the game was loaded where one would aggress, then pause and let another lead the aggression and then another. I’ve seen street fights and that doesn’t happen in the real world.
eJournal: Mental flexibility may be the most powerful thing I see you demonstrating. It’s easy to get stuck back in our salad days and say, “I know this because this is what worked for me, and I was great back then.” Well, you know what? As you’ve said over and over this morning, the landscape is entirely different now.
Can you recommend ways to develop and keep mental flexibility and adaptability, that reality-focused awareness of what may come our way?
Bane: We have to be more humble. When I was climbing big mountains, I trained to climb Mount McKinley, which is a dangerous mountain. We saw people die on its slopes. It is scary. Steve Ilg, who was my personal trainer at the time and who worked with me for years, said, “You ain’t smarter than Mother Nature. No matter what I teach you, Mother Nature can find stuff you’ve never seen before.”
You need to be aware that Mother Nature can throw something that you don’t have the index card for at you. That means that you have to have, as he said, Plan A, B, C, D, ZZ, ZZZ. When you do mental modeling, you always have to know that a chaotic situation can throw things at you that you would never have imagined.
If you train for probable, there are three circles. What’s likely to happen to you is in the middle, and that’s your primary training. Then there’s stuff that could happen, and that’s the second circle. And then there’s another circle, and that circle includes ninjas dropping from airplanes. You have to say, okay, that’s not likely to happen, but it could, and maybe I need to think about that. Maybe somewhere in that outer circle I need to spend more time working around a vehicle or stuff like that.
As Dr. Aprill hammered, you have to have an open mind. When something strange does happen you think, “Okay, alright, do this step by step. How do I get out of this? What do I do here?” That is a humbling experience.
You come out of the dojo with a black belt, or you have a USPSA Grand Master or an IDPA Distinguished Master rank and you think, “Damn, I’m a bad dog.” Well, no, there are bad dogs out there that are really frightening. I spent some time with the FBI profiler on which Joe Mantegna modeled his character in Criminal Minds. I finally told him, “Brother, I am so glad that what’s in your head isn’t in my head.” Talk to people like that and you realize there’s a whole level of scary stuff out there that is beyond what you’ve ever thought about.
You need to be humble and the same time, you have to have your basics down. You have to know under exactly what conditions you can hit the target: what distances, how fast can you fire a second shot that’s going to hit the target. You have to know that on a granular level. You don’t need to find out in a worst-case scenario that you can’t hit a head shot at ten yards. That is a bad time to find that out.
I come back to a story I love to tell. I was eating at a McDonald’s with two SAS troopers and a guy who went on to Homeland Security and did other spooky, secret squirrel things. USPSA had just started; we’d just started “combat shooting,” and I was really new. The SAS guy says, “Quick: The balloon’s gone up. Here you are, who do you kill first?” I’m like, “Excuse me?” The other trooper picked it right up and gestures around the room, “One, two, three, four. Let’s talk about why we’re talking about this. We talk about it because you need to start thinking, well, what happens if a balloon goes up? What if there are a lot of bad people? What if this is the McDonald’s from hell?” At the end, the guy said, “You see why we’re doing this?” and I said, “I do,” and he goes, “After a while it won’t even seem weird to you.” The modeling function needs to run constantly, constantly.
eJournal: You go into the Walgreens and who do you see around you?
Bane: Who do you see around you? Does anybody look scary to you? Want to see a change in the landscape? Look at the number of aggressors who are in the 11-to-14-year-old age group. Ask a carjacker, why are you stealing this car? A normal business carjacker will say, “Because I got a contract, it’s going to be disassembled and shipped out to Matamoros tomorrow afternoon,” but the young ones might say, “It looked cool. I’d like to drive this car. It’ll be fun.”
To me, the scary one was the three women who hijacked an Uber driver. Eventually, it ended up in a car crash where the Uber driver was killed. This is a guy working a side job for extra money for his family. One of the aggressors was 17 or 18. She gets out of the car, and she goes, “Damn, I lost my phone.” The driver’s dead: he’s lying there, his head cracked open like an egg and she’s saying, “Yeah, but damn, I lost my phone.” That to me was very scary.
I believe that we have to change our lives somewhat in the world we’re in now. When was the last time you went to the mall?
eJournal: Five years ago? You?
Bane: Oh, about 2013. I don’t eat in food courts. Those things are no longer a part of my life. I don’t tend to go to things with large crowds of people, things that I might have found super appealing when I was younger. I used to live in New York City and when I was there, I loved it. But I wouldn’t do it again. When you live in a big city like New York, you have to learn the city and learn what you can get away with. I know exactly what I can get away with in 1978. Sadly, it is no longer 1978.
eJournal: We talk a lot about awareness, but I think there’s also something that you’ve hinted at here, and that’s acknowledgment. It’s acceptance. It’s accepting the level of threat we’re actually seeing and modifying what I do to accommodate it.
Bane: I so believe in reality. I really believe in reality. I think that most people don’t. I’ve discovered that most people talk about wanting to live in the present as if it’s a goal: “I want to live in the present,” but living in the present demands that I acknowledge that the universe can be a scary place. I have to acknowledge that I can’t walk around my head in the phone all the time. Sooner or later, something from reality is going to ding me. I do want to protect myself; a lot of people don’t. It’s easy to find yourself building a model in your head and then running the model as opposed to looking out your door and asking, “What’s going on out there? Wow, that doesn’t look like what’s in my head.”
eJournal: We’re blinded by our biases. The scariest thing is trying to figure out what’s real.
Bane: I was lucky enough to work with a guy named Joel Arthur Barker. He wrote a book called The Business of Paradigms. That book shook American business. It said at any given time we have blinders that shape what we see. In business, if you can’t get beyond the blinders, you are limited to what you can do in your own business. He gave people a test that showed you cards, but some of the cards were the wrong color. The ace of spades would be red and things like that. Your job was to identify and describe them exactly as they were. I scored a hundred percent on that test, and he asked, “You saw the red spades?”
“Absolutely.”
“You saw the black hearts?”
I said, “Absolutely, because in my world view, I believe in reality. I will accept that most spades are black, however that spade wasn’t black.” I replicated his test with a scuba class. I dropped a Coca-Cola can down about 75 feet in the water. What color is a Coca-Cola can? 80 percent of that class said red, but no, red light doesn’t penetrate that deep. There is no red there. You have got to understand the Coke can’s not red; spades can be red, maybe yellow. You have got to see that and be able to get past what Joel Arthur Barker called paradigm paralysis.
It was great working directly with the guy. Somehow, in my life I’ve bumped into interesting people.
eJournal: Then you brought it out what you learned from that fellow and many others to the rest of us. I’m never going to meet Joel, but you’ve exposed me to his thinking. You’ve carried forward some of William Aprill’s principles, although he’s now gone. How touching is that?
Bane: The opinions of Marty Hayes, Ken Campbell, Gunsite, Lou Gosnell, the late Ed Head, my late mentor Walt Rausch are important to me because those guys have been there, done that. Their opinions were based, not in what they read or saw, but their opinions were developed over years in the real world. We should have more of that.
eJournal: You’ve got a lot to teach us. Where can we keep up with the material you’re developing?
Bane: Everything is at Michaelbane.tv but you can find the podcast I’ve been doing for twenty years at https://www.michaelbane.tv/category/podcast/ . Also, I do a weekly show, Triggered. My joke is I have a tiny following on the Internet, but the difference is I actually know what I’m talking about. Let me rephrase that: I try not to talk about things that I don’t directly know.
eJournal: That’s refreshing. Thank you for so freely sharing your knowledge and experience. It has been great talking with you today.
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Take advantage of Michael Bane’s extensive online programming at the links above, and don’t miss his excellent books Trail Safe and Over the Edge which are available on Amazon or through used booksellers.