The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - April 10, 2026


On the Dangers of Ruminative Thoughts (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_983)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Arthur Schnitzler Wide Shut Drama
Dr. Steven Skultety - On the Relationship Between Freedom and Education (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_982) All Roads Lead to Franz Kafka (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_984)

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

137.36

Word count

788

Sentence count

21


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Gad Saad talks about the relationship between ruminative thinking and OCD, and how it is found in movies like The D.A.R.D. movie and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. Back in 2006, I published a paper in a medical journal titled
00:00:10.820 Medical Hypotheses, where I was arguing that various sex-specific forms of OCD, obsessive
00:00:19.960 compulsive disorder, happen in their particular ways because they're a misfiring of an otherwise
00:00:27.080 adaptive process that are very much sex specific and this is very much the mechanism that i use
00:00:36.420 to explain how we go from adaptive empathy to suicidal empathy which please i hope that you
00:00:42.940 go out and pre-order a copy today in less than five weeks in four and a half weeks it'll be
00:00:48.380 released but it's really important to pre-order so i will put a link to uh to to pre-order the
00:00:56.220 book in the description section. In any case, in the book, in the paper in question, I was talking
00:01:02.400 about various forms of OCD, one of which is what's called ruminative thinking. So instead of
00:01:11.000 imagining that you suffer from germ contamination fear, where you then obsessively will wash your
00:01:18.980 hands because you can't extricate yourself from the infinite loop of, oh, what if my hands are
00:01:24.560 still dirty. Another form of infinite loop is that instead of the germ being on your hands,
00:01:30.900 it's typically a negative thought that becomes ruminative and that you can't get yourself out
00:01:37.900 of. And then there are different strategies that OCD sufferers of ruminative thinking will engage
00:01:43.720 in. They might go back and try to ask people to alleviate that anxiety or that anxiety-inducing
00:01:53.440 pattern of ruminative thinking. Now, why am I saying all this? Because this past weekend, I
00:01:59.900 went to the movies with my family where we saw a movie where a form of ruminative thinking arises,
00:02:08.880 not because the protagonist suffers from OCD, but because once that person hears of a certain
00:02:17.760 In reality, they simply can no longer think about anything else.
00:02:23.360 They're fixated on that.
00:02:24.500 I won't tell you what, I'll tell you the movie, but I won't tell you, so I don't give you
00:02:30.800 a spoiler, you know, I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's the movie, The Drama,
00:02:35.020 which came out, I think, last week.
00:02:38.620 Young, happily engaged couple about to get married, sitting around, and then they share
00:02:44.440 with one another, with a couple of friends.
00:02:46.480 what's the worst thing that they've ever done
00:02:48.920 and then the fiancé, the girl, the woman
00:02:52.120 shares something that she almost did in high school
00:02:57.260 that then causes the guy to go into a tailspin
00:03:02.220 he simply cannot extricate himself out of that thought
00:03:06.980 and then all kinds of bad things happen
00:03:09.840 but at the end, again, I don't want to do spoiler alert
00:03:14.200 you see when you talk about love is humble love is forgiving and so on so watch it but the point
00:03:21.260 here is that I'm linking OCD based ruminative thinking with the ruminative thinking in this guy
00:03:27.620 in the movie where once he learned something about his wife to be even if it happened many
00:03:34.040 years ago he simply can't wash that thought away and then I want to link it to one of my
00:03:41.520 prized possessions in my collection, very large personal library. This is the gift that my family
00:03:49.960 gave me on my last birthday, my previous birthday. It's a first edition, English edition, of
00:03:59.640 Arthur Schnitzler's classic novella, which then resulted in Stanley Kubrick purchasing the rights
00:04:08.340 of the novella and then resulting in the movie in the late 1990s Eyes Wide Shut. Eyes Wide Shut
00:04:14.360 was based on this beauty right here. You don't know how much I love this book. Anyways so why
00:04:23.320 am I saying this? Because the main gist of that movie is another form of ruminative thinking
00:04:31.160 whereby once the husband and wife decide to go down the very dangerous path of sharing
00:04:39.860 sexual fantasies and once the wife shares with her husband what her sexual fantasies were and now
00:04:48.080 that is ingrained in his mind all sorts of bad things can happen and of course there's a very
00:04:53.860 clear evolutionary story here. So here, I started off by talking about ruminative thinking as a form
00:05:02.660 of OCD instantiation. I gave you an example in a film where the guy, once he hears something about
00:05:11.800 his wife-to-be, he can't extricate himself from that repetitively intrusive thought, and then
00:05:17.800 linked it back to a novella written a hundred years ago by a Austrian psychiatrist Arthur
00:05:25.900 Schnitzler so there you go people one of the things that we love so much about literature
00:05:30.820 about films and so on is because if they are powerful cultural products that usually is
00:05:38.220 because it speaks to a universal window to our human nature take care everybody cheers