Don’t cut corners. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree,” that great orator, President Abraham Lincoln, is said to have once remarked, “and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Spend all the time it takes to sharpen your axe, to sharpen your arguments. And make sure you hone your delivery—the way you look, the way you sound, the way you stand —until it’s as sharp as can be. It all counts, and you can never ever be too prepared. So, when host Jonathan Dimbleby came to me for an answer to that provocative question from the audience, this is how I answered. I said it was “absurd” to claim Abu Qatada could not be prosecuted in a UK court. Why? MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan isn’t one to avoid arguments. He relishes them as the lifeblood of democracy and the only surefire way to establish the truth. Arguments help us solve problems, uncover new ideas we might not have considered, and nudge our disagreements toward mutual understanding. A good argument, made in good faith, has intrinsic value—and can also simply be fun. A lot of people think you don’t need any of that, or you can wing that, or that you can’t build that. Some people believe, Oh, I can never be confident, or, I can never be a good researcher. All of those things, I believe, are teachable. Human beings don’t just accept facts blindly. They don’t just accept truth blindly. You have to be able to deploy it.

Mehdi was one of the toughest interviews I did in the White House. In this book, he takes us on a journey through his own experience over years as a journalist and through compelling examples from history to capture the thrill of winning arguments. His book includes the kind of specific advice and applicable tactics that will make readers want to finish the book and immediately go find a sparring partner.” Facts matter, but feelings matter more. If you win their hearts…you win their heads. 2. Play the ball…and the man. I learned this lesson early on. I was raised in, one might say, a disputatious household. To put it plainly: we Hasans love to argue! My father would challenge and provoke my sister and me at the dinner table, on long car journeys, on foreign holidays. He never shied away from an argument over the merits or demerits of a particular issue. It was he who taught me to question everything, to be both curious and skeptical, to take nothing on blind faith, and to relish every challenge and objection.You could say my father is a living, breathing embodiment of the dictum outlined by John Stuart Mill in his classic philosophical treatise On Liberty: I wanted to close on the idea of winning, which is essential to the book’s title. But there are times when winning an argument isn’t the only or even the primary goal, aren’t there? Mehdi is a generationally talented interviewer. He has mastered his craft, and in this book, he generously spills his secrets.”

Make sure you have three main points, and make sure you have a beginning, middle, and end—because three also gives you what Cowan calls a “stable structure.” It helps organize your arguments in a way that people find easy to absorb, remember and, ideally, agree with. Below, Mehdi shares five key insights from his new book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. Listen to the audio version—read by Mehdi himself—in the Next Big Idea App. https://cdn.nextbigideaclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/29000810/BB_Mehdi-Hasan_MIX.mp3 1. Feel your way to victory. No matter how odious and nasty Abu Qatada may be, the whole point of human rights is that it is the nasty and odious people who need human rights the most, and need the protection of the law the most, because if we don’t extend it to them, there’s no point [in having them].

Win Every Argument shows how anyone can communicate with confidence, rise above the tit for tats on social media, and triumph in a successful and productive debate in the real world. Inside our digital echo chambers, it is far too easy to forgo persuasion in favor of performance. Yet Hasan reminds us that we will never change the world unless we change people’s minds. An indispensable handbook for our high-stakes and polarized times.”

To win an argument you need good anecdotes and gripping narratives to connect with your audience and get your points across. As Wharton professor of marketing and psychology, Deborah Small explained to me, stories that “are concrete (rather than abstract), personal, and narrative in form tend to evoke more emotion.” Mehdi Hasan is an award-winning journalist and the host of The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC. He has argued with presidents and prime ministers, celebrities and activists, from across the globe. In our conversation below, we discuss how to use storytelling and humor to your advantage, while keeping in mind that usually less is more, and why you might not necessarily want to win every argument, but how to be equipped to come out on top when you do. When the questioner had spoken, the audience had clapped rousingly. They seemed to want Abu Qatada gone! I knew that if I simply cited reports from Amnesty International or the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, I would lose this crowd. Instead, I had to adapt my usual liberal arguments and appeal to what I knew that particular audience would value and cherish—namely, British tradition, British history. In the first section of the book, on the fundamentals, I’ll show you how to captivate an audience, distinguish between pathos and logos, and become a better listener as well as a better speaker. I’ll explain why humor is often key to winning a debate, and I’ll also mount a defense of the much-maligned ad hominem argument.

Despite that pressure, Diodotus began slowly, his calmness a stark contrast to Cleon’s rage: “I do not blame the persons who have reopened the case of the Mytileneans,” he said, “nor do I approve the protests which we have heard against important questions being frequently debated”—a dig at Cleon’s scorched earth tirade. Diodotus instead built his argument around the importance of free and open debate, warning his audience how “haste and passion” were the two biggest obstacles to “good counsel.” But arguing itself tends to get a bad rap. It’s blamed for everything from political polarization to marital breakdown. In his 1936 classic, How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote: “I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument—and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.” Mehdi Hasan: The easy answer to that is I am arrogant in many walks of life, but not all of them. I’m not arrogant enough to pretend that this is a book about science, or that I am a science journalist or a scientist. I’ve just spent the last three years of this pandemic making a focus of my journalism the importance of actually following science and elevating scientists and not having amateurs and ignoramuses and pseudoscientists tell us about masks or vaccines or social distancing. So I would be the last person to pretend that I know a great deal about science. I know very little about science, and I’m humble about that. This program is read by and contains archival audio of the author from MSNBC, BBC Question Time, Oxford Union, and other sources.