Mehdi Hasan: How to Argue and Persuade

Foreign.

KAWASAKI and this is remarkable people. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Mehdi Hassan, one of the most prominent and outspoken voices in politics, current events and society. Mehdi is a commentator on MSNBC and is the host of the Mehdi Hassan show on Peacock. He is also a best selling author and his new book, Win Every Argument. The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking shows readers how to win arguments and debates. I learned a new concept in this interview. It's called the Gish Gallop. The American people will be inundated with this technique for the next two years. So pay careful attention to what Mehdi says. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Mehdi Hassan. What is it like being a Muslim in Western countries today?

That is a deep question. It's a question that I've asked myself, I've asked my kids, I talk to friends about it constantly. I mean, to be fair, less so than I did 10 or 15 years ago. I think things have improved, but for all the wrong reasons. GUY the reason why people aren't talking about Muslims in a threatening way anyway is because people have realized there are other bigger threats to us all. So we don't talk about Muslim terrorism anymore because we're so busy worried about domestic terrorism. And we're speaking. GUY After a weekend in which there were two massacres of people, one on Saturday in Texas, a shooting, and one at the border in Texas where a guy drove his car out. Both so far we don't know for sure, but have been linked to kind of far right causes. So being a Muslim right now in the West, I grew up as a Muslim in the UK guy until my 30s. I moved to the US nearly a decade ago. I've been living as a Muslim in the us. My kids are British and American. They're dual national. It is hard because since 911 in particular, but also pre 911 there's always been the case that you have to somehow prove that you're not the angry Muslim. Regardless of your resting face. You have to prove that you're not the extremist. And you have to fit this loaded box that says don't worry about me, I'm a moderate Muslim, which is a very loaded phrase. What does it mean to be a moderate Muslim? So there's always a sense of difference. There's always a sense of having to prove yourself. There's always a sense of having to do things that others wouldn't have to do to be Accepted. And the struggle continues. But as I say, things are much better than they were. I work at MSNBC now. I do primetime shows for them. 10, 15, 20 years ago, I'd have laughed in your face if you said there'd be an opinionated, outspoken Muslim hosting on mainstream American tv. So things are improving, for sure. And Muslims in Congress, as you know.

So still, have you had, quote, unquote, the talk with your kids about if they're pulled over or something?

Not a pulled over conversation, because I don't think Muslim women have to worry too much about that in the same way that young black men do. But I've definitely had the Muslim parent talk, which is be careful what you say about your religion in public. Be careful what you say about other religions. Be careful what you say politically. During the Trump era, one of my kids would tell me that, oh, people on the bus are talking about Donald Trump. And I would say, you don't keep your head down. Because, of course, as Muslims, as young Muslims, in an age where Muslims, immigrants, people of color are being targeted in a Trump era as outsiders, as threats, as not real Americans, that's not what I want my kids to have to put up with now. That's not what I'm going to tell them for their whole lives. At some point, I do want them to speak out, but not as young children. No. Okay.

And pardon the sort of ignorance and maybe blasphemy of this next question, but is Islam that different from Christianity? I think, like, there's a lot of people in the United States who try to make out Islam as inherently violent and they're all trying to kill us, and they're all got bombs strapped underneath their trench coats. But fundamentally, is it different?

No, is the answer. I mean, Muslims consider themselves to be part of the Abrahamic faith tradition alongside Jews and Christians. In many ways, Islam and Judaism is more similar to each other than Judaism and Christianity. In many ways, Islam and Christianity are more similar to each other than Christianity and Judaism. So it's very strange in the sense that Islam could be paired up with either of those Abrahamic faiths, and you could say they have more in common than with the third Abrahamic faith. So I always find it odd when people try and yet treat the Judeo Christian tradition and Muslims as some sort of outsiders to that tradition. As for your point about violence is something I've been arguing for kind of 20 years. The great myth of Islam as a kind of uniquely violent, intolerant religion that not just right wingers and Trump types have pushed but you know, the Sam Harris and Bill Mahers of this world have pushed for years, quote, unquote, liberal centrists, the Richard Dawkins types, the new atheists. And it's been a source of great frustration that the facts just don't get through on this. And that is right now, for example, the FBI says the biggest terrorist threat to the United States is a domestic far right terror threat. As I mentioned over the weekend, we had people killed, possibly by far right types. So it's funny because I just did a segment on my show about this whole Republican refrain of thoughts and prayers every time there's a mass shooting. Thoughts and prayers but no action. And I ended up quoting from the Bible and the Quran. The same line, almost the same line, which is faith doesn't work unless you also have action. So, you know, the faith tradition, the messages, the background, the history. Yes, it's all very similar. What the real issue, guy, which people don't really want to admit, is that it's much less about religion, much less about theology, and it's to do with race. Right. The reason why Muslims stand out is not because of our theological views. It's because we're brown. It's because we don't look like what the archetypal white American is supposed to look like. So a lot of this, as with most things in America, all roads lead back to race.

The myth that America is land of the free and equal. And all that is pretty much bullshit at this point. Right? We should just come to grips. We are a racist society.

Oh, if you say that, guy, you'll be accused of hating America. You'll be asked to leave the country. You'll be claiming that you're anti American. What's really interesting, I don't know if you know this guy, but right now there's Nikki Haley running for president on the Republican side, a brown woman, daughter of Indian immigrants, and Tim Scott of South Carolina, also from the same state. Black man is about to declare in the coming weeks to run for president. So you'll have two people of color running there. And there's another guy, Vivek Ramaswamy, I think his name is, who's also running pointlessly. But it's interesting that all these black and brown Republicans, they make it very clear when they run, we don't think America is a racist country. They go out of their way to say that because you need to make the white Republicans feel comfortable with you. But then they throw in the line when they do their backstory of how they overcame Racism. So Nikki Haley has a whole story about her family, her father getting stopped by police at her fruit cart, how she had a beauty contest, wasn't allowed to take part as a kid because she wasn't black or white. But they say all this stuff, and then they say, but you can't say America's a racist country. You can't say anything about systemic racism because that would take you to critical race theory. And critical race theory is Marxist indoctrination that's destroying America. So it's hard to have these conversations, sadly. But, yes, you're right. The bs. It's very clear what is happening in America today. The guy, Donald Trump, who said he wants to ban Muslims and build a wall, was not just elected, but second time round, even though he lost, he increased his vote share, and now he's running for president again. And Rolling Stone reported last week that he's told people in private he wants to bring the Muslim ban back when he gets back into office.

I'm shaking my head. I'm shaking every part of my body, actually. Can you foresee a time where Muslims are registered and interned just like Japanese were during World War II? I mean, in my mind, that's eminently possible.

Oh, it is eminently possible. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a liar, because as you point out, it's happened before in American history. And Donald Trump in 2016, people forget he ran saying he would consider a registry for Muslims. And when he was challenged and said, how would this be different to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany? He said, you tell me. This is what he said to the reporter. You tell me, was his response at the time. And we know that a second Trump term would be a deeply lawless term. There would be no guardrails, there would be no adults in the room. And yes, Muslims are an easy target. As I say, right now, we're not so much on the radar because kind of ISIS has been defeated. The terrorist attacks are not at the same level, thankfully, that they were a decade ago. And because we all know the real terrorist threat are the people who tried to literally overturn an election and attack our Capitol, who were white Christian dudes. So in that sense, we're not number one villain of the month right now. I think Muslims have to get behind Mexican immigrants and transgender athletes right now as the kind of number one boogeyman in society. But look, it only takes, God forbid, a terrorist attack or something else that easily makes Muslims, again, a target and allows people like Trump to fear monger about Muslims and minorities. And I still meet Muslim friends of mine who joke about, you know, I'll see you in the camps if Trump gets back in. And it's kind of black humor that we engage in. Dark humor, but it's eminently possible anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand or know the history of this country. Guy, we're all in this together. I know it's a cliche, but I've been banging this drum for like, seven, eight years. There's no scenario in which you can allow people on the far right to play divide and rule with minorities to do a whole. You know, these minorities are good. This is the model minority. These are the hard working people, and these are the criminals, and these are the terrorists, and these are the invaders. Because once they come for one group, they come for all groups. And we've seen that. Look at the hate crimes against AAPI people. Look at the hate crimes against Jews. Look at the hate crimes against Muslims. Look at the hate crimes against black people. Look at the hate crimes against LGBTQ people. They're up across the board. There's no group that has been inoculated or immunized from hate crimes over the last few years. Just look at the FBI data.

Mehli, you got to tell us how you really feel. I mean, stop holding yourself back. Okay, I got a smile out of you.

I got a smile I want to use me. Very often.

This is the resting, happy Muslim face I saw. Okay, switching gears here. I really enjoyed your book. I enjoy books about psychology and Bob Cialdini and Angela Duckworth and Katie Milkman and Mehdi Hassan. But I have to ask you, in a sense, is life one long debate contest? Because it seems to me that your book is about winning arguments, but winning arguments may not be what life is. Right? Is life winning arguments or influencing and persuading people to join you because the two things are different?

Well, there's a lot of questions in that one question. I would say, first off, are they that different? I think we can get lost in pedantry. I think some of the skill set are the same, and I think some of the goals can be the same. Is life one big argument? Yes. Is life about winning arguments? No. The title of the book threw a lot of people. A lot of people have said to me while I've been on book tour saying, do you really want to win every argument? Is it wise to want to win every argument? And just to be clear, I'm not saying you should win every argument. Of course not. And I actually make it Very clear at the start of the book, don't try it with your spouse. That's one place I definitely don't try and win arguments. But what I am saying is win every argument. I'm providing you with the skill set to win any argument you should choose to engage in. That's not the same thing as you should go out and just argue with everyone all the time. It's like if I wrote a book called Drive Every Car. I'm not saying go out and literally drive every car you see. I'm saying this gives you the skills to drive any car that you would like to drive. So the point I've made, and I'll say it again, is sometimes you can't avoid arguments guy, right? Sometimes. And it depends how you define it. So I, for example, define it very broadly. I would say, for example, if you go for a job interview to try and get a job, that is an argument. You're trying to win an argument. You're making an argument, hire me, don't hire the guy you're going to interview after me or the guy you interviewed before me. And you may even know in your head that you're probably not the best guy for the job. So you're arguing something, maybe you know it's not true that you're the best, but you need to do it because you need the money, you need to put food on the table, you need to pay for your kids education. So you're making an argument for yourself in that context. And there's multiple contexts like that where we can't avoid the argument. We have to engage in the argument and we have to win whether or not we think it's right or proper or correct. So I wrote this book for the world as it is, not as the world as we want it to be. I would love to live in a world which was free of bad faith arguments in particular, but this book is about good faith arguments. I talk very much about the democratic moment that we're in, that I believe that democracy cannot be safeguarded, our free press cannot exist. We without open debate, without the willingness to argue for and against a point, without free and open discussion and disagreement. So it's a tricky one. I'm very much not saying we should spend our whole lives arguing, but I am saying we cannot avoid argument and therefore we should be properly equipped for it. And right now we live in America in a world filled with bad faith actors pushing bad faith arguments, corroding and degrading our public squares. And we need to be equipped to push back.

So one of the methods that you cite as being most effective is showing the receipts. Now, I understand that concept completely, but if you follow News Today, it's not clear to me that receipts matter. There's, there's plenty of receipts about Clarence Thomas's trips and tuition payments and payments to the spouses of Supreme Court justices, but those receipts don't seem to matter.

So, yes, we do live in an America where receipts have become increasingly harder to deploy and use. And when I talk about receipts, I'm talking about evidence. Facts, figures, statistics, empirical evidence to back up your claims. And I think you cannot really ever fully win an argument unless you have that evidence. Now, what I cite in the book, I cite studies from the Political Behavior Journal and other places from Pew, Gallup Polling that shows, look, people still do value facts, figures and evidence. You still can change some people, people's minds. But it's a smaller pool of people. It's an increasingly shrinking group of people who are willing to be open minded, willing to hear out the evidence, willing to consider A, B, C and make a decision. Because yes, a lot more Americans than previously are locked into their partisan tribes, are locked into their information bubbles are cut off from facts and figures. I would say anywhere up to maybe 30% of Americans now are just beyond. Facts and figures are just not reachable by conventional methods of proof, debate and argument. Now, that doesn't mean the rest of us should give up on it. And one of the main points in my book is sometimes we get lost in arguing with the other person, the person in front of us and saying, well, I'm not getting through to them. Okay, fine, maybe you're not getting through to them, but are you getting through to a third person? Are you getting through to an audience that's watching? And my big point is, yeah, there are tens of millions Americans who aren't going to listen to me about Clarence Thomas, who aren't going to hear the evidence about the corruption at the heart of the Supreme Court. But there are tens of millions of other Americans who are, who need to see the receipts, who need to be equipped with the facts and figures so that they can debate with their family members, friends, colleagues, neighbors. And I think that's what's so important. Sometimes we forget about the broader audience, the big picture, and we get lost. We get locked into a pointless battle with someone who's never going to change their mind. And people keep saying to me, how do you argue with someone who's got a closed mind? Don't, don't Argue with them, make your case to the wider public.

And what do we do with the 30% that will not listen to. Do you just write them off? Do you? What do you do?

It is the $64 million question of our age. What do you do about an increasing number of Americans who have made it very clear? There's a poll out today, Guy. The day we're speaking, I think it's from YouGov. It's going viral on social media. It's a trust in media poll. And they polled Republicans and Democrats on which media sources they trust. Here's a crazy stat that Democrats are more likely to trust far right wing media outlets than Republicans are likely to trust C Span. That's how much trust in media and public institutions has created on the right. The right basically trust Fox Breitbart and that's about it. No one else. Democrats still trust a variety of sources, including right wing sources. So we live in this age where they've lost all trust with the media. They've been told the media is fake news. Public institutions have been demonized to the point where. Guy. Something I never thought would happen in our lifetime. Republican politicians are saying, defund the FBI. Defund the FBI. Republican politicians are attacking the military and generals. Like there was a time when you would never imagine the Republican body would be anti law enforcement in the military, anti the CIA. They're anti everyone. So they're anti all the public institutions. What do you do on that level? When we live in a social media age in particular, where lies go viral, where misinformation is rife, it's very hard to get through to some of these people who have that media diet. And I work for a news channel, I work for msnbc, which people say, oh, you're just a left wing Fox, which is nonsense, but clearly, you know, partisan people watch my channel. I'm an opinion journalist. But we're still news, we're still within the realm of reality. I still try and provide facts and figures for what I'm saying, unlike the Fox guys who, as we saw in the Dominion trial, are saying one thing in public and one thing in private. So when you live in that kind of information age where misinformation is rife and people are in their bubbles and partisanship is high and you have kind of cult leaders like Trump, Trump on the scene. Yeah, I don't have an answer for what we do. I do know that if we continue down this path, democracy can't survive. Democracy can't survive if tens of millions of people in the country don't accept basic reality, don't accept the rules of the game whereby when you lose, you concede defeat, you don't launch a violent insurrection. So, yeah, I think you have to hope that young generations, that younger voters will save us, which is a big hope. We have to put a lot of faith in younger generations to be more political and media literate, to be more open minded. And I think we have to kind of reinforce our institutions as they are. You mentioned the Supreme Court. A lot of our institutions are not fit for purpose and therefore the bad faith actors and the authoritarians and the cultists are able to exploit them. So I would like to see us democratize our institutions much more, reinforce our failing and broken political and democratic institutions. I would like to see young people energized, emboldened, empowered much more. And yet, for the 25% of Republicans who think QAnon is real, I don't see how you get through to them. I think you've just got to contain them in a sense and try and prevent them from doing damage and try and prevent them from holding on to the levers of power.

A few months ago, I interviewed a guy named Mark Laberton, and at the time he was president of the Fuller Seminary, which is kind of the Harvard Business School of Christianity, really. And I asked him about this question, what do you do about people who just don't believe and so contrary to you? And he said, rather than arguing with them about facts and figures and trying to change their mind, the question you should pose to them is how did you come to believe? So how did you come to believe the election was stolen? How did you come to believe that vaccination doesn't work? And by asking that question, it reduces the barrier and it fosters discourse that has a chance of changing people.

So I would half agree and half disagree. I definitely think you need to get to the source of the problem. And for me, the media is everything. I always say, you show me an extremist, you show me a terrorist, you show me a conspiracy theorist, and I will show you their social media diet. I will show you what they've been reading and watching. People don't wake up one morning and believe in QAnon, you know, that is taught to them. That is something that they imbibe through traveling down rabbit holes online. I consume so much of this stuff and I watch so much of what the right is producing that when I see or hear people send me hate mail or tweet troll me on Twitter, if I meet A family member who pushes some right wing talking points. I know exactly where it's come from. Like, I can trace the origins of that. And that's clear to me. Having said that, there's polling and focus group work and reporting that shows there are people who will tell you that the election was stolen and you will say to them, what's your evidence? They say, we don't have any evidence. They're very, very open about it. We don't have any evidence, but that's what we believe. The same people who say facts don't care about your feelings. Their feelings are more important than facts. And so I write in the book a chapter about feelings, not just facts, about appealing to people's emotions. If you do want to reach some of these people and some people you may not want to reach, you have to find some common ground. You have to be able to appeal to their hearts and not just their heads. Receipts are important, but emotions are even more important. I talk about the importance of storytelling. I talk about the importance of showing your own emotions, to engage with people, to find some kind of engagement and connection. And there's been a lot of work done that I don't address in the book. The deep canvassing, for example, that people have done. A lot of political scientists have done this work. Guy on if you go and talk to someone who's anti transgender at the doorstep and you spend kind of 10 minutes just letting them speak and hearing them out, the importance of listening, that can translate into a changed mind over the course of three to six months. It has an enduring effect. Now, the problem with that is it's not scalable, right? You can't go and knock on everyone's door in America and get through to them in the same way. Plus, after you've knocked on their door and made your case and found some common ground and great kumbaya, that person then goes back and watches Sean Hannity, Otaka Carlson, and it's all undone. So again, the media diet is so crucial. But yes, there are certain things you can do, and I talk about it in the book. You can engage with people emotionally, which is better than engaging with them factually. You can engage with people by hearing them out, empathetic listening, by putting yourself in their shoes, making them clear that they're being heard, even they're wrong. Even if you don't agree with them, you're hearing them out. A lot of people just want to be heard. So there are different methods. None of them are easy. There's no silver bullet here, guys. Sadly.

Okay, let's look at January 6th. So I'll give you two sort of sides of what's happened about January 6th. There are a thousand people who were indicted and roughly 500 have been convicted or pleaded guilty. There has been no exonerations. So you look at that, you say the system works. The flip side is roughly half of the Republicans think that January 6th was peaceful and it was legitimate political discourse.

Yeah.

So what do you make of those two completely contradictory things?

It tells me two things. Number one, facts on their own will not convince anyone. So you can bring all the statistics you want about how many people have been indicted and convicted. They will move the goalposts. Number two, it tells me that, again, media diet. The people who are saying it's legitimate political discourse, the people are saying it was peaceful. The people are saying these were just tourists. Where are they getting that from, Guy? They're getting it from Tucker Carlson, who gets the footage from Kevin McCarthy when he used to have a Fox show. He no longer does, but he did it on his Fox show. He showed selective footage to say this was peaceful to the point where even Republican senators said, this is garbage. We don't accept what Tuck calls saying our lives were in danger that day. So, yes, the ability to take January 6th and transform it shows you the power of propaganda. And what's interesting, Guy, is if you polled people in the days immediately after 1 6, they didn't hold these views. It takes time to create a propaganda narrative, to disseminate it to your base, and to have it imbibed and repeated as fact to one another. And that's a mistake the Democrats made by allowing all of these investigations and trials into Donald Trump, into the insurrectionists, to drag out for so long, because we don't have time on our side when it comes to stopping these narratives from forming and hardening, everything should have been done much more quickly. I also think you mentioned 500 convictions or guilty pleas, et cetera. None of the ringleaders, Guy. None of the ringleaders. These are all the foot soldiers. And that's another problem. Unless you hold the people at the top to account and tell the story fully in the way the 1 6th Committee partly did, you're not going to be able to change people's minds. But above all else, I say in the book, show, don't just tell. And I think the power of imagery is very important. Just telling people 500 people arrested is not enough. You got to get them to watch the footage of police being assaulted, of police being hit with Poles of police being tear gassed and electrocuted and say, this is what you support. This is the peaceful protest. I think you've got to bombard them with that imagery. Look at the way that Fox used imagery of burning cities. Much of it was months old. And they used it during the summer of 2019, 2020, on a loop, they were showing Portland burning night after night, three months after, they were showing it as if it had just happened tonight. And what does that do? That led to millions of Republicans today who believe that the summer of 2020 was a summer of violence and looting and rioting and burned cities, which is actually not what the evidence shows. But that's what they saw night after night after night.

So in your book, you discuss ethos, pathos and logos, character, emotions and logic as the three factors for winning arguments and discussions. And so I look at those three factors, character, emotions and logic, and I say to myself, how the hell does Donald Trump get 75 million people to vote for him? If you apply those three factors, his ethos, his pathos, his logos, like, what am I missing?

So what you're missing is that we define these things in ways that fit with our rational, liberal, conventional mindsets. Just for your viewers and listeners, those three appeals, the emotional appeal, the logical appeal, the character based appeal, pathos, logos, ethos, they go back to aristotle. This is 2000 years old stuff. This has been talked about and agreed upon. Let's just take one of them. Guy ethos, your personal credibility, your character, your ability to persuade people based on who you are and what you've done. Donald Trump has ethos. It may not be the ethos you and I respect or agree with, but let's not forget, when he runs in 2016, he runs almost purely on ethos at the front. He has a lot of pathos as well. He knows how to emotionally rouse his base with kind of demagogic rhetoric. He doesn't really do logos, I think we can all agree. But ethos, oh yeah, that's a big part of his appeal in 2016. I'm the businessman, I'm the guy you saw on the Apprentice firing people. I'm the multimillionaire realtor. I'm the guy who gets stuff done. And I'm the guy who's going to go and knock some heads together in Washington, dc. I am the outsider, I'm the guy you send to burn it all down. Trust me, you know me, you've seen me on tv, do it. I mean, there is no presidency of Donald J. Trump without The Apprentice. The Apprentice is what cements him in the popular imagination in the public mind, as this can do. Brilliant billionaire businessman, complete opposite of reality. The reality is he's a failed businessman. Multiple bankruptcy, lied about his wealth, can't even fire the people around him. He's such a coward, but created a fake game show where he fires people on tv. So, yes, I would argue that his own weird, distorted version of character and credibility, his own ethos, definitely had an appeal to millions of Americans.

Wow. Let's say the Democrats call you and say, man, you know, we need some advice. Are Democrats just basically too wimpy?

Yes. Short answer, what would you do? You gotta replace a lot of the people at the top of the party who just don't have the stomach for this fight. Look, let me give you one example, something you and I have been kind of nodding towards for all of our conversation. Clarence Thomas right now is thumbing his nose at the American people and at the political establishment saying, what are you gonna do about it? Every day, there's a new revelation. This billionaire paid for his great nephew, who he brought up, paid for his private school education, paid for Clarence Thomas to go on jets and yachts, paid for his mother's house, paid part of his wife's salary. Indirectly. Other billionaires have paid for Ginni Thomas's salary. Just every day, a new revelation, just one of them would be enough to sink a Supreme Court justice. Multiple. And yet he's untouchable. Why is he untouchable? Not because Democrats don't have power, but because Democrats refuse to wield power and because Democrats refuse to go on the offensive. Dick Durbin is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here's what he said about trying to get Dianne Feinstein, who's another Democratic senator who's absent right now because of how ill, out when he tried to get her off the committee so he could bring in another Democrat and have the number of votes he needed, he said, I would like the Republicans to show kindness. Kindness? Have you been asleep for 10 years? What are you talking about? Because I don't want to show you kindness. This is kind of zero sum politics, scorched earth. On the weekend, he said, history will judge Clarence Thomas. No, history won't judge him. You're supposed to judge him. You're supposed to hold him to account. The rhetoric, the action, it is weak. It is timid. You know, they bring a butter knife to a gunfight. Republicans bring a rocket launcher. And that's just in terms of action. Sky, don't even get me started on rhetoric. I talk in the book about how Democrats will always want to win a debate, win an argument, win over voters with facts and figures. That's not how it works. The Democrats are the people, guy, who say, if you give me just a few more minutes to give you a few more statistics, one more Pew poll, one more peer reviewed paper and I'll win you over. That's not how human beings get convinced. Republicans come along. Donald Trump comes along and says, build a wall, ban Muslims, lock her up. He said that in 2016 guy. We all still remember it because it was pithy, it was emotive, it was rousing, it was horrible in many ways, but it was memorable. What did Hillary Clinton say? I'll give you my 17 point childcare plan, which I'm sure was a great childcare plan, but that is not how you engage with people. That is not memorable messaging. The Democrat messaging needs to be more aggressive. It needs to be more emotive. It needs to meet people where they are, not where you want them to be. It needs to be something that rouses your own base. There's much they could be doing that they're not doing. I'm glad Joe Biden put out a video announcing his reelection in which he hit The Republicans on 1 6, on the insurrection, on book banning, on freedom. That's more of what I would like to see. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has been very aggressive in trying to reclaim the language of freedom from the right. I highly approve of that. These values, freedom, equality, liberty, you have to reclaim.

One of the concepts you discuss in the book is a Gish Gallop. Is it Gish Gish or Gish Gish?

The Gish.

I had never heard of the concept. So first, just for my listeners, can you explain the concept?

So the Gish Gallop is the technique that's known in debate circles and that's used by people like Donald Trump or a Marjorie Taylor today. It's become much more common today, sadly, in politics, which is whereby the debater, the speaker, the person you're arguing with, tries to overwhelm you with, for want of a better word, bullshit, wants to just steamroll you with cherry picked facts out of context, quotes, distorted studies, and wants to throw them at you at a pace and with relentlessness so that you're unable to rebuild. But all of them, or even any of them, because there's so many of them, and we see that with Donald Trump, he throws you 19 lies in one statement. You're trying to rebut lie number seven, he's onto lie number 12. You get to lie number 12, he's already onto lie number 25. So it makes it very hard for somebody to defend against that. It's one of the trickiest techniques to argue back against. It's why it's so cynically effective. It's why Trump does it. Because you don't have to engage in facts and figures. You don't need substance. You just throw enough shit against the wall, see what sticks, and see your opponent basically get drown in the bullshit. And it comes. The name comes from a guy called Dwayne Gish, who was a Christian creationist who would debate evolution in the 90s and the 80s with evolutionary biologists. And you would think, this guy is a creationist, he's not a scientist, he'll lose. He'll lose to the scientists. But he would win. And he would win because the scientist was not trained in the art of debate, would come along and start quoting lengthy scientific papers, and Gish would throw a hundred questions and 100 rebuttals at him, most of them nonsense. But the scientists couldn't respond to them all. And the audience would say, wow, this Dwayne Gish really knows his stuff. And Trump is where they knowingly unknowingly borrowed this technique, as have many Republicans. Now many Trump mini me's.

Okay, so if you're on the opposite side of this, what are you supposed to do?

So it's very hard to push back against. I, in the book, give three techniques that I think you can use that I've used and others have used to try and push back against a gish gallop. Number one, I say pick your battle. Somebody throws 17 lies at you, don't try and respond to all 17 because that's what they want you to do. They want you to spread yourself thin and you'll look foolish and you'll run out of time. Pick one. Pick the weakest, most ridiculous thing that your opponent said, focus in on that and make the audience believe that, yeah, the rest of the stuff they said was also bullshit. So I give an example in the book, when I was debating a woman on Islam at the Oxford Union many years ago, an Islamophobe, she basically did a long rant where she accused Muslims of like 200 different crimes. And I wasn't going to be able to respond to all of them in my time, so I just picked on one thing she said, which was that Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam. And I said, Saudi Arabia was formed in 1932, Islam was created in 622. You're only kind of thousands of years off. Got a big laugh from the audience. Damaged her credibility, her ethos from the get go. And I didn't need to deal with all the other points. It made it very clear to the audience, don't trust her. Her claims are nonsensical. So first thing is, pick your battle. Number two is don't budge the Gish Galloper. Trump wants you to move on to the next question. And I once interviewed a Trump proxy, a guy called Steve Rogers, sadly not Captain America. And he basically came to the interview and tried to defend Trump. And I said to him, donald Trump said that six new steel mills have been created since because of his policies. US Steel have said that there are not six new steel mills. And he said, well, what he meant to say was, there's a lot more steel being produced. I said, that's not what he said, though. He said, six new steel mills. Yeah, yeah, but, you know, that's not what he meant. Manufacturing's up. Trump's doing well. Great deal with my point. Six new steel mills. And I wouldn't budge. And I kept asking him the same question. And at one point, he got so frustrated and so flustered. He was so unused to this because he's used to interviewers moving on to the next subject. He said, just ask me your next question. And I said, no, I'm not going to ask you the next question. That's what you want me to do? I want you to answer this question. So don't budge. The Gish Galloper relies on you moving on. Don't move on. And number three, call it out. Make it clear to the audience what's going on. Tell the audience this person is engaged in nonsense, is trying to flood the zone with shit. To quote Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin does it, too. And we need to point out, when Vladimir Putin talks nonsense, we say, look, he's talking about Ukraine, but suddenly he's talking about transgender rights in the West. He's all over the place. Point out to the audience what's going on, that there's a line, put raincoats on your audience to protect them from the fire hose of falsehood is the analog that the Rand Corporation gives. So, number one, pick your battle. Number two, don't budge. Number three, call out what's going on.

Wow. So you could just focus on Jewish lasers and just never give that up. Right. Just keep saying, jewish lasers.

Jewish lasers.

Jewish lasers.

She came on 60 Minutes and the interview was deeply inadequate. From Leslie Stahl, who's a kind of storied, respected, award winning journalist. But that was a classic example where if you watch that interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Leslie Stahl tries to factor on a couple of things and immediately Greene takes over, starts Gish galloping, saying, well, what about my childhood? Are you going to ask me about my childhood? What about my speeding tickets? Are you going to ask me about speeding? Don't get Gish galloped. Stahl should have said, that's all fine. Answer my question about X.

And is there such a thing as a truth Gallup.

That's a great question. And I've not thought that about that. And I think there is such a thing as a truth gallop. And you know what I would call a truth gallop? I do a segment on my show called A 60 Second Rant where I speak very fast like an auctioneer. As you could have guessed, I speak fast, but I speak even faster. And in 60 seconds, I try and cram as many facts on a topic as I can. So, for example, Donald Trump says, I've never said XYZ 60 seconds. Here's all the times he said it. So, yeah, we call it the 60 second rant on my show, but we could rebrand it as the truth Gallop.

Feel free.

It's a good day.

I made the resting, angry Muslim face smile twice already. I hold a record for this. Okay. One of the points you make is that in order to win arguments, you have to listen well. And so how does one listen?

Well, it's a great question, and I'm not a very good listener. So when I wrote the chapter, I wrote it very honestly. As someone who struggled with the issue myself, I say in the book, when I told my wife I was writing a chapter about listening, she laughed out loud. And then she kind of paused and she said, you're writing a book about listening. You're awful. Listen, I said, I know. That's why I need to write this chapter, because it's as much for me as for my readers. Listen. Look, you have to be able to listen critically because you cannot win an argument if you're not paying attention to what your opponent is saying. If you're not on the lookout for lies, inaccuracies, contradictions, that requires critical listening, engaging in what's being said. You also need to be an empathetic listener if you're arguing in public because you really want to have the audience on your side and to be an empathetic listener, as I mentioned a moment ago, you really need to put yourself in the other person's shoes, especially an audience member. Even if you don't agree with them, you want them to feel heard, respected. You want them to feel like they have a dignity and a voice. And that's more likely to get them on your side, even if you don't agree, maybe on one set of facts or political opinions. So empathetic listening is crucial. Critical listening is crucial. For critical listening. I lay out several techniques in the book. One key one that people don't really value anymore is note taking. I think you've got to write stuff down. People don't really value this enough. And I talk about how some of our great entrepreneurs and billionaires, the Bill Gates and Richard Branson's as well, they swear by old fashioned note taking with a pen and paper, not on your phone, not on a laptop, with a pen and paper. And in fact, the example I gave a moment ago of pushing back against the Gish Galloper in that Islam debate who said Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam. I remember writing that down, guy, and saying 1932 and making a note, I'm going to come back to this, I'm going to rebut this. So note taking is very important as a way of listening. Getting off your phone is very, very important. Great distraction. But in terms of empathetic listening, again, we take for granted, but we don't do. Eye contact, guy, eye contact. I'm listening to you. Don't be looking at your phone, don't be checking your watch as George Bush senior famously did in a 1992 town hall where an audience member was asking him a question. He's busy looking at his watch. He's not paying attention. Eye contact is so key to show someone that they are being heard, that you respect them, that you are trying to put yourself in their shoes. So I think there's many different ways to improve your listening skills. Obviously practice. It's not something you're just going to develop overnight. But I think critical listening requires things like emptying your mind of junk, not being distracted by your phone, may be able to take notes. And empathetic listening is about, for example, eye contact, showing that you're fully present, showing that you're paying attention and that you're not just ignoring the other person.

Up next on Remarkable People, Billy Wilder.

The movie director, and I quote him in the book, says, one person listening to one person, that person might be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark, that's critical. Genius.

Become A little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. I'm gonna give you two pieces of data. First, I have a pen in my hand during this whole interview and I'm taking notes. And number two, I hope you notice that I'm making a lot of eye contact. I have a trick, and the trick is that this screen is being projected to an iPad, which reverses it, turns it upside down to a teleprompter so I can look right into your eye and still see this window, which is in a virtual setting. The way I can make eye contact. It's very hard to look at the camera in a screen.

Virtual settings is much harder. This is why in person is always seen as the way to have the best interviews and have the best conversations. Even in this setting, I'm looking at my camera at the top of the screen. I'm trying not to look at the rest of the distractions on my screen or around me.

I can send you the setup for a teleprompter to make it much easier if you want. Oh, third, smile. Okay, so now I want practical tips about how to come up with zingers.

I have a chapter in the book on the art of the zinger, and this is very important, as we know from the social media age with the mic drop emoji, you want to have that one line, ideally kind of 10, 15 seconds, something that's not too long, something that you may have workshopped a bit, or ideally spontaneous, but it can be workshopped. And I mentioned in the book Guy, that one of some of the most famous zingers from presidential debates were ones that were pretty pre made, prefabricated. Elizabeth Warren's one minute takedown of Michael Bloomberg at the presidential debates in 2020. Or the very short and sweet Lloyd Benson takedown of Dan quayle in the 1988 vice presidential debate where he says, I knew Jack Kennedy, you'll know Jack Kennedy. That came, as I point out in the book, from extensive debate prep where his team reminded him that this is a good line to use. If Quayle brings up the Kennedy analogy. So it wasn't some spontaneous thing that he pulled out of his backside. I'm someone who says, do your practice. If you could come up with one on the spot, great. If you're that nimble on your feet and you have that great a sense of humor, go for it. But if not, try and work out what is that one line? What's that one insult, mic drop, joke, gag, either self deprecating or on the other opponent that you can have up your sleeve that can get you out of a corner, that can give you the upper hand when you're kind of backs against the wall. And I cite a famous few from the presidential debates in the book in terms of practical terms, like I said, practice. But here's one other thing. Look at what people before you have said. And I talk about it comes back to note taking. When you hear people use good lines, make a note, that's not because I want you to plagiarize them. It's because it's the kind of things that can inspire you. It's the sign of things you can synthesize with other great lines. And also you can quote other people. There's nothing wrong with quoting people. I talk a lot about the importance of quoting in the book. Using a quotation in a speech or in an argument or in a debate or in a column or in an article. It's very powerful because it gives you a sense of authority. It brings in a second voice to reiterate what you're saying. It provides a change of pace. If it's a funny person, people say to me, you know, how important is an audience? And I say, billy Wilder, the movie director, and I quote him in the book, says, one person listening to one person, that person might be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark, that's critical genius. That's the famous Billy Wildegate. Always gets a smile or a laugh. Yet that's a good way of making your point. So don't be afraid of quoting people. Don't be afraid of doing research and having some workshop lines. Up, up, and make sure it's short and pithy and try it out on friends and family. I always say this. Any kind of humor that you want to use in public, any kind of one liner, test it out on people, say, hey, I'm going to say this, what do you think? Because they might say, no, no, no, no, no, don't say that. And they may save you from some public humiliation. Say what you think is funny might not be what a room full of strangers think is funny. Something I do in interviews when I'm interviewing a guest is I will notice a verbal tic they may have. They may say a line again and again and again and I'll wait for a moment and I'll say that line back to them and it totally disarms them.

I must say, preparing for this interview, I had reservations that, you know, I was gonna get slaughtered.

Never, guy. Never. Only when you come on my show, then I'll slaughter.

So you talk about zingers. Now I want to get two more really tactical pieces of information for you. One, one, how to make a grand entry. And two, how to make a grand exit.

Okay, so I have many examples of the book. Let me give you one on each grand entry. You want to start with something that's going to blow the crowd away in a few seconds. I say in the book that human beings, according to some studies, have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Like eight seconds. We have our phones, we scroll away. You know, you have an audience of people who are not a captive audience. There's no such thing as a captive audience anymore. You can switch the channel if you're at home. If you're live in an auditorium or a chamber, you can just go on your phone and ignore the speaker. So you have to grab them straight away. So what are you going to grab them with? You grab them with a question, a provocative question. You grab them with a provocative quote. You grab them with a provocative story. You want your opening line. You know, there's the Dale Carnegie quote. The first thing you say is the most important thing F I R S T. The first, not the second, not the third. People start speeches with, thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. No, you're wasting precious time. Get straight into it. That's the grand entry, grand exit. You really want to go with a call to arms. You really want to leave people a. Leave them wanting more. There's that famous line. There's a quote I use in the book, which is, people may not remember what you told them, but they'll remember how you made them feel. That's how you want to leave them on a high. You want to leave them roused, inspired, uplifted. So, again, is it a story, is it a quote, or is it a call to arms? I prefer to use a call to arms. I prefer to say at the end, what are you going to do about it when you leave this room today or when you finish watching this show? What should we do tonight? How do we stop racism? How do we end corruption on the Supreme Court? What are you going to do about it? It?

What is a good press secretary supposed to do?

It's a good question. I think if you are the President of the United States and you have a press secretary, you probably want them to do Three things. You probably want them to be able to convey your message to the media in an eloquent, articulate and competent manner. You probably want them to be able to spot crises before they've happened, see around corners, and you want them to be able to firefight once you're in the middle of a crisis, be able to get you out of the crisis, be able to have the connections and contacts and messaging and strategic abilities to get you out of trouble. Those three things off the top of my head that I would want from press secretary if I was a politician.

Obviously you must consider Jen Psaki. One, but do you have, you know, these are press secretaries I really respect list?

Jen Psaki was very effective. I'm biased now because she's now a friend of mine since she's left office and she works at MSNBC with me. But I think it's fair to say most of most people thought she was very, very eloquent and dealt with some of the Fox folks in a very clever way. In the briefing room, she clearly was across her brief. I don't know. It's a good question. I think a lot of press secretaries think that the best way to be is to kind of bully the press, especially on the right. I mean, if you look at Ron DeSantis team, who I've clashed with a lot on social media, they're just a bunch of kind of online trolls and bullies who think that they can just kind of scorched earth on journalists and treat the media as enemies. And I think that's now backfiring on DeSantis. He's now trying to run for president nationally. Turns out you actually, I mean, can't just demonize the media and expect to get good media coverage. Shock horror doesn't really work out for you on the national stage. It might work for you in little old Florida. Doesn't work for you on the national stage. So I think a lot of these press secretaries really need to find the right balance between being tough and aggressive and actually being charming and being able to engage and win over journalists. I think the bigger challenge for those of us who are interviewers and journalists is not to get lost. My big worry is a lot of my colleagues get seduced by people in power. A lot of journalists in America, Britain and beyond get too close to people in power. And that's what I try and warn against and I try and check myself from falling into that trap, too.

And if you're a press secretary, who's your audience? The president? Your boss?

Well, if you were Donald Trump's press secretary. Certainly you were playing to an audience of one, which was you bash the media and hope the boss is watching and says, you did a great job of defending me blindly. But no, that would be madness if the only audience was your boss. Your boss may not have the wisest or most best strategic sense. Your audience should be a mixture of the American public and the American media. Of course, you're sending different messages, right? To the public. You're trying to show that you're across everything, you're on top of your game. Crisis. What crisis? Everything's fine. And to the media, you're trying to project confidence. And I have a whole chapter in the book on the importance of confidence. If you don't look confident, people will not trust you, people will not believe you, people will not respect you, people will not hear you out. So you either have to be confident or if you genuinely lack confidence in the moment, you have to fake it. You have to project confidence.

You had a few pages where you actually supported fake it till you make it, right?

Yeah. And there's a reason for that. A, because it's effective, B, because we all have moments where we lack it, and C, because there's a lot of social science research and I mentioned Amy Cuddy of Harvard who say that faking it till you make it actually is a self fulfilling prophecy because when you fake it, you actually do become more confident. So then you're not faking it.

As I was reading your book, I thought, man, it's inconceivable to me that the people who need your book the most are actually going to read it and believe it.

That's a good point. And some people have very flatteringly said, oh, great book, but don't be silly. We can't be like you. Just reading this book won't turn us into you. And I say, number one, thank you very much, that's very kind. Good for my ego. Number two, I'm not trying to make people like me. I'm not saying you read the book and you become a TV news anchor or you become Barack Obama public speaker. What I am saying is that you can improve your own skills and become a better speaker. I'm very much of the school that people are not born speakers. There's no natural born orators. You can learn this stuff. Aristotle told us this 2,000 years ago. Demosthenes, another famous ancient orator I talk about. He began life as a very competent speaker with a very bad stutter, lacking in confidence, shortness of Breath. He overcame it all and became the father of modern rhetoric, became the kind of badass of rhetoric. So it can be taught, it can be learned, it can be developed. And that's why I wrote the book. I would not have written the book if I didn't genuinely 100% believe that this stuff can be learned. If you put your heart and soul into it, if you practice, if you read the right things, if you learn the right techniques. Now, now, does that mean overnight you're going to become Winston Churchill? No. But again, Winston Churchill didn't become Winston Churchill overnight. He spent decades practicing in the bathtub. How to address the House of Commons. As I point out in the book.

As you mentioned, in the House of Commons, there was a place where he just lost his train of thought, right?

His 20s, when he was a young MP, before he was the famous Churchill of fight them on the beaches that we know today. He tries speaking impromptu without note and he crashes and burns. He loses his train of thought and he gets heckled from the podium.

This is a real tactical question, but you cite so many great stories of Aristotle, Socrates, etc, etc. How do you get these stories? It's not like you can just go to ChatGPT and get everything like, where do you get these stories?

So I'm glad you appreciated stories. A lot of people have appreciated the stories and I have appreciated stories because I didn't want to be a hypocrite. I didn't want to say, you know what the art of persuading people is through storytelling and then have no stories in the book. And nor did I want all the stories to be about me because I'm not a complete megalomaniac, even though, you know, your publisher and your agent says, make it personal. People love personal anecdote and they do. So there's a mix of stories from my life and my career and interviews that I've done and experiences I've had. And there's stories from ancient history. And the reason I tell stories from ancient history, A, they're fun, like the Winston Churchill story in the tub or in the House of Commons. But B, I want to show people, look, these great people, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Demosthenes, these people had to work at what they did to become who they are. So you can too. I wanted to try and inspire the reader with role model stories. Now I have a chapter in the book on research, the importance of research. I devoted an entire chapter to it. I'm someone who's always been known for doing a lot of research. Bringing receipts. My interviews are known for being interviews where the guest says, well, I never said that. And I say, yes, you did. In 1997, May 2nd, at this venue with this person, you said, and I quote. And that's what we're known for. My team, both at Al Jazeera English, where I used to work, and now at msnbc, where I currently work, we work very hard to bring receipts, to do research, to do our homework, to dig deep beyond page one of Google, to read original sources and make sure that we're fully equipped with the right quotes and stories. And I applied that same technique to the book. It was a lot of fun writing this book, because A, it's a book I feel strongly about, B, it's a very personal book, and C, I enjoyed digging out these stories, some of which I already knew over the course of a lifetime of speaking about public speaking and rhetoric. And B, just in the course of the. Researching the book over the course of a year, saying, hold on, let's work out how Winston Churchill became Winston Churchill. And then you're going to go, and you get, I've got it. Where is it? If I've got it to hand, I can just pull it out for you. Do I have it to hand? Right here in a pile of nonsense I have by my desk. Look, I have it here. I want to have it here and throw it out. Sod's law. I can't take a screenshot.

Madison.

So I've got. I'm looking around. I'm looking around to show the kind of crap that I have on my. No, I'm gonna get. I'm gonna find it. I'm gonna find it. Here you go. Look, right here underneath my desk on the floor here is Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of the uk writes the book the Churchill Factor. Great book. As much as I loathe Boris Johnson as a politician and a Prime minister, great writer. And this is the book where I came across the story about Churchill crashing and burning in the Parliament. It was a lot of fun, actually. Guy to go, well, hold on. How did Aristotle become Aristotle? How did Demosthenes become Demosthenes? How did Elizabeth Warren destroy Michael Bloomberg? And I went and I spoke to the Warren team and I said, can I talk to you about this? How did you come up with this stuff? And they told me the backstory. So, yeah, we did the homework. I did the homework on this book, just as I do on my show. And I'm glad it's come across. I'm glad, glad someone like you Appreciated it.

And if you were writing this book today, don't you think that ChatGPT would make it infinitely easier?

It's a great question. We had a debate about Chat GPT on my show recently with two tech guys. One saying it's a threat to the democracy in our future and the other saying it's amazing. I don't know where I stand on chat GPT. I need to dig a little bit more. I did the debate on my show and I felt like I need to dig a bit more. When I first came across chat GPT, I was blown away by it. Since then, I've seen a lot more critiques come out. For example, its factual accuracy has been questioned by a lot of people. It produces a lot of quote, unquote biographical data about people that's just not true. And it's susceptible to the same kind of political and racial biases that search engines and algorithms that we know are susceptible to. So clearly it's a help. Will it lead to a generation of high school and college students doing plagiarism? Maybe that's what Google did at the beginning. Can it help shortcut some of your research? Sure. If that's the case, go for it. I have a chapter on research in the book. I would probably mention ChatGPT now, just as I talk about in the book, I talk about Google, for example, and the ability to use Google to find what you need. I tell a story about how one of the most famous interviews I've ever done with Erik Prince, the mercenary, the former founder of Blackwater, the brother of Betsy DeVos. It's one of the most famous interviews I've ever done. And one of the moments when I nail him is when he says. I say, you're working in Xinjiang, where Uyghurs are being genocided. How are you okay with that? He says, we're not working in Xinjiang. My company's not in Xinjiang. I said, but your press release says you are. And he says, no, no, no, that's a. That's a Chinese. That's a mistranslation. I said, no, we found it in English on your company website. It's not translated. It's a great moment in front of a live audience. And we found it that day, an hour before the interview. My producer found it, literally by Googling the name of his company, Xinjiang and PDF. And that's what came up.

ChatGPT is maybe the most valuable tool I have as a writer.

Interesting. And now interesting to hear you say that.

Yeah. I'll give you an example. So in my book Remarkable Mindset, I talk about how many remarkable people have made really diverse major career changes. And so everybody uses the same old example, Jeff Bezos, investment banker, bookseller, that kind of example. And so I asked ChatGPT give me examples of famous people who made big career changes. And it came up with Julia Child. Julia child until her mid-30s was a spook. Then she married somebody in the CIA. They moved to France. She became interested in French cuisine. I would have never found that example without chat GPT. Now I have Madison GPT check chat GPT making sure that's not a story. But ChatGPT has changed my life as a writer. So anyway, I'm done. I hope I have broken the record for making Mehdi Hassan smile in an interview.

Yes, yes, I think you have.

Now my life is complete now.

Now your viewers and listeners have to go away and watch my interview on YouTube to act, actually see my resting, angry Muslim face.

We'll use your angry face for promoting the episode.

Funny, because I look the reason I mention that in the book, the serious point for your listeners is your facial expressions matter, your body language matters. One of the crucial ways of winning over people.

Well, you won me over, so I appreciate that, Guy.

Thank you so much. It's been a great company.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. With a wealth of experience in political journalism and an unwavering commitment to the truth, Mehdi Hassan is one of the most respected voices in the industry today. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. Speaking of respected voices, there's Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, and the most respected drop in Queen of Santa Cruz surfing, Madison Nesmer. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.