So the academic establishment in Israel caught wind of this.

So there was a confluence and a collusion between several politicians, especially religious politicians, and the academic establishment. And I felt victim to this, iron and like several dozen other kids.

But I was the most prominent because my IQ was way off any considerable chart.

So and I became the new Maimonides. I became the new kind of the Wunderking, the Israeli Wunderking of the whole nation. And that lasted a very long time into my 21st year.

So well over 12 years, I’ve occupied this slope, this port of the uncontested new mega mind genius of the Jewish people.

People were comparing me, I mean, people were as a physicist were comparing me to Albert Einstein and some of my work and others were comparing me to my monitors and everyone was…

And they were just using you as some kind of publicity.

I was a play thing, I was absolutely playing. I was an emblem, I was a play thing, I was a symbol. One thing I was not was a child with a child’s needs, including the need to remain integrated in a peer network.

So I never had the chance to be a child, because my parents were mentally ill and severely, I won’t go into details, but life-threateningly, life-threateningly abused. When I say life threateningly, it’s a judicious choice of the words. It’s not just a metaphor.

So every single day for 12 years, I had been subjected to, every single day, I’ve been subjected to 20, 30 life-threatening incidents of abuse. And at the same time, I was being toyed with, essentially toyed with various constituencies and interest groups who moved me from here to there and from there to here without consent, consultation, or whatever.

I’ve been at the age of nine. I skipped all the classes, all the years, and I was sent to university and spent eight years.

And the average age there was 24, because in Israel, people served in the army for three years and so on.

So you start to be a student at age 24, and that was one million. One million was 24-year-old men, and very importantly, 24-year-old women.

And I got a completely distorted, nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 11-year-old, and I’m spending all my time with 24, 27-year-old women, can imagine.

My general differentiation suffered mightily. I didn’t have a counterbalance.

Let’s say this is a very sick pathological situation, what I’ve just described, but okay, but home is okay. I didn’t have a counterbalance.

Wherever I went, it was utterly nightmarish and surrealistic and insane. And so I withdrew. I withdrew two books. Books were my best friends and my alternative universe. Two books, two massive exercises of intellectual, rigorous intellectual self-edification and self-control.

I had my own curriculum, my own syllabus that I’ve designed to educate myself. It consumed 6,000 to 8,000 of my day every day.

I read on a typical day, four books. I taught myself speed reading. On a typical day, I read four books. I read a total of 10,000 books.

I know because I kept a list. And so on.

So I tried to establish a haven, safe haven. It was centered around the public library, a safe haven where I could escape from both these madmen, constituent, madmen drivers of my existence.

My parents and crazy family and my, and the psychologists and the politicians and the, I don’t know, who were after me all the time.

It was the Keystone Cups. I was being chased.

I did like the grandiose aspects. The attention, the media hype, the worship. It was nothing short of worship. I was a god figure.

Well, it was just as much of an escape as reading all day in the library was, wasn’t it?

No, I did enjoy it. It was a true, true pleasurable experience to be, to wield, to wield so much power to be so, to be a celebrity.

Now I know, I mean, the modern term for this is a celebrity.

Where, you know, I’m as old as a dinosaur. At that time, celebrity was an unknown phenomenon. I was a celebrity, but a mega celebrity.

So like, you know, children were running after me to sign, to sign, give autographs. And I loved it. I enjoyed, yeah, I loved it. I enjoyed it. And it lasted well into my 21st year.

So I can’t pretend that I didn’t like aspects of it. I did.

But all in all, the closest I would describe it is the famous dream sequence in Hitchcock’s film, which was painted by Salvador Dali. It was very, very surrealistic.

It’s like being trapped in a nightmare and not being able to wake up.

And if you look at my later life, as an adult, it’s a recreation, a reenactment of all this.

My relationships with women are a reenactment of my relationships with, with my mother and with other adults. My mother was the same age of the women who were studying with me.

Oh, it was utterly incestuous. So it was like incest in the air, you know, I fell in love with many of them. I remember that I was particularly attracted to incest films. It was my thing.

I’m sorry. So I was particularly attracted to incest films.

Oh, that was my thing. So I’m trying to recreate this. I’m trying to regain grandiosity, adulation, worship.

And I’m trying to simply recreate that period again and again, whether to resolve it differently or simply to continue to enjoy this unmitigated high.

Because it was a high, of course.

Well, thank you for sharing that with us, Dr. Beckman.

Thank you.

Another thing, another thing I was going to ask you is your career’s taken you all around the world. And I was wondering if you, and if you don’t, you know, it’s fine too. But I was wondering if you have any unique experiences living in any of these different countries and if there are any that you would go revisit.

I’ve lived in 13 countries. I’ve worked in 52 countries. I’ve been traveling nonstop for 40 years now. Inevitably, I have hundreds, hundreds of boring stories. You know, old men, they like to tell stories. They coerce everyone around them to listen.

Are they all boring?

None of them is boring. But it’s always boring to be exposed to someone else’s experiences.

It’s a myth that we like to listen to other people’s stories. We don’t. We like to listen to other people’s stories if they resonate with our stories or provide an answer to a dilemma or predicament we’re in.

So if I’ve been a victim of narcissistic abuse, I would like to listen to someone else who has been a victim of narcissistic abuse, but I wouldn’t like to listen to someone who has just returned from the Amazon forest.

The Amazon forest is not relevant to me right now.

I want to listen to someone who has experienced narcissistic abuse. That’s relevant to me.

Maybe you want to hear about the caterpillars that were yay big.

Sorry?

Yeah, maybe you want to hear about, you know, the giant ants. And you know, that that I mean, like that one story you told on there’s a video you did called something like our hunter-gatherer future. And you told the story how there are Nigeria, there’s these trees.

These were termites.

But again, this story was embedded in a larger message. And it’s the message that motivated people to listen to the story.

The truth is that people pick and choose. They’re very selective when they expose themselves to storytelling. storytelling is not any Hollywood executive will tell you this.

You have the greatest story. You make the most amazing movie, but it’s the wrong period. It doesn’t resonate with mores or crises or any flops.

So why is that? If storytelling is a universal experience, a good story should work every time.

But it doesn’t. It depends crucially on context, temporal context, spatial context, events before, events after, anticipation, expectation, fears, personal experiences and so on.

So I’m very loath to very reluctant to share my stories, although I’ve had amazing adventures and nothing.

I mean, the only word that does justice is adventures. I’ve had amazing, even recently, even as recent as this February, I’ve had amazing adventures, but they are my adventures. And I don’t think they can add anything to anyone.

It’s like, what’s the benefit of this?

Okay, you hear how I ate locust, immoral soul.

What’s the benefit in this? People are very how to think oriented. They’re very what’s in it for me or they’re very like, okay, what can I learn from this?

You know, this is also a change, because until the I would say the 1960s, when I was born.

Yeah, people were far less goal oriented, far less goal oriented. I mean, people were open to, but today, no way.

Like why am I wasting my time? What’s it?

I mean, people are writing to me. Can’t you get to the point? Why are you making a one hour video? I mean, I found the answer minute 48. Couldn’t you have just made this minute? 48.

Like they’re furious at me that I’m wasting the time and believe me, the answer to your question is no.

Go back there.

Yeah, topping off hot ten roots.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And it’s a great video, because we all the richness of life, all the color, all the skin, it’s like, what’s in it for me?

Maybe the world’s just seems a lot smaller too, because I mean, I would think it would be interesting to hear, you know, someone’s like, what were people like over there? You know, what did they, what was the day in the life over there?

You know, I guess people could go online and search like for travel.

They don’t search. They don’t go online and they don’t search.

They’re not interested.

You’re optimistic. They’re simply not interested.

It’s not that there is substitutability, like not Sam, then Dokas. They’re simply not interested. They are utterly, in this sense, our society became very psychopathic.

It’s precisely the psychopath mindset. What’s in it for me? What can I get out of it? How can I benefit? Give it to me straight. Give it to me short. I don’t have time for you. Don’t waste my time.

I mean, it’s very, and it’s very, very, and all of society is like this, and it’s very, very psychopathic.

And so that’s how to, this kind of, they are the best sellers.

Had Peterson, for example, relabeled his book. Had he not called it Twelve Rules for Life, Antidote to Chaos, which is essentially a how-to. It’s a how-to label, a title.

It’s a how-to title.

Had he retitled this book, for example, had he retitled his book and said, had he called it Maps of Meaning, which is, by the way, not very far from the second book. Maps of Meaning sold 500 copies.

I think you’re right. The publicity, you know, shapes the title of the book, because otherwise it would have been a book with 12 categories and a series of anecdotes.

Whoever made the decision made the right decision because it’s a how-to title.

He titled his first book, Maps of Meaning. He sold 500 copies.

Yeah. Huge parts of Maps of Meaning are in 12 rules. Huge. Like I would say.

I haven’t read Maps of Meaning.

Stunning book. Right now. You see? A true book of a great intellectual. Stunning book.

And I couldn’t find factual mistakes. Well, not many. It’s normal to have factual mistakes. I couldn’t find too many factual mistakes in Maps of Meaning, and I couldn’t find any correct fact in 12 rules. Everything was utterly mistaken. Everything, factual, internal facts, not about the interpretation values these days.

He simply gets his facts wrong. I mean, the transformation is mind-boggling.

But you know what? He worked 20 years, took him 20 years to write Maps of Meaning. Who gives a fuck about meaning and maps?

I don’t know if you can see with this. I got, I don’t know if you can see that.

Yeah.

They misspelled his name on there.

Show me again.

Can you, I think it’s in the first, the first Jordan P printer. They were in a hurry to churn this out.

Yeah, because he was popular on horror on YouTube and they wanted to leverage popularity.

Oh, there is another comment you made recently about how people send you emails from all over the world and they send them to you in different languages. How many languages do you know? So, so people in the future will know, you know, what to write to you.

You’re treading dreadfully close to bragging.

Oh, I speak. I know. I mean, speak, write, read six languages. Oh, I’m level up English. And I read and understand 23 additional languages.

I read and understand, but I can’t write. And I can’t, I mean, I’m not a master of these things, but you can read papers on them. I can read papers, books. I understand movies. No problem.

Wow.

Dr. Rachman.

Docus is an interesting name. It’s a gazelle, dear.

Thank you.

I was referring to your name.

Okay. I think we should call it today.

All right. I’ve got one last, I’ve got one last question.

Okay.

Let me see if I can get the mic.

Right.

Is the world flat?

Is the world flat?

Not lost on that.

No, no, I got a question. Last question. What’s your favorite food?

My favorite food?

I hope that’s not too personal.

My enemy’s food is my favorite food, hummus.

I love Arabic food, but I also love the Macedonian, Serbian kitchen.

They’re wonderful with meats and everything.

I mean, they make meats like no one.

And hummus and the Arabic, especially Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian cuisine is my favorite.

So as far as meats, Serbian, Macedonian, as far as other things, plant-based things, then I would say Arabic.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Just edit out all the bookers and bookers and so send me the file and I’ll upload it.

Okay.