Content warning: This talk includes brief stories about sexual assault and IEDs in Iraq. Fear is not a gut feeling. Fear is your brain delivering critical information derived from countless cues that have added up to one conclusion. Stop. Get out. Run. But sometimes fear isn’t life or death. Often, it’s code smell. It’s a bad feeling before a deploy. This talk will explore fear, instinct and denial. We’ll focus on our two brains — what Daniel Kahneman describes as System 1 and System 2. And we’ll look at how we can start to view “feelings” as pre-incident indicators.