069: Winning Arguments while Winning Allies with Jay Heinrichs

Pete Mockaitis
Jay, thanks so much for being here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Jay Heinrichs
It’s a pleasure, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think congratulations are in order.  Is it not true that just recently your revised edition of Thank You for Arguing hit the coveted New York Times bestseller list?

Jay Heinrichs
Yes, it did.

Pete Mockaitis
Booyeah!  Congratulations!

Jay Heinrichs
Thanks!

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so fun.  As I start working with guests in this podcasting game, it’s so funny – they’ll say, “Oh, could you put the episode up a little earlier ’cause we’re trying to make the list?”  I was like, “Oh, the New York Times bestseller list, of course.  I’m in the biz, I know.”  The list, very good.

Jay Heinrichs
Capital L.  Yeah, I tell you – the book is an overnight sensation.  It was published in 2007 and just made the bestseller list.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Better late than never. And that’s cool, and kudos that it’s still appreciated and used in a lot of places. It’s a darn shame in my rhetoric class it was not yet in existence. So I didn’t have that in my AP Rhetoric going on.

Jay Heinrichs
Boy, instead you had Aristotle and Cicero.  You were slumming, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s me.  So tell me – this book, Thank You for Arguing, is used in many different contexts, and so I want to hear what you think would be the most sort of juicy, interesting, useful themes and tips that apply to a young professional working in a corporate environment?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, the book has more than 100 tools or persuasion techniques, you can go off.  I’ll tell you, the reason I wrote it was to show people how to think rhetorically, and by that I mean how to think like a rhetorician.  So rhetoric isn’t taught that much anymore; you were lucky to get a class. It is growing fast now in high schools and colleges, but it’s the original art of leadership; everybody used to study it. Alexander the Great studied it with Aristotle; Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, every one of the American founders studied rhetoric.
So why should corporate professionals learn to think rhetorically?
Well, because it teaches you – it taught me – how to write and think persuasively, how to understand audiences and markets better, and how to produce something to say on every occasion and have people like you when you say something.
So for example, here’s a juicy bit – when someone gets angry with you, watch what tense you’re in – whether you’re in the past tense, the future tense or the present tense.
You’ll find that an angry person will almost always speak in the past or present tense –“You did this horrible thing”, in the past, or “You’re a real jerk”, in the present.  So, one way to take the anger out is to switch to the future – “Let’s talk about how we’re going to fix this.  Let’s find a solution.  Let’s not describe what kind of person I am or what sort of atrocity I committed.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is fascinating.  And you sort of see that time and time again, is that angry people tend to focus on those tenses as opposed to, “This is going to ruin everything”, future tense catastrophising.

Jay Heinrichs
Well, “This is going to ruin everything” is actually kind of an opening. At least it does shift it into the future, which is where choices make a difference, and argument.  By argument, I’m really talking about the deliberative argument, which is a particular kind of argument. And that’s an argument about choices, about how you’re going to influence the future.
So talking about what a jerk I am is really doing nothing for the future.  I’m going to be a jerk forever.  If you’re talking about what I did in the past, well, the only way we’re going to affect the future is to they talk about how I’m going to fix what I did.  And we’re back in the future again.  So when you say, “What I’m talking about is going to ruin everything”, then I can say, “Alright, let’s talk about how not only not to ruin everything but how to make a better future.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. And so you’re saying the wrong answer then, in that circumstance, is to sort of argue or fight over, “Well, I didn’t know. It’s someone else’s fault for not give me the data.” That’s just going to keep you in a bad spot.

Jay Heinrichs
Exactly.  One of the things that I say in the book is, the first thing to do when you find yourself in a disagreement, is to set your goal. What do you want? What do you want out of this thing? Now, if you happen to be in a committed relationship, like a marriage, maybe your goal ought to be to stay married.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jay Heinrichs
Instead of maybe trying not to win, just stay married. On the other hand in a business setting, you want to maintain a good relationship with your colleagues, so that’s an important goal. Or you might think, “Maybe the audience I’m really speaking to is not the person who’s disagreeing with me, but other people who are listening in. How do I impress them? How do I persuade them to take my choice instead of this other person’s?” And that’s a goal. So you set that goal and then you work toward that goal. You don’t simply push back against what the other person said.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is… Right off the gate these are some handy tidbits. Any others leaping to mind for you, or should I do my job as an interviewer?

Jay Heinrichs
I don’t want to blow my wad, Pete.  I’ve got 120 of these – we can go through all of them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, we’ve got to leave a little something for the book, so we will.  So I will maybe just zoom out a little bit, because I was chatting with my fiancee, so I’ll keep some of those lessons associated with arguing well in mind, in terms of the goal and the relationship maintenance. So, we were just talking about… My goodness, it seems like in the United States these days, and in politics in particular, things really are an extra dose of polarizing, close-minded, partisan… It’s just like folks tend to just sort of believe what they want to believe and it’s just not a rosy situation.
I just think it’s miles and miles away from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which just numerous sessions, numerous lengths of time, uncomfortable settings traveling out there, to really hear, think and reason about, “Which one of these guys would be best for us?”  So, could you maybe give us a bit of a historical commentary on how did we get here and what’s our cause for hope for the United States people to get back to thinking and having some rhetoric and Thank You for Arguing – type exchanges?

Jay Heinrichs
Other than having everyone on Earth buy my book… I’ll tell you what.  In the business world, among my clients, I find people are getting better and better at working in teams, presenting solutions, persuading each other in ways that make better choices for their companies.  But you’re obviously not talking about business, are you?

Pete Mockaitis
Not in this particular inquiry.

Jay Heinrichs
Yeah, okay.  So politics.  These days there have been obviously some major changes in politics.  Now you’re talking about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, so obviously that was a Greatest Hits of politics.  That was a lot of nasty stuff going on in politics when Lincoln and Douglas weren’t on the stage.  So, we’re seeing the best of the best.  And so, it’s a little too easy to get nostalgic about our forebearers.
That being said, one big difference is that in politics there’s a big problem that’s going on. And it doesn’t really have to do with what we believe in and what we don’t believe in. The fact is that politicians have little reason anymore to persuade. They don’t have to. Most members of Congress are in safe, gerrymandered districts, where they’re guaranteed their job, right? Their own supporters are already the people living all around them.
Now, they spend most of their time raising money, instead of persuading votes, so they’re persuading donors. There’s a lot of really good persuasion going on with rich people, not with voters. Now, even at the presidential level it’s all about turn-out, not so much the undecided voter. And the reason is there are very few undecided voters in the country. It’s between 4% and 8%, depending on the election.
Now, at all levels what’s happening is political operatives and consultants work communication and marketing content strategies at the micro-level, at the micro-audience level, targeting these tiny groups and saying what they want to hear. So it’s really not what the politicians are saying, and actually speeches do very little. Advertising, lots of studies show, that television advertising does very little. What’s really going on is on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter – this is where the persuasion is going on. And it’s awful persuasion, because it’s very tiny groups.
So it’s very little opportunity for groups to hear anything that they don’t believe in. And I think that’s where you get some of this consolidation and belief. So, Lincoln and Douglas, as you pointed out, they spoke knowing their audience, they were looking at them.  But their larger audience wasn’t there when  they were speaking. Here’s another big factor: their audience, mostly, were readers. Lincoln and Douglas knew that their debates were going to be published in written form. Lincoln knew that when he gave a speech, it would be published and everybody would read it.
He grew up reading two things as a kid, as a boy – one was The Bible, and the other was the speeches of Daniel Webster, who was the greatest orator of his time – United States senator, Secretary of State, brilliant lawyer, great politician. Daniel Webster was Lincoln’s education, and Webster would give these speeches and then he would edit them. And they were the bestsellers of their day. Everybody read Daniel Webster, no matter what they believed in.
So this was a nation of readers.  We’re not anymore; we now look at YouTube in 12-second bites. So if you can get anybody to watch a YouTube video that doesn’t involve a cute animal, and watch it for more than 12 seconds, you’ve pulled off a miracle. And so, as a result people are talking in sound bytes that look ridiculous in print.  Look at Donald Trump – very successful in his talks. He speaks in these 12-second bursts, and I hope we can get back to that, ’cause that’s a really great technique for people, by the way, in presentations. But they look terrible when you read them. They’re great if you see them in a speech, especially if you’re in a crowd.
So what’s the answer to all this?  I think the answer lies in educating young people in the ways that these content agencies and political consultants manipulate us.  And my book is read by thousands of high school and college students, which gives me hope at least for sales in the future, and maybe even in the country.  I think the fact is rhetoric really does need to be studied more, so that people can see how this manipulation goes on.  And also it makes people eager to hear the other side, if only to engage in it in interesting ways.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great.  Well, I do want to make sure we kind of revisit the 12-second bursts and more, so maybe when you talk about revisiting this, I think some people just maybe don’t even have a taste for it.  They say, “Arguing?  That feels like conflict, that feels uncomfortable in my gut and on the back of my neck.”  How should we think about arguing or rhetoric in an affirming light?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, that’s a great question.  And I think it comes down to the fact that people tend to confuse an argument with a fight, as if an argument and a fight are the same thing.  So, in a fight, your purpose is to win, your goal is to win the fight, to get the other side to admit defeat.  You’re going to dominate the other person and win.  In an argument, on the other hand, you try to win over the other person, to make them feel as if they won, while you get what you want.
So in the book, I give this example of this disagreement I had with my son, George.  This was some years ago.  He’s all grown up now.  At the time, he was a teenager, and I was in the bathroom first thing in the morning, and I went to brush my teeth, and I discovered that the toothpaste tube had all been squeezed dry.  And being the father of a teenage son, I knew who the likely culprit was, so I yelled through the closed bathroom door, saying, “George, who used up all the toothpaste?”
And I hear this sarcastic voice coming from the other side, saying, “That’s not the point, is it, dad?  The point is, how are we going to keep this from happening again?”  No, he had grown up hearing me talk about these rhetorical techniques, including switching to the future when you yourself get in trouble.  And I think I was so pleased that he’d actually been listening all that time… I had no idea that he’d been paying attention, that I actually decided to let him win.
So I said “Okay, George, you win. Now, will you please get me some toothpaste?” And you know what?  He went down into our freezing basement – we live in New Hampshire, it was mid-winter – and he got me a tube of toothpaste. So, in the book I say, “Actually, George, I think I won that argument.”  He was very pleased that I had let him win the disagreement, but I got a teenage boy to run an errand happily for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jay Heinrichs
That is a true triumph of persuasion, as any parent will tell you.  So, I think that that summarizes the difference between a fight and an argument.  I started out feeling a little angry at this jerk for squeezing up this tube of toothpaste, and I ended up with a tube of toothpaste refreshed, with everybody happy.  That’s an argument, that’s not a fight.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so fun.  So, a world of difference between winning, like dominating, versus winning them over and sort of getting your outcome, the sort of goal you establish at the beginning, achieved.  So, can you share some, I guess, key principles and tactics that contribute to arriving at that outcome more often?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, I mentioned probably the very first thing… There are some steps you should do habitually, and one is to set your goal.  We talked about that.  So there are several goals in persuasion.  One is thinking about what you want to change with this disagreement.  So the easiest thing to change is the mood, right?  You can use a little bit of humor, as long as it doesn’t look like you’re making fun of the other person, and that will lighten the mood, okay?
So, harder than that is to change someone’s mind, what their opinion is about something.  And George actually was using a technique when he said, “That’s not the point.”  One great technique to change somebody’s mind is to re-frame the issue.  And one way to do that is to say, “What’s this really about?”  By the way, it’s a great way to throw people off their balance, if you care to do that, if you really want to manipulate the person.  You could say, “Is this really about toothpaste, or is it about something deeper?”  And by the way, I say this to high school kids all the time – if you’re really mad at your sibling, and your sibling just comes at you for something, you could say, “What’s this really about? Are you okay? Does this have to do with that lame boyfriend of yours?”
Anyway, in a business setting of course you don’t want to be quite so obnoxious. You could say, “Let’s talk about the larger issues here.”  And then what you’re doing is you’re re-framing an issue by broadening it.  And you can change people’s minds that way to say, “Alright, this issue really isn’t about the fact that we didn’t make our numbers last quarter.  What this is really about is the fact that our audience is aging out of our product.  So, this issue is really about whether we need to update our product, not whether we didn’t make our numbers last quarter.”  So you’re re-framing the issue, that’s another thing to do.
And then finally, the hardest thing to do is to get someone to take an action.  So you see this in elections all the people with young people. You can get them to go to the big Bernie get-together, and get them all to cheer Bernie Sanders. Getting them actually to show up at the poll is much, much harder. And so you can change somebody’s mood, you can get them in the mood for something; you can change their minds, which is harder.  Getting them actually to take action is the hardest of all.  So you can re-frame the issue and say, “This is about the fact that our market is aging out of our product.”
Getting your company actually to commit to a new product is the hardest of all, and that takes different steps.  And I don’t want to lead you through all the steps, but I can leave you with this one thing.  To get someone to be willing to take an action, they have to really desire the goal.  That’s the first thing.  So if you look at diet books, they are really good at getting people to take the action of buying the diet book.  So you give them desire, which is, “Lose weight”.  Especially, “Lose weight rapidly, a ton of weight in no time at all.”

Pete Mockaitis
And eat what you like.

Jay Heinrichs
Well, that’s part two, and that is to make it seem really easy.  So, “Eat what you like: the Banana Split diet”.  “Eat 20 scoops of ice cream a day, and nothing else, and you will lose weight!”  Probably in horrible ways.  So, in other words… And by the way, I got this straight from the philosopher Aristotle, so the Greeks were selling each other stuff long before we Americans were doing it.
So, to get action, build desire for the goal and then make the goal itself, achieving it, seem really easy.  And one way to do that by the way is to chunk it, divide the action you want into tiny little steps.  You can say, “I’m not asking you to go to the polls right now.  Instead, I’m asking you to go to this website.”  Just one step at a time, “When you go to the website, then all you have to do is click on this link.  When you click on the link, put in your email address.  And after you do that…”   And so on.  And gradually, little by little, you find yourself leading this trail up to the polling booth and voting for the candidate, or buying a product, for that matter.

Pete Mockaitis
And so the advice there is to see if you can make it as absolutely tiny and hard to say “No” to as possible.

Jay Heinrichs
Exactly.  You’ve got to keep that desire in front of them all the time.  Don’t ever forget that.  So, in the content marketing world they talk about the consumer journey, which is a path the consumer takes from first becoming aware of your brand to finally becoming a big champion of the brand and recommending it to all her friends and so on.  The biggest mistake that content marketers make along that journey – it’s a series of tiny little steps that lead the consumer along – is actually to make sure that that desire is still there, that they really fully understand that this product is amazing, it’s going to make them really cool, that it’s going to change their lives in all the right ways, and cost them practically nothing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good stuff.  So much.  Well, I want to ask all sorts of follow-ups, but why don’t we hit the quick one, in a 12-second burst maybe – what’s the benefit of the 12-second burst and the magic behind that number?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, unfortunately I always talk in more than 12 seconds. Not being a speechmaker. Alright, I have to get really nerdy on you, but I’ll do it quickly.  The ancient Greeks believed that the patterns of the brain work in concert with the patterns of the rest of the body.  So, for example they believed that a single sustainable thought, an idea, an impression, lasted as long as a single long human breath, an orator’s breath
I tested this theory.  And they called it by the way “The Period”.  Now the period is where we get the idea of the punctuation mark, the end of a sentence.  And sentences are the end of a thought, right?  Okay, so a period to a Greek was actually what they would say in the length of a human breath that would be really memorable, and it was usually the climax of the speech.
So to test whether the Greeks really knew what they were talking about and whether this still held true, I went on YouTube and I looked up all the movie speeches I could, and I looked for when the music started to well up, which was a signal in Hollywood terms of the climax of the speech.  And guess what? From the moment the music wells up until the end…
I did a video on this that highlights Mel Gibson in Braveheart.  And what you’ll find is that they last 12 seconds, which is exactly the length of a well-sustained human breath.  12 seconds long.  So Trump, Donald Trump does… Well, let’s look at Hillary Clinton.  She will climax her speeches in 12 seconds, and she’ll do it once.  That’s the climax of the speech, you don’t get the music, but you can tell that’s the climax.
Donald Trump does something very different. He borrows from stand-up comedians, who speak in 12-second sort of non sequiturs, unrelated passages. They’ll tell a joke about why you get your socks lost in the dryer, and then they’ll switch about their wife’s latest diet. One thing unrelated to the other. They’re just talking.
What you’ll find is that the most effective comedians will speak in these 12-second bursts, and that’s what Donald Trump does.  It’s like he’s telling jokes, only he’s not.  He’s talking about building walls.  He’ll get up on stage and he’ll talk for 12 seconds and then he will stop.  So, it’s pretty cool stuff.  These Greeks knew what they were doing.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m thinking if I want to leverage that knowledge for maximum impact, I should be sort of thinking in particular, “Where am I going to drop something that is about 12 seconds with ‘oomph’?”  Is that kind of how I should think about implementing this?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, there is something that Marcus Tullius Cicero… I love, by the way, name dropping ancient dead people.

Pete Mockaitis
I was a Discipulus Latinae back in the day, if I said that right.  A student of Latin, is what I’m trying to say.

Jay Heinrichs
I’ll tell you what. We have no idea how they pronounced those words, so you can say it any way you want.  There were no recordings back then.  So what Marcus Tullius Cicero teaches is sort of a series of steps you take when you’re writing a speech. So he tell us how to outline our speeche, it still works today. I coach clients in giving TED talks, and so one of the things I do is I teach them the art of invention, or inventio in Latin.  Which is basically about discovery, as well as creation.
And so if you look at ways for you to figure out how do you build to a climax in a speech, one way to do that is to discover what your speech’s climax is. So you know the topic, you know what you want to say, you know what you want to get out of it, and most importantly, you know your audience, you know what they believe and expect. So you think, “What would be the big thing that just gets everybody to their feet?”  So you think about that.  That’s what you think about before anything else.
You don’t begin to write your speech; you think about that climax of your speech, so you start with the period.  That’s what I would tell people. This is not your elevator speech or anything like that; it’s only 12 seconds.  Summarize what you want to say, and then re-write it, re-write it, re-write it.  If you’ve re-written it 30 times, it’s probably not enough. I mean that’s what you’ve really got to work on it. That’s what going to be what people are going to remember and they’re going to share it. That’s what goes viral, okay?  So you do that and then the rest of your TED talk kind of follows. Just follow Cicero’s outline for an oration, and then take it from there and you’re done.  You’re famous.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s so cool.  So, I guess I thinking now Donald Trump keeps doing it and the best comedians kind of just do it again and again and again and again, these 12-second bits.  Whereas you’re saying if you’re delivering a talk, an oration, you want to have kind of one super-money climax period established, and build the rest around that.

Jay Heinrichs
Yeah, because you have to have content. Unlike a comedian, or Donald Trump at a rally, you actually have to say something.  Now I guarantee you that Donald Trump does not use that technique when he’s really making a deal. He’s not going in and saying, “This will be the best building ever. It will be the greatest building.  And it will be beautiful.”  He’s not saying that. He’s saying, “Here’s how the leasing will work. Here’s how my branding for this building works. Here’s what material will be made of. Here’s how I’m going to sub-contract it.” There’s content to what he’s going to say.  He knows when he’s talking to a crowd of people that just want to be entertained and worked up. He’s going to be just keeping them entertained. But remember, he learned how to do this on reality TV, where it’s a content-free environment, and that’s what he’s exercising right now. You and I actually have to say something, as does Donald Trump, when he’s not up there on the stage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jay Heinrichs
And that’s why you have to start with… Think about what it is you want to get out of this speech, and then build the content around that climax.

Pete Mockaitis
And so I guess I’m wondering if you are delivering even maybe more of a mundane kind of a situation, like, “Here is how the radio frequency network performed over the last month.”  Does this apply there in terms of, there is a climax in a 12-second period to be focused on within there?  Or maybe this is not quite an appropriate fit in certain spots?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, I think that a good point.  There are times when you don’t want an emotional peroration, is
the term.  There’s a degree to which you get poetic and there’s a disagree to which you won’t.  And by the way, sometimes your peroration can just be really plain speech and people might not even know that it’s the climax, but it’s memorable nonetheless, people will walk away repeating what you said.  And that’s your ultimate goal – you want what you say to go viral, even if it’s among 6 people in a conference room, you want them walking away repeating what you said.
Now, getting back to politics, the Republicans are much better at this than Democrats.  Democrats are all trying still to sound like John F. Kennedy, where there’s beautifully written speeches.  People love Obama’s speeches when he’s really trying, because they can be very eloquent and you could read them afterwards – they still read great.  But on the other hand Republicans do something much more tricky and rhetorically useful, which is that they speak in terms of tropes, which change people’s views of reality but still sound very plain-spoken.
And I don’t want to get too much into the weeds about tropes, but basically you know what a metaphor is – if I say “The moon is a balloon”, you’re not going to call me a liar, you know I’m just kind of being poetic.  But I’m making you think about the moon a little bit differently, sort of changing the reality just a little bit.  Well, there are tropes that people don’t understand because they weren’t educated in them, that Republicans use all the time.
If you look at Ronald Reagan talking about the welfare mother, that’s a trope. There’s no “welfare mother”.  There’re probably a bunch of mothers on welfare, but not in the way he described this person, who is having children just to make money from the government. That never happened. But what he was doing, and really achieved a lot doing this, is he changed people’s views of what people on welfare were like. They weren’t people who needed help, they were people who were exploiting the system. That’s a really tricky trope; it’s even got a tricky name – is called “synecdoche”. It’s a way of summarizing a whole group of people in one individual, who may be real or not. And the Republicans are much better at that than Democrats are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so fascinating.  And now to that point about being viral, or the period being a climax that really gets attention.  I’ve noticed as I am at different conferences and such, I like to pay attention to what people tweet from a keynoter, and I seem to often notice that it’s kind of a distinction.  You talked about JFK, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”  Or they’ll say… Maybe someone was talking about fraternities and sororities, and they’ll say, “A friend will tell you what you want to hear, but a brother will tell you what you need to hear.”  It often follows that kind of a quotable distinction.  Any comments on that or other elements that often correspond with that 12-second climax period?

Jay Heinrichs
Yeah, it’s interesting.  What the Democrats tend to do instead of tropes, is they speak in terms of figures or figures of speech.  And those are unusual or poetic patterns of language or unusual use of words.  So when you refer to John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”, he’s actually employing my favorite figure of all time, the chiasmus.  I call it the “criss-cross” figure.  So it takes a phrase or a clause and then it flips it.  “Ask not what your country can do for, you ask what you can do for your country.”  It’s turning it around. It’s beautiful and memorable, and you know that if Twitter existed at the time, it would’ve gone totally viral right away. It would’ve been with little posters with a lion on it or something.
So, the reason for that is that that kind of unusual language, people will at first be a little confused by it, as with any kind of poetry, and then they’ll repeat it in their heads and it becomes imprinted that way. And then they feel cool when they repeat it. So that’s great. The only thing is that it’s really out there; you know what the person is intending, you know how they’re trying to persuade you, and that’s not the most effective form of rhetoric.
So sometimes when things get do re-tweeted and go viral, that’s great – I personally love it when I give talks and I see on Twitter the stuff I’ve said gets tweeted verbatim.  And it’s great for my ego, but it often isn’t the most important thing I’m actually trying to say.  It’s often the stuff where I’m just entertaining them.
I did it just the other day.  I was speaking to a group of students over Skype, and it’s a school and I said, “Young people are never going to change things until they start shifting their focus to the future.”  That’s hardly something you’d want to needlepoint on a pillow. And yet,  at least five people tweeted it simultaneously and that got re-tweeted and it went all over the place. And it’s funny because I hadn’t even tried to express that as something memorable, but it occurred to me in retrospect that actually the word “future” is a trope – you’re making people think differently about reality.  You think about this.
A teenage kid is always told about the future, but they never really think about the future, about their failure to look at it as something as if it already exists.  So I think that that was what made the difference.  And I heard back from people saying, “Oh my God, you changed my life.”  You know how teenagers will do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there are so many things I’d like to chat through, but I’ll focus it a smidge.  So you have a nice section in your book about common logical fallacies, and I think that in many times we think, “I’m a pretty smart, I’m pretty logical.  I know a fallacy when I see one.”  But what are some fallacies that even smart people tend to fall for pretty often?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, I’ll tell you.  In an earlier conversation you and I had, if I’m allowed to break that third wall…

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s break it.

Jay Heinrichs
You had asked… Okay, the subtitle of my book mentions Aristotle and Lincoln, and Homer Simpson.  Why Homer Simpson?  And the reason is that I was struggling to write about logical fallacies in a way that wouldn’t make every reader just drop the book immediately.  Reading about logical fallacies is one of the worst forms of torture.  I actually like logic.  I’m really interested in it, and even I can’t stand to learn about logical fallacies, because the human brain being as lame as it is, it comes up with new fallacies every day.  You can’t summarize them all.
So it occurred to me one day I was procrastinating writing the book, and I was looking on the web, and I actually never watched The Simpsons. We didn’t have TV when the kids were little. Don’t ask me why. And so I started watching The Simpsons just because I was supposed to be writing, and it was something to do. And it occurred to me that the humor in The Simpsons is almost entirely based on logical fallacies. It’s on twisting logic around.
So here’s an example, and by the way, this is a fallacy that’s committed all the time by people.
Homer offers Lisa a donut, and Lisa being Lisa – if you’ve watched The Simpsons you know she’s kind of like the good student, the good girl – she says, “No thanks, Dad.  Do you have any fruit?”  And he looks at the donut and it’s a jelly-filled donut, and he says, “This donut has purple. Purple is a fruit.”  So when he says, “Purple is a fruit”, that is a logical fallacy that you see every time.  You look at a package of processed food that says “fortified” on it.  A processed food that says “fortified” is the same as Homer saying, “Purple is a fruit.”  So, this stuff that’s horrible for you, it may contain 46 carcinogens but it contains a gram of protein – that is committing that same fallacy, where you are associating a quality of one thing with the entirety of another thing.  You see what I’m saying?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I see it all the time.  If I’m Googling some health or nutrition topic, I always seem to end up finding a gallery of foods that are going to help me achieve some outcome, because it has some vitamin, like bananas have potassium. It’s like I know that’s not really what I’m looking for.  So there seems to be that game again and again, it’s like I want an outcome, that outcome is assisted by this vitamin, some item has this vitamin and therefore, “Eat this thing and you’ll be all set with regard to that outcome.”

Jay Heinrichs
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And it irritates me.

Jay Heinrichs
So, I could name others as well.  One I especially like is “Post hoc ergo propter hoc”, just ’cause I like saying the Latin.  That’s just confusing correlation with causation.  So if something is correlated with something that happens at the same time, the assumption is that it caused it.  And you see this a lot with vaccination resistors.  There are people who believe that vaccinating their 2-year old children causes autism.  And the thing is that the test for autism happens around the same time in a child’s age as a particular kind of vaccination regime.
And I actually worked with a health care company to try to figure out some ways respectfully for pediatricians to talk to vaccination-resistant mothers.  And so I learned a lot about what they’re doing and that’s in fact what’s happening – they’re committing this classic fallacy.  And what’s happening now is that actually the diagnosis for autism is going to be happening sooner in the future.  So you’re still going to have people who refuse to believe that vaccination does not cause autism, but you’re going to get fewer and fewer new converts to that because the correlation is going to separate from the cause, and that’s going to help people a lot.
So you can see that fallacies can kill people.  Really, important stuff.  That being said, most of rhetoric is not about fallacies. Most of rhetoric in fact isn’t about logic as we learn it in school.  It’s really about what people believe and expect, and whether they like and trust you.
So, I’ll you what’s even more useful, if I may, than learning formal logic.  Just one simple tool, if you want to get all logical.  And it’s a great way, by the way, for people to shift from an extreme opinion to a more moderate one. Insist on defining everything.  So when a politician talks about creating jobs, what does he mean by “creating” jobs?  How is a job created exactly, right?  So, now what does he mean by “jobs”?  So, what kind of jobs?  Temporary jobs, long lasting jobs, good paying jobs, minimum wage jobs, jobs with benefits, those without?
When a politician talks about making America safe, ask, what is safety exactly?  Safe from what?  So how bad is terrorism in America if that’s what you’re promising to make it safe from?  What exactly is terrorism?  Who is committing the terrorism in America right now, and who do you see committing in in the future?  What’s the crime rate, if that’s what you’re talking about, compared to when we were kids?  And by the way, when I was a kid the crime rate was way higher than it is now, and my parents treated us like savages – they would let us roam around, meeting strangers.  Partly because I think they had more of us back then, so we were all disposable. But nonetheless, I think the attitude is very different.
So defining things is really important, like what is safety, what is crime, what’s the crime rate.  Definitions.  Vague terms manipulate you, in other words, a lot more than logical fallacies. We just let people get away with using terms.
Here’s another term – predator.  In regard to anyone who is regarded as a sexual deviant or someone who has somehow hurt other people.  We call that person a predator.  Now when we do that it means that whatever they’re doing cannot be stopped; it’s incurable. So these people have to be kept apart from the rest of us.  It also dehumanizes them, so you can’t treat them in a humane way. Okay, that’s fine, but it means probably spending a lot of money that could be saved, and it could mean acting in ways that are unfair and even unconstitutional. And it makes for, just in general, really easy lazy thinking, which I think lies at the root of most manipulation.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, this is so potent. So now could you share maybe… I was having a lot of fun checking out your video on apologies over at ArgueLab.com. Could you share what are some other kind of handy resources you might point the listeners to on ArgueLab.com, or within your world of resources that you think could be particularly handy in a professional environment?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, ArgueLab.com, I really did it for students. High school students are now being tortured by having to read Thank You for Arguing over the summer, and AP English Language now uses it as a standard text. So that’s great. But I actually wrote the book originally for business people. So, there’s ArgueLab, but also I have a website JayHeinrichs.com, with other resources that may be more valuable.  So it’s JayHeinrichs.com, just my name .com.  And liking me on Facebook – Jay Heinrichs, Twitter, the usual – @JayHeinrichs, and so on. You’ll find that I do blogs regularly, and they have to do with persuasion that’s more of interest to business people.  So, could we talk apologies just really quickly

Pete Mockaitis
Please, let’s do it.

Jay Heinrichs
Okay.  So I give corporate talks, and the most popular, the most requested talk is one titled, “How to Screw Up”.  I’m a master at screwing up, ’cause I do it a lot.  And one of the things I do, one video – I think you’re referring to this – is one I did at why politicians are so bad at apologizing, right?  Well, one reason is that… And this is related back to Aristotle, who said that the main cause of anger is belittlement.  And by belittlement he meant the sense that you’re being treated as less of a person than you feel you deserve.
So you know that one of the main causes of malpractice lawsuits against doctors is belittlement – this idea that the doctor didn’t treat the patient seriously – that’s belittlement.  So it’s a cause of a great deal of anger.  Now, when somebody’s angry at a politician for something, who’s the first person to demand an apology? It’s going to be their opponent. Why?  Well, because an apology is an act of self-belittlement. It’s making you shrink in front of your audience.  Now, politicians don’t like to do that; they like to be big, they like to be huge, and they also don’t want to look powerless, because a leader is supposed to seem powerful.
And this is true in the business world as well.  You don’t want to look like, “Oh, I’m less of a person than we all thought I was” – that’s not very helpful.  And even in personal relationships, an apology is never enough, because it’s really hard, especially for a man, because we’re kind of built differently in terms of power or our attitudes toward it.  We don’t like to shrink in front of other people.  So as a result, our apology seems insincere.
So sometimes just saying you’re sorry is a really good idea.  If people expect it, saying you’re sorry is fine.  But on the other hand, there are more important things that you need to do, and this leads to basic principles of persuasion.
First of all, you have to improve your character in front of the other person.  Whether you’re likable and trustworthy.  So you can say, “Here’s what I stand for, and I actually strayed from what I stand for.  I left the dishes in the sink.  I definitely did that.”  So the first thing you do is you own up to your mistake.  And tell everything; don’t let those emails dribble out, don’t let them keep finding new things.  Tell all, everything you know immediately; every PR person will say that in the corporate world.
Secondly, say what you stand for.  And actually if you do this right, committing a mistake can actually give you the opportunity to remind people of what you stand for, of what a good person you really are.  And what you do is you re-position your mistake, you re-frame it to show that this is a way of you re-committing to your values in the first place.  So, “I left the dishes in the sink.  I definitely did that.  I’m at fault.  You know what a neat person I really am in real life. I strayed from that temporarily. It makes me all the more committed to being a neatnik, and here’s how I’m going to fix it in the future.  I’m going to set an alarm at the end of every dinner time, and within 10 minutes every dish has to be out of that sink.”
Now obviously I am kind of overdoing it here, but in the business world, that kind of thing… Own up to your mistake, state your values, show how you may have strayed from them temporarily, show you’re putting all hands on deck for a fix, show what the plan is, make that very transparent, and then show how things will be better in the future.  And that is whether you screwed up personally, whether it’s the company that screwed up.
I work with Southwest Airlines, who are one of my clients, and I can tell you they are a master at that.  Whether the world’s largest domestic airline, they’re going to make some mistakes.  Their employees occasionally commit errors.  And Southwest is great, they can come out of mistakes like that, making people think, “Wow, they really are nice people.  They’re everything I thought Southwest Airlines was.”  That’s how screwing up can actually enhance your reputation if you do it right, and that’s rhetoric at its best.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s not quite the same with Spirit airlines.

Jay Heinrichs
Yeah, It was your mistake for flying us, you chump!  And that will be another $20 for taking my time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun.  Well, you tell me, Jay, is there anything else you want to make sure that we cover off before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things real quick?

Jay Heinrichs
I’ve already talked too long, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, but it’s been a treat every minute.  I’m not even buttering you up for anything.  I just like this stuff that much, this is a slam dunk, so thank you.  So let’s hear first of all, is there a favorite quote that you have – something you find inspiring or reference often?

Jay Heinrichs
You know what?  We already said it – John F. Kennedy, “Ask not…”  That’s just because it’s the world’s greatest chiasmus, and I use it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or research or experiment – something that you find yourself citing as you’re explaining your principles?

Jay Heinrichs
John Gottman, University of Wisconsin.  Love Lab, as they called it, where he videotaped married couples and how they fought or argued.  And the couples that argued trying to find a solution to things, their marriages lasted much longer than those couples where they saw every piece of disagreement as proof of what a jerk the other person was.  Perfect illustration of the difference between a fight and an argument.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite book?

Jay Heinrichs
Moby-Dick.  I know that I shouldn’t say it, but I re-read it every year, and here’s why – it’s one of the funniest books ever written, and it’s also one of the most serious books ever written.  And for me it’s an inspiration how to take a really difficult subject, like rhetoric, and somehow find humor in it, so that everybody can enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
And how a favorite habit or personal practice?

Jay Heinrichs
Every morning… I may be oversharing here – every morning I get up and I say, “Make this a glorious day.”

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.  Out loud?

Jay Heinrichs
Out loud.  I do, I say it out loud.  My wife is used to it.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you say it in the mirror, or is there a particular pose, or are you standing up?  I just want to visualize this.

Jay Heinrichs
Well, the deal is, I get up at 4:00-4:30 every morning, so that I can get to work before the phone starts ringing.  And so, to do that I’m not a morning person; I say it while rolling out of bed, and for some reason it gives me the momentum to get all the way out of bed so I don’t collapse back down into the pillow.  So I do it while I’m getting up.  So it comes off probably as a grunt if you actually heard it, but that’s what I’m really saying.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun.  And how about any favorite tools, things that you use often and find handy?

Jay Heinrichs
I keep a diary, I have since 2^nd grade.  And I call it “Lunch” and I’ve been keeping it ever since 2^nd grade.  Why do I call it “Lunch”?  Because when I was in 2^nd grade my teacher told me that if I wanted to be a writer when I grew up – and I did – I would have to keep a diary and write something down every day. I said, “What do I write about?”  She said, “Oh, write about yourself.” I was in 2^nd grade, I had nothing to write about. So I decided… Well, someone else said to me, “You are what you eat”, so every single day I wrote down “Bologna sandwich” for like 6 years.  And then gradually I started filling in some details, and to this day I keep a diary and I call it “Lunch”.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun. And how about… Is there any particular… I know we talked about the climax periods and quotable tidbits.  Is there any particular nugget that you share that does seem to often collect the re-tweets or the Kindle book highlights?

Jay Heinrichs
“Switch the tense.”  That’s what everybody remembers from Thank You for Arguing more than anything else.  Switch the tense.  Choices have to do with the future, not the past or the present.  If you want to do better – don’t dwell on the past or the present.  Switch the tense.

Pete Mockaitis
And what you say is the best place to find if you folks want to learn more and check out your stuff?

Jay Heinrichs
Oh, my gosh.  I’m hard to miss.  So, JayHeinrichs.com.  Anything with Jay Heinrichs, search me there.  People in business might be interested that Bloomberg Businessweek did a profile of me, so if you look up Jay Heinrichs and Bloomberg Businessweek, you’ll find the profile.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, will do.  And do you have a favorite challenge or a parting call to action you’d sound forth to folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jay Heinrichs
I’m going to go back to “Switch it to the future.”  It’s such a great experiment.  So when you find yourself disagreeing with someone and there’s anger in the room, just try this as an experiment – look at what tense you’re in and try changing to the future tense. It’s cool, it’s really fun. Try it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, can do. Jay, this has been so much fun. Thank you, it’s a blast. I hope you continue to win your arguments and have fun teaching folks to do the same.

Jay Heinrichs
Pete, I really enjoyed this. You have a likable and trustworthy character.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes! I’m taking that to the bank.