Pathos

I learned a thing or three in my MFA program. The first class I took was called Persuasive Writing, which came in handy because I was an op-ed columnist at Bloomberg at the time.

So the Greeks basically invented rhetoric as a means to settle differences without bonking each other on the head. An innovation at the time. And what they discovered was that there are three ways to argue:

1. Logos

2. Ethos

3. Pathos

Logos is arguing with logic, though you probably could have figured that out. You are going to blind people with science and facts and figures until they are struggling in the grasp of your inescapable reason. I live and work in the investment world, and most of the investment Substacks and newsletters out there argue with logic. They appeal to your sense of intellect. They will give you an interesting factoid you didn’t know, they’ll show you some kind of fancy chart overlay, or they’ll bombard you with statistics. That’s how you argue with logos.

Ethos is arguing with your reputation. If I go on the internet and say that the bond market is going up, it doesn’t mean much—I’m just a newsletter writer. If Stan Druckenmiller goes on the internet and says the exact same thing, everyone is going to listen to Stan, because he is the greatest trader of all time. I say this because I frequently find myself in the same trades as Stan, and people think I am full of shit, but then when I say that Stan agrees with it, they change their mind.

Pathos is arguing with feeling, an appeal to your emotions. Now, the Greeks considered arguing with pathos to be cheating, because it works so well and so often. Politicians argue with pathos, when they are talking about fairness or justice. They appeal to your baser instincts. All the great speeches are about pathos. The “I Have a Dream” speech is about pathos, if you get my drift. The funny thing about writing for Bloomberg Opinion is that they were constantly trying to get me to argue with logos, and I was always arguing with pathos, and the pieces where I argued with pathos did the best, by far, including the CFA piece. Pathos works, man.

Pathos does work. I write this blog with pathos. I write my newsletter with pathos. I write my books with pathos. I play music with pathos. I write with feeling because people respond to feeling.

We are all highly emotional beings. If I sit and think, I can summon up every pain I have ever experienced in my life, from the slights and indignities, to the humiliations, to the incomprehensible demoralizations, to all the loss I have experienced, to the loneliness, to the rejection—all that pain is in my heart and I can summon it when I need to. When my tiny tabby cat Uma passed away in December 2023, we brought her to the crematory in a white carboard box given to us by the vet, and we’re standing there on a sunny, cold day, and we realized that I had forgotten to take her collar off, so I tore open the cardboard box and removed the collar from her dead body, thinking to myself, I will remember this moment for the rest of my life, and I have remembered that moment for the rest of my life. I remember everything. Absolutely everything.

And of course, I remember the good stuff, too.

I think the one thing that artists, musicians, and actors have in common is that they are in the emotions business. They’re not in the world of logos, they’re in the world of pathos. They’re not calculating volatility skew, they’re using their grief and their pain and their joy to create art. I’ve cried while DJing. I’ve cried while writing. I’ve cried while listening to music in my car. Creativity, in general, is not an intellectual exercise. If I am going to write a novel, it’s not as if I’m going to do Step A and Step B and Step C, and after nine months, I’ll have a novel. If I am going to write a novel, I know it is going to be an emotional journey that is going to leave me utterly exhausted at the end of nine months. That’s why it’s so hard. It’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s the summoning up of that creative, emotional energy over an extended a period of time. People get emotional about art, man.

Then you have the logos types, the quants and the derivatives traders and the surgeons and the engineers and the physicists. There is no room for pathos here. Really, this is another way of saying that some people are left-brained and some people are right-brained, as it is known colloquially. Some people tell me that I am one of those rare left-brained and right-brained people. It may seem that way on the surface, but it actually isn’t true. I do finance with my right brain. I trade options with my right brain. I do everything with my right brain. It’s because I am so in tune with my own emotions that I understand other people’s emotions so well. Trading options on a screen isn’t an intellectual exercise, it’s an emotional exercise. I’m not saying that my way is the only way, but my way seems to work a lot better than other people’s way.

I think that most people—most men—deny the existence of emotions. Same mood, all the time. I write these essays under the assumption that most people are like me, but maybe they aren’t. I can tell you that most days, I am a bundle of emotions—sometimes good, sometimes bad. I do things that make me feel good. I avoid things that make me feel bad. My facial expression doesn’t change (as my friends will tell you), but underneath, I’m either deliriously happy or a complete wreck. I think once you understand that people are emotional beings, you understand a lot about life, you understand a lot about social psychology, you understand a lot about politics, and you understand a lot about markets. People are irrational, and society as a whole experiences swings in irrationality.

Which raises the question: isn’t the goal to be completely rational? Well, that has been tried, the communists used what they thought was science to organize society in a completely rational fashion—and it didn’t work. It was a complete failure. It is the irrationality of homo sapiens that makes the species so successful. We are capable of truly great—and terrible things. A lot of people in finance refer to animal spirits. The antonym of animal spirits is…depression? We are capable of both. We are capable of building all of Dubai in seven years. We are incapable of building a single overpass in seven years. If you saw Boys in the Boat last year, you got to see a cinematic depiction of what life was life in the Depression. Waves of irrationality. There is no rational reason why the Depression should happen. There is no rational reason why the Roaring Twenties should happen. Yes, I know all about tax and regulation and economics and such. It is also emotions, on an individual and societal level.

I quit drinking in 2006, and one thing I discovered when I quit drinking was that I could feel feelings once again. I was happy! I was sad! Holy shit! I had forgotten what it was like. I will say a few words about alcohol. Prohibition of any substance is counterproductive and has horrifying unintended consequences, but I get why they banned alcohol. It is insidious in a way that other drugs are not. It has profound psychological and physiological effects—aside from the obvious stuff, like getting drunk and crashing cars and fucking your neighbor. Lots of people like to have a beer in front of a game, or a glass of wine at night. Even a single drink has enormous effects on your psychology in ways that I can’t even explain. And it has effects on your character that I can’t even explain. All I know is that when I quit drinking, it was like I was deaf and I could suddenly hear again, and if you’ve ever seen those videos of little deaf kids that suddenly get cochlear implants, that is what it was like.

The point here is to feel your emotions—not to suppress them—and to use them to your advantage. I will tell you about an emotion I just felt. Last week, I signed with a new literary agent. But I had queried a few others. I just got an email from one that I queried that she’d love to see more of my writing. So I felt a pang of—regret? Indecision? Did I choose the right agent? Should I have gone with someone else? I didn’t feel it intellectually, I felt it physically. I felt it in my heart. So what do I do with that emotion? I use it to strengthen my resolve, that I will write a bestselling book with my new agent, and that I will take action to ensure that my decision was the correct one. The decision I made was with incomplete information, as all decisions are, and there are emotions around making decisions uncertainty. One of the worst emotions is regret, which is why people make so much effort to never feel it. But if your actions are predicated on not feeling an emotion, you will regret that the most.