The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 14, 2025


The Most Incredible Birthday Gift - A Personal Story of a First Edition Book! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_895)


Episode Stats

Length

8 minutes

Words per Minute

133.53505

Word Count

1,118

Sentence Count

88


Summary

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

Happy Birthday, Gatsad! Today's gift is from my family to me, and it's a very special one. It's a novel by a man named Arthur Schnitzler, Rhapsody, written in 1927, about a woman who discovers her husband is sleeping with other women.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.220 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad. Today is my birthday and it is now, let me see, 8.36 p.m. Eastern Time.
00:00:09.120 I spent the whole day with the family and I could have continued spending time with the family
00:00:13.000 but I wanted to take a break and come and share with you the excitement of the gift that my family got me.
00:00:19.580 They are incredible gift givers. Every year they outdo themselves.
00:00:23.780 But today I want to talk about this year's gift and I want to give you the background to it.
00:00:30.480 But first, I'm going to show you what it is. It's absolutely unbelievable.
00:00:35.280 You ready? I don't know if you could read it.
00:00:41.740 Arthur Schnitzler, Rhapsody, a dream novel, first edition. You ready?
00:00:48.200 It's just, it's unbelievable. I don't know if you could see it. 1927.
00:00:56.100 Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian psychiatrist but also a writer, a dramatist and a novella writer.
00:01:04.480 This is a novella that became famous. Again, look at this.
00:01:09.200 There were three copies that my wife could find and this is the best one that you could find in the world.
00:01:15.580 So, the movie Eyes Wide Shut that Stanley Kubrick, the legendary filmmaker, made just shortly before he passed away
00:01:31.880 starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise is a haunting movie.
00:01:37.160 You really should see it. It's just pure art. It's unbelievable.
00:01:41.040 That movie is based on Rhapsody by Arthur Schnitzler.
00:01:50.220 Now, I watched the movie when it came out, you know, 25 years ago and I was riveted by it.
00:01:56.880 And then I did my homework, found out that Arthur Schnitzler, the story is based on his novella,
00:02:04.500 which I have the first edition, 1927.
00:02:08.240 And I'd always been just captivated and mesmerized by that because several things.
00:02:13.280 Number one, Stanley Kubrick, when he first becomes aware of this novella, buys the rights to the novella.
00:02:22.900 And he'd always planned on writing, you know, making a movie and, you know, he was busy with all these different projects.
00:02:29.260 Finally, after many years, he decides to make Eyes Wide Shut and then he passes away.
00:02:36.000 So, there is this kind of romantic, if not macabre story that here is this legendary filmmaker
00:02:43.540 who takes this novella written in, you know, 19, I think it was released originally in German in 1926.
00:02:51.740 I've got the 1927 first edition.
00:02:55.680 Okay.
00:02:56.780 And he buys the rights to it, does the movie, passes away as his last act of creation.
00:03:03.920 But there's more to it.
00:03:06.560 Arthur Schnitzler, by training as a psychiatrist, as you obviously know, I'm an evolutionary consumer psychologist.
00:03:13.380 I've written a lot of stuff on psychiatric disorders.
00:03:17.600 I'm fascinated by psychiatry.
00:03:19.540 I had thought myself of becoming a psychiatrist, then decided to go into, you know, other areas of studying the human mind.
00:03:27.060 But, so there's this angle.
00:03:29.920 Arthur Schnitzler is coming from Vienna where Sigmund Freud was a, you know, studying the human mind, the deaths of the human mind.
00:03:39.640 Now, there is a link here because the story is about what happens to a man's psyche when his wife shares with him in full trust.
00:03:52.500 Sure, honey, you could tell me what you fantasize about.
00:03:55.780 She tells him about her fantasies with other men.
00:03:58.860 Oh, boy, that's not a good thing.
00:04:00.560 That could send the man into an abyss of infinite darkness.
00:04:06.720 So, that's what the story is about.
00:04:08.480 Now, so what is the other angle here?
00:04:10.820 Of course, I've talked about often about Darwinian literary criticism.
00:04:15.460 The reason why literature captivates us so much is because it says something into our evolved biological heritage.
00:04:24.460 It says something about it's a window to our human nature.
00:04:28.240 That's why literature is so captivating.
00:04:30.840 And so, as someone who teaches evolutionary psychology, who teaches about why are men so sexually territorial?
00:04:39.520 Why do they go into homicidal rages if they either suspect or know that their woman has cheated on them?
00:04:46.900 Well, it's because of a paternity uncertainty.
00:04:48.980 It's because, you know, we are a biparental species where your male ancestors and mine did not like it if our women went around cheating behind us, behind our backs.
00:04:59.560 Because then we'd be spending 18, 20, 25 years raising someone else's child.
00:05:04.760 And so, this is what this story is about.
00:05:07.780 This is what's so beautiful about literature.
00:05:09.880 My great chagrin, I'm someone who has not read all of the great literary works.
00:05:16.980 I'd love to read every single one of them.
00:05:18.960 I am a voracious reader.
00:05:20.560 I've always been a voracious reader, but much more so in the nonfiction realm.
00:05:23.920 But this was a novella that I absolutely had to have.
00:05:29.920 It had taken sort of this, it had become a mythical, you know, work that I needed to have.
00:05:37.740 Again, also not because of only the evolutionary psychology angle, the fact that, you know, it's coming from a psychiatrist turned author.
00:05:45.380 The fact that, you know, it's linked to Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut.
00:05:50.180 But also, I'm particularly partial to both the Viennese courant, the intellectual trajectory in Vienna.
00:06:03.140 Of course, the Viennese circle, which came later.
00:06:05.820 But this, I think he was part of another collection of Viennese writers that would get together.
00:06:12.460 But my favorite artist is Gustav Klimt.
00:06:16.960 Last year, they gave me this huge, beautiful reproduction painting of the portrait of Adele Blachbauer by Klimt.
00:06:26.880 And so, that particular Viennese magic holds a very, very special place in my heart.
00:06:33.860 And so, later I was, you know, after they had given me the gift, I was talking to my dad and he goes, to my son.
00:06:41.440 And he said to me, you know, it's amazing.
00:06:44.540 Like, you have all these books and you have all this knowledge.
00:06:48.380 And, you know, I want to be able to do, I said, son, you just got to start reading.
00:06:53.940 Look at my library, start reading.
00:06:56.020 Every week, you read a book and then we go for a walk and we can discuss it.
00:07:01.140 So, this is what makes my birthday so special.
00:07:06.560 Of course, number one is to spend it with my immeasurably beautiful family.
00:07:11.360 But then, that they would know me so well as to go out and get one of three copies that is known to exist of the first edition of Arthur Schnitzler, Rhapsody.
00:07:26.360 Oh, my God.
00:07:27.140 Hope you're having a great day.
00:07:29.040 I hope that you enjoyed this little interlude into the mind of someone who suffers from this disease, this Japanese-named disease.
00:07:40.600 I'm an incorrigible collector of books and I plan on reading, God willing, every single book in my personal library.
00:07:49.080 And now, add this beauty to the list.
00:07:51.340 Cheers, everybody.
00:07:52.100 Take care.
00:07:52.360 Cheers, everyone.