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Q&A With Jay Heinrichs
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Q&A With Jay Heinrichs
Jay Heinrichs wrote the New York Times bestseller, Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion, and How to Argue with a Cat. A persuasion consultant, his clients have included Southwest Airlines, the Wharton School of Business, Harvard, and NASA. His latest book, Aristotle’s Guide to Self Persuasion, was published in July.
Q: Hello Jay, welcome to Book Notions! Would you mind giving quick descriptions of each of your books & what inspired you to write each one?
A: Thank You for Arguing was my first rhetoric book. After looking for a readable guide to the ancient art of persuasion and finding only dry textbooks, I decided to write my own. I wanted this seductive art to seduce me! The book has gone through four editions in 18 languages. The subtitle, “What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us about the Art of Persuasion,” may have helped sell the book. Who can’t resist Lincoln and dear Homer?
Next came Word Hero, about ways to practice “witcraft”—using figures of speech and tropes to get laughs, go viral, and live forever. The ancient Greeks and Romans invented these tricks, and they still work.
After Thank You for Arguing went big, some people began asking for a simple introduction to the art of persuasion. Being the companion of two cats, I decided to write How to Argue with a Cat. If you can persuade a cat, you can persuade anyone. During the book tour, I got 2,000 publishing executives in the London Palladium to purr. My proudest achievement.
I wrote my latest book, Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, because my wife told me to. She’s very smart and I do everything she says. She was hoping to get me out of a serious rut: I was depressed, feeling old, and suffering from a debilitating hip problem. My quest led me on a yearlong self-experiment, using the tools of rhetoric to motivate me to try and become the first person over 50 to “run my age” up a classic mountain in New Hampshire, reaching the top in fewer minutes than I was old in years. The experiment was difficult and painful—I lost 28 pounds and trained four hours a day—but the rhetorical tools led me in an unexpected direction: they made me happier than I’d ever been. And that joy has lasted.
Then there’s The Prophet Joan. It’s a novel that started with a bunch of little stories I read to my wife every night when she came home from work. Its setting is identical to where we live: a town of 278 people at the base of a mountain. A 13-year-old girl gets visited by a raven claiming to be the Angel Gabriel. Or the god Hermes. Or maybe both. Oh, and it’s a murder mystery, because why not? I got the courage to write the book after ghostwriting a popular nonfiction book, Better Angels, for a heroic cancer survivor named Sadie Keller.
Q: How long does it take you to research and write your nonfiction books?
A: Before writing Thank You for Arguing, I spent 20 years studying rhetoric and bothering rhetoricians, linguists, and neuroscientists around the world. Writing the book—and rewriting the entire manuscript three times under my editor’s direction—took a total of two years.
I delayed writing Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion for ten years, in part because I wasn’t sure how to craft it. I wanted more than just another self-help book. Even while showing readers tools that help them gain better habits, manage their time, learn new skills, and achieve their ambitions, I was hoping to coax them into the original art of leadership. All by leading yourself. When I finally figured out how to do that, I wrote the thing in a few months.
How to Argue with a Cat didn’t require research, other than a few tough conversations with my cats, so the draft took just a few weeks. And Word Hero arose from a blog, Figarospeech.com, that I’d been keeping for years.
Q: Your books mainly focus on how to disagree without anger and the art of persuasion. What are the important lessons you wish readers would learn when they read your books?
A: I want them to see that it’s okay to disagree. Learning how to argue without anger lets us make the best decisions. The secret is to focus on the future, a kind of rhetoric that Aristotle called “deliberative.” When we stick to the past tense, on the other hand, we tend to fall into accusation—“forensic rhetoric,” Aristotle called it, because it’s about crime and punishment. Then there’s the kind of preachy, present-tense rhetoric that deals with values, good and bad; who’s in your tribe and who’s out. You want a future focus when you disagree.
Example: When my son was 15, he used up all the toothpaste in the bathroom. “George!” I yelled. “Who used up all the toothpaste!”
He’d heard for years my dinner-table lectures about how switching to the future tense can get you out of trouble. So he changed the tense. “That’s not the point, is it, Dad?” he said. “The point is how we’re going to keep this from happening again!” He was teasing me. But he did get me toothpaste.
Most of all, I want to spread the gospel of rhetoric, an art that created democracies, inspired Shakespeare and MLK, and can save our civilization by bringing us together, even—especially—when we disagree.
Q: In the age of social media, it seems easy for everyone to bate each other in online spats. Do you think that has contributed to people not being able to agree to disagree? Why or why not?
A: Social media is all about what Aristotle called “demonstrative rhetoric.” That’s the tribal, good-people-bad-people, name-calling performative language that tears us apart and makes us miserable.
Why does social media make us tribal? Because it values “engagement” over trust—pure attention over honest reputations.
Aristotle said that the most important rhetorical tool is people’s belief in your character, your ethos. But we often don’t even know who our online adversaries are. And when we do, they’re mostly just pictures and videos and very short texts. Not people or ideas. And possibly robots.
When you find yourself in an online spat, it’s good to think about what your true audience is. The person you’re arguing with may not be persuadable at all. So, who else is following your argument? What can you say to convince them? And how do you get people to see you as a leader? The tools of rhetoric can show you how.
This works in real life as well. When the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving starts spouting his nonsense, can you be the grownup in the room? The sensible, reasonable, may even the witty one? Or maybe you should just shut the argument down, at Thanksgiving or online. Who wants pie?
Q: What advice do you give to anyone whether it’s writing nonfiction or the art of argument and persuasion that you struggle to follow yourself?
A: For me, writing is rewriting. I’m happy to write badly and then improve through multiple drafts. This works whether I’m writing fiction, crafting a memo for my persuasion and marketing clients, or explaining the secrets of rhetoric. I tell students, “Write badly.” Writer’s block isn’t such a big deal if you’re willing to write garbage, knowing you’ll later turn it into something, uh, tasty.
But occasionally I do get blocked, especially when I’m writing something different, such as my most recent book. I found two solutions:
1. A nerf basketball. I’m a terrible shot, and chasing the ball around my writer’s cabin got the blood stirring and made writing seem less frustrating.
2. The Queen Mary 2. I was procrastinating by searching on travel sites, imagining being anywhere other than my writing table, when I found a last-minute fare for a windowless room on a ship going from Brooklyn Harbor to Southampton, England. Everything included for less than the cost of a Day’s Inn and meals at Appleby’s. A few days later I was writing at 4:30 a.m. until a steward brought me a full English breakfast. (My yearlong self-persuasion experiment included creating my own time zone, Jaylight Savings. My book tells you how to carve out your own personal hour or two—not necessarily that ridiculously early.)
Q: Is it too early to reveal what your next book will be about, or are you still in the early stages of writing it?
A: Between books, I love to launch myself in a bunch of directions to see where they take me. I’ve been experimenting with a thriller based on a real 1980 incident (super fun!), planning a continuing-education course on how to write like P.G. Wodehouse, scribbling notes on how to think like an editor, and drafting a lecture for European speechwriters on keeping the soul in the age of AI.
The lecture is real; I have no idea how the rest will develop. And if you ask me a month from now, I’ll probably name more rabbit chases. Eventually, a book will come. It always seems to, sooner or (mostly) later.
Q: Would you like to provide your social media accounts for readers to follow you?
A: Of course! See my Substack newsletter on rhetoric, persuasion, and the power of words. I’m also on Linked In, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, all under my name. And there’s jayheirichs.com and a website for students and educators, Arguelab.com.
Yikes. And here I’ve been abusing social media in a previous answer. What a hypocrite!
Q: Since your new book is titled Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, if Aristotle were alive today, what do you think the two of you would discuss? What questions would you ask him?
A: Having read him for so many years, I get the impression that he’d have so many questions for me that I wouldn’t be able to get my own questions in! He’d be fascinated by our legal system and appalled by how many Americans we imprison. (Why not simply enslave them? he’d ask cheerily, and when told we stopped doing that, would wonder what on earth we meant by “race.”)
But if I could ask, I’d want to probe him on his concept of the soul. It’s key to my new book, thanks to his wonderfully strange book, On the Soul. Given modern neuroscience, how would he redefine the soul?
I’d also ask him what he thought about current governments around the world. Would he prefer our version of democracy? Or would he suggest some ingenious way to make it better?
Q: Would you ever try your hand at writing fiction in the future, or will you stick with writing nonfiction?
A: I’m mostly a nonfiction guy, in part because I love research and teaching. But I did do that novel, Prophet Joan, which got pleasing reviews. And I’ll keep writing fiction between books, just for fun.
