Why Is It So Hard To Change A Person's Mind? ft. Dr. Gad Saad

Hey everybody, it's the end of the Charlie Kirk show. Gad Saad joins the program, Dr. Saad, as we talk about the death of the West and a rise, that's right, a rise of the citizen in Western civilization. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com, that is tpusa.com. Get involved as members today, members.charliekirk.com. Buckle up everybody, here we go. Charlie Kirk's running the White House folks. I want to thank Charlie, he's an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

That's why we are here. One of my favorite guests and very smart man, Dr. Gad Saad, visiting professor and global ambassador of Northwood University. And I think I got that right. Also, we have a forthcoming book, which I'm excited about, the title Suicidal Empathy.

Won't be out until 2026 at the earliest, but the title alone is worth discussing. Dr. Saad, welcome back to the program. Oh, so good to be with you.

Can I start with one thing very quickly? So good to be with you. I saw a photo of you with President Trump where you towered over him, which reminded me of the fact that I shall never, ever take a photo standing next to you. OK, very good.

So we are we will take we'll just take photos on separate sides of the room. That photo went very viral, by the way, because some lunatic again, I'm not one to talk about my height. I'm just tall. Some guy said, oh, Charlie's only six one. And I was like, OK, like, we've got to set the record straight.

Here's how you know the Internet lies, by the way. Dr. Saad, for the last five years, Wikipedia has said I'm six one. I'm not OK. Just we can get over that misinformation and disinformation.

Dr. Saad, I have been really enjoying your Twitter feed, your X feed lately. I think it's been so crisply put and suppression and so important about the danger of what the of what Kamala Harris would bring to America, but also to the entire West. I wanted to book you for the entire hour because you do speak about politics, but you don't always speak about politics. But you have found that this particular political threat is worthy of your platform and examination.

Please walk our audience through how you're thinking about this. Well, you know, one of the things that worries me the most, Charlie, is the fact that when people should be engaging their cognitive system when making such a consequential decision as choosing the leader of the free world, they're solely and singularly focusing on their affective system, which basically is a fancy way of saying feelings over thinking, emotions over thinking. Now, it's not that emotions are not important, right? We are both a thinking and feeling animal. So, for example, when advertisers are trying to sell you a perfume, which is a hedonic product, they don't try to engage your cognitive system.

They show you a sexy girl on a horse with flowing hair and then some cool brand name like Mystere, right? Because in this case, it's a hedonic product. I want to engage your affective system. But on the other hand, if I'm trying to sell you why you should buy my reverse mortgage or why you should invest in my hedge fund, then I need to engage your cognitive system. Now, imagine if the most consequential decision that most citizens of a democracy will ever make is the choice of their leader. Imagine if one camp, which is the Kamala camp, is completely hijacking the electorate with joy, positive vibes, future vision, right? It's affect, affect, affect.

The whole goal is to ensure that you shut off your brain and only allow your feelings to dictate whom you choose for. That worries me a lot because the substance of what she's talking about is very dangerous. Yeah.

And just the two. This is so important. And by the way, just so we're clear, I hear from people all the time. Doctor said they say, oh, Americans are going to get their reason back and their cooler heads will prevail. I say, hold on a second.

There's no guarantee at all that that the rational or the reasonable will triumph over the emotive or the pathological. Right. Doctor said we should not underestimate the power of feeling based propaganda. Oh, absolutely right.

I mean, again, which is thank you so much for having mentioned my next book, Suicidal Empathy. Right. It's not that emotions are not important. Right. Empathy is a noble emotion when it is triggered in a regulatory manner, in a manner that's within normal ranges.

And it is triggered to the right target. But if I prefer being empathetic to, you know, millions of illegal immigrants over my American veterans, then it is misfiring. So it's not that feelings are not appropriate, but you have to evoke them in the right context. So if I want to choose my president, what's your position on immigration, on fiscal policy, on taxes? Do you care more about diversity, inclusion and equity, or do you support a meritocratic ethos?

These are the things that you should be worried about or thinking about when you're choosing your president. And yet every single one of my colleagues, if I ask them, why do you why would you vote for Kamala? It's always emotion based. She's exciting. She's changed.

How has she changed if she's been in the administration for three and a half years? So even professors who are supposed to have many titles with their names can be completely hoodwinked by their emotions. So lots to talk about this topic. How then do we overcome the emotions?

Is it time? I mean, for example, during covid, we saw rationality and reason be thrown out and insanity and feelings and fear win. What do we know about the human brain and how it operates to try and have the the reasonable component basically win the day? Well, in a sense, it is a design fault of the architecture of the human mind.

Why am I saying this? Because humans face great computational complexity in the world. Right. If I stopped and tried to analyze the pros and cons of every single decision I'd be making, I'd spend the next week choosing which meal to have next. Right. And therefore, we need to fast find what a very bright German psychologist by name of Gerd Gigerenzer, he called them fast and frugal heuristics. Heuristics are mental shortcuts.

Fast and frugal means frugal means that they should not be cognitively too effortful and fast means that they should be easily deployed. Right. Well, emotions are autonomic. Right. You quickly experience fear. Right. You don't need to think about it. So in a sense, it takes a herculean effort to convince more people to engage their cognitive system over their emotional system.

That's why, by the way, Charlie, whether you're Republican or you're Democrat, whenever it comes around to election season, what is the first thing you do? You show yourself with a baby. Why is that?

Why do the baby pictures always come up? Because everybody knows that the way to people's hearts is not through their minds, but through their hearts. So this is really a very, very big obstacle to overcome.

It's very difficult. And so but also it shouldn't be we shouldn't just allow one side to utilize it. So let me obviously I want Donald Trump to win to save the West, the West. How can Donald Trump use emotion and feelings to his advantage?

Why should Kamala Harris have a monopoly on such tactics? So I'm going to answer it in a kind of a reverse way. So it's not that he should he shouldn't elicit necessarily positive emotions, but he should try to at least mitigate the probability that people are negatively triggered by some of his behavior.

Right. So you know this because you're I know that you're you're you're a good friend of his. And I'm sure that people have tried to tell him there are ways by which he elicits a negative response. Oh, Donald Trump disgusts me. He's so boorish. He's so cantankerous. He's such he's such a brawler. He has such a bad elocution. Of course, this is not me saying it right. But each of those reactions are not talking about I hate Donald Trump because of his fiscal policy.

They're responding to like an aesthetic injury. So if only he could modulate that. Right. And again, I understand that part of his charm is that unique element.

Right. But as Aristotle told us, there's the golden mean. Too much of something is not good. Too little of something is not good.

If we can get Donald Trump to not get the undecided voters to decide against him simply because he triggers a repulsive disgust reaction, then I think he's on his way to the White House again. Dr. Sad, I want you to react to this. You did on so on X on Twitter. This is Ben Stiller being asked about why he supports Kamala Harris, because he says he wants change.

Play cut one eighty three. Quick question. What do you like about Harris platform? Just very excited about moving forward and all the energy and excitement that's around this movement right now.

So that's why I'm here, because it's time for change and seems like it's happening. You think she'll be able to sustain the momentum post convention? For sure. He's going to be close.

It's going to be close. But, you know, everybody's motivated to work and make it happen. So and she's and she and Tim Walz are just incredible candidates. Thank you. Wait, wait, hold on. She's the vice president of the United States, doctor said. It's unbelievable.

She actually wrote that exact snippet as part of an article that I just submitted to a major American outlet, actually. It's so notice how he said energy and excitement, which speaks speaks to my earlier point in the first segment. Right. Activate your affective system. Happiness, joy, excitement, fun.

We're not weird, right? There's zero substance. Let me draw an analogy with a phenomenon that at first might seem to be completely unrelated, but I'll tie it back together.

So in Lebanese culture, there is this process whereby you take the residue of the Turkish coffee and you flip the coffee mug and then it creates certain patterns. And then someone will come over to your house, a fortune teller to read your future. Right. Well, my paternal aunt was supposedly a fortune teller. And when she'd come over, she'd start telling you things like, oh, I see in your future there will be happiness.

I see that in your future there'll be joy. So how is she able to get away with this? Because her enemy is specificity. Right. She doesn't predict that in three months you're going to be moving to Atlanta and get an 8 percent increase in your salary. She just hits you with anything that can be fitted to your reality in any possible way. That's exactly what Kamala Harris does.

I see a future vision for who we will be. Right. So all that Kamala Harris is, is my paternal aunt that was reading the coffee stain leaves in Beirut, Lebanon in 1967. That's right. And there's no specificity.

It's nothing but abstractions. And so for Ben Stiller to say something like this, I mean, I don't think Ben Stiller is exactly bright, but it shows that the mind virus can be so powerful they can convince themselves that you must vote for change while voting for the status quo. Exactly. Or you can get Rosie O'Donnell, which I'm not sure if that's a different person from Keith Olbermann, because I've never seen the two of them in the same room at the same time. But I don't know if you saw the clip of Rosie O'Donnell where she said she does not believe that Donald Trump was shot.

So imagine the conspiratorial, parasitized mindset where you have the actual footage of the attempted assassination, but that must have been some big conspiratorial plot to garner sympathy for Donald Trump. It's simply unbelievable. What what upsets me the most, though, is that this kind of imbecility is not reserved only for, you know, the great unwashed who otherwise are not educated. To the contrary, some of the folks who engage in this kind of denial of reality, they're called professors and doctors. They should be right.

I mean, they should be. So the one of your tweets here was in response to an account about the what's happening in the United Kingdom. Can you tease our audience about your analysis of what's been happening in Britain, especially these last couple of months? Oh, I mean, Orwell couldn't have predicted it to be so nefarious, right? I mean, did you see the clip where an 11 year old is being whisked away because he posted something?

I don't know the exact details, right? People are getting put in prison for two years, whereas child groom gang rapists are being let go because to arrest them would be Islamophobic. It is simply dystopian what is going on in Britain. I simply can't believe that within my lifetime I've seen the change that's happening in the West. It's unbelievable, Charlie.

And we're going to go through why. And your tweet says it best, which is that there is no leader so weak and so castrated as Western leaders right now that it is actually here. There is nothing more cowardly, meek and castrated than a Western leader today. We are seeing national suicide.

We are seeing the suicide of the West, of a civilization that is deciding to no longer exist, to no longer flourish, allowing the third world to come in and to rape our women, to overtake our culture and our society. Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here. You've asked and MyPillow listened. They're finally bringing you the most requested offer ever. Right now you can get the queen size premium MyPillow for only $19.98. MyPillow is made with patented adjustable fill. It adjusts to your exact individual needs regardless of your sleep position.

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Wonderful organization, MyPillow.com. So Dr. Said, help the audience understand you are now moving to America. Is that right and why? I am. So I've accepted a visiting professorship and global ambassadorship. What a lovely title at Northwood University, which its official tagline is the free enterprise university. So my free thinking, my support for liberties and freedoms, all of the things that have historically made the United States great. Those things that I defend are exactly the values that are exemplified by that school. So when I received an email out of the blue from the president of the university saying, hey, would you like to come down for a visiting position and see how it goes?

I jumped on it right away. As you know, it has not been an easy reality in Canada in general for Jews. Canada and Montreal in particular, which is my official residence, has been listed as the number one most antisemitic city in North America. So for all sorts of reasons, I thought it was time to explore other frontiers.

And so I'm really, really excited with this opportunity at Northwood. I mean, so I mean, Canada in some ways is a warning to America. How did it happen and what lessons can we glean to apply the rise of our own communist Marxist revolution via Kamala Harris? Right. Well, you know, the old expression is when the United States sneezes, Canada catches a cold. Well, we can argue in the reverse direction, right? Canada is certainly more woke and more parasitized than the United States. But that doesn't mean that the parasitic ideas will stop magically at the border, right?

The border agents can't stop ideas from infecting your society. Look, Canada is built on the idea of, you know, a socialist paradise, right? It really is built on the idea that the more government intrusion you have to create the utopian social welfare state, the happier everyone will be. But of course, it's a Ponzi scheme in that it requires that five percent of the most productive people pay everything for the other 95. Well, I happen to be part of those five percent.

And therefore, it may not surprise you to know, Charlie, that at the end of the year, when I look at my bank account thinking that there'll be a lot of zeros, I realize that there's actually almost zero amount of money left because, you know, our benevolent government has decided that my thoughts, my ideas, my words should be taxed to a level that most Americans could simply not fathom. So Kamala Harris is trying to to replicate the same ideology, which is to the extent that there are any differences between people. It can't be because there are individual differences between people. Some work harder, some work less hard, some are taller, some are shorter. It must be because there are some nefarious reasons why person A is behind person B and I will come along Kamala Harris and create equality. So you will all be starving at the bread line, but you will be starving equally.

So let me ask just if it's if I could poke here, you're not a banker, you're not you're not a tech executive, you're an author and a professor. What what tax rate do you pay in Canada? So let me thank you for asking it, although it's going to make my cortisol levels and blood pressure rise. So the highest level at the federal is 33 percent, the highest level at the provincial in Quebec, it's 25 percent. So we are now well beyond 50 percent. But now you might think, OK, I have already fleeced the sky enough. I'm going to leave him be with his 40 around 40 percent remaining.

No. If I now spend money, you will tax me 15 percent sales tax. Part of it is provincial tax. Part of it is GST, the goods and services tax at the federal level. So once you take out 50, 55, 58 percent of my income tax from income tax, then you take sales tax, then you take property tax, then you take school tax, then you take carbon tax, then you take, you know, gas tax.

You're lucky if you're left with 30 percent. Let's put it another way, Charlie. Imagine working in a place where so, for example, if I were 100 percent a slave from January 1st to December 31st, none of my labor would be owned by me. Right.

If I were 100 percent free, all of it would be owned by me. Now, in the Canadian system, as I face it, I start making money, Charlie, around September. Right. So from January to September, you are you are you are a serf of the state.

That's right. I'm a serf of the state. And then starting in September, they allow me to keep my book royalties. That's not what you want in the US.

Don't vote for Kamala Harris. Well, no, I mean, it's it's it's similar here. I mean, you know, if you count all the taxes that I pay, it's over about 50 to 55 percent of what I earn goes to the government.

And so it's we're not that far off. And so, you know, the government owns half of me. And but I mean, look, there's that doesn't even all count the other social contagions you have in Canada. No free speech protections, no religious liberty protections, no Second Amendment. And then you also have to have the the government basically take all of your earnings and all of your income. So how in Canada there is not that same sort of liberty loving spirit that we have in America, but we're seeing the entire West kind of be on the ballot this November.

I want to reiterate your tweet here. Why is that Western leaders are so castrated and so weak? When did this change and why? So there are several reasons for it. One begins with all of the parasitic ideas that I discuss in the parasitic mind. One, so postmodernism, there are no objective truth, cultural relativism. Who are you to judge the cultural practices of another society? Right. It's racist to stop people from coming and experiencing the magic of the West.

Right. That's elitist of you. That's cultural imperialism. Radical feminism creates the idea pathogen that men and women are indistinguishable from each other.

Other than social construction, all differences can't be due to biology. So for all sorts of reason, there's been a frontal attack on the edifices of reason. OK, so that's one. Now you coupled that with my next book, which is suicidal empathy, which is the idea that the most laudable thing you can be in life is empathetic, even if it means killing your society. Nothing is more noble and progressive than not only self-flagellating and self-loathing, but killing off yourself, because that is the highest thing that you could aspire to as a progressive.

So how does that come to be? Well, if you let in millions of people into your country, whether through legal or illegal immigration, and those people do not share a single one of the foundational values that define the Western tradition, it doesn't take a fancy professor to tell you that things are going to go wrong. Now, it might take five years. It might take 50 years. It might take 500 years. But you are going to have irrevocable friction that could only be resolved through violence. And that's why I've been predicting now for nearly three decades that civil war will be coming to the West. I simply can't tell you exactly on which date it will start. And I hope I hope you're wrong.

I hope it it's prolonged and I hope it never actually happens. So the what we have in America is an opportunity to refute this and to really create a referendum against it. For now, you as a newcomer to America, can you remind our country here how how important this opportunity is and how Canadian Canadian conservatives would would kill for an opportunity to retake their country?

Can you can you remind our audience, please? Look, every single idea to the extent that she ever espouses a tangible, intelligent idea or semantically coherent idea that Kamala Harris espouses is absolutely incongruent with the American foundational deontological values. So, for example, when she does the price control nonsense.

Right. Well, I mean, we know what happens with price control. I teach at a business school.

I've taken micro and macroeconomics. Nothing could be clearer. That can't work in the same way that if you throw a tennis ball 100 times, you know exactly what's going to happen 100 times because there's this thing called gravity that you you can't escape while you're standing on earth. Right. So whether it be her price control, whether it be her equality of outcomes, right, her commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity, that is an ethos that is contrary to everything that the United States stands for.

Right. Why do immigrants come from all around the world for the past 250 years? Because I could shed the restrictions I had from whatever society I'm coming from and I could come to the United States and through my individual talents be anything that I can be. Well, she's saying, no, you all have to end up at the same breadbasket suffering from famine.

That will be just and fair. So there is nothing that she espouses that is congruent with anything that the founding father said. You have to make sure that Donald Trump wins. And believe me, I'm not a surrogate of Donald Trump.

I'm Canadian. I've never met Donald Trump, but I know good ideas versus bad ideas. She is a walking manifestation of every bad idea that you could one issue. You should everyone should vote on one issue. Immigration, period. Done.

End of story. Kamala Harris will allow what is your what is your quote? They look at the West as a something to be mounted.

A woman, a woman to be mounted. Those are Arabic guys. When I would speak to them and they didn't know who I was and they could speak freely to me in Arabic. They're always amazed how weak, effeminate and castrated the West. And they view the West as a woman to be mounted, which in Arabic, you know, there's a very sort of vivid, somewhat non-politic way of expressing that, as you can imagine.

Yeah, and that's Kamala Harris wants that to happen. So doctor said, what is your response to somebody that says that Trump is insufficiently as, let's say, conservative or as in alignment with how they would like things to be? The idea that Trump is not the way that I would be, that he's not my perfect fit. I'm not asking you to make an apology, you know, do an apology to her for Trump. But how would you respond to those sort of criticisms or if you'll say, ah, I'll just let Kamala Harris become president.

No big deal. Well, look, I can understand why some people may have an aversion to Trump's style. And of course, that's been documented by many people. But that can't be enough for you to not choose him.

I have engaged many people that are supposedly smart. Many of them are called professors where I say, but so give me the reason why you're voting for Kamala. And the answer is always, well, because she's nicer than Trump, because Trump disgusts me and so on. You have to pick on issues. Earlier you mentioned, look, if you're a single issue person and it's immigration, then you have to go for Trump. Well, I could list off the top of my head the top four, five, six issues that I could think of if I were an American voter and all of them Trump would perform better than Harris. Right.

I'm engaging my cognitive system. So don't let your emotions hijack what is a very consequential decision that will have not only an effect on you, but on your children and theirs. Kamala Harris and her type will change irrevocably the fabric of the United States.

Don't let that happen. So one thing that makes this election a little different is the class traitors, people that have defected from status statuses they once had, for example, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard or Elon Musk. Just looking at this from an analytical standpoint, Twitter being liberated and Elon Musk, who I think is one of the most important, courageous people in the West, has allowed for free discourse of ideas online to occur.

That will make a very big difference. Talk, Dr. Saad, for a second about this idea of class traitors that are defecting at great risk to themselves to try to save the West. Well, look, I was asked recently, I guess about a year ago on a British show hosted by a psychiatrist, what was the singular phenomenon that I thought was most surprising about the human condition? And I thought for a second and then I came back and said the inability to get people to change their minds. So to your point, the fact that someone like Elon Musk, who historically has been a moderate Democrat, but obviously he's a brilliant man, an intelligent, honest man, is able to change his opinion. It might seem like it's an easy thing to do, but for most people, there is no amount of evidence that will ever get them to sway from their anchored positions. So to me, you know, I love Elon Musk even more than I already did.

And as you know, I have a personal relationship with him because he is an honest guy. He is doing what I found through my studies to be a nearly impossible task, which is to get people to change their minds. So I don't see these people as class traitors. I see them as terribly intellectually honest and that they're willing to alter their beliefs in light of incoming evidence. To repeat kind of a theme we said earlier, just to close, Dr. Said, if the West does not rise up this election, what does the world look like under Kamala Harris? You said civil war.

Add a little more context or detail to that. Look, the reason why some of the most vociferous and staunch defenders of the West are immigrants such as myself, it's because we hail from the types of societies. We've sampled from the buffet of societies that are not like the way the West is, right? And so that's why, right, the typical Western person wakes up thinking that the West is the standard default value throughout history. No, it's an anomaly.

It's a miracle. So if Kamala Harris and her ideological commitments were to flourish in the West, then you would have in the West exactly the types of societies from which millions of us have escaped from, right? So again, both carefully engage your mind, not your heart, and hopefully you'll come to the right decision. Dr. Said, excellent. Thank you so much and thank you for your time. Thank you, sir. Great to be with you. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us, as always, freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless.