The Bulwark Podcast - Mehdi Hasan: How to Win Any Argument

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Master interlocutor Mehdi Hasan says come to a debate prepared — bring receipts and know the other side's best argument better than they do. And Democrats: The heart beats the head almost every time. So, don't bring a policy paper to a knife fight. Hasan joins Charlie Sykes today. Show Notes Mehdi's book: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250853479/wineveryargument Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. I can remember the exact moment when I first met Mehdi Hassan, met him in the digital sense. It was back in, I think it was November of 2018. And I'm scrolling through social media and this video comes up, this viral video comes up of his interview with a guy named Steve Rogers, who was a flack for Donald Trump and wanted to explain that, you know,

that Donald Trump never lies. He's a truth teller. And he walks into this incredible buzzsaw. Listen. The president lies daily, multiple times. When he says we're the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and that baby is essentially a citizen of the United States, is that true or false? No, it's false.

It's a misstatement. That doesn't mean it's a lie. Okay. He said there were riots going on in California against illegal immigration in so-called sanctuary cities. Were there any riots in California? Oh, yes, there were. A lot of civil disturbances. Where were the riots?

Where were the riots? Can you tell me where they were? Oakland, California. There were street skirmishes in Los Angeles. Oh, yeah, that's a fact. No, no, hold on. The spokesman for the California Police Chiefs Association says there were no riots taking place as a result of sanctuary city policy.

There were no riots. He just made it up. When he was asked to say where they were, he said, go look for them. I can give you many more. He said during the campaign that there's six to seven steel facilities that are going to be opened up. There are no. U.S. Steel has not announced any facilities. Why did he say they've announced new facilities? That's a lie, isn't it? No, it isn't, because there are a lot of companies opening up. There are steel facilities that are going to be opening up. Sorry, Stephen, that's not what he said. I know it's difficult for you. I know you want to try and defend him.

No, it isn't difficult for me. Let me read the quote. Let me read the quote to you. U.S. Steel just announced that they're building six new steel mills. That's a very specific claim. U.S. Steel have not announced six new steel mills. They have said they have not announced six new steel mills. There's no evidence of six new steelers. He just made it up. And he repeated it. He didn't just say it once. Look, I don't know of what context these statements were made, but I could tell you this. The president of the United States has been very responsive to the American people and the American people are doing well. Look, that's fine. You can look at me and say Steve Rogers lied and the president can be a liar. There's no contradiction between those two statements. I am not going to

say the president of the United States is a liar. No, I know you're not, but I've just put to you multiple lies and you've not been able to respond to any of them. Let me ask you this. I didn't respond to them. What didn't happen is you didn't hear what you wanted to hear. What did I want to hear? I wanted to hear that there are no steel. You wanted to hear me say, no, well, let's go on. I mean, you want to go on because you know it's alive. Oh, my God. So I'm thinking, who is this guy? Mehdi Hassan, thanks for coming on the Bulwark podcast today. Thank you for having me, Charlie.

Mehdi is the host of The Mehdi Hassan Show on MSNBC and NBC's Peacock. He's the author of a brand new book, Win Every Argument, The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. And first of all, it is a great read. It is an entertaining read. Let's get into the details a little bit later of that, Mehdi. But congratulations on the book. Now, you were up late in Philadelphia. You were doing Morning Joe this morning.

So you're not burned out yet on this, right? I'm not burned out. I was up late in New York and then D.C. and I'm doing Philadelphia on Thursday night and then Houston ahead on Saturday. So you've written a wonderful book too, Charlie, which I have actually. I'm staring at it right now. It's on my shelf right in front of me, How the Right Lost Its Mind. But, you know, you've done the book tour.

It's fun, but it's exhausting. The funny thing is my book's about speaking, so I've got no excuses when it comes to the keep speaking. It's basically what I do. I wanted to start with your argument, you know, winning every argument, the art of debating, persuading, and public speaking. By the way, can I just make a confession? After I saw this video back in 2018, you were at Al Jazeera English, right? And I think the week after that, I got invited to come on. I think it was your show.

And I'm thinking, shit, I'm not going anywhere near that guy. He will kill me. Being an interesting part of the journey is how do you get people to come on after clips like that? How do you get people to come on? If anyone's ever seen that video, why would they do it? I got asked in a politics and prose last night. It's a classic question. I say I've got very good bookers.

And also, I think a lot of people enjoy a good fight. A lot of people don't do their homework before coming on shows. And I have a whole chapter in the book about do your homework. Know what you're arguing. Know who you're up against. A lot of people don't do that and they get caught out. That is amazing to me. I mean, I think that one of the most important things that people ought to take out is this. You need to go and do the preparation. You need to have the receipts. You need to have thought about this. And you obviously do that. But you admit in the book that it's pretty damn hard these days to make a convincing case

for the reasoned logical evidence-based argument. And I guess that's the question, is do people want to be persuaded? It almost feels like a lost art because people have decided, I'm never going to change anyone's mind. There's nothing that I'm going to say. So I'm just simply going to repeat my same old talking points, and I'm going to beat the opposition over the head. So is this a lost art to believe that anything you say or do will change anyone's mind about anything? It's a great question, Charlie, and it goes to the heart of actually what I do for a living in terms of my journalism, my TV show. And I remember after Donald Trump won in 2016, I was sitting with a colleague and I said, should we just jack it all in and go be accountants? Not that there's anyone being an accountant, but what are we doing this for? What is the point of sitting and trying to do

debunkers and fact checks and reality checks and long form interviews, long monologues with receipts if it's just bouncing off millions of people because they either don't want to believe it or they're stuck in an information bubble where they're just not receiving it. And it has depressed me at times over the years. But one of the things I say in the book, and chapter three is called Show Your Receipts. It's about the importance of a fact-based argument. Because I say in the book, emotional arguments are best and most important, but don't forget about fact-based arguments. I'm not Kellyanne Conway. I'm not saying alternative facts. I'm not saying Rudy Giuliani, the truth is done. We're done with the truth. Truth isn't truth. No,

facts are really important. And I haven't given up on facts. And, you know, if you look at a study published by Political Behavior back in 2017, they say, by and large, citizens still heed factual information, even when it challenges their ideological commitments. There is enough research done that people have not been completely closed off to facts, thankfully. And we see that in election results as well, where you can get off the fence. So you're right, it's a horrible trend. And one of the reasons I wrote this book is because there are far too many gaslighters and bullshitters out there degrading our public discourse. But we haven't completely lost the independent third person. Believe it or not, I had circled that

exact passage in your book. By and large, citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their ideological commitments. Really, Mehdi? I mean, well, let's take an interesting point. Like, let's take the pandemic as a good example, where if you start at the outset of the pandemic, people did, by and large, follow the the, I know we're now rewriting the entire history of the pandemic, especially with lab nonsense, but people did by and large accept what had to be done, accept the science, accept, obviously there were always troublemakers. It was over time that the right and the anti-vaxxer right, the anti-masker right, the pro-trauma won the argument. I do think they won the argument, sadly. They won the messaging, certainly the messaging argument. And that goes back to why this book and why I wrote this book and why it's so important. Because you can have the best

arguments in the world, the best statistics, the best data, the best science on your side, but that is not enough to win the argument. That is not enough to make the case. Because if the other side is doing a better job of whatever it is, deceiving, misleading, rabble-rousing, you will lose. And I say this to liberals and leftists in the UK, I say it in the US, you can't just say, I've got a great argument. We've got the best policies. We've got science on our side. That's not enough. How do you get it across to people? How do you convince people? How do you persuade people? So in this book, I've tried to come up with A, the case for why it's important to do that. B, here are the tried and tested techniques, going back to Aristotle, that work. And here are examples from my own life and career.

And I love the anecdotes. And many of the stories that you tell are of set piece debates in England with the, you know, the, was it the Oxford Union Society? Yes. In BBC's Question Hour. But in those formats, first of all, it's structured, and you do have both cases being made, and there is an audience that is usually persuadable. In this country, it feels that those debates have become increasingly rare, that what we have is we have these alternative reality silos, echo chambers, bubbles, whatever, you know, cliche you want to use here. And so that much of this, you know, doesn't get to the other side. You know, I mean, how do you persuade someone if they've basically decided

they don't want to hear anything out of their own safe zone? I think that is a huge question. It's an existential question, Charlie, for our democracy and our free press, because if you have 20 to 30 percent of the American public just cocooned off, walled off from reality, for example, you know, you have 20 to 30 percent of the American public just cocooned off, walled off from reality. For example, you know, you have this massive story about Fox hosts lying to their viewers. Yeah. Dominion lawsuit about the election. Problem is, we can all say, ha ha, Fox got caught.

But the Fox viewers don't know they've been caught because the Fox viewers are not getting that story. The Fox is not covering the story that relates to Fox. I'm surprised none of the primetime hosts are addressing these leaked texts and these depositions from Rupert Murdoch that reveal them to be liars. So that is a huge problem. But look, my point in the book is where you can have these arguments, and obviously the book doesn't try and address the massive media imbalance and silos of the country, but where you can have these arguments, even in an unstructured way, even on cable with all the time constraints of live cable news, and you know that as a guest, I know that as a host, you can do it. And I make the point in the book, I give the example of Congressman Dan

Crenshaw, a Republican right winger who signed on to the Texas lawsuit in 2020, but didn't vote to overturn the election, to be fair to him, on January the 6th, 2021. And we had an argument, he and I, on Twitter, which is where I have most of my arguments these days in a very unstructured way. But I try and read the same lessons that I have in the book to Twitter as well. And that Twitter argument then migrated to my TV show where he, to be fair to him, agreed to come on MSNBC on my show live. And we had it out for kind of 15, 20 minutes on immigration and the border. And, you know, I thought it was a very ferocious and heated exchange, but a lot of important stuff got said. So I agree, there are constraints. Life is not a

university debate hall or a high school debate competition. And in fact, I wrote the book precisely because I actually like the way those structured debates happen. My daughter does high school debate, and I see it, and I encourage her and I support her, but it's not something I like doing. I like to live in the real world, Charlie. Real world debates don't have all the rules that structured debates have. So for example, right at the beginning of the book, I have a chapter on ad hominem attacks. It's called play the man and the ball, because for far too long, we've been told, especially in liberal arts education, you must address the substance of the argument. You must not go after the arguer. You must play the ball, not the man. That's an ad hominem attack. That's a logical fallacy. And I say, come on,

live in the real world. In the real world, ad hominems are everywhere. And in the real world, ad hominems work and they are relevant. And I mount a defense of ad hominem arguments precisely because in limited time up against someone who may sound like they know more about a topic than you do, your job is to persuade whoever's watching, whoever you're trying to convince, whichever third party or audience that, hold on, my credibility is better than that person's credibility. That person's credibility, that person is a liar, or that person is someone who's paid off, or that person is someone who is a hypocrite who doesn't follow his own advice. And those are ad hominem attacks, but I make the case for why they are relevant.

And I go back to Aristotle. Aristotle said one of the three pillars of making your case is stressing your ethos, not just your pathos, your emotions, not just your logos, your rational arguments, but your ethos, your own personal expertise and credibility. And so I say, you know, to go back to your question, yeah, you know, we're not in the Oxford Union, but even if you're standing on a street corner chatting to someone, you might want to stress, well, you know, what do you know about this subject? I know more about this than you. Oh, you were talking about COVID. Well, hold on. I'm quoting a doctor here. You're quoting some quack from an internet message board. I believe those are relevant and viable and defensible and actually sometimes necessary techniques that apply

in whatever forum you're in. I've wondered this question for a long time, and I don't mean any disrespect to American journalists, but there is a real difference, it seems to me, between the culture of British journalism and American journalism. There's more of an aggressiveness. It is not a coincidence, I think, that two of the most effective interviewers in the American media today would be Jonathan Swan and you. When I'm watching a BBC clip, there's a completely different quality. The willingness to challenge, is it the follow-up questions? Is it the level of preparation? What is different in the different cultures of the British media and the American

media? And what could we learn from that? Well, what you just listed is all true. It is the preparation, it is the tone, it is the follow-up questions. I've been asked this question for years now since I moved here. And I have to answer it carefully because number one, there are people doing good work on American TV. There are good interviews out there. I cite people like Jake Tapper at CNN, Chris Wallace in his Fox days, Ali Velshi on my channel at MSNBC, people who do strong, well-prepared, confrontational, combative interviews. But you're right. It's interesting that a lot of outsiders have grabbed a lot of headlines with interviews, not just held up as this kind of great conservative debater who goes on college campuses and owns people, YouTube clips, getting millions of views of Ben Shapiro owning a social justice warrior. And yet Ben Shapiro, the great debater of the right, does one brief interview. Destroyed. To the point where he almost has to run away,

take off his microphone and end the interview. And Andrew Neil is a conservative, by the way, he's not a leftist, as Ben Shapiro thought, because Ben Shapiro didn't do his homework before he sat down with Andrew Neil, tried to call him a leftist. Andrew Neil destroyed him. And I think, yes, I do think there is less of a deference. The British media has a lot of problems. I lived in the UK. I was as critical of the British press as I am these days about the American press. The British media has a lot of problems. But when it comes to TV interviewing specifically, I do think there is less deference. I think there is a sense where holding to account is much more central to the purpose of the interview. And it goes, it's a cultural thing, Charlie, as you say,

it goes back many years to people like Robin Day and some great interviews. But I grew up watching a guy called Jeremy Paxman. I urge your listeners to go Google YouTube Jeremy Paxman. He's an attack dog. He was the greatest attack dog on British television to the point where one of his most viral clips, he wasn't broadcast in a viral moment, but today it's still very viral online. He interviewed Michael Howard, who was the home secretary at the time, our version, the UK version of the attorney general, who had just fired a prison governor, very controversial story. Jeremy Paxman asked him the same question 12 times, Charlie, 12 times, because he wouldn't answer it. Can you imagine that happening? I can't imagine on American TV someone taking time out, stopping the ad breaks and saying, here's, I'm going to ask the same follow-up until you answer

me 12 times. And Paxman had a famous line, which is, in my head, before I start an interview, I think to myself, why is this lying bastard lying to me? Which is a very aggressive way to start an interview. I mean, some might say that's too far. That's not impartial enough for a BBC interview. But it's about a state of mind, which is, I'm coming into this to hold you to account. And I do think, you know, despite America being the home of the revolution, the place that stood up to the British monarchy. We've gone too far in the sense of kind of the deference to institutions and people in power and political conventions and orthodoxies. I think we need to break some of them down. And I think one of the only silver lining of the horrible Trump cloud was that it forced journalists to get off the fence and start using words like lie. This person is lying, which was something, as you know, many mainstream journalists would not say in this

country for many a year. So what was your favorite interview? What was your favorite? I won. I've got this guy. I'm dropping the mic. I've got to say Eric Prince for many reasons. I was hoping you would say that. The Michigan billionaire family, the brother of Betsy DeVos, the founder of Blackwater, mercenary chief, close Trump ally, close Steve Bannon ally. He agrees to go back to your earlier question. We asked him to come on my Al Jazeera English show at the time, which was filmed at the Oxford Union in front of a live audience. He agrees to come on. I was shocked. My producer says, Eric Prince is going to do the show. What? Eric Prince is going to do the show? Why would Eric Prince do the show? People have asked me for years, why did Eric Prince do your show? And I say,

I don't know. If I was Eric Prince, I wouldn't have done my show. But he turns up. I said, great. We do all our prep. We do our homework. We read his memoir. We read all the interviews he's done before. I had to see what he's been asked before, what he hasn't been asked before. It was the interview that basically made me famous in America. It probably got me my job at MSNBC. When I spoke to executives at MSNBC, they had all seen the Eric Prince interview. It was the interview that made me depressed that Sunday. It was the interview that Adam Schiff referred to the DOJ when they tried to refer Eric Prince for prosecution for allegedly perjuring himself

in front of the House committees because I pushed him on his contacts with the Trump campaign. And he said, well, I was never asked these questions. And I said, yes, you were. And he said, no, I wasn't. And I said, well, I've got the transcript here of your House testimony

and they didn't ask you the question. And the audience starts to laugh. And Prince says, well, maybe the transcript was wrong. And he's floundering now. He's in a hole. He doesn't know where to go. And it's amazing because it's such an obvious question, but no one had really asked it to him and no one really just stood there. What I try to do, Charlie, is, and you played the Steve Rogers clip earlier, is people want you to move on. That's what they want. The number one thing the interviewee wants is move on to the next topic so I can get away with what I just said. And I say, no, I'm not going to move on. I say in the book, don't budge. Stay put. It's great TV. And it's also valuable because they've got nowhere else they're forced

to answer the question because you're just sitting there and you're saying, well, hold on, it's not in the transcript. It is valuable because a lot of these guys are very well trained and they're used to being able to either just simply deflect, move on, or filibuster. You described something called the GISH gallop, which is basically the fire hose of bullshit, which is really a problem in politics and debate. So just talk to me about this. I mean, these are somebody who talks really fast, makes a series of completely bogus, misleading, false claims, but there's so much stuff there that you can't refute or catch up to it. And I'm sure every listener is thinking,

isn't that Donald J. Trump? It is Donald J. Trump. And I talk in the book that he's adopted this tactic known in debate circles as the Gish Gallop. It's named after a late Christian creationist debater called Dwayne Gish, who used to overwhelm all these far more qualified and eminent scientists in debates on evolution by just throwing cherry-picked stats and quotes and out-of-context remarks and fake studies to the point where the scientists couldn't respond to them all. And the audience thinks, well, maybe there's some truth to this creation argument. And that's what Donald Trump does so skillfully, and some of the mini-Trumps do. And Trump did it in the 2020 debate with Joe Biden,

where I think he told a lie every nine seconds across one two-minute period, where Chris Wallace couldn't even jump in and cut him off. What do you do in that situation, where the entire strategy is based on overwhelming you, tiring you, disorienting you? To quote Steve Bannon, our opponents are not the Democrats, they're the media. And the way you deal with the media is to flood the zone with shit. And that is what they do. So how do you stop yourself from being drowned in shit? And I say in the book, there's three ways to do it. It's not easy. There's no silver bullet, but three possible ways to do it when you're confronted with a bullshit merchant who's trying to gallop all over you is to say, I'm not going to address all hundred lies they just told in a 60 seconds. I'm going to ignore 99 of them. I'm going to pick

the dumbest, most ridiculous, most outrageous, most demonstrably false one, and I'm going to rebut that to show the audience that the rest of them are equally bad. It's called the worst case rebuttal, right? You take the worst argument and you rebut that one. And then you go, okay, so you've done that. You pick your battle. You don't try and do everything. Number two, you don't budge, as I mentioned a moment ago. And I always give the example of Jonathan Swan in his famous Axios interview with Donald Trump, where Trump is throwing ridiculous stats about COVID and trying to move on. And Jonathan says, hold on, what's that? What are you talking about?

Which death statistic? Which country are you comparing us to? And Trump is floundering now, because normally people don't say that to him. And he's already moved on. Jonathan doesn't move on. He doesn't budge. And then the third tactic, and you mentioned the fire hose of falsehood, is to call it out.

Call it the fire hose of falsehood. Call it the bullshit strategy. Make people aware of what's going on, that this is all a strategy to bewilder and disorient and mislead and gaslight. Make people put, you know, the Rand Corporation says, if it's a firehouse of falsehood, put raincoats on your audience. Protect them from that firehouse of falsehood. So it's a kind of three-step strategy. And I say in the book, I always have three reasons for everything.

Three things to do in this case is pick your battle, don't budge, call it out. You also like presenting a guest or a debate opponent's own words so that you can contradict them. And again, this is part of being Mediasan is you have to know how much homework you do, how much background work, how deep you dig beneath just, you know, the headlines. And so maybe you could help me here. I actually need some help. I'd some advice from you on this. Okay. So you interviewed John Bolton. Yes. Okay. Famous interview. I'm sitting down with John Bolton. Yes. Okay.

Famous interview. I'm sitting down with John Bolton in D.C. on Saturday. I just want to get some sense of what you would ask him, but I want to talk about your experience with Bolton. Bolton's a really, really smart guy. He's been debating since the Yale political union. He's very, very, very good at interviews. He is. And usually people don't get the better of him because he has done his homework. He is knowledgeable. Yes. So tell me about when you interviewed John Bolton and you brought the receipts. So what we did in that John Bolton interview,

and people can watch it online, it went viral. It was, again, one where my producer rings me and says, John Bolton's agreed to do the show. And I'm like, really? Why has John Bolton agreed to come on? Why would he come on? He obviously didn't do his homework on me. So he turns up, and we had two strategies. One is I want to talk about Iraq, because I'm obsessed with Iraq. I think it's one of the great crimes of the modern era. We're about to mark the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which he was an architect on. But he's been asked about Iraq 100 times, Charlie, right? He's been asked every possible question, you might think. But one question he's ever really been asked, because interviewers maybe think it's kind of, you know, not for them to do is the moral

question. People have asked him all sorts of things about WMDs and the intel. I wanted to know the moral question. And there's a fascinating exchange where I ask him, forget everything else, forget all the arguments, pro and for the war. People died. Thousands of innocent people died. Does that not weigh on your conscience? Does that never make you, you know, does that make it hard to sleep at night? And then he starts talking nonsense about the war and about how the war was effective and the occupation. And he doesn't answer the question. I wait, I let him speak, I don't interrupt him for a couple of minutes, and then I go back. But you didn't answer my question. That's all, you know, we can talk

about the occupation or the war or whatever. What about all the deaths and the torture and destruction and the refugees? That never keeps you up. Doesn't bother you at all. Doesn't make you feel bad. And again, Philip tries to avoid. It's a very powerful thing because you know he does not want to answer this question. And then we get on to other issues where I did bring receipts.

And one of my favorite exchanges I tell the story in the book is where he, you know, he's very, very good at what he does, but he didn't expect people to dig into certain parts of his background, which is he often addresses a group called the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, M-E-K, which is a nuts Iranian opposition group, bunch of cultists, misogynists, too many American politicians, including many Democrats have gone to speak at their venues because they're anti the Iranian government. You know, my enemies, enemies, my friend. No, these guys are nuts. Bolton took money to speak at them when they were listed as a terrorist organization by the state Department. So I called him out on this. I said, you say you're for freedom in Iran. Is it because you're paid by this opposition? Oh,

you've got your facts wrong, sir, which I love when people say that to me because I'm about to display the receipt. He said, I spoke to them. Hillary Clinton delisted. I'm sure you love Hillary Clinton. What do you say about that? And I said, but you didn't. You spoke to them before she delisted them. We watched the YouTube video. I have the transcript of your remarks. Here you are in Paris, taking money from a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States State Department. What does John Bolton say? Does he have a receipt of his own? Does he have a pithy comeback? He says, sir, your time is up. You said I had 15 minutes. This interview is over on now. I mean, hilariously, he tries to shut down the interview saying time is up,

which, by the way, the time wasn't up because I had a timer in front of me and a producer in my ear. So those moments, I mean, Charlie, I'll be honest with you. People will cheer at a football match when a goal is scored by the team they love. That's the feeling I get in those moments. I'm a nerd. That's why adrenaline rush. That's what I enjoy doing.

I'll be very open about it. I'm not going to hide. I love that stuff. So you and I come from extremely different backgrounds, but as I was reading this, I was thinking, okay, I get this. I'm not sure that a lot of other people do, because when I was a kid, I was, when I was growing up, I wasn't any good at sports. I was the fat kid and, you know, not, not terribly popular. So of course I had to use my mouth. I had to use, you know, my debating skills and everything. And, and, and my father was, was that way as well. And so I grew up thinking that one

of the most fun things in the world to do would be to argue and debate. As I became older and went out into the real world, what I discovered was a lot of people do not like that. They don't like to argue. I'm thinking this is a sport. This is fun. And then other people start crying or they get mad at you and you lose a lot of friends and everything. So, I mean, this was something, I mean, you understand what I'm getting at? It was when you were, you like arguing, you like this. So I would say two things, and I completely understand where you're coming from. Everything you just said echoed with me. I say two things. Number one, on the micro level, I don't think people do dislike arguing. I think that's a myth. I think people do like it. I just think people

don't like losing. And that's why I wrote a book to say, here's how you can win. I think everyone at some point in their life wants to win an argument, needs to win an argument, has to win an argument. And I say in this book, everyone can win an argument. Let me show you how. That's the purpose of the book on the micro level. On the macro level, let's just take a step back. Sorry to sound kind of grand here, but democracy, our democracy existentially relies on debate and argument. As the public sphere is degraded, as our discourse is degraded, as the gaslighters and grifters dominate the political spectrum, I'm saying, no, no, no, no, no. You have to be able to make the argument. You cannot run away from this, people. You cannot keep your head down. And if you

want to fight for democracy and truth and a free press, you better be rhetorically equipped to do it. So sorry if you don't like it. Sorry if you think, oh, no, this is a little bit too aggressive for me. This is 2023 in America. You don't get to avoid these fights anymore. Sorry. One of the interesting things that you wrote in the book was the importance of listening, listening very carefully, listening to your opponents, listening to your questioners. And I think you acknowledge that when your wife heard you were writing a book about being a good listener, she said, you, you. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, that's one of the most difficult things. If you're arguing, debating with somebody, you know, I think the default setting for most people is to be thinking about the next thing they're going to

say. And you're saying, no, you need to focus and listen very, very carefully. That's acquired, isn't it? I mean, that's a skill. Oh, 100%. I mean, I would argue 90%, 95% of what I'm saying at the book is acquired. The reason I wrote the book is that actually a lot of these things that we think are natural, that we think, oh, MLK, Churchill, Lincoln, they were all born this way. Not true. A lot of them had to work on it for a long time. But just to take listening as a specific one, I am a bad listener. I do cut people off.

I'm not paying attention. I admit that fully, and not just with my wife, but with others. I'm sure members of my team will say in team meetings, I sometimes just do my know, just doing my own thing. Too often in debates, we're not listening, we are waiting for our turn to speak. And that's a mistake, because when it comes time to speak, we haven't heard what the other person said, we can't rebut what they said, we haven't maybe picked a hole in their argument that we could have done. Critical listening is so important. I do try very hard in interviews, in debate, in public appearances to try and listen out for, has someone said something inconsistent? Has someone said something self-contradictory?

Has someone said something flat false? I'm always on the lookout for that. And then even harder than critical listening is empathetic listening. This idea of putting yourself in the shoes of other people. That's really hard for us to do, especially in an age of social media and cell phones, and we're all distracted all the time. And actually, to be an empathetic listener, you have to be present. You have to be making eye contact. You have to be not just paying attention, but show that you're paying attention to the other person. And the story, the example I give in the book is the classic 1992 town hall from Richmond, Virginia, presidential town hall, the first town hall in American history, where Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, hilariously, are all on stage. We're all sitting on their

stools in this town hall. And a woman in the audience asks about the national debt. How has it affected you personally? George Bush senior not only doesn't pay attention to her question, he's looking at his watch. When he goes to answer, he gives a long rambling answer about interest rates and visits to black churches and all sorts of other nonsense, but it doesn't actually address the question or the questioner. When Bill Clinton's time comes to answer, what does he do? He gets off the stool. He walks purposefully towards the woman in the audience. He looks her in the eyes and he says, tell me how it's affected you. Because he wants to hear her. The audience, when they come to hear you speak at any event, whether it's an audience in the boardroom at work, whether it's a jury in

a courtroom, whether it's an audience at a presidential debate or a political rally, they come to be seen by you and come to be heard by you. It's not one way traffic. They only want to see you and hear you. They want to be seen by you and be heard by you. And I think Bill Clinton is a master empath when it comes to our politics of the modern era. I mean, I can't think of anyone better than Bill Clinton for that specific trait. You cite Aristotle saying, you know, that there are, you know, three main rhetorical techniques, logos, pathos, ethos, basically reason, emotion,

and authority. You know, facts are the basics of an argument, but you can't win on facts alone. You write, the reality is that pathos, emotion, beats logos, appeals to reason almost every time. This strikes me as explaining some of the asymmetry in American politics where you have a lot of the Democrats being big whiteboards and charts. Here's the alphabet soup of legislation we passed. And people on the right are going for more visceral, emotional appeals. And you said they won the pandemic debate. Is that basically it? Because they clearly didn't win it on facts. Exactly. I think that by shouting about freedom and tyranny, by talking about values, by arousing the fear and loathing of their base, yes. I mean, what Donald Trump did so effectively in 2016 to

beat Hillary Clinton was he understood emotional appeals. He said stuff like ban Muslims, build a wall, lock her up, things that roused up his voters, things we remember, very pithy one-liners. It was, you know, demagogic, but it worked. And too often, you know, Hillary Clinton came along with, you know, an 18-point childcare plan. Great. I'm sure it was a fantastic childcare plan, but that's not what people vote on. And I worry right now, you hear a lot of Democrats saying stuff like the chip sack, the chip sack. Okay. Nobody's going to go vote because you did. The chip sack is very important. It was a great legislative achievement, but that's not enough to get people to the ballot boxes and turn out for you and be inspired to vote

for you. People want to be inspired, especially on the left, even if on the right, it's fear and loathing. Well, then the left have to have an emotional story that's about something else. Is it about hope and optimism? Is it about, you know, a common bond? Is it about solidarity between people? I don't know what it is. But they need to have an argument that appeals to people's hearts. Because if it's heart versus head, yes, the heart will beat the head nine times out of 10. And the great political communicators understand this. Bill Clinton understood this. Barack Obama understood this. Joe Biden, in his own way, understands this. He's not an orator like Clinton or Obama, but he's authentic. And he knows how to appeal to people's emotions. And the people who lost on the Democratic side, I know correlation is not causation. But for me, it's no coincidence that Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, they all lost presidential races. They weren't the most inspiring of speakers. They didn't really make emotional appeals. You know, Al Gore was mocked by George Bush, you know, for the fuzzy math and the calculator and all of that stuff, inventing the internet. And I just think if only liberals, and I say this about the UK Labour Party too, can shed this image of being kind of

technocrats, managers, and be storytellers, be people who can tell a story about national hope, our national future, our national bonds. That is what will work. And I tell the story in the book of perhaps the worst democratic presidential debate example in modern American history was Michael Dukakis. Michael Dukakis. Michael Dukakis in 1988 is asked, what would you do if Kenny Dukakis, his wife, was raped and murdered? This is the first question of the presidential debate. Everyone in the audience takes a gasp, and Dukakis gives a two-minute, 360-word answer in which he talks about crime rates in Massachusetts, drug hemispheric

summits in the Americas, law enforcement by the DEA, does not address the fact that the man just said his wife was raped and murdered in this hypothetical. Where's his anger? Where's his emotion about his wife being raped and murdered? He came across as flat, and his campaign manager said later, I knew we'd lost that night. So Democrats, please, please tell stories, show emotions, use language that engages people's aspirations. Don't just be technocrats. Don't bring a policy paper to a knife fight while the Republicans bring an emotional bazooka. It is an incredibly entertaining and valuable book. Win every argument, the art of debating, persuading and public speaking. Mehdi Hassan, entertaining and valuable book. Win Every Argument, The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking.

Mehdi Hassan, congratulations on the book. And thank you for coming on the podcast. Great to talk with you. Thank you so much, Charlie. Really appreciate it. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Seitz. We'll be back tomorrow.

We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.