What made people trust that crypto guy?

Rhetoric’s most powerful tool, that’s what.

Crypto Man! For a short while, Sam Bankman-Fried was a currency superhero.

Mop-haired recent billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has just been indicted by the feds for wire fraud and conspiracy. Last month his cryptocurrency trading firm, FTX, managed to lose at least $8 billion within the course of a few days.

Which raises the interesting rhetorical question: Why did more than a million investors trust this guy in the first place? The answer comes from Aristotle, as answers often do.

Aristotle defined the three basic characteristics that make people like and trust a leader. He called them phronesis (practical wisdom), eunoia (disinterested good will), and arete (virtue). I call them Craft, Caring, and Cause. Let’s see how SBF employed these tools.

Craft:

 This is the quality that makes people believe you know what to do to solve a particular problem or lead in a particular field—such as the misty world of crypto, a type of currency that involves massive computer banks “mining” wealth by, essentially, solving puzzles. (Hey, I’m a rhetorician, not a tech guy.)

 SBF seemed almost genetically engineered for this arcane profession. The son of Stanford professors, he majored in physics at MIT and minored in math. Even before he graduated, he began working for the prestigious trading firm Jane Street Capital. At the tender age of 25, he co-founded a quant firm and soon began making vast amounts of money exploiting the difference in the price of bitcoin between Japan and America.

 He founded FTX in 2019 and—this is the rhetorical point—managed to attract more than half a billion dollars from venture capital firms; including Sequoia Capital, legendary funders of Apple, Google, PayPal, LinkedIn, and Zoom.

 Here was a guy who seemed uniquely suited to understand the arcana of cryptocurrency trading. The harder a field is to understand (and even the Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman couldn’t figure out what crypto was for, exactly), the more an audience tends to trust the smartest guy in the room.  Crypto was both a problem and a potentially lucrative opportunity. Young SBF seemed like exactly the character who know how to solve it, and exploit it.

 Of course, we now know that SBF was, at best, a terrible manager. Few people in history have managed to lose more money in such a short time.

Caring:

People are much more likely to trust a character who seems to have their best interest at heart. And here SBF did something brilliant:

Unlike other crypto billionaires, many of whom are libertarians who hold Ayn Rand as their patron saint, the mop-haired mogul made nice with Congress. He actually encouraged some market oversight from the feds. SBF came off as the honest merchant in an ocean of pirates, the man who would ensure a fair playing field. His goal, he said, was to “bring greater investor protections” to ensure their economic security. Members of Congress ate it up. (It didn’t hurt that Bankman-Fried donated $40 million to Democrats.) Only later did he message a Vox reporter, “Fuck regulators.” His encouragement of regulation, he admitted, was just “PR.”

Cause: 

Here the leader appears to share his audience’s values, and to live up to those values. Bankman-Fried was a leading advocate of effective altruism, a utilitarian philanthropic movement that encourages rational thought about ends and means along with “longtermism.”  SBF said his purpose for gaining vast wealth was to give most of it away.

Corporations have used the Cause technique to sell everything from socks to petroleum. Politicians quote the Bible to show they share the values of evangelicals.

Even the way you and I dress can be seen as virtuous (or unvirtuous). Take SBF’s hair. Like Boris Johnson, SBF deliberately showed off his wild, um, coiffure. It made both men seem authentic, natural, like they were being totally themselves, careless of what shallow people might think of them. In reality, the hairstyle is a studied act of decorum, an attempt to fit in with an audience. I’m not a banker, Bankman-Fried’s fro says. Total wunderkind fashion statement.

Together, Caring, Craft, and Cause constitute the trifecta of ethos, a leader’s expression of character. As in all of rhetoric, the point is not whether the person actually embodies those qualities. The point is whether people believe he does. And a million investors, along with some very smart Silicon Valley VCs, clearly believed in SBF.

In all of rhetoric, let the buyer beware.

Claus for divorce? How Santa’s wife saved Christmas (and her marriage)

This year’s Christmas card does a role reversal on the Clement Clarke Moore classic.

The Wife Before Christmas

 By Jay Heinrichs

’Twas the week before Christmas, and old Mrs. Claus

Stepped away from the kitchen and took a short pause.

She sat by the fire with a small bone to pick:

Lately things weren’t the same between her and her Nick.

Oh but don’t get her wrong; there was no overt strife.

She knew that no husband’s a saint to his wife.

But Nick’s ample belly had lately grown lumpy.

His year-round good nature could sometimes turn grumpy.

He gagged on the sugarless cookies she’d bake

And groaned when she switched his coat’s real fur with fake…

She observed her own belly, which stretched her red felt,

Admitting that she too was no longer svelte.

It’s not that she rued her long marriage to Nick.

What she-elf could ask for a jollier pick?

Still, these days their relations were mere Hershey’s kisses.

She wished he would no longer call her “The Missus.”

Mrs. Claus: that cognomen meant mere borrowed fame…

She’d been called that so long, she’d forgotten her name!

And besides, though she lacked the sheer nerve to have said it,

She would rather like getting some more of the credit:

Who saved that one Christmas—and this was essential—

By telling her husband of Rudolph’s potential?

The truth was, he needed her aid more than ever.

The years had not made the elf any more clever.

She was starting to doubt that his wits passed inspection—

What saint in his right mind forgets his direction?

Take last Christmas Eve, when the addled old master

Drove the sled the wrong way, a near-run disaster.

Only Donder and Blitzen, with Germanic force

Pulled the sled over Iceland and set it on course.

Wait: She had an idea! She would save the old coot!

Just this once, she would take on his magical route.

She spent all that week learning each little annual

Chore (all explained in the Sled Owner’s Manual).

Then she spiked Santa’s eggnog with rum Mission Night:

Ere long, he was out like a faulty tree light.

Mrs. Claus felt some nerves when she grasped the sled’s reins…

But Dasher et alia took added pains

To launch extra gently, and had the good sense

To veer at the clouds that forewarned turbulence.

Setting down on each rooftop, she hoisted her wares…

And avoided the chimney, preferring the stairs.

Come Christmas morning, the children awoke

To find lovely presents, not one of them broke.

And handwritten cards in Ms. C’s own light scrawl

Declared every child the most special of all.

Elves’ reports soon flowed in from the region HQs:

This mission was getting the highest reviews!

Still, she worried her Nick would be more than just miffed—

He might find her adventure the worst kind of gift.

She brought him strong coffee to ease his poor head

And told him the truth… then he smiled and said,

“I must say I’m surprised; but you made the right call.”

(It turns out that old Nick was a saint after all!)

“Next Christmas,” he said, with the tiniest pause,

“We’ll do this together, S.C. and Ms. Claus!”

She leaned toward her husband and cooed in his ear:

“Call me Alice,” she said. “And I get to steer.”

© Jay Heinrichs

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Persuasion 101: Watch the tense, practice decorum.

Here’s another question, this time from AP English Language student Will Sims.

We are learning about these rhetorical skills and tools, so how do you begin using them in real life? Once you do start using them how do you know you are using the skills correctly and not creating more fallacies yourself?

The beautiful thing about rhetoric (and the ugly thing as well) is that there is no “correct” way to use the tools. If you achieve your persuasion goal, then you’ve used rhetoric perfectly. Fallacious logic often persuades people. That qualifies an effective fallacy as “correct” rhetoric. (One motive for writing Thank You for Arguing, other than the fact my wife told me to, was my desire to inoculate people against rhetoric’s more evil manipulation.)

When it comes to which tools to use in real life, I’d start with the ones that calm things down when emotions get uncomfortable. My favorite two tools on those occasions:

1. Watch the tense, and try to change it.

Aristotle himself made this point, and it’s brilliant.

The past tense often gets used for failures and crimes. (“Look what you did!” “Who used up all the toothpaste?”) Aristotle called past-tense rhetoric “forensic,” because it has to do with crime and punishment—forensics. It can be useful for investigating a problem, but this rhetoric rarely actually solves problems. “Who used up all the toothpaste” investigated the toothpaste crime, but it didn’t get my son to bring me a tube.

The present tense has to do with values, tribes, and identities. (“A good son wouldn’t use up the toothpaste!” “Americans who don’t believe what I believe are traitors!”) This rhetoric—Aristotle called it “demonstrative,” because competitive speechmaking in ancient Greece often had to do with what’s good or bad—makes for the best sermons. In fact, just about all the greatest political speeches use the present tense in their best lines.

To solve problems, make common choices, and get people excited about a needed action, you want the future tense. Aristotle called this rhetoric “deliberative,” because it has to do with deliberating decisions that affect the future. (“How are we going to keep this from happening again?”) When an argument uses blame (past tense) or calls names (present tense), try pivoting to the future tense. (“Let’s talk about what we should do.”)

2. Practice decorum.

Remember when I made everybody uncomfortable by telling the class I was sending love beams out of my eyes? True decorum isn’t just about convincing an audience you’re part of the same tribe. It starts with convincing yourself that you have a lot in common, and that they’re worthy of your love. This gets especially challenging when the annoyingly opinionated uncle shows up at Thanksgiving. It’s hard to send the guy love beams while he’s pontificating and everybody around the table is staring down at their turkey. Your job is to love that uncle, even honor him. Think of what you have in common, and speak to it. Most of all, be the grownup in the room. Personally, I wish the world’s religions focused more on this aspect of decorum: love first, think of differences later. It can move rhetorical mountains.

That’s it. Practice tenses and love. Learn to spot fallacies—it makes for great brain training—but don’t obsess over them. You’re on your way to mastering the art of leadership.

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