The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions by L. David Marquet, Michael A. Gillespie

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions by L. David Marquet, Michael A. Gillespie https://www.amazon.com/Distancing-Leaders-Reframe-Better-Decisions/dp/0593713109 Distance gives you perspective. Bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around! former US Navy Captain David Marquet and professor of psychology Michael Gillespie show you how to make better decisions by becoming your own coach. Be yourself. Be fully present. Be in the moment. This is a message we hear constantly. While this may be beneficial some of the time, the biggest obstacle to making wiser decisions that actually drive lasting success is ourselves. Being fully immersed in our own limited point of view biases our decisions toward defending our previous actions and maintaining our self-image. We need to exit our me-here-and-now self and get an outside perspective that sees us and the situation we are in objectively. We need a coach. This book shows us how to become our own coach by using a mental technique called psychological distancing. We do this in three ways: self-distancing, spatial distancing, and temporal distancing. First, we can be someone else, inhabiting another’s perspective. This activates the neutral observer’s outside point of view. Second, we can be somewhere else. We zoom out and see ourselves from afar, as just another person who is part of a larger context. Third, we can be sometime else, imagining that we are our future selves who are thinking back to what we wish we had done today. In each case, we can coach ourselves from this distanced perspective. The result is a powerful and immediate reframe of how we see ourselves, our situation, and what we should do. Featuring compelling scientific research, business cases, and exercises, Distancing equips us with effective practical tools to reduce anxiety, see more clearly, and make better decisions for ourselves and for our organizations.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Cause you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster

with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. You know, there's the only thing that makes official over the 16 years, 2400 episodes of Chris Voss I think we're almost to the 2500, we're getting there. Anyway guys, be sure to refer the show to your family, friends and relatives. We want to build the show out. We need more listeners because after 16 years, we can never get enough. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Facebook.com,

Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1, the Tiktokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Today we have amazing two young men on the show with us today. We're going to be talking about their book that is coming out August 12th, 2025. Are we in August already? I'm still in February. The book is entitled, that's not the title of the book by the way, the book is entitled, Distancing. How great leaders refrain to make better decisions. L. David Marquette joins us on the show and Michael A. Gillespie, both authors on the book. We're going to get into it with them and all that good stuff. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

How are you? Great, great. Thanks for having us on the show. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. So give us dot coms for each of you or both of you, whichever you have it set up on where people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, for me, davidmarquet.com,

D-A-V-A-D-M-I-R-Q-U-E-T.com, and I'm on LinkedIn. I say yes to any connection. Basically, I trust first. So it's L on LinkedIn, I'm L, David Marquet, and L is, Loo, stands for Lewis. There you go. So give us, I'll give each of you a shot at this as we go through the questions and

stuff to give a response. So I'll let one of you take it first here. Give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside the new book? All right. I guess I'm jumping in. So this is, this is Mike. I didn't know if David's hand jive was for me or for him. So I'm going.

So the big picture of this book wanted to help people make better decisions. I'm an organizational psychology professor. I want to help make the world a better place, help make people help people's work lives be better. And this is a powerful way that we can help people do that. And I was a submarine commander and I accidentally stumbled on this because I really wanted to get my guys to make decisions and tell me what they thought rather than me telling them what to do.

Cause we know it happens when people just do what they're told. And so I ended up accidentally asking questions like, well, what would you do if you were me or whatever, if you could talk to your six months in the future self, what would they tell you to do today? And it was like, nothing changed. They were just, the words coming out of their mouths were just smarter, better. And so I ended up, now it's been a while, over 20 years,

but I'm now finally getting to understand why that is. I've paired up with Mike, and Mike's bringing the science, and this is really a superpower for making better decisions, because we just, empowering people to make decisions is only half the story. We actually want them to make good decisions. Oh, yo, good decisions?

What? What kind of unique stuff is that? So I don't see that on Twitter at all every day. A lot of bad decisions. Or on TikTok for that matter. How do you define distancing? This sounds like maybe something where you set boundaries or something like, or maybe just explains why I never returned from getting milk with the family. So that sounds like it sounds like a gaming

term we use in gaming. Yeah, your dad left clearly and never came back with the milk. What is distancing? What does that mean? I'll give you both of you guys a shot at it. I'll just go real simple and then see what David wants to add if that's okay. So it's getting out of your own head and we just get stuck in our own head. That's our default. How do we get out of our own head? And it helps us make better decisions. Yeah. So you live your life. Most people live their life as if they're the quarterback of their life.

Like I'm in it. I'm making decisions. I got my team. I got my assets. I got my skills. I got my knowledge. I've got my connections. I'm calling plays. I get hit by the other side, I get hit by reality.

And it feels very personal. Experience the world on a first person shooter basis. That's the immersed self, is our default self. We don't even realize we're in it, but there's a choice. You don't need to be in that way. And for certain periods, certain critical times, for example, when you need to make a decision or when something traumatic has happened or you get cut off in traffic and you want to explode, distancing is what you want to be. You want to be the coach sitting on the sideline. You're on the bleachers, you're looking down,

you're dispatching, you see the quarterback get sacked and you're like, Oh, that's gonna hurt, but you didn't feel it. And all of a sudden, your brain goes, Okay, what's gonna happen next? And oh, by the way, when the coach looks at the field, he sees a whole bunch of players, 22 players, you're just one of them. Where's there get, you know, you see the sweat and the guy right opposite you, it just feels very personal. So what happens is

when we live our life that way, that accumulated baggage of us being us has this huge distorting effect on how we see reality, because our brains are going to want to say, Oh, yeah, you're a good person. What you decided, you know, your decision last year to start a company, your decision last month to double down on microprocessors, whatever it is, was correct. Even when evidence starts to show up that it wasn't, your brain's going to convince you it's correct. And then number two, it's going to convince you that what you're seeing is actually the truth. It's not by the brain. That's how people get those rose colored glasses. They like to call it maybe. Yeah.

And how companies like Kodak get stuck in the old, they don't change. Blockbuster doesn't change. Blackberry. Yeah. And like we all on your listeners know all the stories and, but it's happening to them too in their lives. Yeah. Typically stay in something longer than you should in the face of evidence that hey might not be working on you need to make an adjustment Sounds like my first love marriages

It's a callback joke on the show we change the number every time the I just explained that joke every time so that people Otherwise people come up to me go. how many times have you been married? The joke is zero. That's why it's funny. That is not funny. I just throw out different ones that people come up to me and they'll be like, what? Anyway, so you guys, so is the ego kind of the issue here trying to get outside of the ego? I know as you talk about that in the book.

here trying to get outside of the ego. I noticed you talk about that in the book. Mike. All right. Yeah. So, sure. Yeah. So, we set out to try to figure out how do we get people to shed these biases that we naturally have. And these biases are, they're made worse when, as we colloquially think about it, when our ego is involved, that's where we see people do the most horrible things, tragic decisions. And so we're thinking, how do we help people shed this? And there's lots of great practices

that people can devote their lives to, to trying to let go of their so-called ego and really be a better person. And those are all great, but they take a really long time. And so sure, yes, do yoga, do meditation, whatever it is that you wanna do, but what if you have to make a decision now and you haven't been practicing any of these things?

It's not gonna help you right away. And so even for those people who have been devoting their whole lives to shutting the ego in whatever form they have, everybody can benefit from this concept of distancing. There's strong psychological research. The term is psychological distance. So we're wanting psychological distance from ourselves basically. And so we have all of these biases that work against us

making good or rational decisions. They're the accumulation of our life experience as David was talking about. And so we actually started going down the path of how do we help people eliminate ego? How do we help people shut all these biases? But it ends up being like a whack a mole game. Like you hit one bias, another one pops up and you can't you

just can't keep up with all of them. And even even David Kahneman, who's researched this stuff for decades, he came to the conclusion that after all of this, he's not that much better at correcting these own biases in his own head. So what is it that we do do? So what we came across is this idea, a lot of science and based on this is stop trying to address the biases directly. The bias training doesn't even work that well. So what you do is you employ psychological distancing. It gets you out of your own head. You be someone else, somewhere else, or some time else, these basic mental tricks that we can do. And then now you're

no longer that same person that has all these accumulated biases, but you have the wisdom and the benefit of the knowledge base that you can bring to bear on the situation, but you're no longer attached to it. So you can see it more clearly and you can make better decisions. Oh, you know what I do to, to, to get this and seeing as I just got a restraining order against my ego, you want to jump in here? We're going to steal that quote. This that's what this is. So because you're not you anymore, I'll give you an example.

You give us, you give a speech, you come off stage, someone says, hey, can I give you some feedback? Well, when I first started speaking, I was like, yeah, sure, help me out. Now, 15 years later, I'm like, no, that's what my brain is thinking. But then I say, oh, yeah, what I say is, David loves feedback. Like I personally, even though I try to train myself to like feedback, I my ego doesn't like feedback, but David loves feedback. So what I do just by making that little mental that just linguistic change, I'm not not talking about me anymore.

And so when the person says, Oh, yeah, they may still say, well, you, but you, you, you know, you went on too long about this or, you know, that was confusing. I was like, oh, well, David will, uh, you know, incorporate it. You know, David will think about that. And it's like, it's okay. It's fine. There's no stinging it because I'm not even talking about me anymore. Oh, well, who's David then? If you're not talking about you, you're not talking about your ego, right?

Yeah, I'm talking about David, the speaker. Yeah, well, who's David then? If you're not talking about you, you're not talking about your ego, right? Yeah. I'm talking about David, the speaker. Yeah. That, that other guy. And, and you can do this in your journal studies that show that if you journal and you say, Hey, I had a bad day, I had a good day. I had this issue. I'm worried about that. that you just feel more pressure, like that's just a little bit more emotional for you than if you write, David had a good day,

David had a bad day, David's thinking about doing the following thing, Chris is thinking about this, Mike's thinking about that, and even again, that just little linguistic tweak now, it's like, oh, now I can just see reality a little more clearly. It's not information, you just see clearly what you did before. Pete Yeah.

You know, I've talked about this before on the show and probably in my book, Beacon's Leadership, the, being able to try and get outside yourself. I think some people refer to them as Katomas or blind spots. And whenever I was working on a new idea or some new innovation, I would go to my employees and I learned very early on. I smacked a lot of home runs early on and then somehow on and then somehow I started striking out and I realized that I wasn't the purveyor even though my title was CEO. I wasn't the purveyor of all the great ideas in the world. So I needed feedback, any of my employees. A lot of times as CEO you can get isolated.

It's kind of the same thing that happens to a president in the White House. You become isolated from what's on the ground and you kind of end up in a bubble and you're surrounded by yes men going, oh, whatever you do, you got a boss is great. Exactly. Yeah. And you can really fall into that ego trap with that kind of worship. And so being able to, I'd sit down with my employees and my staff and I'd be like, what am I missing here?

What am I not seeing? Why is this a bad idea? What are the things in the room? You know, I think I've told the story of the one board member, my last CEO I worked with had where he was the negative Nancy of the board, right? Everything, any idea that the board talked about or came up with, he was the negative Nancy of the board, right? Everything, any idea that the board talked about or came up with, he was the one who, well, it's gonna go to hell in a handbasket.

You know, this guy's a falling guy. And I said to my CEO one time ago, hey man, why do you keep that guy on the board, man? He's annoying as hell. He's always, and he goes, yeah, he's wrong a lot. He goes, but Chris, when he's right and everybody else is wrong, but they're telling you they're right,

he has the answer you're looking for. And so he goes, you always, don't ever surround yourself with the husband. You always wanna have people that will tell you the truth. And he goes, that guy, he goes, he's the guy who sets the straight there. And he was wrong a lot of times, but when that guy was right,

he was the canary in the coal mine, basically. I don't know if you guys wanna throw any thoughts onto that. Yeah, we need to send him over to Boeing, be on a Boeing board. This is exactly what they fell into. I was like, all this, do this, this, this. And then we blame, oh, well, no one told me.

Well, yeah, we didn't run the meetings in the way it showed any kind of interest. And in hearing those, and we know now, of course, the test pilots were saying the thing was wacko in the simulator, but we didn't want to hear that. But there's an interesting study about, you're talking about CEOs, and what you're saying is exactly true,

and there's studies that show CEOs effectiveness peaks after 10 to 20 years. I don't know, Mike, you probably have more details on this, but it's exactly because of what you say. And they basically get convinced that they're right in their worldview is right. And when the world changes, they're still stuck in that. And then so that outweighs the learning that they continue to do. And then they end up going off. So you need to get that second. And again, there are all these biases, there's actually one bias all

these human but they'll come boys down to one thing which is you are you you view the world from you and you carry that accumulated weight of you being you with you and that basically almost every bias you can trace back to this fundamental situation Wow yeah Michael Eis you know, maybe he ruled Disney for a long time and then, and then somehow got off the game. I think it might be an example. The there's probably lots of different high end CEO examples of this. It's kind of interesting. I think CEOs only last like what an average of three years in their positions.

Yeah, that's about right. I mean, maybe why because after a while they kind of, they become their own thing. I mean, maybe why? Because after a while, they become their own thing. I mean, some guys are good at it. You look at the, who replaced Michael Eisner, Bob Iger, I think of Disney. I have a lot of respect for him and stuff. I think, I think maybe he also had, you know, the groundswell on his back for a lot of different things, you know, trying to return to Disney and clean up whatever. And of course, the markets have changed or the world has changed, I think, politically, especially for Disney.

But those are some examples, probably, of some guys who went long. Let's do your bios. Normally, with two people, I have you guys do your own bios. Give the audience a little bit of background on both you guys, on your upbringing, what influenced you, what prompted you to get together and write this book. Mike, if you want to lead off? Sure, yeah. So, you know, I mentioned earlier on, I'm an organizational psychologist.

I'm an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida. And funnily enough, I actually went there for my undergrad, so it's kind of fun to be able to come back and work for the university. But I set out in school to, I wanted to be able to help people. I wanted to be able to, I wanted to develop a knowledge base that I could use to then help people.

And I considered clinical psychology, but there were things I didn't really love about the idea of being a clinical psychologist. And then I stumbled in this idea that if I was an organizational psychologist, you know, people spend about two thirds of their waking hours at work, roughly. And so if I can help people make those two thirds of their of their lives better than man, that's a huge impact that I can make. And it gives me a chance to work with people, individual people, but also organizations and help organizations to be more effective. So this got me interested into, you know, how to select people, how to train people, organizational culture and leadership.

And I did some work for an organizational culture and leadership consulting firm that ended up getting published and getting some recognition. And that showed up on David's doorstep in the form of a Wall Street Journal article. And it turns out that we're kind of neighbors, I mean, in the grand scheme of things. And so that gave us a chance to work together a bit. The partnership has been awesome for me because David is, he has the practical knowledge, know-how and experience and the record to back it up.

And he makes a great simple point. I'm an academic, it all depends, it's all complicated and let me sort it all through it. This kind of been, you know, the ebb and flow of writing the book together here. And so it's been a lot of fun though. And like I mentioned before, the, the, the ebb and flow of writing the book together here. And so it's been, it's been a lot of fun though. And like I mentioned before, the thing I'm really excited about is these are some of the most practical tools I've come across that can actually help people make

their lives better. And the thing I really like about it as it's relevant to everyday people. And it's also relevant to companies and CEOs and leaders. Mark, you want to jump or David, you want to jump in here? Yeah. So my story is, uh, I was a geeky kid growing up during the cold war and went home one day and said, mom, instead of being a scientist like that is I want to go join the military scary.

Yeah. But if you're a geek, I said, bombs, okay, I read about these things called submarines, they hide from people. Oh, and she said, Okay, so I went down, I went to the, I went, I ended up being in a submarine force and got did really well and strength of my math, you know, my math team brain and knowing the right answer and getting people to do what I wanted them to. And, uh, they made me a submarine commander and we won the cold war and, um, Thanks dude. I really appreciate you taking care of that single-handedly. Yeah, no, no.

We, we, I became commander. We won the cold war. I say it together like they're linked. Um, but my experience are very interesting because I got sent to a submarine that wasn't trained for and then I, and I had always been a fan of quote empowerment and getting the team to think, but now my life depended on it. And yeah, another line needed the guys on the submarine to say, not what they thought I wanted them to say,

but what they actually thought. So I learned a bunch of tricks, including this thing, and then I wrote a book about it. And so anyway, so I was reading the Wall Street Journal one day, and our shop was set up down in Sarasota, Florida. And I said, oh, these guys in the US, these guys are neighbors. So I called them up and said, hey, Mike, I need you to find all the science that proves that everything I'm saying is true.

Mike's like, that's not how science works. Come on down anyway. And so we started a partnership. And we went on from there. But it's been really great. I would, I wrote a couple of books by myself, three books as my fourth book. I'm never writing another book by myself. It's just too, I mean, Chris, you written a book too. So it's hard. Yeah, it's a lot of, it's not, you know, it's,

well, it was hard at the beginning and then it got easier, but a lot of it was easy for me. Cause it was a lot of it was just repeating my stupid stories over 35 years, which is cool because I can't remember anymore. I'm just like, I don't know, go read them there in the book. I forgot. But you know, I'd been honing those stories over all the years telling them. But the editing part, that's the fun part.

The editing. Yeah. I like it when they take like 50,000 words you wrote and they throw it away and they go, yeah, these two lines are good. Yeah That's well that's what that's what Mike and I were doing with each other Yeah, we had a rule that you could just delete the other guy's stuff without asking Then you get all this drama and all this kind of Person if it's versus really wet to it, it tells read it and they'll wait

to an item, they'll put it back in. It's like a Wikipedia page. So that's kind of extreme version of distancing. Just delete the stuff. Yeah. You know what? Actually we used some of the techniques in the book to delete about a third of the book because we had this whole other part that we really loved

that was about, it's the process, there's the journey, not the destination, this, that, and the other, and what's the purpose. And it was really fun stuff, but we're looking at it and trying to make it fit. And we had a conversation, David, I don't know if you maybe remember the details more than I do, but basically we decided that if somebody else

were advising us on this book, they would just say, cut that third of the book. Yeah. And so that's, that's what we did. There you go. Focused there. Keep it focused. You know, you practice what you preach as they might say, but yeah, it's, you know, a lot of people have this trouble getting out of their own ego and, and being able to,

you know, see their own bullshit. And like I said, I used to spend a lot of time just trying to see what was wrong to see outside of myself. Cause I realized, like I said, I'm not the purveyor of all the greatest ideas. And sometimes that one thing that you're missing,'s Katoma point that you you can't see you know, you're And sometimes, you know, you've sometimes fallen the trap that you convince yourself that I am the person who who knows everything And or on this I think I know this is the way sometimes you're really excited to you get emotionally connected to yeah The idea and you're like, I'm really excited to, you get emotionally connected to the idea. And you're like, I'm really excited. This is a great idea. You see the innovations you can take

and invoke, but then you're like, then you find out that, yeah, maybe, maybe I don't know what's, what's up. Now in the book, there was one thing, let me pull this up. So I have an, I'm flipping around here. It's different data. There's one thing you talk about how to become your own coach. So you might make some, a lot of people angry who come on the show, who sell coaching. What's this about becoming your own coach? You're gonna put some people out of business. Talk to us about that portion of the book, part two.

Wanna go ahead, David? Yeah, sure. So the idea of becoming your own coach is you're in a situation and you don't really know what to do about it. And it could be big, could be small. Hey, what kind of a workout do I need this week? Or it could be should I retire and move to France?

And what you want to do is think about that not from the perspective of you. Because when you about that not from the perspective of you. Because when you think about it from the perspective of you, you've got all this accumulated baggage, all these decisions you made in the past, all your self image of what kind of person you are, that's all going to weigh on your, on it. And your brain's going to distort your decision making calculus based on that. And you won't know it's doing it. You'll think it's true. So what you do is you step out and you say, okay, Hey David, in this And you won't know what's doing it. You'll think it's true.

So what you do is you step out and you say, okay, hey David, in this situation, and now you become your coach, you still know your true value. You still know what's really important to you. But from that perspective of the coach, you're not as hung up on the fact that, oh, I'm the smart guy and I need to oh, I'm the smart guy, and I need to

prove that I'm the smart guy day in and day out, or I'm the whatever person or I'm the talent or whatever, whatever it is, or I made that decision last year that the company should go in this direction, therefore must be right. And then you say, okay, what should David do? You, you, you issue the coaches instructions. Now you go back. You don't live as coach for a long time. It might only be for a minute or two,

but it helps you just like the blinders drop to see clearly. Then you go back to being you and you do what coach tells you. And now you're doing it for coach, you're not doing it for you. So there's actually more likelihood that you're going to fill your workout for the week because you're doing it for you. So there's actually more likelihood that you're going to fill your workout for the week because you're doing it for another person. You have this accountability person even though it's an imaginary avatar of yourself. It still works. And the likelihood is that you're going to do your workout more fulfilling than if you just say, well, this

is just me. I'm just going to work out on my own I decided this I know do I use that conversation when I talk to other people because I mean they might not get schizophrenic or crazy. Yeah Yeah, that get a little weird pretty fast. Yeah. Yeah, we Yeah, we're really careful about this Mike on you get there's also some examples we use in the book But it's almost all people talking to themselves. It's weird when it's a public thing. The king and the queen can kind of do it, but if you're not there. I don't know that I want to do this on like a date when I go on a date. No, not recommended. But before the date, before, yeah, that recommended, but, but before the date before, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like, there's a, there's a Seinfeld episode on Jimmy and Jimmy always talks about himself in the third person and Jimmy does this, Jimmy likes this. Jimmy, no, no, we were not advocating for a bunch of Jimmy's in the world. Um, this is kind of like a personal self reflective thing. Yeah. It's like, when is Chris always talking to the third person? I mean, it's bad enough. I have the multiple personalities. So there's, you know, 11 multiple personalities, you know, they're all talking, arguing with themselves already. They're always arguing with the one

person I use says kill, kill, kill all the time. I can't use that one anymore. So yeah, it's a legal thing. I get one of my six ankle bracelets off next week or my personality does not me. Anyway. Chris gets his ankle bracelet. Well, we call the kill, kill, kill guy, Bob. It's always fucking Bob. Yeah.

So yeah, he says that could, you know, so basically you think this in your head, you don't annunciate it to anybody or else you might end up in a rubber room with a straight jacket. Sometimes you just have to take a pause. You just need to be like, normalize calling a pause and taking a timeout, and then you can kind of sort through it on your own and then come back in. We have examples from this in the book too. I think David,

you're going to say something, I think. Well, I was going to say, sometimes you do vocalize it. We have a story in the book where Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, who founded Intel, were in trouble 15 years after they founded it. And Andy says to Gordon Moore, hey, what if we got fired and they brought in new people to run the company? The problem was they made memory chips which were being pressurized and Intel actually posted a loss in the early 80s for the first time, but they had this little tiny product, a microprocessor, and they're like, should we throw everything into the microprocessor? They had to bet the whole future of the company, and even though ostensibly like the evidence was clear,

the futures in microprocessor for you that plays in the company's strengths, it's a complicated product, you're engineering prowess, on and on and on. But for a year they couldn't decide. So, I mean, that's an example where it's sort of done at a team level. If the team's doing a, for example, a retrospective,

instead of saying, well, let's talk about how we could have done better. Last week, when we did our built this product, say, imagine another team on the other side of the planet, physical distance in the future is doing what what we just did, what would we want them to have learned from our experience? Now you're not talking about you anymore. Now you're talking about the boneheaded thing that you did. Now it's like, okay, oh yeah, they should do this, they should do this, they should do this. It drops the ego and see these, there's this very simple mental manipulations which make these everyday things

way more effective and you learn faster and you get better faster. Well that's the thing they do learn get better faster. Who doesn't like that? Yeah who doesn't like that and like I said you know you know it's we live in a strange world where a lot of people overestimate themselves uh Magalia we see this as social media you know I'm a social media brand and you're just like, no, you're just another Instagram influencer really. And as you know, who knows what it will be next week. But you know, you see a lot of that as they do it.

So interesting stuff. This is I've always been looking for ways to get people out of their ego. You know, I grew up in a cult and so I've always studied people on why they believe things and why they stick with those beliefs. And they can't get outside of themselves. A lot of times they build that whole sort of layered onion around themselves. They adopt one belief and they just keep, there's that reticulating activating system in the brain that keep, you know, there's that reticulating activating system in the brain that, you know, anytime it sees, you know, like if you buy a red Porsche, you know, that you suddenly see all the red Porsches in the road, your brain is, oh, you're so, you're so smart.

Look, there's other people that also bought red Porsches. What a brilliant person you are. You clearly the greatest decision you could ever make in your life. And it's perfect. You know, it has that sort of ego What you call it calling way to just self reinforce our own Yeah, and and then and then other people outside of us like what the fuck is he doing? Which is kind of what the job of wife I think

What are you doing? Anyway, uh the job of a wife, I think. What are you doing? Anyway, uh, just jokes, people. Anyway, as we go out, folks, uh, give us your final thoughts, both you and David and Mike, uh, give us your final thoughts. We'll start with Mike and a pitch out to order up the book and dot coms where people can find you on the interwebs. All right. Yeah. So I have, um, I have a simple challenge or exercise for your readers if they want to try this on a

little bit. I don't know how many people journal. I like to journal. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But try journaling. And then notice how you're journaling. You're probably using a first person speech. So then try it again and use third person. So mike's trying to decide blah blah blah

He is trying to blah blah blah he did or he felt blah blah blah blah flip it into the third person And just see how that feels mentally just try that on and see what happens. I'd be curious if anybody gets a chance to report back Uh, so give us your dot coms too as we go up mike Oh, uh, you know, i'm on I'm on LinkedIn, I'm searchable, Michael Gillespie, USF. I have some domains I bought but I don't remember them right now. Mike the businessman. David just here with your final pitch out please. David, just here with your final pitch out, please. Yeah.

Um, again, David Marquet, M-A-R-Q-U-E-T, DavidMarquet.com and talk about the books on there and, uh, look, I've been using this, this I'm 65 years old. I've read a lot of crappy books about leadership and this magic pill and that other thing and all this is gonna change your life and here's the lottery ticket. And so you get to the point where like, what could be new? What could be interesting? I wish I knew about this when I was 15.

This is magic. It is a superpower. It happens instantly. Anyone can do it. If you bring your brain with you, you can do it. And I've used it. I've improved my relationship with my parents. I've made smarter decisions in business. I'm living a bigger, better life because of it. And this is the real deal. This is the superpower. And I just, people use it it great business leaders they use it and

you're missing out if you don't use it. It's books called distancing and it's the next big thing. I totally agree I've always been trying to figure out ways to do it. I'm gonna I think maybe I talk to myself sometimes I'll have to start listening myself. Yeah. You know you bring up a good point why journaling is so important because journaling can kind of give you that third person aspect of what you're doing kind of in a way. Absolutely. And what I have what I have found is that if I can't be bothered to try using the third person to figure something out, if that is just feels like too much effort and darn it, I just want what I want. I want oh man I'm getting ready to really screw up bad it's a warning flag it's a

warning flag that's right that's because it doesn't take much effort and that you really see it more clearly definitely definitely well gentlemen thank you for coming the show we really appreciate you guys coming on and sharing your ideas and wares as it were thank you you very much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. And thanks David. Thanks for tuning in. Check out the book where refined books are sold.

You can order up today, pre-order it as it were. It's out August 12th, 2025. It is called, Distancing, How Great Leaders Refrain to Make Better Decisions. Boy, we sure need a lot of the better decisions for leaders these days. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris

Foss one on the tick tockety and Facebook.com Fortress, Chris Foss. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have a