EconTalk · Russ Roberts

Learning to Think Like Someone Else (with David Marquet)

August 11, 2025·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

Andy Grove asked Gordon Moore what new leaders would do, instantly unlocking Intel's shift to microprocessors.

Russ Roberts speaks with David Marquet, whose previous book Turn the Ship Around documented how he transformed the worst-performing submarine in the U.S. Navy by refusing to give orders and instead building what he calls a leader-leader organization. His new book, Distancing, co-authored with psychologist Michael Gillespie, focuses on cognitive reframing as a decision-making tool. The episode opens with the Grove-Moore story: Intel's founders spent a year deadlocked over whether to exit memory chips for microprocessors. Their breakthrough came when Grove asked Moore what a replacement CEO would do — instantly Moore said shift to microprocessors, and they recognized they should simply walk out of the building and come back in as those replacements. Marquet frames this as a classic failure of identity capture, where accumulated past decisions lock leaders into a self-concept that filters out obvious responses. Roberts connects this to Kodak, Blockbuster, and other companies destroyed by the same trap. Marquet describes three dimensions of distancing: becoming someone else (a coach, a board member, a future self), moving somewhere else (the balcony view, the fly on the wall), and being some time else (Bezos at eighty looking back at the Amazon decision). He explains that Bezos's boss gave entirely rational advice against leaving Wall Street, but Bezos reframed the question from probability-of-failure to regret-at-eighty — shifting from the practical self with its competing obligations to the ideal self focused on core values. Marquet shares his own submarine example: he took over the Santa Fe having been trained for a different vessel, gave an order to speed up on the electric motor, and was told by a junior sailor there was no second gear on that motor. He describes the moment as clarifying — it showed him that command cultures built on telling people what to do produce compliance without thinking, and that his own identity as a fixer had made him exactly the problem he was sent to solve. The episode discusses how NFL referee teams use mandatory self-review of game footage as a form of distancing, and how Yitzhak Perlman used his wife as an external observer. Marquet contrasts leader-follower industrial-age English, where questions function as micro-coercions toward predetermined answers, with genuinely open conversation. Roberts draws the analogy to the socialist calculation debate and market prices as a mechanism for aggregating dispersed information without centralizing it. The episode closes on how modern organizational failures — Boeing 737 Max, Deepwater Horizon, Wells Fargo — share the same pattern: people who knew something was wrong but felt their job was to comply.

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