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. 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. I’ve always been interested in narrative and story. I talk a great deal in the book about emotions and connecting with the audience emotionally. In the chapter on connecting with your audience, I talk about the importance of starting a story. And I talked also about the importance of repetition.

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.We live in a country where democracy is on the line. With climate change deniers or election deniers, yes, you want to win, and you want them to lose. I wrote this book for many reasons, but one of them was because we cannot have a functioning democracy, we cannot have a functioning free press, if people are not willing to have good-faith arguments, and if people in possession of the facts and the truth are unable to win the argument rhetorically. Human beings don’t just accept facts blindly. They don’t just accept truth blindly. You have to be able to deploy it. Whether you are making a presentation at work or debating current political issues with a friend, Mehdi Hasan will teach you how to sharpen your speaking skills to make the winning case. You cannot afford to forget or ignore the rule of three. As people have pointed out for years, it covers it all: from birth, life, and death, to past, present, and future. Once you master it, the rule of three will have you winning arguments left, right, and center. 5. Be prepared. I think it was Ben Shapiro, the conservative pundit, who popularized the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But what about the reverse? What if our feelings don’t care about the facts? Author Dale Carnegie famously described human beings not as “creatures of logic” but as “creatures of emotion.” Every single person on the face of the planet—every man, woman, and child—has, at some moment or another, tried to win an argument. Whether it is in the comments section on Facebook, or in the marble hallways of Congress, or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Whether they’ve trounced their opponent or walked away sullen, everyone might then imagine all the things they could and should have said. We’ve all been there. We cannot escape the human urge, need, and—yes—desire to argue.

It’s interesting to understand how it works. But sometimes our intuitions are misguided, right? We have ideas about what should work and sometimes it doesn’t, or not nearly as well as you think it might. I have been arguing my whole life, in fact. I’ve even made a career of it—first, as an op-ed columnist and TV pundit in the UK; then as a political interviewer for Al Jazeera English; and now as a cable anchor for MSNBC in the United States. I’ve argued with presidents, prime ministers, and spy chiefs from across the world. I’ve argued inside the White House; inside Number 10 Downing Street; inside the … Saudi embassy! 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.” One of the main points I found fascinating—not an original point from me, but one that I echo in the book—is to make it an extension of your own personality. We’re all very different. Your humor is different than my humor, but we can all make people laugh. Everyone, even the unfunniest person, at some point in his life has made someone laugh. It was a profound aha moment. It was like, yes, human beings are irrational! That affected my politics. I’m on the liberal left. I’ve been a critic of the way the Labour Party in the U.K. and the Democratic Party in America conduct their messaging. They message on the basis that a member of the public is some rational political animal.

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Sometimes you’re having an argument and they make a brilliant point. Perhaps something you hadn’t considered or anticipated. Perhaps something you have no response for. And yet rather than concede that point, you double down. You dig in. You refuse to budge. There are millions of people across America, and the world, who want to learn how to win an argument, who are keen to improve their debating techniques, as well as master the art of public speaking in general—but who need a push. 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. Arguments are everywhere – and, especially given the fierce debates we’re all embroiled in today, everyone wants to win. In this riveting guide to the art of argument, Mehdi Hasan shows you how to communicate with confidence, rise above the tit for tats on social media, and triumph in a successful and productive debate in the real world.

I did economics A levels, which is, in the U.K., the exam you take between 16 and 18 years old. Then I did economics in university for a year, and I dropped because I hated it. As a student, a 17-year-old, I remember vividly the economics teacher saying, “Assume perfect competition, assume free information, assume rational consumer.” I remember saying, “But why? Why should I assume any of that?” “Be quiet. That’s how you do it.” I remember being slapped down. I was curious to speak to Hasan to learn more about how he brings a scientific grounding to the art of persuasion. In particular, Hasan emphasizes that logic is only one element of an effective strategy, and that one ignores the importance of emotion at one’s own peril. Human beings don’t just accept facts blindly. They don’t just accept truth blindly. You have to be able to deploy it.

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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.” 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. 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. 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.