Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. The ancient Greeks believe the human soul had three parts, reason, appetite, and something called thumos. Thumos is difficult to translate into English. It encompasses anger, no spiritedness, pride, ambition, a sense of honor, and the drive to act. The Greeks thought it was essential to living a life of manly virtue, and my guest thinks we could use a lot more of it. His name is Mike LeBlanc. He’s a decorated Marine, a Harvard Business School grad, a tech founder, and the author of What If Anger is the Answer? Today on the show, Mike and I discuss how the angry energy of thumos can help you close the gap between who you are and who you should be. We discuss why physical training helps cultivate thumos, how it can be an aid in overcoming appetites, overthinking, passivity, and cynicism, and the role it can play in being an effective leader.
After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/thumos. All right, Michael LeBlanc, welcome to the show.
Mike LeBlanc:
Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay:
So you’ve got a new book coming out called What If Anger is the Answer? And it’s all about one of my favorite concepts from the ancient Greeks. It’s thumos. Before we get into it, let’s talk a bit about your background because one, it’s interesting, and two, I think it will provide some context for your interest in thumos.
Mike LeBlanc:
Well, my background, my formative years were really in the Marine Corps. And so that consisted mostly of 12 months in Afghanistan and then six months around the Middle East when ISIS had come and taken over Iraq and Syria. And I was a bit of a strange fit for the Marine Corps because I didn’t come from a military family. I had never shot a gun before. I didn’t know anything about the ranks. I didn’t know the difference between officer and enlisted and really had ended up just putting my phone number into marines.com, a kind of scary way to get into the whole thing. But through that process, I think that the reasons that I’d gone into it were for wanting to put myself up against the hardest things that I could find. It was about becoming a certain worth that I thought that I could deserve.
And throughout the course of my time in the Marines, I think I learned a lot about that. And that really, to me, felt like a dissertation in thumos.
Brett McKay:
Also, your education background’s interesting. Didn’t you go to St. John’s? You did the great books.
Mike LeBlanc:
Yes. So right before that, I mean, that was kind of the way I’d grown up in Ohio and I only applied to one school, St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. And there you learn to translate ancient Greek, you read all of the great books. And so I was spending my days with Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides and you really start to take on that world. No one’s allowed to have a TV at the school. So you really just start to live in what are ancient Greek principles. And it was through that, that I really started to see young people my age, they went to war, young men went to war. That was what they did. And I started realizing, well, there was a war going on at the time, the war in Iraq. And I was thinking, why did I think that I was exempt from this?
What made me so special is not to have to go to this. That was really what started popping those questions into my head.
Brett McKay:
Alright. So the great books led you to join the Marines?
Mike LeBlanc:
Yeah, it doesn’t do that for a lot and it surprised my parents quite a bit.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And what did you do after the Marines?
Mike LeBlanc:
So after the Marines, that was direct into. Well, I had met my wife and I had deployed while we were together, but she was very clear that it wanted me to get out if we were going to get married. And so I knew that I was going to get married and start a family. Today, we’re 11 years married with three kids, seven, eight and nine years old. But at that time, getting out of the Marine Corps, I really had trouble finding any kind of job. There was no one that would really hire me. I was trying to make $60,000 a year. That was my entire goal in life was to get that and just couldn’t seem to find it. And so through some lucky interactions, ended up realizing that going back to school was my best bet, and I worked very hard at the GMAT and then went to Harvard Business School.
Brett McKay:
All right. And then now you run a company today?
Mike LeBlanc:
Yes. Yeah. So I’ve founded two robotics companies since then. And so my current company is called Foundation Future Industries. We make humanoid robots, so like robots in the shapes of humans that we sell into wars. We sell to the Department of Defense.
Brett McKay:
You make Terminators.
Mike LeBlanc:
That’s right. Yes. It’s a Terminator Company.
Brett McKay:
All right. So I can see your interest in thumos because you learned about it reading the great books and then that inspired you to join the Marine Corps. And thumos, as we’ll see, is a warrior emotion, a warrior drive for the ancient Greeks. What’s interesting about this book though, you don’t go right into talking about Thumos. You start off with a letter to your son, Michael, and it’s all about what it means to be a man. First, why start the book off with that? And then what did you tell your son in that letter?
Mike LeBlanc:
It was interesting. For a long time, I had written this book a long time back and I would wake up in the morning at 5:00 AM and we had little kids, only my son at the time. And I would wake up at 5:00 AM and I had until 8:00 AM until I had to get to work. So I had three hours to work on the book. And it became a kind of meditation about what was it that I had learned about thumos? When I joined the Marine Corps, I think that I had a rudimentary understanding of what I was up to. I knew that everyone at the time had been telling me it was good to be sensitive. It was good for me to be nice to the people around me. It was good for me to find middle ground with people and to compromise.
I had heard a lot of that and then I was reading in the great books and thinking, no, that’s actually not the path to virtue. That’s a path to a slow descent. And so I took this time to really try to think through what was it that I did? Was that right? And what did I learn about it along the way? And during that time, I really just would think about having my son, Michael, Mike Jr. just sit across the table from me. And so I wrote the whole book in a way that I thought he would understand it when he was 20 years old. And I hoped that I was in the Marine Corps for 13 years. I was hoping to condense that experience in a way that you could read it in about four hours and understand the same deep things that I did, or at least introduce the frameworks for people to start thinking about them.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. That was interesting in your letter, you talk about how in the 21st century in the United States and in the West, to be a man means, like you said, be sensitive, be compromising, don’t lose your temper. But as you read the ancient Greeks, and we’ll talk about this, they believed in prudence and not going overboard with your anger, but they actually believed anger was an essential part of the soul, particularly a male soul. Being able to experience anger was important. And you bring in this idea of the role anger played in the Greek world with one of Socrates’ metaphors for the soul. He has two of them. The most popular one, the most well-known one is the one from, I think it’s the Republic, the chariot. But you referenced this one that’s in the Gorgius. So tell us about this metaphor of the soul and the role anger plays in it.
Mike LeBlanc:
So it was interesting to me that no matter who you look at that is talking about the soul, they always break it into parts. Any serious look at the soul breaks it into parts. And a kind of classic one is you see it in all of the old cartoons. It’s an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. And I think we all know this experience of having an angel on one shoulder and devil on the other. It’s when you’re in Vegas and your friends are like, “Let’s go out to the next club.” And you have the angel that goes, “I think it’s probably time to turn in. Nothing good is going to happen. It’s midnight.” And then you have this devilish part of you that goes like, “Let’s just throw all of our money on black and let’s see where the night takes us.” Everybody knows that kind of back and forth, whether it’s about eating a piece of candy or taking revenge on somebody that they know.
Everybody kind of knows those two. And so Socrates had some version of those. He had the little man of the mind. So he said that your mind is like a little man and it is rational and it thinks about what it should do and what it shouldn’t do. And it makes generally good decisions. And then you have your desires, which are like a hydra. So he considered this a many-headed beast and that beast could just completely take us over, so just completely give us in two desires. And so as he’s first talking about it, those are just the two parts. And he says, “Maybe that makes up the whole of the soul.” But there enters this third part, and it was a part that I didn’t really understand until I had left the infantry officer course in the Marine Corps. So the infantry officer course is a place where you don’t sleep, you don’t eat, right?
It’s very hard for 10 weeks. And so when I got done with that 10 weeks, I got my first night in a hotel room right after that. I was beginning a new course in intelligence and this was going to be a gentleman’s course. So I thought, all right, I earned it.You’re always giving yourself excuses for these things. And so I went and I bought every food you could imagine. I bought Wendy’s, I got the Philly cheese steak at Subway, I got Cheetos, I got ice cream. I got all of this junk food and my favorite of all junk foods, which is peanut butter. And I sat in the hotel room and at first I’m eating and my desires have been locked up for 10 weeks and now I’m eating subway, eating Wendy’s and I’m going, “I deserve this. The hydra’s been locked up in a cage.
I’m going to let it out.” And the rational part of me, the Little Man of the Mind is just like, “This is great. I have that.” And then I start digging into the Cheetos and things and Little Man of Mind goes, “You know what? Go crazy. What’s it going to do? It’s a cheap day. It’s one day. No big deal. We’ll get right over this.” But I just kept eating and kept binging. And so by the time I got to the peanut butter, I started with just a spoon and eating peanut butter directly out and thinking, “Oh, this is great.” But pretty soon I’m in one of those big Jif jars and I’m halfway through and now the little man of the mind’s getting concerned and going, “Oh man, I can’t be sitting here eating this huge tub of peanut butter.” You’re like, “How many calories is this?” And the hydra is just screaming back, “Screw you.
You’ve locked me up for 10 weeks. I don’t care.” And I’m just digging through this thing. And the little man of the mind is thinking, “Can you even eat a full tub of peanut butter? Am I going to have to go to the hospital? What happens if you eat this much? This seems like some kind of weird YouTube challenge and the hydra just keeps blowing on through.” And so that battle keeps going back and forth kind of between the angel and the devil or as Socrates would have it, the little man of the mind and the hydra. And finally, I get so angry with myself. I’d finished all the peanut butter and I was about to turn toward more junk food and I was so angry at what I was doing and this whole argument that I made myself put on my running shoes. I had some ice cream left.
I had a gallon of ice cream. I just unloaded the whole gallon of ice cream into the toilet, flushed it down because I couldn’t trust myself near it. And this is at midnight before this course, and I went out running and I ran 10 miles and I just forced myself. I mean, I felt so sick, so exhausted, so tired. And so I ran 10 miles, got back at somewhere around 2:00 AM. And by 6:00 AM, I was at my course. And now everybody at the course though, oh man, LeBlanc had some fun last night. They pictured me out with spring break or who knows what they pictured, but they were like, “This guy really came in and had a good time.” And no, it was actually, I was shame eating peanut butter in my hotel room alone. And that to me was where I really saw what Socrates was talking about with this third part.
The third part was the part that got angry with myself. It was the part that was so fed up with not living up to what I thought that I was worth of not living up to my dignity and that forced myself to become something better. And that was the clearest example that I had of this third part of the soul.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. It’s thumos. And what was the symbol or what did Socrates use to describe thumos?
Mike LeBlanc:
When he describes it, he actually describes thumos as a lion. And so that had always been a mystery to me. Before that experience, I’d always look and I’d think, okay, there’s a little man in the mind. There’s something right about that. There’s a way in which your mind, your conscience is kind of like, it’s like a CPA. It’s like you just picture him with glasses and just shaking his finger at you and the hydro was a good fit that you go, yeah, that’s definitely how the desires feel. They’re just monstrous and every time you try to cut off one head too grow in their place, that makes good sense. But I couldn’t make sense when I used to read it of why thumos, this anger, would be a lion, why it would be a noble creature, why it would be something that you would aspire to, something that is a great strength like that.
It seemed like it was just another monster head. And so that experience of getting angry with myself, that was the clearest that I started to see. Oh, that’s why it’s the lion, because it’s the part that demands that you’re going to be better than you are.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I’m sure everyone has experienced that in their own lives. Maybe they want to change somehow. They want to break some habit, but until that point where they just get fed up with themselves, nothing really ever happens. You just had to reach that point where it’s like, “I’m acting like a piece of crap. I am not a piece of crap. I’m going to go do something about this.”
Mike LeBlanc:
Yes. And that to me, that’s what I had to do when I was in college in the first place. You really do just have this part of you that everyone is willing to let you just sink into mediocrity like it’s a warm bubble bath. There’s this invitation of the world to, you don’t want to be toxic, you don’t want to be too aggressive, you don’t want to be too assertive, and you just shut up and just be polite to everybody, which generally is good, right? I’m not getting on manners at all, but it leaves you in this case where you’re thinking, “Am I who I’m trying to be? Am I living the life that I’m trying to live?” And for so many people, and I think it’s almost like weeds in a garden, they kind of grow back over time. It always comes back a little.
You have to keep shaking yourself out of that and going, “Is this what I meant to do? Is this who I want to be? Are my habits reflecting who I think that I am?”
Brett McKay:
Well, let’s dig into thumos a little bit more because it’s a really complex concept because there’s an anger part of it and it’s sort of a righteous anger. It’s an anger that’s connected with honor and your sense of self and status. There’s also anger in protecting those you love and care for. So if someone’s messing, crossing a boundary that they shouldn’t, thumos would be the, “Hey, back off. These are the people I love.” But there’s more to it than that. What are some other attributes of thumos that the Greeks thought it entailed?
Mike LeBlanc:
It’s really interesting because as you start to learn about this, it pops up all throughout philosophy. So from the ancient Greeks all forward, and it’s just called by a lot of different names. So I mean, this is like Machiavelli talks about the desire for glory or you have Rousseau talks about. You have all of these different realizations of it, but the main idea is that we do have some worth or some dignity that is worth protecting and that the primary mode of anger is to be angry at people that are not treating us like we have that dignity or to be angry at ourselves for not living up to the dignity that we have. That’s where the word indignation literally comes from. Dignity is your self-worth and then indignation is when somebody offends that sense of worth. So when we live up to it, we call it pride and when we fall short of it, we get very angry with ourselves and we feel a sense of shame.
But that’s the big thing to me that thumos really unlocks is shame is a tool. I used to look at shame and think it was something that if you’re feeling ashamed, think about it, talk to friends about it and they’ll tell you, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Everybody does that.” There are ways that you can kind of brow it out to just make it feel okay. But no, shame is a signal. It’s like a check engine light. And when you’re feeling angry, when you’re feeling indignant, when you’re feeling angry at somebody else for not treating you with enough worth, that should all be telling you, I should be doing something about this, not necessarily the things that you’re thinking about, which may be punching somebody in the face or whatever, but you should be taking some form of action. That’s the reason that you get angry at these things.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Well, speaking of action, thumos is also associated with action. It’s not just something you feel or think. It spurs you to action. It’s very action oriented. What’s interesting about thumos, we’ve written an article about it a long time ago on the website. There’s also an element of evaluation or discernment or decision making. There’s a part, I think in the Odyssey where Odysseus says that he sort of reasons with his, or he ponders evils in his thumos. So it’s when he’s about to take over the suitors and he’s feeling this indignation because they’re just mooching off his household. And so he kind of thinks with this thumos, “What do I got to do to take these guys out?”
Mike LeBlanc:
Yeah. Well, and that’s what Socrates recognizes. So this is kind of the general rule of three in politics is if you have two, they can work as an alliance until they disagree and then it’s going to be one-on-one. But when you have three, and I know this from having three kids, every disagreement is going to sort itself into two against one. And so the soul works that way, right? If you have this little man of the mind, if you have the hydra of your desires and this lion, the heart that is thumos, you have these three parts that need to play together. And Socrates is saying you’ve got those three in one body and they’ve got to come up with one action. So they’re constantly voting on what your actions are going to be between these three. And so the lion, he says, can become a great ally of reason because if you just put a little man against a hydra, the little man loses every time.
If you just go walk around a mall, you’ll see just how quickly people have let the little man be overrun. People have always given into their desires. That’s why obesity is such a big problem in the US because it’s very easy to just keep eating. I know that. That one still gets me. But when you have this third part, you all of a sudden could have the lion and the little man and the little man has a fighting chance against the hydra. And so to Socrates, what it looks like to live a good life and to have a well-ordered soul is to get the lion coupled with reason instead of having the lion coupled with the hydra, because there are way too many times that we get, “I’ve worked too hard. I get to eat this. No, I’m eating my food. Leave me alone.” Or, “No, I’m taking time off.
I’m watching TV.” Whatever it is, whatever sin we’re indulging in, we’re happy to use the lion to defend it. But that’s where Socrates says when you can couple it with the little man and actually have it in line with reason, that’s when you can get the strongest life.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I mean, another example of coupling thumos, the lion with the little man, this idea of people crossing your boundaries, maybe actual physical violence, maybe they’re threatening you physically or it’s an employee who’s maybe stealing from the company. The 21st century guy would be like, “Well, just use little man reasoning. We can talk about this. We’re reasonable people and we can talk this through.” Socrates would be like, “Well, that’s probably not going to get you very far because this guy who’s overstepping this boundary, he’s just going to take advantage of you.” You need to bring in that lion-like thumos along with the little man to. You got to have a little passion there and be like, “Hey, this is wrong. I’m angry. I’m upset about it, and this is not going to happen anymore.”
Mike LeBlanc:
It was so interesting. When I was in fifth grade, I had a mouth on me and I would mess with everybody. And one day before school, there was this kid sitting on his bike and he had every bike accessory known to man. He had not just a water bottle holder, but he had little gloves that he wore with the cutoff fingers. He had Oakley glasses on. He just had all this stuff. And so I’m sitting there making fun of this kid in front of everybody. And this guy, instead of just taking it, like I’d been used to people doing it, he just without warning, just winds up and just punches me in the face and knocks me to the ground.
I’m just laying there on the ground and thinking, “Okay, well, there’s a boundary. That’s what it feels like to cross a boundary.” And one of my friends goes and punches him back in the face, and the two of them get suspended and the principal pulls me aside. We’re all sitting there. I’m bleeding from my mouth and the other kid’s bleeding and they’re both getting suspended. The principal comes and tells me, “You did the right thing. You didn’t do anything. He punched you and you didn’t get back up. That was the right thing. We shouldn’t be fighting.” I though, “Okay, good.” So I go back to my class and every other kid, especially all of the girls in school are all like, “What happened to Chris, my friend, who punched him?” I realized there was this disparity between what the teachers and the principal talked about as me being the bigger man and kind of being above the violence and the just basic human instinct to stand behind my friend who had stood up for his friend and who had put himself in danger to do it and knocked the other guy down.
So I was just ashamed. Everybody would come up and go, “Why weren’t you suspended?
I don’t get it. So why did the other two guys go, but you’re just allowed here and I have ice on my mouth and everything.” But that was an early lesson for me that there is just kind of this split between how we think of these things. Boundaries, we get taught when somebody’s overstepping boundaries to pull people aside for mediation and that it’s something to talk about. And I’m not saying that it needs to be a punch in the face every time, but that should be kind of the basic response is saying, “No, you step on a boundary. You talk about my wife, you talk about my kids, you do something to my family.” It isn’t a let’s have PTA meeting about it. It’s, “You better stay the hell back.”
Brett McKay:
Yeah. But what’s interesting, you have to have that thumos with the little man. You can’t just have only thumos because the ancients, that can lead you down some bad paths. Were there negatives that they saw of leaning too much on that lion-like thumos?
Mike LeBlanc:
Yeah. I think anybody that’s watched Jerry Springer has seen the negative sides of it, right? What you end up with is the biggest problem is that we have so many people that are saying, “You’ve treated me lower than I’m worth,” and they get very indignant, but they don’t live up to their own standards. So when you’re out there and you don’t act, when you don’t take care of your business, you don’t take care of your money, you don’t work and do something productive, you don’t take care of your kids, you don’t defend boundaries properly, then you’re just kicking the ocean. You’re throwing tantrums all the time. I think a lot of the anger that we have seen that gets highly publicized, especially over the past 10, 15 years, is really just tantrums that older people recognize. These young people, they haven’t done things to deserve the level of this high standard that they seem to be defending.
And that’s why I think a lot of people get back to this principle of you need to take care of, get your own house in order before you go and criticize the world, because we do have an America that is filled with people that are just getting angry about things and not fixing their own life, right? Why come yelling about our economy or come yelling about the system or the man or all these things when you don’t have your own house in order? And so I think the Greeks were very sensitive to that of recognizing anger is not always good. It’s not always bad, but like any of the virtues, it is the middle between this kind of being too cowardly and shy and being too angry and violent overly so.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. You need the little man to kind of figure that out. One of the other interesting things about thumos is that the Greeks associated it with the physical body. Specifically, they said you kind of resided in your chest. It was in your breath. thumos sounds like your breath, thumos in your blood kind of made you hot blooded. In your experience, is thumos something that has to be awakened physically?
Mike LeBlanc:
It was such an interesting thing to me because I had this sense. I’d play baseball. I’d always played sports and stuff through being a kid and through high school. But when I got to college, I had this sense that I was going to leave that all behind and I thought I don’t need to do any of that. I can be so smart. The idea was to have this big brain and learn so much that I would do everything with my mind. I was shocked when one of my professors, Mr. Page, was the one that was really pushing me to recognize that shame was a tool. He was my ancient Greek professor and started to open up what virtue really looked like for me. He told me one time I said, “Oh, well, I’m going to keep working out, but it’s only to push myself mentally.
I just want to make sure that I’m mentally tough.” And he was very clear that he said, “No, you should be doing it to get strong and in shape and to look good.” He’s like, “Those are all very important things too.” I was shocked when he had told me that, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve recognized it’s all part of the same thing. It’s not enough to just be, in principle, pushing yourself to do hard things. I mean, you could lock yourself in a kennel for two days, that would be hard, but it wouldn’t get you stronger. Maybe it would make you mentally stronger, but it’s not doing anything for your muscles. No, actually getting out there and pushing yourself to run, to march, to lift heavy things, to fight. Plato is a wrestler, Socrates is a soldier, all of these guys, they were very much doing this with their bodies.
And I think it’s one of those things that once you actually get into lifting and once you get into fitness, it’s just right on the face of it. You can see why that awakens the thumos in you, why on a day that you get a workout, you’re more ready to go into work. And to me, if I’m being indecisive or just kind of mushy in my thinking, the first thing that I do is force myself to go do a very hard workout because I know it’s going to clean up the mind just like that.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. People forget that about the ancient Greek philosophers. You said Plato was a wrestler. Where they went to discuss philosophy was the gymnasium and they not only discussed philosophy, but they were working out while they were there.
Mike LeBlanc:
Yeah. And it’s exactly right that it would happen. I mean, once I was in the Marines, I saw this all over the place, that you really would have these incredible leaders that I’d think, how did these guys do it without philosophy? I’m sitting there thinking about how the Greeks have gotten me into this and I’m thinking about Aristotle and Socrates, and that’s kind of how I view the world. But I have these other guys around me that have no interest in any of those things, but they are so decisive and they’re living up to the virtues better than I am. And I realize a huge part of that is they are pushing themselves in the gym. They are pushing themselves to lift more, to run faster, to do more pull-ups. And it’s just a huge part of pushing each other, pushing yourself, and how that matches with manly virtue.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So they were training the lion.
Mike LeBlanc:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right.
Brett McKay:
I’m a big proponent of all people, girls, but particularly young men, I want them active doing some sort of sport or an activity where they get physical. One of the things I just hate is you see these young men who just don’t have any sort of vitality. They don’t have any thumos and they kind of go through life anesthetized and there’s really no there there. And I’m like, “Bro, you need to get doing something. Start playing ultimate Frisbee at least, or let’s go lift weights.” So I think that could be a starting point to developing this thumos that can help you develop these other more noble virtues after that.
Mike LeBlanc:
It’s interesting too with the body. I always have this kind of framework for myself that as a man, you should be horny in the morning, hungry through the day and tired at night. I think that when you give into the world of TV, when you give into a world of just pleasures and Binge eating and whatever, you start to realize that all of your good drives are muted. The volume is way down on all of those things. I hear about so many young men that say they have insomnia. My good friend, Tom Shuman, Marine, he always says, “Insomnia is for people that haven’t heard of leg day.” And I think that there is this sense that we miss a meal and we start to think, “Oh my gosh, I need to get it. My blood sugar’s low. My blood sugar’s low.” That is not how your body’s designed.
And to me, that’s like taking a Porsche 40 miles an hour and going like, “That was too much for the tires.” It’s like, no, it was designed for a lot more than that. And there may be some unpleasantness with that. There may be some withholding from desires and not eating for long periods of time. You might have to be hungry, you might have to go through being tired. You might have to lift very heavy things and think, my muscles are just screaming at me to stop. But all of those things, it’s amazing how rewarding they become, how quickly. If you do that for seven days, if you actually do a good workout split or even just take yourself, just go on an actual run and push yourself seven days in a row. And if you stay off of TV, if you stay away from junk food, seven days, you’ll be amazed with how much your body rewards you with clear thinking, with more drive, with just more excitement in your life.
So I always think people are a week away from that, but instead you’re just lulled into this muted sense of self-worth.
Brett McKay:
All right. So thumos is this part of our soul where we feel anger towards ourself if we’re not living up to a standard that we think we’re capable of reaching. It’s connected with our sense of honor and status and sort of self-regard. And it can motivate you to put that hydra of desires in its place. You also talk about this idea of thumos being overwhelmed by the little man of reason. How do you see that play out?
Mike LeBlanc:
Well, that was the interesting thing is I always had this idea that, well, the mind is just untouchable. The mind is always right and you’re always going to go back to these rational things and that’s what you’re supposed to land on. You’re supposed to let reason win out. But actually you see a lot of people that are too smart for their own good. And I started to see there’s this real danger of letting the little man be too much in control. There are too many distinctions. You can’t get anything done in the world when you’re just stuck in research mode. And to me, the Marines had a great principle to live by, which is the 70% solution. And the little man of the mind wants the 100% solution. I see this now running tech companies. I have a lot of smart people working for me.
They want the 100% solution and they go, “Well, shouldn’t we think about this before we move on to the next step? And why make that mistake?” No, because mistakes are good. Iteration is good. And if you have something that is 70% of the way there, that’s good enough to move forward. That’s how you actually get things done in the world. And so you have the little man of the mind kind of pitted against execution. How many people have I seen that are out of shape, they’re overeating, they don’t work out? But when I talk to them about working out, they start going, “Well, I know there’s just a lot to get into. I’ve been studying form. You need to get your form right or else you’re going to get injured.” And I’ve really been reading a lot about diet, understanding keto. I hear this kind of stuff all the time of people that are just letting their minds just jump into this R&D mode and they never escape from it.
And you think all you had to do was just get some shoes on and go for a run. Don’t even wear shoes. Just go on the grass, go barefoot and just go for a run. Go sprint a couple times and that will be better than whatever reading or research you did.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So yeah, the little man wants to overthink things. The lion says, no, we’ve done enough thinking time to take action.
Mike LeBlanc:
Yes. And that’s the thing is you’re trying to get yourself to action. I see today so many young men that have so much to offer and they have so much potential, but they are locked between their desires just taking over their lives. You see it with gaming, you see it with porn, you see it with not going out in the world to don’t go date, they don’t go and get jobs, they aren’t ambitious in their careers. And then you also see it with their minds of just rationalizing away every reason that they would do that. Oh, well, it’s rigged against me. Ah, well, the economy’s bad. They have all these reasons why it isn’t working out for them. And that’s what happens when you don’t develop your thumos, when you don’t take this other part of you that says, I do not care about how strong the desires are.
I don’t care about how good the reasons are against anything. I’m going to just do it. We used to have that. I used to paint houses with my dad and there would be these really tough sets. They’d be three stories up, they’d be on the roof. You’d have to do the side of a window that was jutting out or something. And we’d be looking at the thing from the ground and we’d be thinking, how the hell are we ever going to get a ladder up there to do it? When you’re discussing it over and over again and going, I think maybe if we had a ladder on the top and we had it hooked from the top, you have all these ideas. The solution was always just to take the highest ladder you’ve got, throw it up there and climb up there and then solve every problem as you go.
And I used to do that of getting on the roof and then you’d go, oh, actually I didn’t realize if you were here, if we could hang onto this and you’d end up with these weird sets, but you’d get the whole thing painted. And I think that’s what we’ve lost so much of is just saying that’s thumos that drives you to just say, throw the ladder up. Just get up there and do this thing because you can sit and nitpick things with your mind all day. You can absolutely sit and let your desires run things all day, but it’s not the outcome that you’re looking for.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about thumos in relation to other people. We’ve been kind of touching on a little bit how our thumos is used to defend boundaries and establish boundaries. You have this section in this book about the role thumos plays in establishing power and authority. First off, is there a difference between power and authority?
Mike LeBlanc:
Yeah, I think there really is. Power you think of as whatever you’re able to do out in the world. The person who punched me when I was messing with his bike, that kid had the power in that situation. Authority is when you have the right to do it and you don’t get suspended after it, right?
Brett McKay:
Right. And you can have power without authority, but then you can have authority without any power.
Mike LeBlanc:
Yes. The Marine Corps is really a great place to look at this because there are battalions that you would go into. I would have all the rank in the world and I might be, especially when I was a lieutenant, you outrank all of these guys that have been in for 20 years, you outrank them. You outrank a master sergeant, a first sergeant. But it’s very clear that you don’t have any power when you try to go and start ordering them to do anything and they’re like, “I appreciate the thought, sir, but no, we’re going to do it this way.”That’s where you always see those, I don’t know, I think that a lot of young lieutenants conflate power and authority and they think because I’m wearing the rank, I can go and tell people what to do. And yeah, people, they’ll probably do the one thing that you’re asking them to do, but then they had a good way of teaching lieutenants that, which was all the enlisted would just do exactly what you said and it turns into a sort of Amelia Bedelia battalion.
You have this way in which you start to realize, “Oh, they were doing a whole lot that I didn’t know and that I didn’t know about.” And you get taught pretty quick that there’s a big difference between the two.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. In my experience, if you ever have to resort to authority to get someone to do something, you’ve already lost.
Mike LeBlanc:
Yeah. Well, and that’s a big thing. I’ve always told that to people in my companies is I say, “You think that I act the way that I act because of the role that I have in the company, but actually I have the role in the company that I have because of the way that I act.” And that’s something that a lot of employees don’t realize is I was always, no matter where I was in the pecking order, I was always stack ranking my peers. I was always thinking who would I want on a team? I used to have, I had a long list that I kept all throughout the Marine Corps called the people I want to hire someday. And I hired a lot of them once I got out, but I was just always thinking from, all right, this is what the organization needs to do.
And in that way, I never felt that I had a boss. It was interesting to me because people love authority. There’s some security in having somebody else who’s in charge, but I just always looked at myself as, all right, I’m a captain in this battalion. Here’s what captains should be doing. Here’s what the battalion should be doing and here’s how I fit in with that. And my commanders were another stakeholder, just like my sergeants were a stakeholder. They were all people that I had to deal with and keep happy in the way that they wanted to be kept happy to get them moving in the right direction. That was always the way that I navigated it. And I think that really helps you as you’re going to become a founder, an entrepreneur, a boss in any way, a boss, a manager, a leader.
Brett McKay:
So how does thumos help you develop that power?
Mike LeBlanc:
Well, to me, to be a good leader, you need to be the one that is willing to say that the emperor is wearing no clothes. There are all kinds of things that go on in organizations that everyone has to live with that they go, that just doesn’t make any sense. At my first company, Cobalt, so we made security robots and they were supposed to replace security guards by catching all kinds of open doors or bags that were left around, just things that a security guard would catch. So it’s a robot that would drive around and look for those things. And we all kind of knew that it didn’t work. We had probably, I don’t know, maybe 200 people in the company at the time. So we’re all working every day. Everybody has big salaries and all these things, but we all thought, no, the robot doesn’t quite work.
We had a customer that tested us and we realized just how bad it was. We were catching under 5% of what we were supposed to catch out of the little booby traps in these things. So that’s not just an F, right? That’s not just a failing grade. That’s like you almost didn’t even show up for the test. So when I saw those results, I was so angry and I was mostly angry with myself because I thought, what? I’m running this company and I tried to get into it every now and then and go, well, shouldn’t this be better and shouldn’t this be better? And everybody would tell me, no, it can’t be that way. Well, this has to be this way because of this and this and that. And so the whole company, we’re all going to work every day knowing that we’re working on a product that doesn’t work.
And I got so pissed about it. And so I was home with my dad in Ohio at the time and he was like, use that, get into that, go get a plan and execute it through the company. He was like, just be done with everybody’s excuses, be done with all the reasons against what you’re doing. And so I did. We went and I got my close team together and we put together this plan of showing people. It wasn’t actually that we were just below 5%. There were actually something like nine steps from a robot catching something all the way to us reporting it properly. And we realized, okay, it’s actually everybody’s getting a C. That’s why nobody feels like they’re really failing. It’s just, it’s a very leaky funnel when every single step of the way is doing about C, C minus work. So they all feel like they’re doing well enough, but in the aggregate you’re failing.
And this happens across organizations all the time. So to me as a leader, that’s your role is to start getting angry about that and go, we’re not going to deal with it. We can’t have C-minus work anywhere. We need to have everyone at an A. And we definitely ruffled some feathers, but I set a timeline of 90 days that we were going to be at 80% effectiveness. And within 90 days we were at 80% effectiveness and we kept doing it week over week until we were 95% effective. And then it became this big marketing tool for us that we did all these tests and that we would show to customers. But that to me, that’s what thumos does in business. That’s what it does in leadership is it takes the status quo that’s not working and it forces it into being something that’s excellent.
Brett McKay:
And it might require you to pull rank or go over rank and skip it, ignore it because maybe there’s a guy listening to this show, they’re in a company and they’re working on a project and it’s just not going anywhere. And because of all the politics, no one is actually trying to make a solution happen. Well, the thumos in this guy could be like, “You know what? I’m going to come with a plan. I’m just going to execute without asking permission and then show the results because then you can’t argue with the results.”
Mike LeBlanc:
Yes. And I tell this to my employees all the time that being right has an authority all its own. Jeff Bezos for Amazon, one of his principles was leaders are right a lot. And it’s funny, we kind of leave that behind of realizing that, but that is the case. When you’re a leader, when you’re getting promoted, it should be because you’re right a lot. And to me, when I’m going into a disagreement in my company, it doesn’t matter if somebody’s working for me. I don’t think about it in terms of that. I always think let’s get to the best thing, but I’m arguing for something that I think is right. So I’m happy to be talked out of something, but it was always amazing to me, even as a second lieutenant, you’re really pretty low on everybody’s mind because everybody knows that you’re school trained, but you don’t have experience yet.
But at that time, I was still able to make these arguments that were able to move a lot of people my way because I worked it and was right. And there’s a way that right arguments went out.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And then if you are in a position of authority, you can use your thumos to establish the power so that authority is effective.
Mike LeBlanc:
Absolutely. That’s the big responsibility of a leadership position is I spend a lot of my time just going, “Man, this isn’t right. What we’re doing here isn’t right. And how do we actually get it right?” I’m still trying to do that work of the cynical employee. I’m still trying to think just what do these things look like? Do we have good enough reasons for what we’re doing? Are we doing what investors are expecting us to do? Are we doing what customers are hoping us to do? Are we doing what employees think we should do? There’s a lot of mulling time that you just need to put in that and you need to act on it when you go, something’s just not right here.
Brett McKay:
Well, you mentioned cynicism. You have this chapter about cynicism and this can affect people personally in their personal lives, or it can affect an organization where they just feel like everything we do, it’s not doing anything. And you argue that the little man is probably responsible for that cynicism. How so?
Mike LeBlanc:
This is where smart people really get themselves into danger. I saw a ton of this at Harvard. I see this still in my peers from Harvard when I talk to them, that a lot of what you do is seeing through the picture of everything. So you have this way in which when you’re young, you have this idealism, especially going to a place like the Marine Corps, you’re like, “This is the place where virtue actually lives. We’re going to get to put this on the battlefield.” And by the time you’re working at the Pentagon, you’re going, “Oh my gosh, this guy’s trying to get promoted. That’s why we’re doing this mission and this person’s just doing this because he wants to fight over budget.” And it’s very easy once you start to see these things in the world to just get cynical and to just think there’s no real reason for this.
Nobody’s trying to do well. Everybody’s just jumping in to get theirs and they’re just trying to get money. People are greedy, people are empty and the whole organization is empty. And I don’t think that’s a bad place to get or at least a rest stop along the way. I think that there’s a lot that’s right about that and you can sit and look at an organization and a lot of it is about budgets and promotions and all kinds of things that shouldn’t be driving it. This is where Michael Jordan famously, when he began in the NBA, he kept playing his hardest, even though his team was thinking that they should lose so that they’d get a better draft pick. That’s the kind of cynicism that somebody like Michael Jordan overcomes by saying, “I go out there to win.” And there’s an idealism to it, there’s a naivete to it, but really that cynicism of thinking, “Yeah, we should just get the draft pick.
Let’s just not put it all out there on the field.” That’s actually something to overcome. That’s something to get through. And I think that that’s something that’s very much taught in the great books, but it’s something that so many smart people today, they don’t think about what is that next chapter? They know, yes, I can become cynical. I can see through why people are doing these things, but there’s still more room to act. But when you let your mind fester, the mind will figure out everything that makes the world an empty conspiracy.
Brett McKay:
So what role does thumos play in overcoming cynicism?
Mike LeBlanc:
Thumos is that part, again, that believes in nobility. It believes in worth, right? I mean, it’s very funny to me because when you think about worth or recognition, recognition is probably a good word for it, Hegel’s word for it, or the best translation for Hegel’s word for it. Recognition is, we talk about it when somebody gets a watch at the end of their pension, right? It’s like in recognition of service for 30 years, we have kind of that word, but the basic recognition is to do with how worthy are you and do people recognize that? Do people see how hard you’re working? I think there are so many fights in marriage, in companies that are directly about recognition, and we talk about them in all kinds of other forms. We like to make it more economic. “You’re getting more than I am, “is a big way that we like to fight, but it’s actually much more about worth.
People want the credit, people want recognition for what they’ve done. And so people see that as very unfair when somebody’s getting a lot and getting a lot of glory for something and they go,” They didn’t do the work. I did the work. “So it’s something that we see in everything, but it gets minimized because there’s almost something childish about honor and nobility. But I think that’s where Thomas can step up in this cynicism and says,” No, even if this is some of the workings, even if there is a budget that’s going on and people are actually just fighting over the money, there’s still something that we’re all here to do and we’re always kind of putting on a play. “And so you see someone like Winston Churchill, very thematic man, who he took this as he loved to wear costumes, he loved to dress up as a soldier, he loved to dress in his medals and his awards.
He loved his iconic hat with a cigar out of his mouth in a three piece suit. There’s part of a game of dress up that goes on with it. And it’s a very thematic thing to do to say,” I’m going to engage with my life beyond all reasons not to, beyond yes, of course the system’s rigged. Of course everything’s rigged and of course people are out for themselves and they make it look like very charitable thing. Of course, if you’re a grown up, you know that’s the way the world works, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t engage with life. And so Themas is sort of that one that looks at how the little man gets very cynical and says, “Get up off the mat. You’ve got to get back in this and you’ve still got to play your part in life regardless of what else is going on.”
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Live with nobility.
Mike LeBlanc:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
Let’s go back to your son. I’ve got a teenage son. I lead teenage boys in my church congregation. One of my biggest concerns, as I said earlier, is I feel like a lot of them are lacking that thumatic drive. What are you doing to teach your son to harness his thumos or foster it for noble aims?
Mike LeBlanc:
It was interesting. I was just in Montana last week and we were out with Pibiabate is like a nonprofit for veterans that brings a lot of veterans back to this actual place. They have acres of land in the woods in Montana. And while we were out there, the power was out and since it’s on septic and everything, the toilets are out, the showers are out, there’s no running water. But it was amazing. We all had our kids out there and the kids just seemed to not notice that we didn’t have power or any of these things for the week. At night, we would have a fire. They were all completely enamored with the fire, putting sticks in it, throwing pine cones in it.
We had axes and they’d be chopping wood. They loved to pick up the axes and play with them. They’d love to go build forts. And I was thinking about it as I was looking at all of them that boys have a good way of finding thumos when you just get out of their way. The problem is when we start to think, here’s what we should be teaching them, here’s what we should be doing with them. Let me get them this screen and this math game. And everybody tells me how important STEM and STEAM are and I need to get them a robotics toy if I want them to not be working at Home Depot someday. The real answer, the real cure is put them in nature, put them in the woods, put them somewhere where they have to deal with the actual world and they have to engage with the actual world.
They may get cut up, they may get hurt, there may be some suffering that’s part of it, but they’ll get over it and they’ll become strong. That’s how they will become men is when they engage with the world that way.
Brett McKay:
I love it. Well, Mike, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Mike LeBlanc:
Officialmikeleblanc.com is my website. So I have all kinds of things about the book on there, but also at Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble, anywhere that you look for books, What If Anger is the Answer? will be there.
Brett McKay:
All right Michael LeBlanc, until next time, it’s been a pleasure.
Mike LeBlanc:
Thanks so much, Brett.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Mike LeBlanc. He’s the author of the book, What If Anger is the Answer? It’s available for order right now at all major book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can learn more information about his work at his website, officialmikeleblanc.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
