Paul Heyman opened up about his childhood and the profound influence of his parents, detailing how his father’s perspective on his ADHD diagnosis and his mother’s “ferocious” intensity as a Holocaust survivor shaped his entire worldview.
Speaking on What’s your story with Steph McMahon, Heyman recalled being diagnosed in elementary school. “I was born in 1965… in early 70s, I was in elementary school and and there was a big thing about ADD,” Heyman said. “Of course, I couldn’t just be ADD, I had to be ADHD, because I do nothing half assed.”
He described the school calling his parents in. “Mr. And Mrs. Heyman, your son’s been diagnosed with with ADHD… we like to put him in a special ed class.” Heyman said his father’s reaction was immediate.
“My father’s looking at them, and he’s saying, Oh, how are his grades? Oh, he’s doing fine,” Heyman recalled. “My father looks at them and my father says, you look at it as a disorder. I look at it like he can multitask… Looks at me, goes, get the f**k back to class… And later I asked my mother about it, and she just said, Oh, he tore them an ass.”
Heyman explained how he “learned how to play into my own flaws.” He noted that while he can’t focus by staring at one person, he concentrates by “blasting music” and “by distraction.” He also has the ability to “hyper focus,” stating, “I can sit at a computer for 20 hours at a time, and never get up to pee… I haven’t moved.”
He credited his father’s insight. “That was the brilliance of of my father, and that he just looked at things from from that perspective. Again, it’s not a problem, it’s a solution… he’s going to have to be juggling sharks and chainsaws at all time, because that’s what he’ll end up doing, because he’ll figure out his way right?”
Heyman described his father as a “voracious reader” who graduated high school at 16, a “super articulate and well spoken, very charismatic and street smart, street kid from the Bronx.”
He said his mother was his father’s “intellectual peer.” She was a “badass, a ferocious mind” with an “insatiable appetite to learn because she was deprived of an education as a child.” He shared that his mother, a Holocaust survivor, enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in her 40s and graduated with a 4.0 GPA.
Heyman shared his mother’s harrowing story of surviving the Lodz Ghetto, where she “witnessed 13 of her cousins starve to death” and “both of her grandmothers starve to death.” At 16 or 17, she was sent to Auschwitz.
“This is the defining moment of my mother’s life,” Heyman said. “My mother got off the train… My mother’s mother and my mother’s seven year old sister went that way. Within an hour, they were in the gas chambers… My mother was in the march from Auschwitz to Bergen Belsen… liberated April 15, 1945… Had no family.”
This experience, Heyman said, made him “fear nothing.”
“Did I get scared being fired… I didn’t care about being fired. Why? Compared to what my mother went through… Hey, these guys are going to kill you. Yeah, okay, take your best shot. Why? Nothing compared to what my mother went through,” he stated.
He also shared the “intense conversation” his mother had with him every Friday as a child: “Listen, if your father and I get hit by a drunk driver… If we don’t come home. You move forward. You go on… I don’t want you 25 years old, in the gutter… I want you on top of the world.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit What’s your story with Steph McMahon with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. You can listen to the full podcast on all major podcast platforms.
