When Instinct Meets Intuition

Alright Greg, we're recording, so we are going to go ahead and jump into things today. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Just a reminder for those folks who haven't heard before, we do have the Patreon site that you can check out even more, and we have subscriber-only episodes.

But today we are talking about instincts and intuition. Sort of, there's a difference between those and how they affect us when it comes to decision-making, and it comes to perception, and it comes to a whole bunch of other things. But it's kind of spurred by a couple different conversations that we've had before in the past, or different social media posts, where people are trying to take some sort of understanding of either instincts or intuition, or something about that's unique to the human condition, and maybe using it incorrectly. Not really their intent sometimes, but it turns into one of those, what was it from Anchorman where he's, "60% of the time it works every time" kind of stats where people look at stuff.

I'm going to throw to you in a second, Greg Williams, but I do want to define intuition versus instinct because we see these things – excuse me – we see these terms used quite a bit and interchangeably sometimes, even though they mean something different. It's important to understand this, and we're going to get to the "so what" of that in a little bit. But I just want everyone to be clear that intuition and instinct may seem like the same concept, but they're very, very different in a number of important ways.

So an instinct is something primal. It's an innate behavioral tendency shaped by evolution to promote survival and reproductive success, mostly in the present moment, so mostly like right now. Our instinctive behaviors are triggered in response to some sort of environmental stimuli, and they're the oldest psychological mechanisms controlled by the most ancient parts of our brain. So you're talking instinct is your fight or flight, your breathing, flinching, certain automatic actions, like, "Oh, that's hot!" and I drop the pan. Those are instinctual behaviors. Another good one: you take a bite of some food that's like rotten or something like that, you instinctively spit it out. Before you even really have a conscious thought of it, you're spitting that out. So that's the idea. Something that involves instincts does not require any sort of thinking. They're basically just automatic behaviors designed, I would say, promoting survival and reproductive success. That's basically about it.

But now, intuition is that feeling of, "I know something," without thinking about it. "Man, I knew something was up!" You have an intuition about something. It's a judgment or valuation, and you can't really pinpoint how you came to the judgment. It just feels right. Like, "I felt like this is what's going on." So those intuitions seem like they sort of just pop out of the blue, but it's really a result of a whole bunch of thought processes that are too quick for your conscious mind to note. And that intuition is basically a shortcut. In a sense, it helps us make quick decisions based on very minimal information, and it relies heavily on experience. It's the ability to detect patterns quickly and without having to think about it. We teach people to do that so that they become better at it, and then they can do it without thinking about it. But that's what intuition is really, when you get into high-level subject matter expertise, and they can just make a decision quickly without even really being able to articulate why they made that decision. But it's based on a whole bunch of different factors, and that's where people get that, "I kind of had this gut feeling," or "something didn't seem right," or "I noticed this about that." So that's where, "I didn't like their vibes, man," whatever it is. That's some sort of intuition.

But now we talk about that and how that can go wrong. We can get corrupt file folders and I'm relying on something, maybe something from my past that wasn't right or wasn't typical, and now I'm basing everything off of that. But I just wanted to hit those up for the definition of those two different terms so that we can talk about it, Greg. I'm sure you have other stuff to add to that before we go on.

I hope so, or I don't know why I would be here if I didn't. But yeah, so what Brian did is he defined instincts, and we're born with biologically determined innate patterns of behavior that are designed to help us survive. Those we name instincts. So the difference in my mind between instinct and intuition is that instincts are primitive. For example, we have the primitive instinct to survive, the primitive instinct to carry on a species, where primitive means something from an early stage in evolutionary development that we can point to. Now, I would say evolutionary and historical development, because there were primitive means of doing something, a tool that we adapted over time, and then we conflate certain terms. Some people say primal or primordial. That's all primitive; that all is from earliest stages. The primal, the primitive instinct of humans, for example, are to hunt and gather. Now we've evolved, right? But we never lose those factors. We might lose the vestigial tail, but we never lose the part of our spine that used to be that tail. You see what I'm saying? So the tail is gone, but we can point to that and say, "This is where our tail was." Go ahead.

You're no, and you're talking about the those changes, these changes you're talking about, are over hundreds of thousands, millions of years.

Millions, millions, really, if you're talking about a tail, right?

But no, and so I just want to note that. The reason I'm talking about it is historic development is something we always have to go back to: sociological, psychological, physiological. And then we always talk, "What's the historical perspective of this? What did this do? Why is it memorable or why isn't it memorable? Why was it forgotten?" And we've all heard of the term "survival of the fittest," and that means our survival instincts are typified by self-preservation, survival instinct. Therefore, the ability to know what to do, when to do it, in order to stay alive.

Brian and I had a brief discussion, a hallway discussion, about the "survival of the fittest." Brian rightly said, "Most people get that wrong." And Brian, you're right. When they hear the term "fittest," they think like, "Oh, the strongest will survive," or "the strong." And what it really means is the most adaptable in that environment. So yes, maybe being the actual physical biggest and strongest will help, but you can also be the smartest and most cunning and survive. So there's different ways or different mechanisms that will occur when we talk about that. But that was even what Darwin was getting at. It was about this adaptability, was really what it was. It was to change or, excuse me, adapt over time based on the conditions that you're put into, based on the other environmental things, based on whatever's happening in that area that you can adapt and continue to survive. But it's always one tied back to survival, and it's just the adaptation part of it.

But that's an important distinction. The reason why I want to just make sure we're clear, right up front, at the beginning, the reason why we're talking about that is that part, those instincts, anything primal, anything what we would call the term "hardwired" in a sense in our DNA, is something that we cannot change. It's still there. Even though society is the way it is today, we still have all of those things. Like you said, we're still wired in a sense to go out and hunt and gather and continue to propagate the species for survival. And we, in our lifetimes, will not evolve past that. Maybe, maybe a million years from now or a half a million years, things will change. But the idea is we're still that way. And so anything primal that you're getting at, anything in there will always take precedence, especially in certain situations. It's always going to be there, and it will always win. When people talk about, "It'll fight until it wins," I agree. It's kind of like the discussion between nature versus nurture, and it's like, "Well, look, yes, there's all these things that influence who you are as a person and your behavior and your decisions and all those things, but what's encoded in you, those primal instincts, are the most powerful." And now it's depending on how and why they're expressed, but what you're getting into is that's going to win, right?

Yeah, I have to, it will always. We need to know why that's important. You're right on.

Sorry.

No, no, you're spot on. So I think instincts fall to the bottom on the cutting room floor when we start thinking that intuition is powerful. That's wrong. We have to switch those things. Humans at birth have the natural instinct to survive. So medically, there's a term "failure to thrive" for kids, for kids that are too short, for kids that don't weigh enough, for kids that don't have that natural instinct to survive. But none of that has anything to do with intuition.

Intuition is a cue, it's a prompt, it's something that later in life as you experience things more, you'll start saying, "Wow, this feels like an earlier experience." Well, when I can compare things, that's not instinct, because our instinct is a hardwired decision. I'll give you an example of that. "Training changes behavior," our tagline has been forever, and we really, really understand and mean it. What do I mean? So let's flip the coin and go, "How can we tell if we're doing training wrong?" Well, I'll give you an example. You give a person an aluminum flashlight because it's a defensive impact tool. That means an aluminum tube on the flashlight can stop somebody swinging an aluminum bat or a piece of rebar at you and hurting you by using it in a defensive manner to block. That's what it's intent for. Now, if you use it to strike, you strike certain parts, nerve motor points on the body, rather than a knee or an elbow or a head. But what happens to every single person that's handed a club and they're in a fight for their life? They do the overhand swing. They go what we used to call on the street, "head hunting." And I've done thousands of those investigations, and those people were trained. They were trained to do the common peroneal strike. They were trained to do a different manner of thing. But when you hold those two things next to each other, and you see the instinct, the instinct is to survive, which means you will do anything that your brain tells you is within the realm of the possible to survive. And that's where the overhand chop comes from.

I'll give you another one. You run up on a car, you're pulling on the door handle. The person's trying to put it in gear. The very first thing you have, your hand is your weapon, and you're holding your police-issued sidearm at the person saying, "Open the door!" And they don't, and you start banging it against the glass. Thousands and thousands of films that you can look up, people doing that. Now, Brian, where is the overhand chop with an aluminum flashlight taught? Nowhere. Where is bashing your firearm against the window to get inside that car taught? Nowhere. So how could we come up with it on our own? It's impossible that of all the choices that are out there that we would choose to do that. It just happened to go that way. No. What happens is our instinct drives our reproduction. Our instinct says we have to be alive to reproduce, and this is one of those moments where we're going to cut out the middleman, and we're going to go straight to the source. And that means that we're going to do whatever it takes in that moment. And that's where our training falls short because those aren't physical skills, Brian, those are mental skills. This is where Maslow got it right: we can't change certain instinctual behavior with training.

Well, and this is sort of the situations you just gave examples on are predicated on what I've now gone past the point of being able to really understand the environment and the situations. So therefore, my brain instinctively and will always go primal. It doesn't go, "You know what, everything's probably going to be okay." If our human race probably wouldn't have survived this long. Two, there would be no such thing as anxiety. If people talk about anxiety, it's like, "Well, yeah, you're good. You're primed to stay alive." That's where that comes from. Right? Anxiety is that fear of the unknown in the future, whereas fear is sort of like right here now in the present. Anxiety is like, "What's going to happen? Do we have enough food to make it through winter?" That's an innate instinct in human beings. So anxiety is something I don't look at it as, "Oh, man, I got to figure out my anxiety." It's like, "Well, okay, why is it being triggered for these situations?" Is what you need to figure out. That that's the corrupt file folder. But having it is the best thing ever, because that's what allows you to continue to do your job well and be a good human and contribute to society and stay alive.

But what I just want to be clear is, you brought up a couple situations there to use as examples of where you've gone past—you're not using intuition, you're not using anything—you've gone primal at that point because you've the psychological arousal has gotten to the point where your brain is relying on instinct. And once you do that, it's probably going—you said it—you were in a fight for your life. Even if you're not, even if the situation in clear light of day, after the fact, is going, "Well, that's not what was going on. It was an accident. This old man was getting a cane out of the bed of his pickup truck, not a shotgun to shoot you." But you saw a shotgun or rifle because you went close enough, and your brain went from intuitive processes and thinking to this very instinctual way of looking at it, and then it becomes very binary. It becomes either a threat or it's not, and it's a threat for my life. I am going to die here if I don't kill this person first.

Yeah.

Or I don't do whatever action my brain has computed. It's off on why you see people run out and try to grab a vehicle or jump in front of a vehicle when someone's fleeing. It's like, "No, no, no, no, that's everything in the world would tell you that's the dumbest thing on the face of the Earth." But instinctually, at that time, your brain is so primitive it doesn't understand that this car is going to kill you if you go in front of it. It can't. It can't see that. And if I haven't trained for that sort of event, I'm not going to. And I become overwhelmed, and my decision-making has become so clouded that I'm just thinking with instinct. And that's never—and this is why we hit the neuroscience and the limbic system so powerfully, and why we hit the limitations of cognitive performance over and over and over again—because it's something you cannot increase. It's something you can't change. You can become a better intuitive thinker, and you can get better at thinking critically so that you do not become psychologically overwhelmed. You don't become—you don't reach that level where instinct kicks in, and this primal. You can get better there, but it doesn't matter who you are, what level of training or experience you have, if you do get to that point, it's going to become a very simple: either kill them or they're going to kill, or I'm going to die. And it becomes very binary. So this instinct is obviously to keep you alive. And you can—there's nothing you can do to prevent those. There's nothing you can do basically to control those mechanisms once they've kicked in, right?

Right, right.

That's the idea between anger and rage. Once I get to that point, it's on board, it's there, it's happening, and I can't do anything about it. I can do everything before it gets to that. I can focus on that, but not once it gets to that level. Does that kind of make sense?

Makes a lot of sense, and you said a lot of great stuff, so let's unpack it. First of all, there's certain types of survival engineering that we have. For example, the nose being above the mouth, that's not accidental. The nose makes sure that it passes the smell test before it gets into the mouth so you're not going to accidentally eat fetid food, which would inhibit your ability to survive. You may die from that. So absolutely everything: the ears being panoramic, our eyes being forward-looking. If we go down through all of those things, Brian, that's survival engineering. None of it's accidental.

Okay, second part of that, we have risk-reward circuitry, which by itself means that we were trying to get up and get out of the cave. So you said arousal. Arousal is a huge word, folks. Seeking arousal outside our cave as early man and woman: fear, anger, anxiety, pleasure, all instincts, none of them are intuition. All of them are hardwired instinct. Now, much later, okay, you can say that, "Hey, I found that most fish are found in a stream, not on land." Okay, well, there's your intuition kicking in. You see what I'm trying to say? One is very much more important than other.

So look, there's certain stuff we cannot override. For example, if we take a look at all of the world, hibernation in animals is an instinct. It can't be overridden. And when an animal does fight hibernation, it ends up starving or dying or being killed by other predators. Migration, okay? You don't migrate, you freeze in place and you die. So those are the type of things that we see repeated over and over. I'll give you an example on I-70 outside of the small city of Eagle in Colorado. There's corridors where the animals have gone south to north for better feeding grounds for so many years that they had to put up fences with gates and underpasses to allow the elk population to continue to migrate, or they would all die in the freeway.

There's a place up in Northern Colorado called the Leather Highway that so many... they've done that, they've done even in other places they've built highway overpasses that are just for animals, right?

Exactly. That they built it between two areas because they know they're going across, and now the animals learned, "Oh, we can just go right up over here and we're not going to cross the freeway."

Exactly.

So we compare that in humans, it's stuff like eating and drinking and sleeping, and they're examples of our instinctual behavior. And so hardwired are they that when you take a look at circadian rhythms, for example, they're specifically set up to make sure that we have that brain rest cycle, and that we come off being switched on all day. They're driven by our need to survive, an example of a primal instinct. Another one is hunting, another one is gathering. Those were so essential to early survival, and we still do that today. That's why there's a drive-thru at a restaurant, okay? Because we figured out, "How will people get it? Hell, if you can deliver it to their house, they'll even pay extra for it." Look at what's happened even since COVID, which helped us understand that humans that are best adapted to the environment are going to continue to survive. So that failed to thrive in our nature, we have to pass on our characteristics, our biases, our behaviors to future generations for them to have a chance. So those things that are instinctual stick around because they're hardwired and they're hard to break that habit. Those things that are intuition-based are those things that we've learned over time that now all of a sudden, like a female intuition, that's a great one. I rarely use the term "intuition," but I often use the term "female intuition" when I'm describing it. Why? Because females have been predated like horses in the environment. You take a look at the evolution of a horse, the evolution of a female—and I'm not trying to say anything by that that's negative, I'm trying to say that because they were predated, because they were thought of as less person, they didn't get the right to vote, all these other things—they naturally, with their instinct, adapted, "I might get raped, I might get attacked in some way, I might have a problem." So those two things went, and that's still go...

That goes back to the adaptation, right? So men are born with more muscle mass, greater bone density, higher levels of strength just across the board on average than women are, and different hormones that allow for that. So what did women have to do to survive? Well, women have a greater functional field of view than men. They can see more in their environment. So that's the part of the adaptation, instinctual adaptation process where you have to go, "Well, I have to be able to survive in this world." So as a species, this is what happened to me, right? These are the extra things I have that you don't have, Greg. Greg, you might be bigger and stronger than me, but maybe I'm faster and smarter, or something. It doesn't matter what it is.

What we're getting to on all this is that onboard system is the most powerful thing, and those instincts will push and influence our behavior, but it's towards very specific rewards. It is the reward: procreation of the species, for food, for survival. And then intuitively, I like—I actually want to go back, because I like your fish example—it's like, "Okay, I found out." I'm picturing me coming out of the cave, I'm still looking like I could fit in with that tribe today with the beard and hair that I've got. But the idea is I find out that, "Wow, I went down to the river, and I came across this fish, and I ate it and it tasted good, and I can survive off of this stuff." Well, now I've figured out some way to capture those. That instinct drove me to develop these specific intuitive skill sets to now where I can teach my grandkids, "Hey, if we come over here on the stream, this is the spot where they all like to tuck, and it's easier to catch them here than it is over there." So it's not an instinctive process, it's an intuitive process that I can pass that down. I can pass those intuitive experiences down to the next generation, like you said, just like I passed down my DNA to the next generation. So the idea is that that's how they sort of interact together.

And then you tied it back to sort of training and how we look at things. And those things, I consistently see, they cross the streams, like in Ghostbusters, "You're not supposed to cross the streams!" Or people get it wrong in the sense that some of the science behind it is right, it's just not being applied, it's not being implied correctly, which you actually just gave a shout-out to Maslow a couple minutes ago.

Which I never do, but let's go one more layer with your the direction that you're going in because I think that everybody's catching on now. But let's talk about the color red. So you came out and you talked about fishing outside of the cave, so now we come out and we're foraging, okay? So we're not hunting, we're foraging in our environment, gathering they called it back in the day. And we find out that these red berries, I took a mouthful and I immediately started vomiting. So I caught on, okay, because the hardwired system on my body taught my mouth and my esophagus and my stomach that this is not good food, these are poisonous, to vomit. Now, it also gave me a couple of very strong instinctual clues, because Muktar and Uglu that were hunting with me, they died because they ate too many of the berries and got sick and swelled up. Now what happens is from seeing that, driven by instinct to stay away, I've created an intuition that things that are red are not good to put into my mouth. How long did that last? What was the tomato called? We thought they were poison apples. We take a look at radishes, and because they were red and when they're hot to the touch, we said, "Oh my God, those are poison too." That's the intuition side of it, Brian. That's what happens when we develop a brain and we start thinking about those things, and we put them into a category. But the instinct never changed to sample your environment, because sooner or later you will find that food that is going to sustain you through the winter.

And that's an example, too, of how those sort of intuitive processes don't always apply in every situation. So the instinct, I spit out the red berries because those are poisonous. Now I go, "Oh, man, I can't eat anything that's the color red." It's like, "Well, yeah, you can. You just can't eat those things that are red." And you get into smell and all that too. That was what was actually what I thought the craziest thing about COVID with people losing their sense of smell during it. I mean, if that had—imagine if that had happened a few hundred thousand years ago, maybe a significant portion of the race wouldn't have survived.

Exactly, correct. Right, because that's an environmental clue, right? So look, folks, we get environmental clues and internal clues. I'll give you an example of that. An environmental cue: food sources drying up, the water source is tainted, I don't have the right amount of berry to animal thing, the ratio, to stay alive, there's too many dangerous animals in this vicinity. Those would all be environmental cues that are screaming at me that would force an instinctual change. You get it? So the other one, what about an internal signal? Well, that vomiting was an internal signal. What about your biological clock ticking? A female that thinks, "Hey, listen, I'd love to have a baby before I get too old," because, "Okay, you think that that's something you came up with?" No, that's something your body and your hormones and your chemicals are screaming at you to make it an imperative. It's not societal pressure, it's very biological.

In some households it could contribute, right?

That's so true, right? No, no, no, but...

Well, those are those are contributing factors versus...

Versus, but again, intuition: contributing factor. Instinct: actuality. It's the power cable that's running. Everybody sees those commercials for Generac. I want to get one of those generators because we live off the grid out here in the middle of nowhere, and we're very highly susceptible, as Brian knows, to our cable going down, our internet going down, all these other things. So what a Generac standby does is it's—and it's not a commercial for Generac, folks, whatever any generator company...

I was just saying, are we being? Am I getting paid for this? Are we being sponsored?

So what happens is we set it outside, discount code Alpha. So, and if you call right now, you get two for the price of one. No, but it sets outside your house, and what happens is if you've got energy hardwired into your house, what they do is they create a loop through the generator. So in the generator's sense, the power is no longer coming from that tube, it takes over. So what you've got is the instinct is that power from the line that comes into your house. And your intuition is that Generac generator that says, "Hey, something's wrong, we have to step in now." So if you modify your training to understand the instinct, and you add intuition, Brian, it's as simple as the training that we do with pushing off of that car. It's as simple as telling somebody during that class on firearms, because it doesn't matter where you intervene as long as you do intervene, saying, "Hey, one day you're going to get in a trick bag and run up alongside of a car. And in addition to wanting to grab that guy and get dragged next to the car, you're going to want to take out your pistol and shoot them. And then you're going to have the 'Should I stay or should I go?' and start beating on the windshield with it." These are choices that are instinctual that you're likely to make, so let's work together to overcome them. Do you get how easy it could be if we compare the cognitive with the physical?

Good one. A good one for that is, you know, look, instinctually you start getting shot at, you're going to want to dive or get behind some sort of cover. Your brain's going to want to keep you alive, and it's going to want to get behind something. Here's the problem: this thing right here doesn't stop bullets. This thing over here does stop bullets. So you need to look for things like this because that stops bullets, this one doesn't. Because instinctually, you'll, "If I can't see the threat, it can't see me." Well, they can still penetrate it with rounds coming through there. So I, that's a good example of good instinct between intuition and intuitive thinking and instinctual thinking, sort of, together. I wouldn't even call it instinctual thinking; it's just instinct, it's not thinking. The intuition part is thinking. But that's how you can kind of interplay those.

And that's why, when it comes to setting up, when you're talking about training or even just developing with my family, coming up with what are some likely things to consider? Well, if I understand better what instinctively, the "Insurgent Cheese 11" has no formal training in a lot of stuff, what is she instinctually going to do when these things happen? Okay, so if I use that as sort of the left and right lateral limit, or I use that as the roadway, as the street, where do I want her to go? What do I want to—how do I want to build on top of that? Because you're instinctively going to do these three things maybe in this situation. So what can I teach her in those moments so intuitively she can make better decisions at that, or have a better response? Like, instinctually she's going to freak out, or be very scared if the baby starts choking. Okay, so what can I teach her? Can I show her? Can I make her hold Max and do this? Well, yeah, I did. I was like, "This is how you do it. This is how you actually do it. Put your finger in his mouth right now. See how it's tough, and he doesn't want it in there? Okay, well, that's what it's going to feel like in a real situation." Having a little taste of that will help in that situation. But if I don't start with, "What are you instinctively going to do?", I'm sort of—I'm already setting her up for failure. If I don't take those factors into account when I'm coming up with that course of action that I want her to do and train her on, then it's going to fall apart in the real event.

That's the thing, is that that instinctive, primal instinct is going to take over, and it's going to override anything that they've taught. And you see that time and time again. And so that's the biggest issue I see when it comes to how people set these things up. And it's like we're forgetting this primal instinct in us, or we're rushing into that saying, "This is going to happen, right? You're going to become overwhelmed by events. You're going to have..." It's like, "Well, you don't have to."

Right. If I back this up a little bit, if that's the only path you're used to following, then that's what's most likely to occur in your prefrontal cortex. Remember, we're talking primitive brain versus neocortex, which means that there's always a struggle in your mind. Your mind is always struggling, looking at the rest of the world survival-based. So, for example, the people that develop "run, hide, fight." They got all of those from primitive human instinct, because those are all instinctual. But the science behind putting them in that order, I haven't seen that yet, okay? And I don't know if we can agree with that in all humans. So training to that standard might be the right thing for your agency, as long as the training teaches you options and you understand early. When you pull that weapon out and you're about to hit that window, you go, "Holy crap, that's exactly what we were talking about! Oh man, look, I'm going instinctual. I'm going primitive." If you can pull yourself out of that overhand bat swing, Brian, then you've got a chance. And that's what you were talking about with your daughter.

So I'll give you this. "Run, hide, fight." I'm not damning you, I'm saying that the science is there, you just got to make sure that the training fits the science, okay? And you have to make that choice for yourself because I'm not a proponent of that. I think you can think your way out of situations and then decide what the options are. And you're saying "time." Yeah, I get the temporal element. The bathroom is the smallest room in your house, other than a closet. Your brain doesn't think of a closet as a room because it has linen or pantry. Okay, when you go to hide, more people hide in the bathroom than any other place because there's a number of things in the bathroom. There's hard things like the tub that I can jump into, and a lot of firefighters have found kids hiding in the tub, and dying under their bed. Why? Because what happens, that fire overrides all of their training and all of their intuition, and it goes instinctual: "I have to hide from the fire, the fire is bad." And therefore they're in the tub or in the bed, and that's a bad thing. Okay, so we have to train them to overcome that. We also have to train them that the fireman that's coming to pull them out from under the bed is going to be dressed like Darth Vader, the actual thing that we tell them that they're going to be scared shitless of. There again, we have environmental cues and internal cues that are going to come and fight between our primitive survival brain and our neocortex.

So your training—and again, I don't care what your training is—but your training has to have components of each, and it has to be repetitive enough, and you have to change, like a rat, the amount of external arousal. And external arousal doesn't always have to be fear or anxiety-based, it doesn't always have to be a gun. It can be competing arousal, because the brain, now over a million years of evolution or more, now we see survival and what do we always equate survival with? Opportunity. "Hey, here's an opportunity. Hey, take a look, if I step in there right now, if I do these..." So now we have an additional competing factor because it's not as dangerous as it once was. And everybody goes, "Oh, it's so dangerous now." Look, survival rate in the age that you lived to, 200 years ago, take a look at that and compare it to today. You got a splinter and you weren't on the way to the emergency room, you were on the way to the morgue. Those things change how we think about the future.

So we have to understand, for example, applying the tourniquet. And now people start carrying a tourniquet, but that's not good enough. How do you carry your tourniquet? Is it ready for use? What if you get shot in your gun hand? How are you going to shoot with your off-hand? That's the great type of survival thinking that I see that's going on with trainers. But that's not enough. It's not enough to flip the tire or shoot the target. We have to think through these things, and the first part of thinking through those things is anticipation: what might I encounter today? What might I see when I turn the engine in my car and it does the slow crank, and it's not cold outside? "Hey, it might be time to check that battery, or my starter might be..." Brian, we do that when we're talking about our car, we don't do that when we're talking about our kids. So the education, then training, then rehearsal for the real event process is critical. And you can do that in a number of ways. No in-person training will ever stop because virtual training is so good. That'll never happen because humans have to be face-to-face. Maybe in a million years that'll change, but virtual is a great step when you can't afford the other because it costs a lot of money to get actors and ranges and bullets and all that stuff. So you see what I'm talking about. As long as we're moving the dial forward and giving our brain options and seeing what could happen, then our brain gets it from there. We teach the brain how to go, "Hey, there's Waldo," and it loved that. And now we're back to that reward circuitry that we've already got instinctually that was born with us. So I know that was a long, Brian, but I think...

You know, even your example of someone running to hide in the bathroom, that's... instinct is telling me I need to go to a... I'm in fear for my life. Instinct takes over and says, "I need to find something that's safe." Well, you're going, "Why would it then go to the bathroom?" Because you're in a very vulnerable spot when you're sitting on the toilet, and you've done that so many times in your bathroom in your house that you've now—this is now to your brain a safe place because no one's ever... I mean, think about it, it's like even why dogs, especially even when they're puppies, if you're potty training them, it's a very—it's a very vulnerable time when they're pooping. So they literally get kind of weirded out, and they'll look back at their owner, and they'll look around. It's because anyone can come attack them because they're trying to figure out their bowels. So it's a very—it becomes this place where you're safe. So therefore, when that fear kicks in and I become overwhelmed by the situation and I go to instinct and I'm not thinking through, I will run to those places. That's why you see in those emergency situations people do crazy stuff or something weird or something that seems literally counterintuitive because your thinking brain would never do that. But instinctually, it makes a lot of sense. "Oh, now I know why they go there."

You even brought up—we talked about another podcast before—but, you know, when someone's in a, and this is probably more true for a little bit older vehicles, but still just as true today in some sense, is when someone's being pursued and they're not wearing a seatbelt, and they go to take that left-hand, high-speed turn, and they almost lose it, and they almost come sliding out of the driver's seat. But then when they take a right-hand turn, they can pin against the door, and they're fine and not going anywhere. So now instinctively, their brain goes, "Got it. I now know that I have a better chance. I can take a turn at a higher rate of speed going right than I can left." So will it start to choose more right-hand turns? Well, yeah, that's how your brain works. It learns, and it learns very quickly, and it's driven by that instinct. So that's that underlying operating system that's always, always on. And the more extreme the situation, the more it's going to take over. The higher the stakes, the higher the arousal, the more of a survival situation it is, the more instinctual you will become. And so it's an important distinction between instinct and intuition, and it's important to understand it when, like you talked about, setting up sort of a training scenario or figuring out what's likely to happen next.

And this is why we go to the primal stuff when we're doing predictive analysis. When the pressure is on with someone, they're going—they're going to fall back. And you—that's what people mean when they say, "We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training." It's like, "Well, you and then you're going to fall to the level of your instincts after that." So if you don't have that training, if you don't—or your training was a presumed capability, not an actual capability—all that stuff's going to go out the window, and you're going to do the most basic, rudimentary stuff. And then now what we do, unfortunately, is everyone posts of it and points and laughs at people and says, "Oh, look at these idiots!" when you know that's you in that situation.

Right there, clearly, clearly, science is that if we videotape or tape or record—gosh, all of those terms are outdated now—yeah, I mean, think about that for a minute, okay? Because there are no tapes or anything. But if we record a situation, and we point to it, immediately what we're saying is we're not going to use a scientific method, we're going to use this one example, and it's going to prove everything. That's non-science, okay? That's all intuition, that has nothing to do with instinct. But that bag of weed or meth or fentanyl that you've got hiding in your car, the fact that you hid it instinctually tells me that you knew possession of that item was wrong, and therefore you made extra effort to hide it. You know what you didn't hide? You didn't hide your lunchbox. You know what you didn't hide? You didn't hide your hat or your gloves or your umbrella. Those things were all where you could reach them. So you can make an argument for when you go to search that home SWAT teams: "Where likely will your suspect be?" I guarantee it's not likely the living room. Okay, you can make sure that you understand that intent has been established if the person makes a furtive gesture to hide something. Why would they go through the motion on a traffic stop to conceal something from your view unless they had the mens rea (guilty knowledge) that there was something wrong with that?

So the same thing when you come in and you ask your kid, "How's your day at school?" "Fine." Okay, you can say, now Brian, that would be intuition based on all of the other times that your daughter walked in the house, you know something that's wrong. But instinctively, you have to go after that and pull that thread to find out what it is. So there's a constant balance in humans, and survival is at the end of that balance. So therefore, when you see a statistic where somebody just casually throws it out there and says, "Well, you know, this has to do with your choosing a bad job or having a bad boss or being in a bad relationship," none of that matters to your survival brain. Those are all things that you attributed.

Yeah, you've attributed that value to it.

Yeah, so don't think that those things are going to be in the way of your survival. When it comes down to it, you will save you before you save any other member of your family. And that's why it's so remarkable, and we give the Congressional Medal of Honor to a soldier that saw that the situation went sideways and now there's a grenade, and put themselves on top of that grenade to save everybody else, because it's not normal, Brian, not clinically normal.

And that's another point of how you can sort of—those specific cases where you can override your natural instinct through training. Yes. Or through that. I mean, that's that, but that takes a long time, and it can take, you know, you're putting in that situation, you're sacrificing your life, so you're overriding your limbic system in a sense for something else. For something, but if you think about it, it's not really overriding your instincts because it goes back to survival of the species. Right? So you're saying, "I'm sacrificing myself for the good of the rest of the people in the tribe." So that's why you're actually able to do that is you can say, "I can do that because this group of people will continue the fight, and I will be gone."

Exactly, exactly. And Brian, let me ask, those are so rare that it's remarkable, and that's why we give awards for it. Brian, you went through the same thing. All soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, National Guard, Coast Guard, you went through an induction station, then you went to basic training, then you went to advanced individual training, then you went to even more specialized training, then you did a workup before you went to combat, then you went to combat, and then you learned in combat. You came back, you went through a routine again to build up for the next. Okay, so everybody out there that hears my voice, that's a cycle. So as you went through that cycle, you encountered other people that were great stateside. Man, they could throw the grenade, they could do the bayonet drill, they knew all the, you know, the man on the range with the saw, they were just cutting down targets. Did you ever see somebody that was really, really good stateside, but now you're in a combat zone, and they had no idea what to do, and you had to grab him by the chinstrap and pull him out of danger? Has that ever happened to you?

Of course. Of course, yeah.

And vice versa as well. Yes, of course it is. Of course it is. You had people that sucked in training that were the hero out on the battlespace. Why does that happen? Because we still haven't been able to tap into the difference between our survival instincts and our neocortex. We continue to try to out-think the problem, but we don't understand that even though training is really, really good, the real event will change us dramatically. And in some people, they just won't function. Well, some people will grab the gun instead of the taser. Some people will hang onto the steering wheel, and it'll kill them. And you know what, Brian, I hate to say it, but that again is going back to the survival of the fittest. If you make the wrong choice in those circumstances, you may still have heroic mindset in your prefrontal cortex, but I'll tell you that your instinctive brain is screaming at you, "Let go, run, hide, save up your energy for another day."

So we have to, we have to crack the code as humans, and we still have it. Look, we've cracked the codes on some stuff like OSHA. What a brilliant thing, okay? Because it's likely that you're going to get in an industrial accident if you don't have these safeguards. It's likely you're not going to survive getting hit in the head with a hammer dropped off the roof from the roofer that it slipped out of his belt. Those are brilliant things. What do we got with the National Aerospace, the people that investigate plane accidents? Okay, I love the way they do it. What do they do? NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board). They go back in and they take a whole hanger, and they recreate everything. They put the belt buckle back where it was. They want to understand everything about it. Okay, you know what we haven't done that to? We haven't done that to HR, courts, corrections, prisons. Those are the places that we need this type of intervention to understand the difference between instinct and intuition and training. And we haven't cracked it. Are we on the way yet? But guess what? There's a lot of people dying. There's a lot of people pointing to things that don't matter and saying those things are specifically the cause.

That's the issue, is we conflate some of those. We conflate the issues, we conflate contributing factors with approximate cause. We don't fully understand why these things occur. So therefore, without an understanding of what really the problem is or what to address, then you're never going to address it correctly. So we come up with ways that are seemingly good, or certainly well-intentioned, but seemingly good things to have, and it ends up not working. That's where you get that presumed capability. And that's why we're discussing this instinct versus intuition because there's certain factors at play. And because we even get into it, people like, "Why do you guys talk about physics sometimes?" It's like, "Look, if you're walking along a hill or a sloped ground, you're naturally going to start to go downhill, even if you're not thinking about it, even if you're just going about focusing on what you're doing." Meaning, there's certain elements that are at play here that you cannot—and if you're not aware of, you're going to attribute your problems to something that, like you just said, doesn't matter, or is inconsequential, or wouldn't have mattered had you known that.

And this is why we're always trying to get people to wind the tape back on a lot of different issues. It's like, "Well, hang on, there's a whole world." But everyone focuses on whatever that flashpoint was. It would be like your example of the plane crash and the NTSB going like, "Well, it was pilot error." It's like, "Okay, well, what was the error?" It's not just pilot error. It's, "What was it?" Because then what they do is they go, "Well, see, we're training these people incorrectly. They made this choice in that manner because they truly believed that was the right thing to do. However, that was the wrong thing to do. But that's exactly what we trained them to do. So we actually have to go back here when they're first learning to fly and fix that portion of it so that this doesn't happen again. Not fix the plane, not have it be able to handle higher-level Gs in a dive." No, it's this back here. Those things have to do with physics. Here's where the human went wrong, and that's what we can correct. And if we understand the interplay between these two, I think it gets us better at at making—well, at least at seeing and identifying what the potential problems are. And now getting to address them becomes just as complicated as getting to know what they are, because we consistently do that incorrectly sometimes.

So it's these things playing back and forth, the reason why we get into the—it's not really a semantic argument, it's an "I have to understand these situations." It's not about, "Well, don't use that word, use this word," because the problem is those arguments are usually on something where it doesn't matter, where this one is really important.

You want to make a name for yourself by coining a phrase, right? Come on.

Yeah, and a lot of that isn't as important as what people think it is. And this is again, kind of answering a lot of the questions we get about why we get so heavily into how the brain works, and why we keep reiterating certain things about, like, even when it comes to like functional field of view and orientation, why certain body language doesn't matter. Because there's other factors at play. It's like, "Look, if I get these parts right, everything after that will become much easier, and I don't need to spend as much time on that stuff. If I focus on what is instinctually every human being likely to do in this given situation." And so when I keep it vanilla like that and say, "Any person in this situation," it sort of allows me to see it a little bit clearer, right? Instinctually, like you even brought up, someone getting nervous when they get pulled over. It's like, "Well, that could be for a number of different reasons, man." If I'm running late for work, and I've been late three times in the last month, and now those reds and blues come on, I'm not just thinking about, "Yeah, look, I've got nothing wrong in the car. I was maybe doing a few miles an hour over the speed limit, this isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things." Yet, but instinctually that kicks in, and now I'm going, "I'm going to lose my job, or I'm going to be late. I'm going to lose my job, then I'm going to lose my house, and I'm going to lose my family." So now it's a fight for survival at that point. That's where I'm at in my head. It's that instinct that's starting to kick in. So those two things influence each other, right? The intuition and the instinct. It's sort of a play between the two. One can drive one, and one can drive the other. And so, but we always like to start with that, "What's the lowest common denominator?" And lowest common denominator is always biology, physiology, and neuroscience. That's it. It's your subjective experience in life, and your training is ancillary to these mechanisms and these cognitive processes that are at play. And that's the most important thing to focus on because I think there's the least amount of understanding because we want to attribute our actions to something. When I get something right, "Well, I—it was because of me, it was my decisions I made." And if I get something wrong, that fragile ego system: "It was someone else's fault, or it was this, was the issue, or it was raining out." I mean, and that's part of the interplay, but that's who we are as human beings, I think.

So that's kind of like my big takeaways and points on this was just that, is that I have to know where that sort of line is between instinct and intuition. I have to know how they interplay with one another, because I think it just gives a better understanding of anything that's going on, whatever the situation is. I mean, I'm dealing with some family stuff right now, and I get all kinds of range of responses from people and what they say and do. And even I, even though I know these situations and have experience, I have to sit there, Greg, and not get pissed off when someone says something, because, "Alright, they're processing it in this way, and this is where they're at in their headspace, and they're thinking about this instinctually, and it's manifesting itself in this manner. They don't really mean it in the way because I have a larger, more experience to draw from and a better understanding of the situation than some of the people involved." So I really know how these things work where they're just sort of instinctively responding to something that's a non-standard observation for them. And then so I have to sit there, and even though I know all those things, it's still horribly frustrating, and I get pissed off because I'm going like, "That's not how this works. That's not what this is. It's not this!" But that's instinctually how they are. So, I don't know, Greg, this is kind of—we covered a lot in here, so I want to kind of throw to you for sort of last, okay, so your final thoughts.

If you're a trainer, if you're a leader, if you're a boss, if you're a coach, a mentor, or a friend, what you need to do is understand how the anxiety can build up in a human. For example, Brian's example of the traffic stop. So if we know that if I go up there, I can de-escalate the situation. And de-escalation has been around a long time. I'm not answering this locally. If I can say, "Hey, the reason I stopped, your taillights are out in the back. This will only take a minute. How are you today?" I can completely change what's going on in your head from, "Holy, I'm going to be late for work," and all that. There's a million different ways to do that. When's the last time you rehearsed that with a mentor? When's the last time you as an FTO (Field Training Officer) had a number of people sit in that role and go, "What would you say? Can we rehearse that?" And that's the same thing about testifying. That's the same thing about knocking on a door and asking somebody for permission to do something, HR. That's the same way that you're going to get to the real nut of the issue, rather than all the peripherals that are going on. And Brian, we don't train to that. If we're a chief of police, I should be watching my people from an unmarked car how they drive during non-stress situations to understand how well they understand their community. Are they running stop signs? Are they going too fast for the speed limit? Are they setting a good example? All of those things, Brian. That's where instinct meets intuition, and that's how we are going to give ourselves a report card.

Because if we don't, if we don't modify training to include the cognitive elements, if we don't understand the emotions that go along with the instinctive imperatives that we have, what we're going to do is we're going to sell ourselves short, and we're going to default to putting bullets on a target or coming up with a ballistic shield. All those things, look at the MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle), Brian. The MRAP is a huge bank vault. Why? Because that was our answer to IEDs, not finding the IED placer or going after the builder. My thing to you is science should always lead the way, and humans are simpler to figure out than you think they are. They're much more complex in some ways, right? But if we add just an element of rehearsal and training in anticipation to our daily routine on things that matter to people: street contact, traffic stop, "Hey, listen, I know your instinct is to flee from me, don't. I only want to tell you this one thing before we get..." There's a million ways that you can de-escalate that situation, and training is the key. Training and education go hand-in-hand, but training goes further because training continues to put you in situations where you can rehearse those. So when it happens for the first time in real life, you're not scared shitless, and you don't go back to your instincts and just start clubbing people like baby harp seals.

Yeah, I think that's the baby seals is a good way. Everybody's got that image, come on. So yeah, I think when that sort of nexus of when instinct meets intuition is—it's a complex interplay. And like you said, humans are simpler than we think sometimes, even though there are a lot of complex factors, and they can get crazy. But that's what I always say, I mean, that's what I always tell people about even the podcast, is we talk about the complexity and the simplicity of human behavior, because that's how it is. So, well, you know, if you're still listening to this point, reach out with any other questions. You know we have the Patreon site as well that you can, and of course, we appreciate everyone listening and sharing this stuff with your friends. It's how we grow. And apparently, if you go to get a generator, use discount code Gunnison for an extra 10. Make sure you tell them Greg sent you.

Sure. Make sure you tell them Greg sent you. I do that nowhere. Thank you. That's a good survival instinct, Brian. No, I don't. Do you know Greg Williams? No. Who? Exactly. So that's not me. I got to do that in my own town so I get it. Yeah.

Oh, I know. I know. "Hey, you're not one of those people here with Greg, are you?" "Who's that?" "Oh, never mind."

Exactly. Much to say for that.

Alright, well, we thank everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior.