Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, & Public Speaking

The Intercept: “Win Debates like Mehdi Hasan”

admin — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:45:11 +0000

Mehdi Hasan’s debates tend to go viral, like those against John Bolton, Erik Prince, or a Saudi ambassador. Hasan wipes the floor during debates and interviews. But it’s not an easy process; as Hasan says, it requires a lot of preparation. In “Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking,” Hasan outlines the best ways to win debates against all sorts of opponents. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Hasan, where they discuss some of his greatest viral debate clips, along with helpful tips to win debates.

Listen at The Intercept

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KQED: “Mehdi Hasan Wants You to ‘Win Every Argument’”

admin — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:49:22 +0000

Mehdi Hasan says he has been arguing all his life, and he’s made a career of it as a formidable interviewer known for challenging presidents and prime ministers on his MSNBC and Al Jazeera news programs. To him, a good-faith debate is not only the “lifeblood of democracy” but it’s also fun, and he wants us all to learn the craft. We’ll hear how to captivate and persuade an audience, use pathos and humor and handle low-information interlocutors. Hasan’s new book is “Win Every Argument.”

Listen at KQED

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Rolling Stone: “Is Donald Trump’s Name-Calling Actually a Good Debate Technique?”

admin — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:38:20 +0000

“What if I told you that Trump’s much-maligned tactics were not that different from those deployed by one of the most respected and accomplished orators and debaters in history? Back in Ancient Rome, the statesman, lawyer, and rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero was notorious for the invective he rained down upon his rivals. As the classical historian Valentina Arena has pointed out, in one famous argument, Cicero called his opponent Piso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, a belua (“monster”), bustum rei publicae (“funeral pyre of the commonwealth”), carnifex (“butcher”), furcifer (“scoundrel”), maialis(“gelded pig”), and inhumanissimum ac foedissimum monstrum (“most foul and inhuman monster”). Cicero, Arena added, also mocked his opponent’s physical appearance, including his “hairy cheeks and discolored teeth.” (Positively Trumpian!)”

The Guardian: “Mehdi Hasan on Fox News, tough questions and post-Trump politics”

admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 13:44:34 +0000

Hasan has kept his mask on throughout our interview of nearly two hours but also followed his own book’s advice of maintaining eye contact from beneath his thick brows. He is about to take the book on tour, which he admits could prove the ultimate test of his Covid defences. With the 2024 election under way, he intends to keep warning against short memories and the danger of normalising Trump or other extremist Republicans. That he has the platform to do so is something he regards as a privilege, like when your dad hands you the keys to his expensive car.

I feel like, ‘Wow, they gave me the keys to go out and drive and I’ve got to be really careful with the car, but I’m also got to enjoy it and do what I want to do and make the most of it.’ That’s constantly what I’m thinking. Otherwise I wouldn’t do what I do, I would go and do something else. There would be no point if I wasn’t constantly thinking about how it’s being received and what I’m trying to achieve. I’m trying to win an argument every night. I’m trying to say: this is what I believe. You don’t have to agree with me, but let me make the case.”

New York Times: “Fight or Make Nice? Two Books Consider How to Listen and Be Heard”

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 19:07:36 +0000

“Win Every Argument,” by Mehdi Hasan, and “Say the Right Thing,” by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, offer different approaches to talking to others. An excerpt:

Hasan’s book is, by necessity, the more straightforward of the two. He has an unambiguous case to make: He will teach you not just how to argue but how to win. Whether you are debating on national television or sniping at the Thanksgiving table, there are distinct parties involved: You, your opponent and your audience. You persuade your audience by demolishing your opponent. By necessity, a good strategy is paranoid; you’re on the lookout for missteps and weak spots so that you can poke a hole in your opponent’s argument and bring it all down. These conflicts are zero-sum. There is no “win-win” here.

Hasan offers an entertaining primer on rhetorical techniques, including what Aristotle called appeals to logos (reason), pathos (emotion) and ethos (authority). Logos is the basic stuff of argument: Present the facts and draw connections between them. But it would be a pretty fantasy to think that the facts can speak for themselves: “The reality is that pathos beats logos almost every time.”

The Atlantic: “How to Beat Trump in a Debate”

admin — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 15:06:11 +0000

Unprepared and weak-willed opponents continue to play right into his hands. An excerpt:

Donald Trump is probably unaware that he’s an avid practitioner of a debating method known among philosophers and rhetoricians as the Gish Gallop. Its aim is simple: to defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it. Although his 2024 campaign has been fairly quiet so far, we can expect to hear a lot more Gish Galloping in the coming months.

Acknowledgments

amjad — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 11:23:53 +0000

This book would not exist without so many people who helped make it happen – family, friends, colleagues, publishers, and a multiplicity of experts who came before me. So my thanks to my publisher and editor in the United States, Tim Duggan at Henry Holt, who had faith in me before any other major publisher did, and who cold-emailed me out of the blue in early 2021 to suggest we do a book together—before I had even had a chance to come up with a proposal.

And my publisher and editor in the United Kingdom, Matthew Cole, at Pan Macmillan, who had such confidence in me that he outbid eight other publishers for the UK and Commonwealth rights. The folks at United Talent Agency (UTA): my powerhouse literary agents, Pilar Queen and Meredith Miller, and my TV agents, the dynamic duo Marc Paskin and Lia Aponte.

I also want to thank the many authors, writers, and online speech coaches who developed or collated so many of the arguments and concepts outlined in this book—and, in particular, a special shout-out to authors Carmine Gallo (Talk Like TED), Sam Leith (Words Like Loaded Pistols) and Jay Heinrichs (Thank You for Arguing).

Writing a nonfiction book like this requires a great deal of researching and sourcing. Win Every Argument contains 33 pages of endnotes – around 400 in total! – but, despite that, I did spot that I had missed a handful of endnotes after the book went to print. My sincerest apologies to Ejaz Haider, Andrew Dlugan, Paige Parvin, and the Hellenic Antidote blog for this oversight. Thankfully, these extra endnotes have already been added to the eBook edition of Win Every Argument, as have a couple of missing Wikipedia links, and will also be included in all future hardback and paperback editions.

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Publisher’s Weekly: “Readers will be won over by this perceptive guide”

amjad — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 07:36:50 +0000

Publisher’s Weekly reviewed “Win Every Argument” favorably in February. An excerpt:

He challenges Aristotle’s assertion that ethos, logos, and pathos are equally important to persuasion, countering that “pathos beats logos every time.” Citing a study that found stories focused on an individual garner more charitable donations than stories about groups, Hasan suggests that one should use “good anecdotes and gripping narratives” to get audiences invested in one’s argument.

He posits that sprinkling in humor can build rapport, defuse tension, and undermine opponents, recounting when he put an “Islam-basher” and Labor Party parliamentary candidate on the defensive by joking that she would better fit in with far right parties.

“Do your homework,” he urges, but he suggests that jokes are more effective when they’re spontaneous. Bolstered by Hasan’s incisive analysis of his interviews and debates with high-ranking political officials from the UK, US, and China, this collects illuminating insights on persuasion. Readers will be won over by this perceptive guide.