EverydaySpy Podcast - Your Human Instinct Working Against You

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Every death in the field carries a cost and a lesson. The cost is paid in blood and tears, but the lessons are invaluable for saving the lives of others. In this episode, Andrew shares a powerful lesson in human instinct that was first discovered in the Vietnam War, trained into Special Operators, and even codified into State Law in Utah. This is science that saves lives, stops bad guys, and wins case law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. There's a secret training base in the deepest, most southern, hottest, hottest sweltering armpit of America that is used to train special operators, military special operations units, and a handful of covert field officers. And we go there because they teach us a very specific type of self-defense, of defensive maneuvering. And they teach us about our natural threat response instinct. And that threat response instinct is something super interesting.

To me, it's been really invaluable in how I have approached my business, how I handled the field when I was with CIA, and something that I like to teach other people as well. And I wanted to share it with you today because I imagine that one of the big questions you have, like so many of my clients, is what is the right response? What is the best instinct when you're faced with a threat? A threat in business, a threat at home, a threat in the field, whatever it might be. Physical threat, monetary threat, digital threat, et cetera. So I want to start by telling you a story.

So when I first went to this base down in the forgotten armpit of the world, there was a senior master sergeant there who was teaching me about, stuff from Vietnam. Now, if you are a history buff or a military history buff, then you know that the Viet Cong were a very difficult group to combat with existing American tactics at the time. And what would happen is they were experts at ambush and they were experts at concealment at hiding themselves in the jungle. And often what would happen is a U.S. troop on patrol would walk into and, you know,

ambush in tight quarters. And that's often why the air support during the Vietnam War would come in and try to just destroy, burn, poison, huge swaths of jungle so that they could take out all the foliage and make it difficult for the indigenous Vietnamese guerrillas to be able to attack American troops. Well, the reason that this strategy, this ambush strategy, worked so effectively for the Viet Cong was because it did three things to American troops that were on. patrol. So first, it surprised them. And surprise is obviously an element of war from, you know,

ancient Chinese days to current days. So surprise was one significant benefit. The second significant benefit was that it forced people to act instinctively. And instinctive behavior oftentimes goes contrary to to effective training. So what ends up happening is when people act instinctively, they actually act in counterpoint to whatever their training is. So if you can get someone, to act on instinct, then essentially you've neutralized whatever training they've had. So if they're a good shot when they train, when you get them to act instinctively, they become a bad shot. If they're very good with words by training, but you get them to act instinctively, they start to stumble through words. If they are very calm and collected through training, and you can get them to

act instinctively, they'll be panicked and they'll be flustered. So so far, the VC ambush surprised people and got them to act on their instinct. And then the third big benefit was whatever their instinct was, it was highly likely that the troop on platoon, the platoon that was out there, would not all have the same instinctive reaction because human beings are wired with three distinctly different threat response instincts. And those three instincts are what I want to teach you today. So the first instinctive threat response instinct that's out there is called individual instinct. Now, we're not talking about primal instincts, fight or flight. That's something that happens at an almost hormonal level in your head. And fighter flight happens with any number

of stimulus. It doesn't have to be a threat. It can really just be a piece of information. It can be bad news. Even just coming across a family member who might be crying is enough to trigger your fight or flight, right? So it has nothing to do with the threat. It has to do with the stimulus. I'm specifically talking about a threat. A threat is something that threatens what you have, whether that's your life or your money or your loved ones, or it threatens your current moment in time. Fear is something that's future-based. A threat is something that's present-based, if that makes any sense. You can't be afraid in a moment of what's happening in the moment because you're reacting to the thing that's happening in the moment. Fear is always something that is a fear that's based on future

behavior. What will happen next? What might happen next? That's what causes fear. What you are doing in the moment is either going to be an instinctive reaction or it's going to be a trained reaction. And like we were talking about in Vietnam, the guerrillas in Vietnam wanted to make USGIs act on instinct because instinct can supersede training. So these three different threat response instincts are an individual response An individual response is a response where you put your safety, your life, your security first and foremost. That's an individual instinctive response. You become the most important thing in your universe. Somebody pulls a gun and you immediately think of yourself.

Maybe that means that you run away. Maybe that means you hide behind a wall. Maybe it means you put your hand on your own holster. Whatever it is, that is an individual instinctive response. The second type of instinctive response is called maternal. Now, the maternal instinctive response is a response where you don't worry about protecting yourself. Instead, you focus on protecting your cubs or protecting others. This is anytime you see the situation where somebody pulls a gun or somebody pulls a knife and they say, give me your wallet, and you see a mother's arms, usually it's a mother's arms in a movie, they go out and wrap around their children.

The mother is obviously not reaching for a weapon. She's not reaching for mace. She's not reaching for a gun. She's reaching around to shepherd to corral her children and act as a human shield between the threat and her cubs. That is an example of a maternal instinctive response. Anytime that you are essentially sacrifice yourself for the protection or benefit of others, that's a maternal response. The third type of instinctive response is paternal. a paternal response.

Now, unlike a maternal response, which is protecting others, or an individual response, which is protecting yourself, the paternal instinct is actually an instinct to engage the threat directly, to proactively put yourself in harm's way to neutralize the threat. That's the difference between the three instinctive responses. So let me go through those again. Individual response means you immediately try to protect yourself. maternal instinctive response means you sacrifice yourself in an effort to protect others. Paternal instinctive response means that you actively engage the threat in an effort to neutralize

the threat. Now you see the difference here. In maternal, you are willingly sacrificing your own security and well-being in exchange for the protection of others. In paternal, you're not trying to protect yourself and you're not trying to protect others. That is not the priority. The priority is engaging and neutralizing the threat. A secondary benefit of neutralizing the threat is that by neutralizing the threat, nobody else is in danger, whether that's your cubs or whether that's strangers and bystanders on the street. It doesn't matter. That paternal instinct is uniquely separate from the other two because you are actively engaging the threat, engaging it first and foremost to try to neutralize it. So let's go back to that story about the VC and

Vietnam, ambushing and surprising USGI soldiers. So here you are on patrol in Vietnam, and multiple platoons were being ambushed and surprised by VC. And on top of that, they were finding that the VC attacks didn't always include firearms. Oftentimes, they included just bayonets or knives or some kind of makeshift machete. So it was very violent, very intimate violence, but it didn't always involve gunfire. So the studies, the field information was collected that these ambushes were happening, triggering these three different instinctive responses in troops, troops that were not trained

to manage their different instinctive responses. And as a result, the ambushes were largely successful, killing most of, if not all of, platoons, and then at least forcing them to retreat with their wounded, they're injured, or they're dead, and come back and report the ambush back to their headquarters or their base. Well, that information, made it back to the Pentagon. It made it back into the United States. And from that was born this special operating school in the South, in the deep south, here in the United States.

And they started to assess why and how this VC attack was working. And what they discovered is something known as the 21-foot rule. Now, the 21-foot rule has a very interesting history here in the United States for a number of reasons. But it all started with studies on. military bases in Vietnam. And what they found is that the Viet Cong would intentionally allow troops to come within approximately seven meters, 21 feet, within seven meters of the ambush site. And they would have, they would intentionally align themselves so that as the platoon

walked through in a single file order, the single file line would run 21 feet, seven meters, parallel with the hidden troops, the hidden VC. And then the VC would rush with knives and bayonet. they would rush the troops that are on patrol. Now, the reason this was so impactful is because we discovered in these research studies that 21 feet takes approximately one to one and a half seconds for a human being to cover that ground, especially if the ground is thick, if the ground has, is got heavy foliage or whatever else, they can basically rush through that foliage and cover seven and a half meters in about a second and a half.

Well, it also takes about a second and a half for someone who is unaware to draw their firearm and make a positive target identification, target ID or PID. So in that same period of time, it takes someone with a knife in their hand to bum rush a soldier. The same amount of time is required for that soldier to draw their weapon and then also get positive identification on a target. Well, the problem is that the knife is a knife is a weapon. essentially stuck into the soldier faster than a soldier can draw the weapon and make a positive

ID on their target to fire off around. And then add to that the fact that if they don't make a positive identification or if they don't train the target correctly, there might be a shot, there might not be a shot, but the shot does not neutralize the threat because the knife, the damage is already done. Seven troops in a platoon attacked by seven Viet Cong, all within 21 feet, essentially turns into a successful ambush and seven dead US GIs. That was the result. That was the finding that came out of Vietnam. So the question became, what do we do about this 21-foot rule?

How do we keep our soldiers alive if they are rushed using this Vietnamese strategy? Now, you can't really make them move too far because they're walking through dense jungle. So if you try to get them to scatter or run, then they're going to be tripping over branches and tripping over logs and whatever else might be in the jungle floor. So you can't get them to run. But you also can't get them to react any faster because training speed drills takes time and the troops are already on the ground.

So you can't work on that. So what they discovered is that the only thing left was to train the instincts of the GIs. So let's go back to those three instincts. Every human being has at their core the capability, the capacity for all three of those instincts, individual, maternal, and paternity. The individual instinct was to keep yourself alive.

That's essentially the instinct where a gunfight breaks out or some conflict breaks out and you want to run and hide. That run and hide instinct is essentially your individual survival instinct, your individual threat response instinct. Anytime you want to be the one that acts as a shield for the other people in your group, right? So this happened in the field in Vietnam. It still happens today. You've seen it happen in everyday life. Whenever, do you remember being in grade school, do you remember being in perhaps even middle school or high school, and a fight would break out? You had those people who heard that a fight was breaking out, and they walked away.

They didn't want to be part of it. They didn't want to have anything to do with the recess brawl or the after school brawl. They would walk away. Those were people who had the individual threat response instinct built into them. That was their primary instinct. They would walk away. Well, then you had those group of people who watched the fight. but they kind of held the circle around the actual combatants.

I'm sure you can even envision in your head. You had those, maybe they were the soccer players, the baseball players, or maybe they were the cheerleaders or somebody else. But they would stand on the inside ring of the circle, but they would hold their arms out to hold everybody else back, to hold everybody out of the actual area where the fight was happening. That's maternal threat response instinct. They want to be face front to the threat,

but they want to shepherd or corral or hold back. everyone else so that nobody else gets into the fight. But then you actually had the people who pushed past that person holding the ring back and they bum rushed in because their friend was in the their friend was being fought or their friend was being beat up or whatever it might be and the fight would get bigger. Those are all your people who have paternal threat response instinct. They want to get into the fight. They're seeking out the fight. They're actively engaging in the fight. The same thing existed with USGIs in Vietnam. Whenever the VIA Kong would bum rush, you would have those people who wanted to run and hide, you would have those people who started yelling to everybody

else, hey, it's an ambush, get down, stand back, but they themselves wouldn't get down. They themselves wouldn't stand back. They just sat there warning everybody else. And then you had the people who had the paternal instinct, which were the people who didn't run and hide and they didn't announce the oncoming threat. Instead, they would actually run towards the attacker and engage the attacker head on. Now, it turns out, after months of research, the paternal response was the response that yielded the highest survivor rates during these Viet Cong attacks. And here's why.

The person who ran away and hid didn't get very far, because the Viet Cong would be able to neutralize the platoon and then go back and hunt the person hiding. That did not work. The maternal instinct also did not work, because the individual would get stabbed multiple times in the time that it took them to say, get back, get down. it's an ambush. So that person would also be neutralized. It was only the person with the built-in paternal instinct who counter-surprised the ambush, right? The ambush surprised the platoon. The person who ran towards the ambusher surprised the person ambushing them. And then that person had a fighting

chance. That person using the butt of their rifle, using their fists, using anything they could to fight. That person had enough scrapping time with their VC assailant that they could ultimately pull a handgun, use a knife of their own, or even take the knife from their assailant. So you can see how the three different instincts play out in the field. You can also see how the three different instincts play out in everyday life. Think about it in the workplace. Some people, when they're threatened by their boss or threatened by some new person to the office or even threatened by a new policy, some people go back to their desk and quietly hide. And they just, they put their head down and they work diligently and they try to convince themselves that if they just keep

working quietly and they don't make any waves, they're going to keep their job. That is your individual threat response instinct. Then you have the people who get threatened or who get worried about work and they go back and they start to gossip. Oh girl, don't trust that guy. Don't trust the manager. Don't trust that they're going to do what you're saying. Or they go back to their guy friends and like, oh, that guy's a jerk. You can't trust that guy as far as I could throw him. You know, if I had a bottle of beer, I'd smash it on his face. you got these people who spread gossip. All those gossipers are the manifestation of maternal instinct in the workplace.

And then the last group that you have are the people who get threatened by their boss or threatened by some policy at work and they go find a new job. They reopen their resume. They polish up their resume. They start tapping on their network. They don't tell anybody they're doing it or maybe they tell just a few close friends that they're doing it. But they have put together in their head that the threat is in the workplace and they're going to find a new workplace. part of that is what you see with the great resignation right now happening in America. You see people knowing that they don't like where they're currently at, so then they quit.

Unfortunately, that quitting, that great resignation that we're seeing, that's actually a manifestation of individual threat response instinct. These people are just running away. They're not actually trying to find a new job. They're not trying to find a better job. They're not trying to start their own business. They're just running away from something they don't like. That's individual threat response. That is not the most effective threat response.

We were trained in this little, terrible, hot, jungle, reenacted base in the South, that you have to learn to master and control your paternal response instinct. Because only the paternal response instinct yields the highest chances of individual's success. success in the field, success under active physical attack, or success from any kind of outside threat. In fact, the ratio breaks down to about 80, 20. 80% chance of success engaging your paternal instinct. 20% chance of success engaging your individual threat response instinct. Only the maternal threat response instinct yielded zero or near zero percent chance of success in face of a threat. So what that means is that if you are the type of person who thinks first

to sacrifice yourself, if you're the kind of person who puts yourself in front of the threat to protect others, if you think that you'll pay the price so others don't have to, that is the only natural instinctive response that is guaranteed to fail. It has a 0% to almost 0% chance of success. That means less than 1% chance of success. So if there's a hundred conflicts in your life, there's a low probability that one of them will work out if you actually sacrifice yourself. The probabilistic benefit in all three responses, in all three threat responses, is to actually use your paternal instinct. That paternal instinct means you take the threat head on. You lean into the threat. You react to the threat by being a threat. That is what we are trained. That's the big change

that transformed the troop loss rate in Vietnam and it transformed it so much that even to this day, the 21-foot rule is what's trained to military special operations, military tier one, covert field operatives. We are all taught the 21-foot rule and to understand that if we are attacked with someone holding a knife or a jagged weapon within 21 feet, that we will not have time to respond by drawing a weapon. So we are trained instead to counterattack, to bum rush into the threat. So that means if they're running at us from 21 feet away,

before we even try to draw a weapon, we run towards them as well. And then in the scuffle, we use some sort of alternate method to protect ourselves from being stabbed, but then buy ourselves the time to respond in kind, whether it's with a weapon, whether it's with a firearm or a knife or a fist or a choke, something else. The only time that we ever counter away and use that, use a different method from counterattacking in using paternal defense instinct, the only time that we run away is when we use our individual threat response instinct. And even then, the idea is to use your extra space to put five, ten, fifteen feet between you and assailant, which,

does give you enough time to draw your weapon, make a positive threat identification, train your side alignment, and then neutralize the target. So you can see that the most elite people in the world are trained to use their paternal threat response instinct first, their individual threat response instinct as a backup. Never are we taught to use our maternal threat response instinct because we know that the maternal threat response instinct will end up in mission failure. You will be killed and then the cubs that you're trying to protect will be hunted down next. Whether you're in the field of combat, whether you're in the field of business, whether you're outside in the street with your kids and your family at the mall during a time that a threat

breaks out, it's the same in every scenario. I want you to lean into your paternal threat response instinct. You already have it. All three responses, all three instincts are already inside you. What I want you to do is learn to trust that paternal instinct. When your boss yells at you and you feel in your heart of hearts that you deserve better that you don't want to keep doing this, then go find a new job. When you're trying to close business and a customer is talking to you in a denigrating

or insulting way and you know you don't need that customer, then fire that customer, fire that client. You don't need their $1,000 a month, their $10,000 or $1.4. You don't need that money when you know that you can just redirect your energies and find a new better client, find a new and better customer. If you're out in the streets or you're out at the mall or out at a picnic or a park this summer and you see somebody who pulls a knife or you see somebody who's high or who's drugged out and they're pulling some kind of weapon or causing a fight, don't stand and put your family behind you. Take the initiative to step towards that threat and neutralize that threat. You won't be the only one. There will be a handful of other people also moving towards that threat to neutralize that

threat because they're using their own paternal threat response instinct. The difference between you and them is that they don't realize it. And you are training, starting today, to trust that instinct. When there's a threat facing you, you have the opportunity to surprise the threat by leaning into it, whether it's at work, whether it's when you're out with your family, whether it's an everyday business. Do not sit back and hide. You only have a 20% chance of success when you do that. Do not sit back and try to protect others. You have a zero to less than 1% chance of success if you do that. Even as uncomfortable and as dangerous as it sounds to lean into the threat,

to counterattack the threat that's coming at you, statistically you have an 80% chance of success, neutralizing that target. That doesn't mean, you're not going to walk out with a few bumps and bruises. It doesn't mean you're not going to get struck with a knife or have your arm cut or possibly get stabbed. But what it does mean is that you will defeat the threat. You will neutralize the threat and you will be in a position to move forward in an environment that has no threat. When you recognize that your paternal instinct is one of your best, most secret weapons, it's already inside you. You just have to trust it and train it. When you recognize that paternal threat response instinct is one of your secret weapons, that is

everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everyday Spy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.