Learning to Think Like Someone Else (with David Marquet)

Former submarine commander David Marquet joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to explore how distancing--thinking like someone else, somewhere else, or sometime else--can unlock better choices in business and life. They talk about leadership without giving orders, how to empower teams, and what it means to see yourself as a coach rather than a boss. Along the way, they discuss Jeff Bezos's leap to start Amazon, Steve Jobs' unique vision, and how a simple mindset shift can transform a struggling crew--or your career. A conversation about thinking clearly under pressure, avoiding regret, and becoming the kind of leader who creates other leaders instead of followers.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is July 17, 2025, and before introducing today's guest, I want to mention that we will be doing an Econ Talk Book Club in two weeks, an episode on Ernest Hemingway's

• 0:47Speaker 00

  novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I encourage you to read the book. Before that episode airs, I'll be talking with Hemingway scholar David Wyatt about the book, Fascism vs. Communism, Hemingway's Passion for Grace Under Pressure, his literary reputation, many other things. So if you'd like to read the book in advance, please do so. It'll air again in about two weeks. Now, on to today's guest, author, consultant, and former submarine commander, David Marquet. His latest book, co-authored with Michael Gillespie, is Distancing: How Great Leaders Refrain to Make Better Decisions. David, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me on the show, Russ.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Now, near the beginning of the book, you tell an incredible story, which I will never forget. I think it's both fascinating and useful. You tell the story of Andy Grove and Gord Moore in the early days of Intel. Gord Moore was the founder of the company. Andy Grove was his first hire. At one point, they faced a crucial decision, and how did what you call distancing help them?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we all know Intel, we all know that they make microprocessors, but that's not how they started. They started with memory chips. And so Grove and Moore in the 60s started building this company and they did extremely well, as we know, and they grew the company up. And then by the time the 80s came along, memory chips were being commoditized and there was, there were competitive squeezes from mainly the Asian manufacturers who were doing better on both price and frankly, quality. At the same time, they had this little tiny product called the 4004 microprocessor. And so now we're in the early 80s and they can't

• 2:44Speaker 01

  make enough of these things because it's a minute part of the company and it wasn't what the company was started with. And so Grove and Moore are kind of going back and forth for a year about what they should do with the company. And any external observer would look and say, well, that's obvious. You need to throw all in on the microprocessor. But that's not what they did. They kind of debated and they debated and they debated about it. And Grove talks about it in his book and he says, "We were memory chips. Our identity was linked to memory chips. Intel was memory chips." And so they were at this

• 3:24Speaker 01

  impasse. One day, a year into this, stasis, they're in a meeting, just the two of them, and Grove describes, he's looking out the window. So there's sort of this, this distance perspective. He talks about seeing flags off in the distance. And he looks at Moore and he says, "If we got fired and we got replaced and the board brought in new..." People to run the company, what would those new people do? And immediately, Moore says they would shift over to microprocessors. And the thing that's really amazing about this, well, of course, the punchline is that's what they did.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  And then Intel, Intel Inside, Intel became even more famous with the microprocessor. But what's really interesting is the decision was not impaired through a lack of market research, through data, through consultants, through anything like that. It was simply impaired because of the way they thought about. The problem and the fact that they identified with this whole accumulation of all these previous decisions that resulted in them being rich and famous and the company being successful that had to do with memory chips. And this we find is the biggest problem with decision making. It's not all these other things that we think it is.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  I mean, it's a fantastic story, I think, for two reasons. The first is just the phenomenon, the challenge of, as you write about extensively, stepping outside yourself, forgetting, which seems like a bad idea, but it's a good idea in some situations, forgetting the fact that you've built this company in a particular way with a particular product, which is actually locking you in. It's actually this wonderful sense of success that you've had, all the thrills, all the identities you talk about. It's actually a trap. It's a terrible, terrible trap. So that's the first thing I love.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  The second thing I love is this slot experiment, which is mind blowing. Like, what would they do? And then, well, why don't we just, I think you're right, why just go outside and come back in and do that? What they were gonna do.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Pretend we're them. Oh, okay. What a good idea.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Right. And it's so freeing. And we know, of course, in these examples, they'll be well-known to your listeners as well, but we know the stories of Kodak and Blockbuster and other companies that are stuck way too long with their product. And again, it's it's not because they're not reading the market research. It's just because mentally their brains are processing it in a way which it tricks you. We live in a curated reality, but we think we live in a pure reality. We think that what we see, feel, sense, and interpret is the truth, but it's not. And we all know from reading about human biases

• 6:30Speaker 01

  and Kahneman's work that that's the case. But we sort of have this calculus that says, well, that that happens to other people. Oh, I can see that in other people. But you never see it in yourself because you're that's the trick of the brain. Because it says, oh, no, this is the truth. Oh, the reason that don't pay attention to that. Here's why. And it will feel so genuine. And it's that stepping out of yourself and imagining you're somebody else, even from a we don't advise living your life in this sort of out of body mode. But there are key times when it's super, super powerful.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think as powerful it is in a corporate or business setting, I think in a personal setting, it's even more powerful. Because, you know, we talked about the identity that Intel had as a membership company. But we as individuals have identities as followers of certain ideologies, having a certain career path, a label after our name that describes our occupation, and changing that and pivoting, which is the polite way of saying, doing something radically different. Sounds so innocent, by the way. I'm just gonna pivot. I mean, like, I'm gonna turn a little bit. But it's actually requires an enormous leap of of faith, is extremely hard. And I think the

• 7:51Speaker 00

  You know, I think of it, what your book does is the way I think of it is you go get outside counsel. You ask someone for advice. You say, if you were me, what would you do? And often that answer is like, oh yeah, that does make a lot of sense. And in your case, you're saying you actually don't need outside counsel. You might, but you can also treat yourself as the outside counsel. Step away and look at your situation with what Adam Smith called the impartial spectator. Someone who doesn't have all that baggage and the self confirmation bias and all the other problems that come with with decision making on our own.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You have a built in outside observer. Because humans have the ability to imagine ourselves as somebody else. It's it's a superpower. But most of us don't take full advantage of it or don't take near enough advantage of it. We can imagine ourselves, there's three dimensions we talk about. You can imagine yourself as someone else, like Gordon Moore did. You can imagine yourself as somewhere else. And so psychologists do studies where they say, okay, tell the story as if you were a fly on the wall watching you as an actor in the story. And there's so many benefits of this when people retell, for example, traumatic things that have happened to them in the past.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  First of all, there's sort of a natural tendency in depositions where when people get to the real traumatic part of the story, they often will shift to third person. They'll say like, so I was jogging in the woods. And then and then there she was landing, laying there. And they'll shift to the second or third person. That's your brain protecting you. And be someone else, somewhere else or sometime else. And that sometime else is typically your future self. And so this, all these are really interesting and useful. I like to imagine just being my coach. My experience of my life is I sort of view myself as the quarterback.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  And I'm on the field and I get sacked and the guy across on the other line is says something bad about my sister and I get, you know, it hits me personally. And when I get knocked on the ground, I feel the bruises and the coach is sitting there over on the sideline. He's like, oh, wow. That's gonna hurt. And, uh, and, and you're just, the word is immersed. You're like in it. You, you, the, the, your sweat, the sweat and you see the sweat on the other place. And like you're in it, you're immersed. You get cut off in traffic. Oh, they did that to me. And then you have this immediate, uh, but an hour for now, hopefully you can't even remember it because it's not important. And so it's that idea that we jump out. I like to say, okay, imagine I'm my coach.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Now my coach is going to tell me what to do. And it helps both ways. One, it helps with what you should do. And then it helps with actually following through on your things because now you're doing something, uh, it could be something easy like, uh, I'm not going to eat desserts. Or it could be something like, I'm going to retire.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  It's not easy, David. Don't use that example. It's a bad example. Pick a different example.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Or move, I'm gonna, uh, you know, uh, stop traveling and move to France. Whatever, whatever it is, um, we, the coach can see it more clearly. So, so when you then re-immersed yourself in yourself, you're not doing what you want to do. You want to do what your coach wants to do. We all know the experience of having an accountability partner in business or in workouts or whenever it is. And so now I want to keep coach happy. And so that also plays a trick to you on your brain where you say, hey, my coach says, I gotta get out and walk for an hour a day. I should get out and walk for an hour a day. And you want to do it because you're making the coach happy.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  So in all these ways, we think it's a super, super powerful, um, uh, mental, uh, mental manipulation.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Well, a coach is a great example because a lot of times we don't notice our own failings. We're oblivious to them. And we don't want a real coach. Somebody's going to tell us what we're doing wrong all the time. I don't need that. But of course, we do often. And the idea of doing it without the humiliation of that third person, that second person, but it's you. It's a, it's a great trick. It's a really clever trick. And you give the example, it's very, um, it's moving of Yisya Perlman, the, you know, one of the greatest violinists of all time. And you ask, why didn't, he didn't have a coach. A lot of great performers don't have coaches. Some do, uh, for parts of their game, obviously. But he talked about his wife.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  What did he say? What did he say about his wife?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically she played the role of the honest. She was the one who was stepped on the outside. She was the independent observer and she was able to give him honest feedback. And he, and then here's the key, listen to her.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  But when I read that part of the book, I thought about the idea, which I love when I'm writing of the reader over your shoulder. For most of my life, that was my father and sometimes it was my wife. Uh, my father's passed away, so now it's my wife, uh, more than, than others. And when you have a co-author, sometimes it's your co-author. Uh, but the idea that it's not just, oh, I'll get advice for them. It's while you're in the moment, you're in the embodiment of the stepped away, slightly distanced, or maybe greatly distanced observer, helping you perform in a way you can't when you're afraid, uh, when you're tense, when there's pressure, uh,

• 13:39Speaker 00

  and, or would you probably just go off on the, you know, a crazy side mission that's a mistake? Uh, your, your coach, whether it's your spouse or parent or yourself, imagining yourself as a, as a mentor, uh, can make a huge difference.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the idea is you become the other person. It's not like you consider the perspective of the other person. I want you to go deeper than that. So there's another story we tell in the book, which was where Jeff Bezos is talking about starting Amazon.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  That's a great story.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  And he uses the vector of be sometime else. And so the story is...

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Say that again, he is the vector of what?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Be sometime else. He became his future self. So the three dimensions are be someone else, be somewhere else, be sometime else. So you can be someone else, like more gross. I'll be the coach, I'll be my replacement, I'll be my kids, I'll be the board, I'll be... Then somewhere else is I'll view myself in the balcony. So don't be on the stage giving a speech. Be in the balcony, dispassionately looking and say, you know, what do I, you know, what do I think? Not sort of from a, not the Instagram sort of self-absorbed perspective, but just disparagingly. But and then the third dimension is be sometime else. So what you do is you fast forward yourself into the future.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And then you inhabit that yourself, your future self. And then from that vantage point, you coach your current self. And I did this on the submarine. I used six months was my typical window. And I actually had a calendar that was, was a physical calendar that showed six months in the future. And I would say, what would the six months from now David want today's David to do in this situation? And it's so good because today you're just like, you have all these competing factors and and you just kind of want to get through the day and you're sort of tempted to

• 15:52Speaker 01

  either overreact in certain situations or not really fix the problem, but just sort of just get, you know, solve it yourself. That's the classic. I'll just tell them what to do and then we'll be moving forward rather than really teaching the team. How to think about and solve their own problems because and then then you talk to your your six month in the future self and says, well, if you keep doing that, you're just going to keep doing that. So how about you solve it once and for all and and and invest some time and energy now or be more work today, but in the long run, you'll be way better off. And so this and then I would say, okay, that's what I'm going to do. And that was really, really helpful. And this is what Bezos did when he had to decide to

• 16:33Speaker 01

  start Amazon because he left. A sure thing. He had a great job on Wall Street. He was he would still have made a lot of money, not as much, I don't think, as in making with Amazon. But the thing that happens is when you leap to he he he leaped out to 80 years. He said, when I'm 80, what am I going to regret more? Starting and failing or not not having tried it. And when you're on the far side of the decision, looking back, you're that fear that you talked about gets reframed in your brain as regret. Oh, I wish I had done this. And therefore, you're now more biased towards taking some of these

• 17:14Speaker 01

  bold leaps, which in today's society may feel scary, but they're really not dangerous.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like it because it's a way to offset the other human tendency of ah, the future's so far away, I'm not even going to think about it. This is to bring it into the moment. The thing about Bezos that I love, though, is, as you write, he went and got outside counsel. He went and asked somebody for advice, I think his boss on Wall Street. Or what who was it?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he asked his boss. And his boss, his boss said, he said, hey, I got this idea to sell books on the internet. And the boss says, so this is back in 94. And his boss says, I think that's a great idea for someone who doesn't already have a good job. But then his boss said counsel him and said, hey, why don't you go, you know, take the weekend and think about it. And so he was, over the weekend, was basically by himself, thinking about it. This is how he frames his way of thinking about it. He thought about himself as an 80-year-old, thinking back to the situation in the day. And he talks about it, he says, you know, I was gonna get a big bonus. I had to pay rent.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  And when you're way out there, the way we describe it in the book is you're your practical, you today are your practical self. You have all these conflicting things going on in your life that you gotta try and balance. So you're making compromises. When you strip all that away and just go way out, you say, when I'm 80, what do I really wish I'd done? You become your ideal self. You look at it from the perspective of what are my real values? And it's easier than to say, you know what? Yeah, I might have trouble with my rent, I might have to go to a smaller place or whatever. But at the end of your life, you'll have fewer regrets. And you'll be happier and live a bigger, fuller life because of that.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, the part also I love, though, is the boss's calculus, which is not ridiculous. You've got a good job, why would you... Not just a good job, by the way, that's being polite. He had a great job, he's making an enormous amount of money. And he's saying, why would you throw that away for something that is, first of all, uncertain and might turn out very, very badly? And of course, there are many, many answers to that, but the part that Bezos was focused on was, yeah, but what if it comes out really, really well? And so much of our human frailty and as our evolutionary inheritance is fear. And a lot of your book is about overcoming fear, right?

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Your natural impulse is, I'm in a hammock.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  I am comfortable. Why would you roll out of the hammock, which is high above the ground? And run around the savanna and risk getting eaten? And that's what the boss said. And it's good advice on a certain level. But Bezos had the courage to say, I will regret this. Which, of course, he didn't know he'd regret it. The internet might have turned out to be a flash in the pan. Amazon could have failed, which he came close to doing many times. And then he might have said, why didn't I listen to my boss? And it turned out well for him. It turned, you know, it might not have. And for many others, it didn't turn out well, by the way, who made the same calculation. But they didn't have that regret. And but I think the idea of knowing that you have as a human being,

• 20:50Speaker 00

  this natural tendency towards security and a fear of failure that you might want to push back against. And this is a tool to help you do that.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my co-author is the brains behind the outfit. He's the PhD in psychology guy. So he was mustering up all this research that we we read through. By we, I mean sort of, sort of, sort of me and mostly him. But there's a lot of really interesting research about how we process emotional pain. And it turns out that if you go back on an evolutionary level, as we were developing as a species, we had wiring for physical pain. Oh, most basic animals have wiring for physical pain. I smash my finger, I feel it.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  It's wired through certain conductors into my brain. It's processed this pain on and on and on. When we became mammals and we started to become social animals, there was that our organism needed to process social pain, things like ostracism, or, oh, I said the wrong thing, or I'm worried they don't like me. Because these are very important in the social context. And our bodies just sort of borrowed or scaffolded onto this physical pain system to process our social pain. So our social pain is processed on the physical pain system, which means it feels like physical pain.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  So.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Social pain can be mitigated by taking an aspirin, for example.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Physical pain, physical pain.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Physical, yeah, and social pain. Social pain can be mitigated by taking an aspirin, which because it's, because it's using the same system that the physical pain system is using, which is really, really interesting. So, so the social pain things, so now in today's modern society, most of the stuff you can do is safe. You're gonna live a long time, you're gonna have plenty to eat, you're gonna be fine. You can quiet, you, you can keep doing something, you can move to another country, you can, you can do, you can do a lot more than our brains wanna make us think we can because why would you mess it up? Why would you mess up a good thing? You're lying in your hammock, you're,

• 23:22Speaker 01

  you're still alive, that's number one. So therefore, anything you do can either be, continue being alive, which is really basically where you are, or you can be dead, which, so what's, is a risk, and that's how your brain processes it.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  So I love the story you tell, obviously a different kind of fear story, which is, you get on a, an airplane, and you find yourself surrounded by NFL, National Football League, referees. Now, listeners out there who are football, American football fans, have a certain image of umpires, referees, every sport, whatever sport you like and watch, we just finished Wimbledon, the people who make the calls of in or out, and we have an image. And this story, one of the reasons I like the story is it really shakes up that image.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  And you say that as soon as, before the door had even closed, this group of referees had taken out iPads, and were watching the game they had just called, and they were critiquing themselves. And then you later saw them at Super Bowl as the referees, because obviously they were one of the best teams of referees in the country, because they paid attention. And I just, I love that, a couple of things I like about this, right? First of all, it's very hard to watch yourself perform. Many people just don't ever wanna do it. Of course, it's a fantastic way to get better, is to film yourself, and these guys. We're stuck being filmed whether they liked it or not. So they thought, hmm, maybe we ought

• 24:59Speaker 00

  to watch and see what we did wrong and maybe try to improve on it. And I love that. That's really true distancing, right? They're literally watching themselves from outside the game and realizing what they did right and wrong and getting better.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's so important. And again, it ties up with your identity. So the thing that's really interesting is these guys were one of the top ref teams in the NFL, probably the top one, because they were the ones selected to ref the Super Bowl that year. So they have the self-image, hey, I'm a good referee, but they're still watching themselves. So I, I took up open water swimming a few years ago. When I took up open water swimming, I mean, I never, I, you know, had swum, but I never really got any coaching. So there's really no expectation that I was going to be a good swimmer and that I was going to have any kind of correct form. And I was super eager to get coaching and my wife would videotape,

• 25:59Speaker 01

  I had a coach in Australia, Breton Ford, who was an amazing guy. And I would send my tapes into him and he would say, okay, this is what's happening. Your hands are coming across. So do this drill. And it was great. And I, I was seeking that feedback and it felt, I didn't feel threatening or anything. And then I started to compare that to my experience as a speaker, which after I was the submarine commander and I wrote a book, first of all, and it started selling, and then I started getting invited to do talks. But again, there's no expectation that I was going to be any kind of a good speaker. And so at the beginning,

• 26:41Speaker 01

  I was like, hey, how was that? And what could I spend more time on? I was, I was again, with that curious, eager, seeking feedback mode. And now, like 10 years into it, a thousand speeches later, someone comes up to me and says, hey, can I give you some feedback? I mean, my brain goes to a dark place. I was like, you know, no. I'll say yes, I'll pretend to be interested. But really, my brain, I'm like, my brain makes up all these bad, it said, well, how many speeches have you given and blah, blah, blah, how much you get paid to speak, blah, blah. And it's, because my brain is still, I haven't trained it fully to be eager and seeking the feedback.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Well, it happened for a while, but then when my identity kind of started to merge too closely. So I changed my bio a while back, and this was partly under the advice of Simon Sinek at the time, because my bio used to say, David Markey, well, bestselling author, expert in leadership. I didn't, I didn't write it, but it's that expert of leadership. He says, you should change that to student. I was like, yes.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  What a great idea.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  So now it's a student, student of leadership, which I really, really, really, really like. Way better, but every once in a while, someone just misreads it or something, they'll like, say, expert of leadership. I'm like, no.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  So there's a line in your book about leadership that I really love, that really encapsulates for me, both organizational leadership, I'm the president of a college, so I think about this a lot, with my, my team, and also, public policy. And you, you contrast what you call a leader, leader organization versus a leader follower. Now, leader follower, everybody knows what that is, is a boss, called the leader, and the boss tells people what to do. That's what bosses do, isn't it? I mean, that's what the leader does. The leader tells people what to do. And in economic policy, we would call that top down.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  The alternative in economic policy is bottom up, letting people make their own individual decisions with the information they have, and you call that a leader, leader organization, which is basically, instead of having followers, you're creating leaders among your team and your staff. And here's the, the part I like, quote, where the, so a leader, leader.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  A bottom-up organization is where the quote, "Where the governing principle is to push authority to those with the information, not push information to those with the authority." So in the leader-follower organization, the boss curates all the inflow and tell, you know, people make reports to the boss, so the boss can make the good decisions. Right. In a leader-leader organization, the boss empowers the people who already have the information to make those decisions, and by the way, not just at the end of the week or the end of the month, but often in real time. And that is, for me, the gold standard of when possible. It's not possible in every public policy area, obviously, there are areas where government

• 29:54Speaker 00

  has to make decisions and leaders at the politicians have to make decisions and heads of bureaucracies have to make decisions. But in the best kinds of situations, it's the people who make the decisions because they're close to the information. And I'll just close with this and let you respond. You know, a friend of mine said, "How many organizations have you been in that are top-down where the people who are, uh, have their boots on the ground, the people in the trenches say, 'Oh, the boss is so great, you know, the boss makes all the best decisions,' instead of what really happens, which is, 'The boss is an idiot. He doesn't know anything. Why did he tell us to do X when, when, when, he has no idea what's actually going on.'"

• 30:38Speaker 00

  And that, um, that is the essence of military, good military leadership, right? In time of war, I'm sitting here in Israel, which is famous for empowering its soldiers to make decisions in real time where hierarchy is incredibly minimal relative to other armies. Um, and it's, um, it's a good lesson for life.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that I think is a legacy. When I was running the submarine, I took over the worst performing submarine in the fleet, and I was trained for another submarine. So I didn't know the detailed way to operate the submarine. And what I needed was more thinking. I didn't need more compliance. I didn't need people to nod their heads and do what they were told. I needed people to think. And we dealt with this in a lot of hard ways. But the short story is it started with me refusing to give them orders. I would just refuse to tell them what to do. And then it had to come to me.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Because if you say, hey, I think 737 is a max and a great product. We've got the FAA board, we're going to catch up to Airbus, blah, blah, blah. What do you guys think? You may get someone speaking up who is independently wealthy and doesn't really care about their job, but you're probably not. And then later, the reason we do that is so that we can say, well, you guys had a chance to speak up. It's not because I'm really interested in an honest conversation about it. It's just, so we speak industrial age English is what I now call it. Why? Because during the industrial age, the workforce was largely illiterate. Not dumb, but uneducated.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  And so work and life is built of these two basic building blocks, thinking and doing. And it's always, I got to balance, is this a time for action? Or is this a time for pause and contemplation? And we got to balance those two things. The way an industrial age organization solved that is they simply divided the world into a cast system where the people on top did the thinking and the people on the bottom did the doing. And then we became, we thought we became enlightened, enlightened where we said, oh no, we're going to ask the doers what they think, but it's still a little bit shy of actually letting them make decisions because I'm still holding all the cards. I may see, may say

• 33:14Speaker 01

  words like, oh, you're empowered and blah, blah, blah. But in the context of this industrial age English, where I then ask questions later, is that going to work? Uh, yes. So these binary questions also are a component of this industrial age English. And they're just micro-coercions to basically stop people to think, stop people from thinking and go along with your decision, which is what we wanted in the industrial age. We didn't want people to bring their brains to work. Of course, now that's all changed. And so we see all these organizations wring themselves upside down and inside out to try and get thinking. They know they want

• 33:56Speaker 01

  thinking. They know they know thinking. But at the bottom level, when the CEO is running a meeting, they still do it in the same old way, using the same old language patterns. And we don't have a transcript from when Boeing made this decision. I'm not even sure if they made a deliberate decision, but we all know from the external evidence is that the CEO was publicly behind it, on and on and on, and that the test pilots in the simulator knew the thing was acting wildly. But it didn't get out, it didn't get acted on, and, and

• 34:35Speaker 01

  we have that. And so when you look at situations like Deepwater Horizon, or Boeing 737, or Volkswagen, or Wells Fargo 80s Grade, or all these, basically the worst kind of things that organizations have done recently, it's the exact same pattern. It's this industrial age English where people are told what to do. And the reason that's so pernicious is because it gives people permission. It gives them excuse. It absolves them of responsibility. Oh, I knew it was messed up. I knew it was wrong, but the boss told me to do it.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, before I forget, I just want to mention, when we talk about information, use your quote again, "When you push authority to those with the information, not push information to those with the authority." The classic example in the 20th century in economics was whether market behavior and market forces could be improved on by a deliberate effort from the top down to allocate resources to the most valuable things. Could use a computer to do that. It's the calculation debate it was called, and we've talked, we had an episode on it recently, I think it was with Pete Bettke. But if you listen to Adam Smith, who uses 18th century language, or Vernon Smith, no

• 35:55Speaker 00

  relation, Nobel Prize winner, the way Vernon talks, or Hayek, Vernon talks about it very powerfully, is basically, you've got information in the heads of the millions of people out in the world, and you need to aggregate that information in some way to make good decisions. One way to aggregate it is everybody sends the information up to the top, and then they use some algorithm, or if we're lucky, rather than their own corrupt personal goals. But you send that algorithm, that information up to the top to make a "good decision," because then the person has more information than any one individual.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  The miracle of the marketplace and markets is that prices encourage that information to be acted on without a single person stop having to have that information. Letting prices emerge and result from competition among buyers and sellers is one of the most extraordinary human achievements that there is, and we don't fully understand it. I would argue, most economists struggle with it. I sometimes don't fully appreciate it. But to go back to this question of within an organization as opposed to the national policy issue, the other piece of this, which you talk about in passing, and by the way,

• 37:19Speaker 00

  we'll put a link up to your talk at Google about some of these leadership issues when you're on the server, it's a fantastic talk, I loved it. It's not just that you're missing an opportunity to get information from the rank and file, who often know more than, a lot more than you do. It takes all the fun out of work. No one wants to be a drone, right? When you empower someone, you don't just get a better decision. You get a workplace that's more engaged and paying attention. And I think people often forget that. Ideally, I don't always live up to this ideal, but as the president of the college, I see my role ideally as being the person who worries about risk-reward trade-offs and decisions.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  That it's hard to appreciate any one person in their daily activity. But we're making a decision about what's best in their area? It's a bad system if you think you, as the outsider, can make a better decision because you've made more decisions than they have. The only time that comes into play is on the subtleties of risk and reward and especially the worries of deep downside risk. Deep downside risk, there has to be someone who takes responsibility for it because everybody within an organization is often going to be biased toward risk-taking because they're not going to pay the price for that. But the CEO or the head of the organization needs to worry about that. And that's their main job.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  You know, I've criticized Netanyahu here in Israel because, which he just recently said in October, so it wasn't his fault. Well, history will make that call, not him. But that's his job. His job is to make sure that a few thousand people that come over the border rape, murder, and kill a bunch of Israeli citizens. That's his main job. It's not what he thinks of every day because if you're not careful, you forget about it because it's a low-probability event. But as the CEO or the head of the organization or the captain of the submarine, you have to focus on the low-probability disaster because you're the one who is worrying about

• 39:29Speaker 00

  it, is going to think about it naturally if you're doing your job. Tell the story of when you tried to get the submarine to speed up on its electric motor as an example of how the mindset of an employee or a person on the staff changes in different kinds of organizations.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I like to poke fun at the employees at Volkswagen for going along or Wells Fargo or Boeing or whatever, but it happened to me. I did it. I did it myself. When I was a brand-new captain of a submarine, I was transferred to the ship at the very last minute because the captain resigned and I wasn't trained for it. And so I took over. And by the way, they're also the worst performing submarine in the fleet with the worst morale. So I took over. We go to sea. It's the very first day. It's at the end of the day. It's past midnight. It was, you know, it was hard getting to see, checking all the boxes, making sure the reactor and everything was just right. So we're all exhausted, but I was bound and determined

• 40:31Speaker 01

  to run this first exercise, which was to shut down the reactor and pretend there was a fault with it and see how the team reacted. And it's a very tense time on a nuclear submarine because you only have one reactor. And when you don't have it, you're sort of creeping up to the surface. And then, then when you get to the surface, you can use your diesel engine.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  So this is a drill that you're doing at the end of your first day, which is, but you're going to show them that you're not going to cut corners and...

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Yeah, we're not going to cut, you know, I'm the new guy in there to fix them. I've been the fixer in the Navy and I, you know, had a career of going to places that needed help and fixing them on the dent and the power of my great decision-making. So, so, so, and we're not going to let a little thing like the fact that we're all exhausted and it's 1:30 in the morning stop us. So, so the exercise starts and I'm standing in the control room. Most of the activity takes place back in the engine. And a couple of minutes go by and things seem to be going okay. And the officer is doing the right thing. He shifts to the backup motor, which is this electric motor, and

• 41:42Speaker 01

  he's creeping up, conserving the battery up to the surface where we'll eventually be able to get the diesel engine running and start providing a very small amount of supplementary power, but enough to get us home if we can't get the reactor fixed.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  And I really want to test my crew because I've been told over and over, they're the worst crew in the Navy. So I want to see how bad it is. So I get the idea that, hey, let's speed up, which is the way on all the older submarines, which I had served, there was, there was another speed on this motor. And I said, so hey, let's speed up on this electric motor. And the officer who'd been there over two years, gave the order just like this. And the poor sailor who's sitting, who's supposed to just turn the knob to order this thing, it's kind of his shoulders go up like this. And I'm sitting behind him. And I say, uh, hey, what's going on? He says, Captain, on this Antipas, it's a one speed motor. There is no second gear. And I have to tell you that

• 42:43Speaker 01

  that was like a hammer blow to the head because I was immediately internally focused. I looked down on my shoes. I was there to fix them. And I made this huge mistake. I mean, submarine captains know all the answers. They, this is like, what color is your car? Oh, I can't remember. It's so basic. And, um, and that's when everything got better because I said, stop the drill, officers assemble, we got to talk about this. And that's when I made the vow, never give another order.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  But you did ask your second in command, why he told, because he knew.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I look over, I look at the officer. Well, first, so I'm really inter- internally focused. I'm like thinking about myself and how this makes me look, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all about me. It's, it's the immersed, it's a classic immersed mindset. So then I hit this light bulb, boom. I actually didn't order it. I, I suggested it to the officer, who was the one actually giving the specific commands to the ship. And I said, and he, and I said, hey, do you know about this? He kind of gives me the smirk annoyingly. And he says, yes, sir, I did. I said, why did you order it? And we all know what he said, because you told me to. And it, I, the way I think about it now is when you give an order,

• 44:03Speaker 01

  When you, when you tell someone what to do, you give them a little ticket that says, "And don't bother thinking. Shut down your brain because I'm doing the thinking for the two of us." And this is the most underutilized thing in all these huge organizations. The militaries, the governments, these big companies. I'm convinced, over and over and over, having done over a thousand interactions with companies since my first book came out, is what's up here. It's the, it's the brain power of the total organization. And what you want is not to you personally be, when you're sitting near the top of one of these,

• 44:46Speaker 01

  you being twice as smart is gonna make zero difference. Getting everyone in the organization to be 1% smarter will make a huge difference. And so that's what you want to work on, over and over and over and over, in my opinion, over and over and over and over and over again. And it's a, and, and good leadership is a, is a journey towards irrelevance. Because you're gonna leave one day, and if you haven't left a good organization behind. There's a big question about Apple, in my mind, and others. Okay, what's gonna happen when Jobs died? And Tim Cook's there, now they seem to be doing pretty well. Because I was skeptical that, I said, "Yeah, I don't know about Jobs, because the way he kind of leads, it's kind of like, it's, he's, he's, he's the guy.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  He's the genius. He makes the decisions." But we now see, looks like maybe there's other people thinking at Apple, thank goodness.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a tough one. Um, history, again, I'll make a judgment there. I don't, I don't, I think Apple's a very successful company. Can't deny it. It's not an extraordinary company anymore with, without Jobs. And he's maybe one of a kind, and I'll say this about him, by the way. I remember when the book came out, Walter Isaacson's book, and a lot of people read it and told me about it. And I very quickly made a decision I wasn't going to read it. And I made that decision because it was pretty clear what people were telling me was in

• 46:23Speaker 00

  the book. It's that he was a jerk.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  And I knew that already. So I need to read a book about it, a 700-page book, or whatever it is. But I started it, and I love that book. It's a phenomenal book, because that is not what the book's about. That's what a lot of people took away from the book, because there was a certain exposure, a bearing of secrets about Jobs, many of his flaws.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, his family.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, many flaws.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Oh, we could find all these problems. Oh, you know, let's unmask the emperor.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  But the thing that I took from that book was how much people wanted to work with him, because he brought out the best in them. It's true, he was a visionary, he imposed his vision on everybody. He would say that people don't know that they need it, I'll teach them that they need it, but they'll find out that they need it, this arrogant, self-centeredness that we all look down on in a certain dimension. But he wasn't a jerk in the normal sense of the word, because people loved the right kind of person, loved who could handle it, loved working for him. And it's clear why. It's because they did great things. So he wasn't, he made decisions that are famous. Oh, the inside of the Mac

• 47:40Speaker 00

  is going to look just as good as the outside, even though no one's could ever see it, because that's going to make us a certain kind of organization. You think, well, that's expensive. I don't know, is that really worth it? And so we hear about these sort of famous decisions he made, where he imposed his will on the team. But that can't be the whole story. So I think stereotyping him as this sort of old-fashioned leader-follower guy is not the whole story.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Let me just close. I'll tell you one quick story about that. I think that's okay. Part of the genius of the human

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Species is that we have this big distribution, broad distribution from risk seekers to risk avoiding people and we need, it's that distribution that keeps the species alive. Some people got to go to the far side of the valley, go over the mountain range and they're not going to come back. But eventually someone's going to come back and the whole species is going to be better for it. I made one of those decisions on the submarine. People will read my books, they, oh, you know, they kind of got a feeling I'm a touchy feely teddy bear. That was not the case.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, anything goes. You just let them do whatever they wanted because you were the-

• 48:50Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, you know that. So I, but I worked really hard on the structure. I really worked really hard on the structure. So for example, we had this problem where, uh, this is like six months into it. Things were going really, really well. I was also getting this gut punch where a guy goes UA. We're in San, Pullen, San Diego. He crosses the brow to the pier. He says, I've had enough of this, sort of in sailor talk and, and, and has off. And-

• 49:17Speaker 00

  You say UA?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, unauthorized absence. He-

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Okay. He quits. Yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  He quit. And so I'm thinking about it and I'm talking to my guy, that his supervisors, I've got like his supervisor, media, there's a whole line of people. And it turns out the guy hadn't had any sleep for like two days. And I felt bad because I'd sort of remember seeing him all the time and, but he, there were a lot more people who were more directly responsible for making, taking care of their people. I was really not happy about this. So I personally went and found the guy who was just on base someplace in the barracks, trying to get some sleep. So none of this really made sense. And instead of punishing

• 50:04Speaker 01

  him, I, I gave him sort of a, a way out, which he took. And I came back, I said, we got a new rule. And the rule is no one can have a watch rotation cycle better than someone under them. And the way it was on the ship was people at the bottom were on watch like six on, six off, or six on, 12 off, six hours on, 12 hours off. And then as you got higher and higher, your motivation to rise in the ranks was then you became six on, 18 off. You got more and more sleep. And I said, this is not what I mean when I say, take care of your people. So here's the rule. If the watch below you was six on, six off, you're going to be six on, six off. And because everything

• 50:47Speaker 01

  is the hierarchy in the submarine, that meant the most senior guys were six on and six off. They did not like it. They would have never elected this thing. But the most amazing things happened because then they got, they filled in the ranks below. They got the right people qualified. And then pretty soon, the whole submarine was one and four, which is really unheard of. It's man for one and three. And so we're giving hundreds of hours of free time back to the sailors. And again, everyone's getting more sleep. Our study, the advancement rate went up because the sailors had more time to study.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  The thing I liked about the not giving an order is that sometimes you would know what the right thing to do was, but you'd pretend you didn't. And again, that gave the staff the ability to gather information rather than saying, oh, I don't need to do this because David will know. And also, you weren't always like shooting them down by saying, oh, yeah, I already knew that. Let me tell you what to do. So talk about that for a minute, and then we'll come back to distancing.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  So not giving an order, but there's two nuances. First of all, it's not really true. I gave orders when it came to controlling language and structure. So the way we ran a meeting, so for example, one of the things that we did was we would vote first, then discuss something. Most groups, if I say, hey, I need you to make a decision, what do you think the price of oil is going to be on December 31st, they'll discuss it, and then they may take some kind of a vote. And this is the wrong way to do it. What you want to do is let everybody vote, like, hey, write your number down. Don't talk about it because you can contaminated, write it on a card, everyone show your card. Now, step two, embrace the outlier.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  So I imposed rules on process, which resulted in the better decisions just coming up naturally. But I tried to stop. I was pretty successful. I stopped making decisions about, hey, load this torpedo.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Start to react it, shut down, do this main, whatever it is, reposition the submarine to the north. Because the process resulted in those decisions, the decision-making machine plopping out a worthy decision at the end. And the way I think about it is, go ahead.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  No, go ahead.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so one of the things I thought about was, how do I want to show up as a leader? And it's sort of a silly question, because for 20 years of my naval career, I said, well, that's obvious. I want to, I called the knowing-doing access, or knowing-telling access. I want to know the answer, of course, and I want to get my team to do it by telling them, hey, let's do it. And by doing that, I'm moving the team forward, making progress, the product's going to come out sooner, whatever.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  And so those things were linked. Because of my experience on the Santa Fe, I was, I end up transitioning through all four of those quadrants where I went to, first of all, I went to not knowing but telling, and then not knowing not telling. And, and, and it's actually not that hard if you don't know the answer, to, to not tell the team what to do. If the team comes to you with a big problem and say, well, we, you know, should we, you know, I, I don't know, should we launch this new product or invest money in this new product? And you don't really know. It's like, well, hey, like, what do you guys all think? That's not that hard. It's when you think you know.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  But I'd seen the benefit. And as, the more time I spent on the submarine, the more I learned things. And the more I was susceptible to being lured back in that knowing-telling. But I'd seen how powerful it was when I kept my mouth shut and saw what these guys thought. And for some things, I would step in and say, no, we're not going to do it that way. We're going to do it this way. And I'd give them a big lecture and just say, here's why, whatever, let's keep going. And no one, hurt no one's feelings. So, at the end, where I think you want to be as a leader, is you want to be, you want to know the answer, because you're the goalie. And then, but don't tell them. You can know the answer. You can decouple these two things in your head. Stop being so impulsive. Know the answer, but then hold it back. Even

• 55:06Speaker 01

  if you think at the end of the, and hey, go work on that for a day, come back. Even if you know tomorrow when they come back, you're going to tell them what to do. Doesn't matter. They've worked on it for a day. They've exercised their brains. And now you know what they would do without you, which is super valuable.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  So we talk a lot on the program about the virtues of saying, I don't know. But I usually talk about that when I don't know. It's even more powerful and takes more courage to say, I don't know. And you do know. And that's a beautiful example and story. I want to talk about Elle Cordova. I don't know how to pronounce her name. She's a, I don't know what she is. She's an internet person. She's famous for a dialogue between a bunch of fonts, typefaces, talking to each other. It's a clever thing. It has millions of views. But she has a much more powerful story, in my view, that you talk about. And I want to just share it with the listeners and you can comment on and expand on if you want.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  She says, imagine you have, you're having a bad day. It's a rotten day. You're on the couch, maybe you're doom scrolling through social media, or maybe you're flicking through channels on your TV, or on your, you're going between tabs on your computer. And it's just, you're in a gray mood. You're just not happy. It's just one of those days. And she suggests, fast forward. And she has a nice way of talking about it. But basically, imagine yourself decades from now, go through all the transitions. Imagine speeding up your life. You watch yourself, maybe get married, have kids, get old, get sick, lose friends, etc. And all of a sudden, you're on your deathbed. And she says, imagine there's a technology, and on the last day

• 56:48Speaker 00

  of your life, you're going to, you're going to get to experience exactly what it was like. On one single day, it's a little bit like Nozick's experience, we're sure you've talked about many times on the program, but you're gonna get one day, it's gonna be chosen at random. What if they chose today, this day when you're having this awful, laying on the couch, doom scrolling mediocrity of a day? And it's a brilliant experiment, because everybody says, well, don't waste today. What if today is the day that they come back to? What if it's the day that gets chosen? And so, go outside, she says, you know, feel the sun on your skin, go call your friends that you haven't talked to in a long time, so you can re-experience that. And what it's really saying is, live your life to create

• 57:33Speaker 00

  memories of what you might enjoy in the future, but more than that, life's finite, don't throw it away, live it to the fullest. It's a beautiful image. I'll just say for the record, I kissed my wife last night, one time more than I would have, because I thought of that story. And that's all it accomplishes, not a small thing, but I think it's a beautiful thing.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Oh, well, thanks for telling me. It reminded me of the story. It's an amazing story. You got to relive one day, and it's today. Stop moping around. There's a British neurosurgeon who's got a book out, and he's basically retired, he's in his 70s at this point, but at one point, he got cancer. And so now, he's on the other side of the medical system. And he describes, I was moping around, I was feeling bad for myself, blah, blah, blah. And then, he kind of did the same thing, but he chose the be someone else vector, where

• 58:37Speaker 01

  he said, so I'd imagine, like, if I was, if I had a friend who was in this situation, what would I tell him? Oh, your life is now more limited than you thought it was, and you're gonna spend it moping around? Like, what? You're an idiot. And so, that's how he coached himself. But again, I think that these are super powerful stories, and you just gotta, you just gotta get out of this, again, the immersed state, it's me here and now. And we know that the more, sort of that pressure of the, okay, I need to respond immediately, oh, I just was slighted, I gotta speak up, the more urgent it feels, it's probably, it's a signal that's more necessary, take a pause, jump out.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  And everything will be better. You'll be more emotionally regulated. You'll see it more clearly. That really is not that, yeah, it's not, it's not, not imaginary. It's not that this doesn't matter, but it's just not as important in the big scheme of things as your brain is trying to make it right now.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  So let's close with what you just mentioned in passing, because when I was reading the book for a while, part of the time I thought, it's a great idea. It's really interesting. It could be very useful. I can imagine many times in my life I wish I'd done this, but sometimes it's hard to remember to do it. Because it's easy to say it, "Oh yeah, just be the coach." But, but when you're under pressure and life is coming at you fast, and you talk at the end of the book, which I love, about the pause. They just mentioned it in passing. You can use that to sensitize yourself to taking a break, which gives you that tiny opportunity to think about what you're actually doing rather than just being compelled by events. So talk about that for a couple of minutes.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we spend so much time reacting. This, this exactly,

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  I always say the number one, the most important reader of the book is the author. At least that's for my books. Like I'm the one, I'm target number one. Because this exactly happened to me just the other day after I'd written this book, where I was in a conversation, I kind of got emotional and I said something and I was like, "Oh, that would have been a good time to pause and distance." It's easy to see afterwards. But here's the thing, that we know that there are certain situations where the likelihood that you'll be feel more immersed is higher and that therefore you might want to take a pause before you go into them. For example, if you're feeling, if you're, if it's a performance and you're feeling under pressure.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  And when I mean performance, I mean anything where you're going to be judged. An annual feedback session, for example, but going on stage or making a presentation could also be the same, landing an airplane where you're being evaluated to be certified in the next bigger aircraft, any, any of these kinds of things. And, and these are stressful situations. Time pressure is another one. A sense of urgency. If you've been slighted, one of the really interesting studies is

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  They had doctors walk down the hallway. They were in one room, they were going to go to the other room and give a diagnosis. And unknown to the doctors, in this little short hallway walk, some of them got bumped by someone kind of rudely.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Who, who, who, who, who did, rather than apologizing, said something like, you know, watch where you're going. So these people were, were, were bumped into and, and treated poorly on the way. Well, guess what? The ones who suffered through that made worse diagnoses. And well, that's kind of bad. You don't want, you don't want that. So if that happens to you, don't make any big decisions. Like take, take a minute, recompose yourself, meditate, whatever you need to do, and then come back to it, having forgotten that and with, with, with a fresh, calm perspective.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Because people's lives, whether you're landing an airplane, or doing surgery, or making a decision about operating a nuclear power plant, people's lives are going to matter.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  My guest today has been David Marquet. His book is Distancing. David, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Thanks, man, on the show. Thanks for your listeners.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.