Minter Dialogue with David Marquet
David Marquet, speaker and author of the best-selling Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders as well Leadership is Language. A graduate of the Annapolis Naval Academy, he became a celebrated commander of a nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Santa Fe, for a remarkable turnaround performance. He left the US Navy in 2009 and has developed a system called Intent-Based Leadership which could be summarized as “give control, create leaders.” In this conversation, we’ll hear about how to let go, galvanize your team, deal with conflicts and develop a practical purpose.
NB You will find the full transcript edited using Descript below.
Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.
To connect with Captain L. David Marquet:
- You can find David Marquet on Twitter: @ldavidmarquet
- David Marquet’s eponymous site
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TRANSCRIPT
Interview with David Marquet
Minter Dial: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Minter Dialogue. Episode number 383. Today is Sunday, the 26th of July, 2020. My name is Minter Dial and I’m your host for this podcast. This week’s interview is with David Marquet. David’s a speaker and author of the best-selling, Turn the ship around, a true story of turning followers into leaders.
[00:00:28] As well as writing the book, Leadership is Language, he was a graduate of the Annapolis Naval Academy, and became a celebrated commander of a nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Santa Fe, for a remarkable turnaround performance. He left the U S Navy in 2009 and has developed a system called intent-based leadership, which could be summarized as give control and create leaders. In this conversation with David, we’ll hear about how to let go, galvanize your team, deal with conflicts and develop a practical purpose. You’ll find all the show notes on Minterdial.com. Please consider to drop in your rating and review, and don’t forget to subscribe, to catch all the future episodes now for the show.
[00:01:14] David Marquet. Great to have you on the podcast. You are someone with very well selling books. Turn the Ship Around was obviously a huge bestseller.
[00:01:24] And the book that, of course, grabbed my attention was called Leadership is Language. Since I spent a bunch of time in leadership and was a linguistic scholar back in my day, so that’s how I initially came to you. But then, of course, the fact is that you have lived the life of being a leader, and you did it on a nuclear submarine, which brought me into a whole other area of interest because of my chance to hang out and spend a lot of time at Annapolis. And I talked to people in the Navy. So I’m really honored to have you on the show, David. In your words, how do you describe yourself?
[00:01:58] David Marquet: [00:01:58] I am a reformed “control freak.” As I always wanted to be in control. I thought that was what you’re supposed to take charge, make things happen, tell people what to do, charge forward, drive the team for it.
[00:02:15] And I was rewarded for that. And then I had this wonderful experience where I realized that was all wrong. And I had to basically rethink everything about it. And, so like most reformed whatevers, I’m a little bit overzealous about giving up control, but it’s something I practice every day and my personal life. And then with our leadership program.
[00:02:39] Minter Dial: [00:02:39] It reminds me of pilots as well because pilots tend to want to be in control of everything, check their instruments. And it’s sort of part of that need when you’re faced with machines that are doing the work with you, there’s an engineering background. I can see how wide the temptation is to be that way. I’d love for you to describe how you lost control. If you will.
[00:02:59] David Marquet: [00:02:59] So I was in the Navy. I was a submarine officer, the US Navy and. I was doing well, by telling people what to do. I was the geek in high school. I was on the math team and the chess club and the computer club. And this is way back in the seventies, heaven forbid. And so I fell now actually into the role of, I would stand back. I would analyze, I would see the problems. Okay, here’s the deal. Stop doing that, do it this way. Blah, blah, blah. And things would get slightly better and then I would leave and they would go back the way they were.
[00:03:33] And I would say, look, see you needed me and the Navy basically agreed with that approach. They kept promoting me and they said, Oh, you’re going to be a submarine commander. Oh, that’s great. And for 12 months, the way it works in the U S is for 12 months, you go to school to learn everything about that submarine, because you’re going to be the one giving all the orders.
[00:03:54] So you needed to know all the answers and the two weeks to go, I got shifted to a different ship, a different kind of submarine. And I walk on board and it’s this Alice in Wonderland moment where everything looks different. I don’t want to over dramatize it cause the physics were the same, but everything’s different now.
[00:04:13] I don’t know the answers, but I still, I know by the way it was the worst performing ship in the fleet. They had a worst morale and the worst performance. That’s why I went there was because the captain quit a year early, so they didn’t have anyone trained upstairs that in my head. Don’t go there, go to this new ship.
[00:04:30] And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is the end of my life because how am I going to, but these old habits die hard. I still try to give orders. It couldn’t. The officers would would order it anyway even if it didn’t make sense on this kind of submarine. And I saw the power and the ineffectiveness of the structure of people telling people what to do.
[00:04:54] And it hit me that we swim in a world where we take for granted that telling other people what to do is the right thing to do as leaders. And we have words, leaders, followers, management, workers, salary worker, hourly worker, white collar, blue collar. We don’t even question that structure. And I was like, why do we have that structure?
[00:05:15] We have the same thing. We have white collar, blue collar in the Navy. College-educated people tell not-college-educated people, what to do. These are obviously gross generalizations, but this is basically the idea. I said, so when I gave an order and the officers were trying to do it, even though it doesn’t make any sense, and I saw the pernicious power of this, do what you’re told it. It hit me that we don’t need to actually operate this way. And so we just started talking differently and the idea was rather than me leaning into the team and telling them what to do all the time, I actually leaned back. It was very uncomfortable. And the day they would come to me and say, Captain, what should we do here? And I was like, what are you guys think? Wait, what would you do if I weren’t here?
[00:06:02] Minter Dial: [00:06:02] And at that moment, did they not say to say, you’re weak! Wait, he’s not telling me what to do.
[00:06:08] David Marquet: [00:06:08] No, we talked about it. They may have been thinking that. And I don’t know. I’m sure some people were, because I did not look like the movie caricature of a submarine commander at that moment.
[00:06:21] Minter Dial: [00:06:21] The fist pounding…
[00:06:22] David Marquet: [00:06:22] Yeah, exactly. Here. We’re going to do this and Oh, by the way, I’m always right.
[00:06:28] Minter Dial: [00:06:28] Of course. Yes, sir.
[00:06:30] David Marquet: [00:06:30] Because they, first of all, they knew they were in the worst performing submarine with the worst morale. No one liked it there. They were all focused on “make sure you don’t make any mistakes.” It was. So that was…
[00:06:41] Minter Dial: [00:06:41] Cover your ass.
[00:06:43] David Marquet: [00:06:43] Exactly, which biases everyone towards not doing anything. And they were witness to this event where I’d say, Hey, why don’t we shift into second gear? But it was only a one gear motor.
[00:06:53] And the officer ordered it, said, so like the problem isn’t I gave a bad order. The problem is I’m the one giving the orders here. It says I don’t have the tactical knowledge on the ship. I shouldn’t be the one giving the orders. You guys need to tell me what to do. Now I reserved veto. So I can stop you and say explain it, but the thing was, and I never talked about empowerment. I just said, just tell them to say, just tell me what you intend to do. Now through practice, it felt like empowerment. It felt like power, but I don’t like, I don’t like that word because it’s polluted in my mind.
[00:07:30] Minter Dial: [00:07:30] And so at that point, you’ve got them starting to think. At what point did they start not coming to you with the question? cause what I used to like to say was don’t come to me with a question, come to me with a solution. Another form of that maybe?
[00:07:43] David Marquet: [00:07:43] Yeah, almost immediate. I mean it depends some of the guys almost didn’t meet immediately. The meeting ended and five minutes later, the engineer comes to my cabin. Here’s the situation. Here’s what I intend to do. Great. Here’s the situation. Here’s what I intend to do. And in the past they might say, here’s the situation. I request permission to do this. So in a way, it really wasn’t huge that they were bringing solutions, but they didn’t truly own the solution. And in general, I felt like I was putting energy into the system. I was exhausted at the end of the day. And I was like, I got to run around, tell everyone what to do. It’s all on me now. And then I have to check on everybody. And when we finally got this thing going, I felt like I was the receiver of it. Energy came to me cause all day long with my team, I was having a hard time keeping up. They’d be like the engineer would say, Hey, this is the weapons officer and the operations. They were all, they’re all coming to me. And I was like, Whoa. And it was awesome. Cause there was this, the problem is we coach….
[00:08:50] We say, we want ownership. We say, you want people to act like entrepreneurs or whatever. Intrepreneurs whatever word we use. We want people at risk and embracing and the right way. But then we steal that. We steal, we poached the ownership. How do we do that? When someone, when I go down to your desk mentor and I say, Hey mentor, give me an update on project ABC.
[00:09:12] Guess who owns that project? I just stole your ownership. When you come to me and say, Hey, David, here’s what’s here’s, what’s going on with project ABC. Here’s the situation. Here’s what we’re going to do about it. You own the project, but if I’m always coming down to your desk, you have no opportunity to come in and down and tell me.
[00:09:30] So I got to lean back and wait and cross my arms. Even if it pops into my head, what’s going on with project ABC?
[00:09:37] Minter Dial: [00:09:37] And during that time, you, so now you’re leaning back.
[00:09:42] David Marquet: [00:09:42] Yeah.
[00:09:43] Minter Dial: [00:09:43] What did that materially mean for you? And does that allow you to do a whole raft of other things that allowed you then to start leveraging up at a different level?
[00:09:53] David Marquet: [00:09:53] Yeah. So it was weird how I couldn’t have predicted this, so I would lean back. So first of all was very difficult because my instinct was every time I leaned, every time my team came to me and said, Oh, what should we do? And I didn’t tell them what to do. I felt, it felt like I was doing the wrong thing because we were, there was like this delay. Cause I would say, what do you guys think? And sometimes it wasn’t a lot. I would just say, go. Sit here for 30 seconds. And then we use our very short period. Now tell me what you would do if I weren’t here. And that’s all, it was even that 30 seconds was very difficult, but what happened for me was, so one of the things you have to do as a submarine commander and a good submarine crew is you’re basically doing pattern matching.
[00:10:42] You have all these patterns, you have the patterns from sonar or the listening . Patterns from what you’re seeing at the periscope, you have patterns from the satellite messages that you’re receiving, the intelligence data from what your might think the enemy’s doing and sort out what, and they’re deliberately trying to fake you out. They are deliberately trying to make you think they’re South when they’re really North. So you’re trying to sift through all this. So what happens is I’d be sitting in the control room, I’d be looking over at the Sonar and then because I wasn’t in the weeds to try to tell everyone what to do, it would hit me. Hey, I think this and this, that could be the same thing, this thing that we’re seeing out there, and this thing that we’re hearing. Maybe that’s means blah, blah, blah. And I would vocalize that. I wouldn’t be sure. So I had to express a vulnerability and say, guys, I think there’s a possibility that we got this wrong and then they would look at it and they’d go, Oh my God, captain, you were genius.
[00:11:47] How’d you figure that out? I don’t know. I don’t have anything else to do. And then sometimes they would feel bad, I didn’t see it. It’s yeah, but that’s not your job. Like you’re running the ship, you’re running the nuclear reactor, you’re in charge of the computer room.
[00:12:02] And so that frees a different level of people like me and the second in command, like we can just now we can put these patterns together and it made us much better because when we got it wrong, we would correct.
[00:12:13] Minter Dial: [00:12:13] One of the areas that I think is always interesting is thinking about how this comes to home to roost, if you will. So you’ve allowed to lean back your team at the, in the submarine are able to deal by themselves. You come home and you also need to shift there. How did that go down? And I’m thinking about with kids and this notion, because I know as a father, my temptation is, son, you need to do this and, or my wife comes through with a problem and I want to fix it, but actually don’t want to fix it. Just want to talk about it, that kind of stuff. So how did that go down? Tell me.
[00:12:48] David Marquet: [00:12:48] How old your son now?
[00:12:49] Minter Dial: [00:12:49] He’s 23.
[00:12:50] David Marquet: [00:12:50] Okay.
[00:12:51] Minter Dial: [00:12:51] My daughter is 21.
[00:12:52] David Marquet: [00:12:52] So yeah. So perfect. So yeah, when you start, when you, when your son’s two, you have to tell to some degree what to do when they’re five and they’re riding in the car, you have to tell them, put on their seatbelt because they don’t know what a car accident is.
[00:13:13] They don’t know how their body can be maimed. So we started telling people what to do you do, but by 23, hopefully there internalize it. And they’re telling you what they’re, we’re planning on doing for the life. And so there’s this graduated, you said you’re backing off gradually. So you back off of the seatbelt and then they put the seatbelt on there.
[00:13:35] Then you back then, that’s the next decision title? how late can I stay out? Where can I go? What kind of friends who I hang out with? What am I, what classes am I going to take? Where am I. that kind of thing. And so there’s this graduated leaning back. Yeah. I picture a light switch. Which is the wrong metaphor.
[00:13:56] It’s much more like a dimmer. It’s I just grab, because if it’s a light switch, like no, you decide that’s too much. Yeah. So you lean back though. So let’s say your kids 15 and they say, I want to stay out overnight. This is a new behavior. And you could say yes, or you could say, no, what I would recommend is something like, okay, let’s try that.
[00:14:21] Let’s do it like, so for a month you can control your own weekends. I’d like to know what you’re doing, but I’m not going to control it. And then at the end of the month, we’ll talk about it and we’ll see how to work for you. How to work for me, back in the thing. So you run a short experiment and then you reflect upon it.
[00:14:39] Minter Dial: [00:14:39] When you’re working at the, doing this work at this, at the Santa Fe, I was wondering how you fed this back to Annapolis or at least to the Navy and to what extent they embedded, those types of thinking into their instruction and into their philosophy. Because as I know a little bit about Annapolis and I certainly. I would think that there’s still a command and control phenomenon in the military in general, but how did that conversation go? What have you seen in terms of their changes in the past or the near term?
[00:15:13] David Marquet: [00:15:13] So on the positive side, if you go on any submarine, now you’ll hear these words.
[00:15:19] “Hey, I intend to…”, the submarine force basically operates this way now.
[00:15:23] Minter Dial: [00:15:23] The idea of intention based leadership and touching base activities, this is what I intend to do.
[00:15:29] David Marquet: [00:15:29] Stating what you intend to do and making someone stop you as opposed to stating what you would like permission to do and making someone give you permission. So there’s a much more of a bias for action and ownership in this environment. And they put Turn the Ship Around on the Navy’s reading list. On the other side. three years later I left the Santa Fe. We had set records, like the highest score in the history of the Navy for on inspections, for how to operate the summary and keeping people in the Navy.
[00:16:04] 0.0 people came to me and said, Oh, Hey, this is interesting. How did you do that? And it bothered me a little bit. Number one. I wasn’t sure I could have explained it at the time because I was so much in it and it felt very messy and chaotic. We would just try things. But I interviewed a bunch of people, including my boss and here’s what I think happens. There’s a para there’s a paradigm that bad leaders give bad orders, good leaders give good orders. And so when they see the summary and improve it, now I’m out at sea, they don’t see it. We would invite visitors and we had inspectors and they would see it, but, Oh, Mark Hayes, just out there giving some brilliant orders.
[00:16:50] He learned the ship and he’s just giving brilliant orders. Their brain doesn’t go to: Oh my gosh. They figured out how not to give orders and how to have the crew and the officers tell him what to do. That’s too far. So they’re just projecting what they know about leadership. And they already know the answer. There’s a lot like why ask? Because they already know the answer. And so that’s what I got. I had this very weird meeting in Annapolis because some, one of the admirals said, Annapolis is the naval academy where we teach young men and women leadership
[00:17:24] How to be Naval officers. And they said, you need to hear about this thing. So I fly there and I get invited into his meeting and there are three people with PhDs across the table. For me, they’re all sitting on that side of the table and I’m sitting on this side of the table and they’re all sitting there with their arms falls and they say, how can we help you? Oh, I thought I was going to help you, but they already knew everything cause they had PhDs. So there was really no helping them.
[00:17:53] Minter Dial: [00:17:53] Know it alls! In the transfer that you’ve done, you were now talking in business and. how, give me some ideas as to how that movement of losing, stepping, leaning back. Cause it was very funny. We got the whole movement of leaning in, with, the Facebook lady wasn’t him. But how does that translate into business? and tell me maybe what. Doesn’t work, it’s because philosophically yeah, I read the book. I get it. Oh yeah. How does it not work? And maybe also give an example of how it does go down in a business environment. Yeah.
[00:18:31] David Marquet: [00:18:31] Let’s talk about how it does work it, so the operations officer for a franchise of 20 McDonald’s, is in the old pattern. She goes to visit half the stores every day, sees problems, tells the store manager what to do. Goes on to the next door. The next day she has to visit those half the stores to check to see that they’re doing it and visit the other half of the stores to tell them what they need to do. And she’s stressed.
[00:19:03] She’s overeating. She’s pre-diabetic, she’s unhealthy. Yeah. And so it’s just craziness. And so we flipped the whole thing. So now she goes to one of the stores. Sits down and has a coffee, looks at her phone. She’s receiving text messages from all the 20 store managers. Hey, here’s how it’s going. Here’s what I’m doing about it.
[00:19:22] You want to come by and help us out. Great. But if I don’t, I’m not relying on you. I’m like I’m, this is what we’re going to do. And, then she picks one. She drives there. It’s leisurely. Oh, Hey, come on and is friendly. She’s viewed as being helpful. She lost 50 pounds. She lost 50 pounds in one year and she’s no longer prediabetic.
[00:19:42] She has more energy to spend with her family. Yeah. That kind of thing. We had to call center to major bank where they were losing; this is dismal work. These are the people you talk to when you can’t get your password to work and your, you can’t figure out their fault what the interest rate is on your loan or whatever. And, they’re also the lowest people in the highest social hierarchy at the bank. you have that. The financial piece wizards and the coders and blah, blah, blah. Then you have, they were losing three people a month. They weren’t happy. And they had these scripts that they had to follow when you called them and you sense this when you call.
[00:20:21] and, the person in charge said, okay, we’re going to throw out all these scripts. Don’t worry about the time. Cause they had to meet certain production quotas. I don’t care how long you spend. I want you to solve the problem. And then they started doing that, which required. It wasn’t as easy as just solve the problem in saying the word they had to actually learn some stuff.
[00:20:39] They had to learn what tools they had available, but their turnover went from three to zero. In six months they lost zero people. Which is 18 people who didn’t hate their jobs so much that they said I have to leave. They saved money of course, bercause there weren’t more people that had to hire and train, the average level of competence in the group went up.
[00:21:08] And for 10 days in a row, they only got it they only receive tens on that net promoter scores from their customers. And this is one of the top us banks. So they’re receiving many hundreds of phone calls and there’s yeah, the burden went up because they were spending more time, but because they were actually solving the problem and the problem behind the problem, the total call volume and went down and then the Oooooh coders who are like, they’re making three or four times as much money as these people said, Hey, what’s going on over there? Can you guys tell us about our, like what do you get called on most and that kind of stuff. So they had the first ever intra-department meeting with them and they’re like, Hey, I got a lot of people ’cause they just want to know what the interest rate is on their mortgage. Oh, that’s easy. You just click here and then you click there and then you go down there and you go out and they’re like, can we just make it a big, signed the top of the page so they don’t have to go click click click.
[00:22:08] Minter Dial: [00:22:08] So how much is ego the issue in this? cause I, when you say coders, I’m going to go bias male. When you say call centers, I’m going to go by us female and hierarchy being that way. Still unfortunately, captains of submarines. I’m sure they’re not. Many women who are captains of nuclear submarines yet?
[00:22:30] David Marquet: [00:22:30] Not yet, but there are, there are
[00:22:32] Minter Dial: [00:22:32] Good. Oh. and thankfully, so I know that there’s a lot of movement on that, but it just makes me think of ego and men in general, the mensch kind of approach and letting go of that.
[00:22:43] David Marquet: [00:22:43] Yeah, I think ego preservation gets in the way it’s not, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as just saying, people with big egos can’t be good leaders because they’re gonna run around and be in charge and tell people what to do. I think there’s some natural wiring that makes you want to feel important and valued in the world. And one of the ways that you think you do that in a short term is by moving the team forward.
[00:23:10] so 99% of these people are not evil people. I’m not like, so you take this guy like Winterkorn who was running Volkswagen when they had the deal. Is he an evil person? I’m not sure. I’d like to think not. How about the people running Boeing, where they push 737 Max software out the result of two airplane crashes and 347 people die.
[00:23:38] Probably not evil people, but they were playing a gam e, where they thought they were doing the right thing. I’m sure they went home and told their spouses there. They thought they were doing the right thing. The problem is the tools we have are wrong. So it’s not like we have a map for London, but we’re driving around New York city.
[00:24:01] So the problem isn’t drive better using your map is we need different maps. We need a different map for leadership. And don’t be better at telling people what to do. This is what most leadership programs are. That’s why they’re dismal. Never forgot to tell people what to do.
[00:24:18] Minter Dial: [00:24:18] Exactly. As you say in your book, subtitle is what you don’t say. Sometimes there’s so many questions I have for you. I have one last one for you, David, and that is, around purpose. So I’ve always thought that purpose is the deepest well of energy. You mentioned before several times, this notion of being depleted of energy and, there’s the taxing element of leadership. There’s the responsibility can be pressing heavily on your head. And then all of a sudden you mentioned how energy came back to you. I’ve always thought that the area where you can get the biggest amount of energy is by feeling a sense of purpose, which at a smaller level as being a sense of usefulness, a sense of meaningfulness, but the bigger level is doing something for other people. I was wondering just if we can go back to the Navy a second, to what extent purpose was part of your mojo. And is that something that you feel is relevant as well in business?
[00:25:19] David Marquet: [00:25:19] Yeah. I’m not sure why, but the picture in my head was I had two things to deliver. One was combat effectiveness, which was the, our primary product. So to speak the summary, when they said get underway on the 11th of July, we got underway on the 11th of July. We didn’t say, Oh, we’re broke. We can’t, whatever. So I had to do that. Number two, though, was delivering back to the Navy, effective thinking, more effective- thinking officers, which wouldn’t have happened if I just told people what to do, but then deeper than that, and the reason for that wasn’t for the Navy, it was for the people because I wanted these people that I spending. It’s a very intense experience. You go for six months and you leave home and you’re just in this too, and you’re never more than a few feet apart. And you know these people intimately, we eat together, we shower, you bump into each other in the hallway and I wanted them to have better lives and they did we.
[00:26:27] And so the reason I wrote the book is because over the next 10 years, 10 of the officers. send me notes. And finally the 10th one said, Hey, I’m now a submarine commander. I never thought I would be. Thanks to you. You thought you taught me how to think like a submarine commander, even when I was a junior officer at it.
[00:26:45] And that to me sustains me now. And I think it’s an issue of short and long term. Every day, your instincts, our bodies are not wired. Our brain wiring is biased towards let’s survive out, running the lion right now. I don’t need to worry about it a retirement plan, 50 years in the future. Like your brain is not wired to do those calculations, because we didn’t care; you probably weren’t gonna live that long. But for me, when I think about like, where do I want to be at the end of my life, I do a mental game where I say, imagine you got an email from God who said, yeah, today’s your last day you had a good run. What would you be thinking about?
[00:27:36] What would you think your contribution was? What would you value? What would you cherish and what would you think? Ah, God, that was bullshit. Waste of time. Why did I do that for me? it’s the people whose lives are better because somehow you, you were on the planet and that gives me solace. I hopefully, if I get, once I get to that point, I’ll be able to go peacefully because I’ll know that some… cause at the end of the day, it’s over for you.
[00:28:08] Minter Dial: [00:28:08] Let’s say you contributed. Yeah. Dostoevsky was given a 24 hour sentence, before the end of his death. And this, one of the reasons why I really appreciated his writing, which was reprieved at the last minute. But for those who’ve ever faced that 24 hour moment, or at least, really looked death in the eye, it does have a way of putting things into perspective. And the other thing I was going to comment on is that oftentimes companies mistakenly — and I have to imagine the military also think — that the purpose is to defeat the enemy. and that, you can rally around people. If you have an enemy to kill whether it was the cold war, the Russians, or today, maybe the Chinese or whomever, and then that’s the rallying force and ra-ra-ra behind that. But that’s the sort of, I feel like that’s such a much more depleted approach, a negative approach as opposed to an inspiring contributive approach. And so what I marvel about what you said is that your rallying cry was about contributing to these people’s lives. Cause that’s not just a new submarine officer. That’s a whole family and in a whole network of people that can believe that they can do that.
[00:29:18] David Marquet: [00:29:18] Look, you don’t want to defeat the enemy. You want to go to combat. You don’t want to kill people, like that. I never wanted to kill anybody. I hope to hell I never had to kill anybody, but by being ready, I, we like the theory is if we’re ready and the Chinese know, if they try to invade Taiwan that the United States Navy will sink all their ships and that it won’t work, that they want to bait Taiwan and you won’t have to.
[00:29:48] That’s the theory. And I believed in that but no one wants to, you don’t want to like no ones. The studies show soldiers are motivated, not for God and country, not to defeat the enemy, but to take care of the guy in a foxhole like that. and that’s the idea.
[00:30:12] Minter Dial: [00:30:12] Beautiful David. I hope that people listening have got some inspiration, some ideas that they can bring directly into their lives and make things happen. A pleasure to have you on the show, sir, David, thanks a lot. And look forward to staying in touch and keep reading and keep writing and contributing to the world.
[00:30:32] David Marquet: [00:30:32] Thanks Minter. And congratulations on your book. How about your father and the Annapolis ring. Really an amazing story.
[00:30:42] Minter Dial: [00:30:42] Thanks for having listened to this recording of the Minter Dialogue show. You’ll find the show notes and other blog posts on Minterdial.com. If you enjoyed the show, please head over to iTunes to give a rating and review and to finish, here’s a song I wrote with Stephanie Singer, A Convinced Man.
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