Dark Squares: Danny Rensch on Chess, Cults, and Finding Purpose

26:59And that's why he was able to convince her, hey, don't see your son for years while he He lives just a town away learning chess. So I'm just wondering where the hierarchy kind of comes in. Well, you nailed it in terms of, like I said, I just explained the framework that kind of gives you the background. And now let's talk about how light vibration was weaponized because I think the first step, and I think many people, even again, those on the most extreme, the most angry or the most like, hey, there were some babies in the bathwater here, Bill, throw everything out, would say that the hierarchy and the sort of self-flagellation, the members did to each other and just the way that you create a pecking order was probably the first step of creating the cult and probably the first step that some would say where it first started going wrong if they're in the camp where maybe there was some good things and then this started to happen.

27:49And so to talk about that, you have a like-vibration relationship, but where the first part of it that could be weaponized is that some souls are older and so therefore their like-vibration is deeper, is stronger, they are more knowledgeable, they are wiser, right? So they have more to give in terms of whether it's in a process, which there are three pillars, I would say, that describe the teaching. I'm starting with like vibration. The next two I want to get to is the process and purpose. So those are really important things to explain kind of the framework that not just will go full circle back to my life and how my purpose of chess was justified to separate me from my mom, but they all have at their core purpose, like vibration, and the process, which is basically group meetings, maybe some good things to them before we talk about how they were weaponized.

28:34And so like vibration could be weaponized, one, in terms of the hierarchy. There are some souls that are older, and therefore they are wiser and better, and you need to serve them and do more for them to be like them. The second part of it, and this is probably the one that I share the most about in terms of how it immediately affected my own parents' marriage, but I would argue the one that really, really unfortunately was probably one of the saddest, most wrong things that the collective did, which was that if the idea of having a like vibration pushed you to really connect with your spouse and work through hard times and tell each other the truth and compromise and listen, and maybe if this was actually practiced with some great mental health therapists who were qualified to help people, it maybe could have been a really good framework to help you save your marriage when it's struggling, to do the hard thing.

29:18When like vibration is used as an excuse to say, hey, this woman isn't really performing for me. Maybe she's not my like vibration. Like, actually, like, I don't know if this woman ultimately is the person I'm supposed to be with in all time and space as we move back toward the original oneness. And so what happened in practice was you had a lot of marriages that came to the collective with the idea that they were saving their relationship, when in reality, it was a fast track to getting a divorce. And in a lot of ways, you had a lot of men leave their wives for different women in the collective.

29:50And in my case, my dad left my mom to marry the oldest daughter of Stephen and Trina Camp, who was only 19 years old at the time, and he was 38. And so there were other marriages that were similar in terms of older men leaving their wives for younger women. And what got crazy in that process is a lot of the women still stayed around, right? This wasn't a thing that happened, and then the women used it as an excuse to leave. In fact, in many ways, it was like a way for them to re-sign the covert contract made with the cult to say why they weren't spiritual enough, what they needed to do to be better, what they would need to change about themselves to be accessible to a like-vibration relationship again, right?

30:26And I think as I saw my mom go through that, a lot of other women went through that, and I won't speak to their experiences, but I'll say that like that was a thing that in hindsight I really observed growing up and a lot of people had and certainly was the direct effect of my mom being sort of shoved down to the bottom of the totem pole in the hierarchy. I was the now bastard son of a like vibration failed relationship. And my dad remarried a much younger woman, the oldest daughter of Steven and Trina, which was justified as like a big spiritual thing. But I would learn with many years that in many ways it was kind of set up by Trina because like I said, she didn't want to be poor.

31:04My dad was a wealthy attorney and the idea of her daughter marrying him was a good one. And how old were you at this time? I was a teeny baby. It was very complicated. I share it in the book. And I'm not saying that as a way to buy the book. I'm saying, honestly, it's a very complicated part of it. I'll just quickly say that my parents' marriage probably shouldn't have made it even before I was born. The fact that I was born was like a small miracle because my dad was already sort of bouncing around in the collective, had slept with another woman, was considering whether my mom was going to be his light vibration, and kind of demanded that my mom get pregnant.

31:39And even crazier, my mom agreed. And so they didn't even have sex. It was in vitro. And so that whole part of it is like its own kind of crazy miracle that I do share a lot of the more rated or details in the book. But so that is two very quick ways where the hierarchy and the idea that if your mate isn't performing, you could find a new light vibration are probably the most fundamental ways to describe how that otherwise spiritually maybe sounding interesting concept that I explain were weaponized in the group. Then you mentioned there's the process. So the other part of it that I grew up with as someone who was born in the collective, so I knew no other way than to process.

32:19And in the group, in the collective, process itself as a word could be like noun, verb, and adjective, meaning you could go to a process. A process was a group meeting with a bunch of people, in its best sense, opening up, sharing vulnerably, being supported by the group about the weaknesses in themselves, things that they don't, things that they're struggling with in their marriage. Like, it could be great if it happened. And probably there were some processes that people felt really good about. At its worst, it was a lot of people using the idea of a process to judge others, ultimately weaponize information that was shared against them in the group.

33:02And I would learn later through my own education that a lot of groups have something like this. similar. A lot of cults have something called the game or the process or whatever this is to... And again, without casting dispersions on every group that does this, I think, again, I would say fundamentally, if the idea of opening up and sharing in a group of your peers could make you all closer in a community and everybody really is on the same page and ultimately acting with just the maximum amount of kindness and empathy and compassion, you might say, great. And I think a lot of people miss community in today's world, and I won't get on that soapbox, but I think that there's an idea of that that goes, oh, great.

33:39But when it became something that was actually used for reasons of, like I said, to judge and to weaponize, make yourself look better than, the processes could be pretty intense, and a lot of them also turned violent, and the fact that there was also a lot of alcohol that was encouraged within the group. Why was alcohol encouraged? Alcohol was encouraged through the spiritual wrapper of, it's a truth serum. It helps you relax and let down your guard and tell the truth. in practical terms, it was because Trina Camp herself was very much an alcoholic. And I would say that alcohol was probably always a part of her life and became something that every older member of the collective was an active drinker.

34:24And if you didn't drink, you were judged in shame because why don't you just have a drink and let go? Why aren't you letting your guard down? And so, I'm giving the very quick terms. There's a lot of people who would share. And I've talked to people who say that in hindsight, they also feel like if there wasn't so much alcohol, maybe, maybe things could have been better too. But the reality is that alcohol mixed with non-really professionally led group conversation with a group of people who were sort of encouraged, whether both subtly, subconsciously, or directly to kind of use that information against each other.

34:56And the process itself wasn't what it was cracked up to be. Now, how is it an adjective and a verb? You could also be processed, meaning, hey, Debbie, my mom, Debbie Sampson really got processed last night. It was really all about her. She was on the hot seat. This was like a term that we use. She was on the hot seat and she was processed. And then you could also describe your process. Like, hey, my process right now is I'm really working on having better integrity in my marriage. Or, hey, my process right now, I'm really working on stuff with my dad or whatever. Someone could have a process that was describing or summarizing like what they were working on, right?

35:30What they were trying to work on. And so those are the ways that the term process was used. That was one of the pillars or the regular practices. What's interesting is, and I had to clarify this a few times, Duran was never part of a process. Duran did not lead processes, the spirit that spoke through Trina, if you believe in it or not. The process was something that was run by the leaders of the collective, particularly Stephen Camp and Steve Wrench, my father. And it also had a lot of influence from the teachings of Est, again, later the Landmark Forum, the idea, in some ways, some things that could be very good about the founding principles of the Landmark Forum.

36:07I have been to a Landmark Forum. I can say that, you know, one of the core things I genuinely believe in in life is that we are not what happens to us. We are the stories we tell ourselves about the things. This is not something I'm saying that is revolutionary. This is, I think, a Carl Jung quote. I'm paraphrasing, right? I am not what happens to me, but what I choose to become. I think that there are principles of the Landmark Forum and that from an existential view, life is meaningless. and so let's give it the meaning that we want. Ultimately, you are not what happened to you. You are the stories you've been telling yourself for years.

36:36So if we can figure out a way to rewind and re-hardwire your brain and the framework you have, you might be better for it. I think there are some principles to that that I genuinely believe in. I've seen them in practice and they've influenced a lot of modern mental health and some good stuff. There's also many ways, like any other message, to weaponize those things, right? And to use them against people. And I think in the case of the process, you had spiritual hierarchy framework and expectations of how to be combined with things that were language and terminology that was used to kind of weaponize and judge people's experience in terms of the stories they were telling themselves and or use their story against them in a way that again, like if you're not working with someone, this is why a lot of people in the mental health industry don't have relationships with their clients outside of therapy because the moment someone has an agenda a goal for and an idea of how you could be your best self is where things get fucked up in a lot of ways of mental health because i would argue even for me i'll just say this real quick i think in my own journey of spirituality and religion if stories can be used to help someone ask some of life's biggest questions why am i here what can i do to have great impact on humanity how can i be the best version of myself and if a story is used to help you ask those questions that can be okay hey, the moment you pretend you have all the answers is the moment every religion becomes a cult, in my humble opinion.

38:02Because the moment you set up a framework where someone is told to believe that this guru, this deity, or this particular church and framework has a dogma that has the answers is where that information or the idea of asking yourself big questions can be weaponized. And I think through the process and through the teachings, you saw a lot of that. I'll end on that before I get to the last one, which is purpose. Yeah, and it's interesting because I've been to a landmark forum session as well. And what I found kind of unappealing was not so much the message of what they were saying in the session, which again, is similar in some ways and similar in some ways to lots of religions and spiritual beliefs.

38:42But after the session, they were just extremely aggressive in their sales techniques about me going to the next sessions and trying to get commitment out of me and almost immediately shaming me for not making further commitment. Like it was just, it was just crazy. Like I, I went there and my wife wasn't there and they said, okay, well now next weekend we're having a thing. You're coming to this, right? And I'm like, well, I got to check with my wife and family. And they're like, oh, he's afraid to make a commitment. You know? So there was like an immediate, there was almost too aggressive, even though they could have won me over by just having a good message, you know, consistently.

39:22I agree with everything you said. And I also experienced the same sort of aggressive sales pitch. My wife and I both did the Landmark Forum at different times. We took the advice, which is that you shouldn't do it with your spouse. It's better to not have any emotional connections to anyone in the room. I think that is a helpful thing to do. But again, the collective should have done more of because when you don't have emotional connections, you and your own, if we call them your own strong suits to use the form language, your own weaknesses aren't as projected or even as manipulatable because you are very clean in terms of presenting on your own, right?

39:52That can be good. And I had a good landmort form experience. I will be honest about that. But the after pitch, and my wife would say the same thing, the idea of whatever that is, the commitment they want you to make, which in their case isn't even so much a covert contract, which I say a lot of cults and groups operate with, what you don't realize they're doing, they are consistently getting you to re-up and re-sign a contract you never knew you signed. Because the more times you can get someone to reproselytize themselves at the feet, to re-sign a covert contract of their own spiritual self-work and their own shame, the harder it actually is to break that contract ultimately.

40:27And I think I experienced that with my mom and a lot of people, and we can talk about that. I think in the case of the Landmark Forum, they can be aggressive about asking you to sign the contract. And I think if they truly were operating with their existential roots and the influence of, hey, life can be meaningless, So find your own meaninglessnessfulness. Learn to recognize that you are not what happened to you. You are the stories you tell yourself. Empower yourself to be the best version and help other people find it. You're like, fuck, sign me up. That sounds great. We need more human beings like that, right?

40:56But the problem is the moment you turn that into some sort of agenda and idea of proselytizing, I think you immediately cross the line. And my wife and I both experienced that. Although we are both grateful we did it, we did not do more than the initial session. So let's talk about purpose, right? That's the third pillar, I think. So the last pillar, I would say, of Duran's teaching, and I would say that like vibration and purpose are really the main two pillars of Duran's teaching and some of the sub-bullets that went into that that would support the idea of everyone has a purpose and we are all moving back toward our higher self, connecting with another person, your soulmate, is a tool to help you get back there.

41:33The process, I would say, was a little more of the influence of Est and the leadership that founded the collective, Stephen Camp, Steve Rentsch, Trina Camp, with a lot of, like I said, the mixings of the spiritual hierarchy. When it comes back to purpose, I would say that, again, fundamentally, the idea of having purpose on the planet, we all want to believe that there's a reason we're here. And even if we're not looking for a metaphysical endowment of what God wants us to do, people want to feel like they matter. They want to feel like they have something they're doing that is their why, right?

42:03The thing that they do that fills their cup. and I've looked at a lot of my own relationship in the self-worth and the ultimately, you know, the shame and the self-deprecating behavior that I developed when I felt like I failed at my spiritual purpose. I've seen all the ways that feeling like you don't have purpose can really be a bad thing for you as a human being. And especially if you feel like you failed at achieving something. And that was a big part of where purpose was weaponized for me and for many others, which I'll talk about. But before we get to that, I would say that purpose inherently as an idea of you have a reason that you are on the planet.

42:37Your soul, as we've said, is having a physical experience, not the other way around. And your reason for being on the planet is to help people with X. You would say, oh, great, right? That sounds good. The problem is that in practical terms, the idea of everyone having a purpose was one used to just say, like, this is your job in the collective. Like, people were told their purposes were as menial as cleaning houses, like my mom, or you're the mechanic, you're going to fix the collective cars, or your purpose is to be a lawyer because that's what you do, or your purpose is to build houses because you're a general contractor.

43:13The idea of purpose being very quickly used to basically just say what someone's job is was definitely a way it was weaponized. And then the other way was that if you had a purpose that was sort of ordained by Duran or ordained by the leaders of the collective, and if you weren't achieving in some way that looked like your purpose was going well, that's where the conversations would change, where it's like, well, why aren't you achieving your purpose? Or, hey, what can we do to help you? Should we change something about your life? Like, maybe you need new parents. Also, the purpose itself could be weaponized through the form of questioning, which in many ways it was.

43:54And I've learned that this was one of the really unfortunate things that I believe Stephen Camp did that was, that was, that as I guess I've reflected, I've been willing to say more and more that I do think it was premeditated. I think for many years, I didn't think it was premeditated, but the idea of weaponizing it through the, through the form of a question with the idea of getting someone to resign the covert contract of their purpose, like, Hey, like you think chess is your purpose? I don't know. Why don't we forget it? Right. Do you think you're doing good enough? Like maybe, maybe it's, maybe you're not up to the spiritual task of chess being your purpose, right?

44:24And then the more you get someone to like, do whatever it takes to convince the person who's in charge and not just of everyone's sort of wellbeing, but also leading the collective, that you have what it takes as a 12 year old kid, that you would do anything, including cast aside your biological relationships to prove to you that chess is your purpose, right?

44:57It's interesting, though, with the idea of a purpose for a kid. Like, at least in America, yes, kids have passions. Kids often think, oh, I'm going to be a fireman. That's my purpose. Or I'm going to be an astronaut. And then they grow up like, no, I'm going to work on Wall Street. Kids often think they have a purpose, but they don't live or die based on that purpose. It kind of evolves. They want to be a firefighter, but they don't think their entire spiritual worth is set up as to whether they put out every fire. Right. It's like that kind of thing. And yet in Hinduism, it is like your Dharma is kind of assigned based on what kind of family you were born into.

45:35What's the cast of the family you're born into? I mean, all of Hindus, this five or six thousand year old religion is based on this notion of Dharma, which I guess societally it is weaponized. but it also has created a very fruitful society for thousands of years. So it's really hard to say, but go ahead. And we can talk about that because I think what you jumped at was, I guess I was describing purpose in terms of what could be good about having a purpose and then how it was weaponized. And I kind of jumped past the idea of what you said, which is how does a 12-year-old kid come to have a purpose, right?

46:07That is like ordained versus just thinking that he loves chess. And that was sort of what happened to me. And in terms of how early someone could be given a purpose in the collective by Duran and sort of told this is what you're meant to do, I was on the very early side, right? Maybe the youngest person to ever be given or told that this is your purpose. And a lot of it is like self-fulfilling because I learned to play chess when I was nine. And within two years, I was one of the top rated chess players in the country and an All-American, right? And so the fact that it was going well, the fact that the Shelby School chess team, the Shelby School was the school for the collective in Toner Village.

46:48We were winning national championships. We were performing very well. Yes, I was the best player, but there were many other very talented kids in the collective. We all got very good, very fast, right? Part of the unique setup of the group that allowed us to really focus on chess. So the thing is we're successful. So it would make sense that maybe chess would be my purpose. but the idea of being told that chess was my purpose and then kind of what happened after that was definitely on like the, you know, the chess prodigy, like prodigy of getting a purpose in the collective. I was very young to be told, oh, Danny, like, oh my God, like Danny was told that his purpose was chess today in the community trance.

47:25And I remember when that trance happened and I wrote about that in the book. And so when chess became my purpose, while I think it would be too quick to say that I immediately stopped enjoying the game. That's obviously not true, at least when I was winning. But it definitely immediately put a spin on what I just said, which is like, now everything I did was being measured through the lens of whether I was achieving my purpose, right? Because ultimately chess itself as a purpose is really only ordained within Duran's teaching based on your ability to win, which helps people see that we're not a cult and that our spiritual way of being might actually be the best teaching on the planet.

48:06It might actually be the best religion. And so in some ways, this was a very direct conversation. In other ways, it was like implied and sort of like if kids weren't doing well on the chess team, they could be kicked off the chess team. So it was like this weaponized thing that everybody felt, you know, really committed to. We had a mission before missions were cool, right? This was a mission we really had. And cynically, he had financial incentive. Like if he showed the superiority of his way of thinking because the team and you in particular, we're good at chess, more people are going to join, more people are going to give money.

48:40And, you know, there's a little bit of financial incentive to figuring out ways to keep you on your purpose. Yeah, I didn't see it that way as a younger kid, but that's because I wasn't exposed to all this stuff. With time and with sort of perspective, I definitely see that and wouldn't disagree. I would also say that even if you don't correlate the growth of your mission, of your teachings of Duran with direct financial incentive, just the idea that you are growing the brand, right, is incentive, right? And the idea that people would want to be a part of it certainly ultimately is about your ability to influence their lives, hear the teachings of Dr.

49:16Duran and provide financial support for that. So I don't disagree. And I think what would happen next in my personal life, now that we've set up the pillars of the collective, purpose, the process, and the idea of a like vibration relationship, And there are sub-bullets and terminology we used. And obviously, I use a lot of this in the book to describe it. But those are the pillars. What would happen next was almost everything you could see being used in a perfect triangle. Whatever was rotated as the most important thing at the time, my process always came about whether I was performing in my chess purpose.

49:52And the question of, is my mom and her now new husband, my stepfather, Dennis's, like vibration relationship spiritual enough to support me in my purpose? If not, they should be processed because we need to figure out whether they can figure this out. Okay, and if their process is reverse engineering Danny's chest, not having the support it needs, are they even financially wealthy enough to support this? You know who is financially wealthy enough to support this? Danny's dad. Danny's dad's purpose is law and his purpose brings in more money to the collective so we can maybe have Danny start to be processed by Steve.

50:26And what happened was like people don't, people are always surprised when they hear this, but I didn't know Steve Wrench was my dad until I was eight, seven, eight years old because I lived in the collective with the man. I had some memory that Dennis was not my dad because I was young enough. He was three or four when he came in, but I wasn't like conscious enough to properly interrogate what that was. So I knew Dennis kind of wasn't my biological dad, but he was my dad. And I didn't even know that Steve Wrench was my dad as this like high up number two man behind Stephen Camp. I'm really, you know, probably the scariest man in the collective, my dad was.

51:02Why didn't your mom tell you? There's a lot of reasons for that. I think the first one is that one of the things my mom was judged about forever, and it actually became something that was weaponized in her process and used to kind of take me away from her, was that she was still in love with Steve Rich. And because my dad left her for a younger woman, and because of whatever her process was, you know, I now know that she hid a lot of things about whatever her feelings would be, whether she was naturally angry at the man for leaving her and her son, or whether she maybe did still have feelings.

51:37None of that was ever okay, even if it was natural, because it would mean she was lusting after someone else's like vibration. He was now Marlow's like vibration. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So I think in many ways she kept it because she was dealing with her own sort of like shame as the scarlet lettered woman, not really able to talk about it in a safe way and didn't really know how to bring it up with me without it maybe promoting the idea that she did still love her ex-husband. The second reason, which would become a fear that unfortunately had reality to it, was that I don't think my mom wanted me to think about Steve as my dad.

52:12I don't think she liked the idea of me knowing that because of what could happen and that there was already a lot of conversation for kids for many years in the collective, but this had happened with other kids, never as young as me, of like kids sort of leaving their parents because it was time to have new spiritual parents or, hey, you've completed your karma with your biological parents. Now this couple is your parents. Steven and Trina themselves had adopted kids that weren't their own, whose parents were still there. Yeah, I think that that's true. Yeah, there were some there. There were also kids who went to live with other families, even if it wasn't as official as they're your new spiritual parents, they're going to change their name to be with that family.

52:52So I think single women were always a little bit afraid of this threat, whether because it was openly weaponized or implied that if we are all here to move toward our highest spiritual selves, biological relationships are secondary to your ultimate being, right? And so I think that for my mom, it was simultaneously, she was a human being who didn't quite know how to deal with her own feelings toward her ex-husband and didn't have a safe place to deal with that. And two, I don't think she wanted me to know. And then what happened was my half-sister, Steve and Marlo's first daughter, the child who's the closest to me in age, Trina, named after Trina, Trina Bean, she had a crush on me when we were little.

53:33And so they had to tell us that we were biologically related. Otherwise, maybe we wouldn't have known. I don't know. So the second you found out, what were your thoughts about Trina? Or were your thoughts about the girl, your sister? Or were your thoughts about, oh my God, I'm like royalty in this cult because my dad runs the whole thing? Or what were you thinking that second? Honestly, I was kind of oblivious. I remember exactly where I was sitting in the Shelby house, which was a house called the Shelby house because it was the closest house to the Shelby school. I was sitting in the Shelby house in a typical process.

54:09My mom and Dennis were on my left and you had Trina and Marlo and Steve and Steven and Trina. And it was a very small process. A lot of through processes or more, but this was an intimate subject. And so me and Bean were told that we were blood related and that Steve was my father. And so Steve and Debbie had been together. And that meant that we can't date. And also I was told at this time that another young girl in the collective, who was also my father's daughter from a very brief relationship my father had with another woman named Debbie. This was while he was married to my mom, but she was also my half sister.

54:41So I can't date her either. Her name is Shalana. And so it was, to be honest with you, there was zero thought about it besides like, when can I go back outside and play? Like, I was like, all right, what the fuck is going on here? Like, that's my memory of it. And so, remember, this was also about a year and a half before I would learn chess. So this happened. I now knew. It was kind of in one ear right up the other. I had no intention of Steve Wrench being my father, and he wasn't my father, right? Dennis was my dad. And I didn't go from this knowledge to a regular relationship with the man on any level.

55:15But that's interesting too. Like even if I was seven years old and someone told me, oh, this guy is your actual biological dad, I would be curious and want to know a little bit more, I think. Like, do you think you weren't that curious? I think the reason, I think part of it was because the indoctrination of biological relationships are less important than spiritual relationships. And I was told at this time as well that Debbie and Dennis are my spiritual parents. I was like, yeah, okay, yeah, they've been my parents the whole time. And that makes sense in terms of the larger game role play in here.

55:44And so I get it. I guess it's funny because I'm seeing so many things during this whole ride of my book coming out and talking about it for the first time. I understand now why that is weird because who would do that, right? But I think that in my view, I had already accepted and been practicing the idea that Debbie and Dennis were my spiritual parents. I didn't know he wasn't my dad yesterday. I don't know now Maybe in some ways it made it a little more awkward when I saw him walking down the road I was like, oh, yeah, that that's the guy there But there was no part of that that my dad didn't show more interest in my life Steve himself didn't start showing up every day with hey now that this is open Here's a piece of candy and let's go on a walk.

56:27I'd like to get to know you kid like my dad didn't get to know me either He didn't he didn't want to know me because I think in many ways I also reminded him of his failed marriage with Debbie, right? There was no part of this that went from, okay, we're out of the closet to, hey, Steve now wants a relationship with you. And this is something that, you know, has been and would play itself out for years to come in terms of my perspective about it. Whenever my dad later, you know, kind of tried to say that he did feel differently about it, I was always like, are you fucking kidding me? I don't think that you did.

56:56I don't know that that really was something I saw. And so, which is sad for me because my dad and I have had a very, to say my father and I have had an incredibly difficult relationship this lifetime, if we're going to call it that way, would be an understatement. You've read my book. And the fact that we have any relationship now, even if it's an arm's length one, is no small miracle. And I love my dad. And we did get close. And I have learned a lot from my dad, both in terms of good things and things not to do. But the reality is like, my dad left my mom for a 19-year-old woman and was, you know, not my father.

57:29And fast forward to the fact that I'm now 12, to get back to the story. And I'm one of the top rated chess players in the world for my age. And, um, and I'm having a bit of a rough go of some tournaments and the seed is now planted, which was a big one 80 for me that like Steve Wrench is not your father, Debbie and Dennis are, you need to love spiritual, spiritual blood was a term used in the collective. You need to love your spiritual blood more than your biological blood, these sort of things. Now, Stephen Camp, who really is my father at this point, because what happened from the age of learning chess, which was basically 10, it was the summer of 95.

58:07I turned 10 in October. From the age of 10 to 12, Stephen Camp, you know, had really taken most of the influence over my life. And for me to now kind of be told like, hey, like you're struggling a little bit, maybe Debbie and Dennis, like maybe, you know we talk about this stuff a lot you know what's funny Danny I'll tell you this story later but when you were born there were all kinds of conversations as to who you should be with you know we'll talk about that later hey you know there were all kinds of conversations when you were younger as to whether um whether Steve and Marlo were your real parents or or or Debbie and Dennis also so he put like he sort of seeded the ambiguity exactly and I and I didn't really realize that you know until until much later and I you know I also was kind of just being reminded both overtly and subtly all the time about how important chess was.

58:53I mean, one of the stories I didn't write in my book, but I've shared since then is he would literally ask me, he would hold up the king and say, hey, which is more important, the king or your mother? And at the time, of course, I'd be like, the king, of course, the king, because I knew what he wanted. It was a funny thing, right?

59:18Thank you.

59:22So between the ages of 10 and 12, you learn chess and then suddenly you're one of the top young players in the country and the team's doing well. This goes to a question about the nature of skill and talent. Was it talent? Did you have, because of your love, did you kind of train in a specific way that people who aren't as much in love with the game didn't train? Like, what do you think is the nature of skill and talent here? Like, clearly there's some talent, but how much, and the other thing is, if you had learned at the age of five, would you have gone even further? because how correlated is the age you start to your plateau?

1:00:01And I know this is not really in the story, but it's interesting to me. It's a great kind of sideline and maybe helpful for me because we were on the track towards some big emotional stuff and who knows if I could keep it together. So let me back up a little bit. I think it's a great question. I've talked about this a lot and I think acknowledging my own sort of, I would not pretend to speak any more, you know, knowledgeably on the debate of talent, nature versus nurture, talent and intrinsic things that some ways are hard for us to measure. Like why is someone's brain, you know, why do they have an aptitude that for some reason connects itself more quickly and efficiently to a game of pattern recognition and what happens there versus why someone else might struggle with it.

1:00:49I've answered this question so many times differently over the years, both as like a player, a teacher, you know, a coach of others, whatever. I will give my best current answer now, which is clearly I had some type of aptitude for the game because I did get good very fast. And when you consider that I also was given the same set of tools that a lot of other kids in the group were, yet I obviously excelled more than they did to some degree, right? There were some very good players. But even with, we'll say, the intense, unique environment that is hard to replicate, a cult leader with maximum influence and say so.

1:01:27We had two hours of chess every day after school, which who could do that? Like there is no program in the world that does that. There was nothing else to do in the village for all of us. We had no shoes. We were dirt poor running around. We fucking loved chess class. But yeah, it's time for chess class. We love chess class. So we had a ton of influence and support. We had two hours every day after school. We loved chess class and didn't have a lot else to do. I believe the curriculum was unique. Gary Moore, who was the principal of the Shelby School, one of the more senior members of the collective, worked with Stephen Camp to develop this.

1:02:00They would print out Xeroxes of not just like Pandolfini's ABCs of chess, Sunil Wiramantri's Best Lessons of a Chess Coach, the Russian chess course by Liv Albert. They would just print out, we would just show up with those shoes and pencils and like, here's your packet today, kids. And we would just do what we were told. Then we would play in tournaments. They were very unique. They were very smart in terms of always giving a child's brain what it can handle. A lot of people give kids a full book and wonder why they're overwhelmed. Or nowadays, you give them a goal online with chess.com, which is very hard to focus on what they can actually control.

1:02:33They gave us like minimal things, puzzles that were building pattern recognition, and then they let us play. They let us play for hours. And kids will teach themselves anything if you just let them enjoy it. If you trick them into thinking that learning is play, you have cracked the fucking code. I've both seen this and this is what happened with us. So they would just say, hey, today's chess tournament is on the Sicilian defense. Everybody has to play the Sicilian. We're like, okay, Gary, whatever you say. Can I have a snack later? Shut up, Danny, do chess, right? This is what would happen, right?

1:03:03And so we would just do what we were told and we got so good so fast. So I think that curriculum was great. But even with all that said, I had an aptitude that was obviously built for it. And I don't know that there were any other signs of this other than one of the stories I actually wrote in the book that eventually got cut, because we had to cut a lot of things, editing, is that the only other interaction I had with Stephen Camp before chess was at the age of six, where he walked into the school. I was in kindergarten. He walked into the school and told the third graders that whoever memorized the multiplication tables up to 12 first would get five bucks.

1:03:44And five bucks is like, are you kidding me? This is like, it's all you need, right? Yeah. and I went home that night and asked my mom to like help me write down the original one so I did one times one equals one one times two equals two I wrote them out on college rule paper all the way up to 12 and I just memorized them in a night and I went up to to 12 and I was like 12 and 12 144 and I just did it all right and I like I went back to school the next day and told him like hey I memorized the multiplication tables and he's like you're not even in third grade I'm like ah well I heard you say can I get the five dollars he's like yep so him and Gary Moore did flashcards with me this was like the first experience I had with him and I memorized them like in a night right and again this is I don't think this is that impressive like totally other than what it did show is that I clearly had some sort of like ADHD brain but when I dialed in I was gonna fucking achieve the task you know what I mean and so that was probably the only like early sign that I think I had a brain for something, right?

1:04:41And until I learned chess a long time later, I don't know that there was anything about me that would have said I was going to be good at chess. Honestly, I didn't want to be good at chess. I thought I was going to be an actor. I think I did share this in the book, in the later chapters, that I used to make myself cry in front of the mirror. I used to practice. I heard Stephen Camp one time say in a process that all good actors can lift one eyebrow. So whenever we were in trance circles and it was dark, I would do this. By the way, I've heard that from movie directors as well. Yeah, like they say things like this, like the rock.

1:05:18Like the rock is going to give you the smolder and whatever. So I learned I practiced this in a dark trance circle. So I wanted to be an actor and I don't know why. I just thought that was what I wanted to be at the age of nine. And then I watched the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher and you know the rest was history on that level by the way it also sounds like you wanted to please steven camp like both examples involve steven camp the multiplication tables and raising your eyebrow 100 and so let me go back to that because i think that that answers the question in the end which is i've read a lot of books on talent is too i love talent is overrated by jeff calvin if i don't know why i'm recommending someone's book but it's a great book on like the difference between like deliberate practice and focus on something versus the debate of whether talent is intrinsic.

1:06:01I love that book by Jeff Calvin. I've had a lot of questions about this again because parents want to know what I was teaching. Is my kid talented or not? And I don't know how to answer this stuff. And so talent is a big question. I've shared some stories now about maybe I had some initial talent, some aptitude. I've also described the unique environment. But back to the question I've gotten, which people have asked, hey, if you had learned chess but not lived in the collective, what would have happened? This comes back to being the Apple in Stephen Camp's eye, there's no denying the fact that I got good at chess because I got good at chess.

1:06:37Because the moment I got good, it's almost like a forum thing. You choose your life because you choose it. There's no reason for it. I got good at chess, James. And because it made me special in the eyes of Stephen Camp, I got even better at chess. And I don't know how good someone can get from the age of 10 to 12. And also, to answer your question, I honestly do think if I had learned chess at the age of four or five, like Hikaru, like that probably given the aptitude that I have and given the unique environment, I think it's hard to say. I don't, I don't think I'm like being egotistical to say, I think I probably would have been even better.

1:07:14And I think the reason there's evidence of that is like, I went from learning chess at 10 to being an All American and in many ways compared to peers of mine who had learned chess at five and six, right? My trajectory was very, very fast. And I think that all those factors went into it. The fact that Stephen Camp loved chess, the fact that we had a unique environment, and whatever I had about it, if I had learned chess younger, that may not have been a good thing because maybe I would have gotten so good as a player that I wouldn't have ended up on the path I did at chess.com. And I'm obviously very grateful for where I ultimately landed in this story.

1:07:49But yeah, it's a hard question to answer fully. Yeah, and then so now here you are. 12 years old, and now that you're among the best in terms of your ranking, you're among the best young players in the country, now your competition also is among the best. You're no longer cruising through all the local competition. Yeah. Yeah. And so we're playing nationally. We're traveling all the time. I did win the national championship. We don't go into a lot of chess in my book, but I think the one tournament that we really did justice was going through the experience of the Shelby School winning the K6 National Championship initially at the Super Nationals in Knoxville, which was the first ever United States Chess Federation Super Nationals.

1:08:30The next year we won in Peoria and I tied for first, ultimately was co-champion, but was the top performer in that event. And, you know, we were traveling to adult tournaments. We were also playing a lot locally against adults at the Chess Emporium, which was the local school, the local club in Phoenix, Arizona. And so, yeah, I'm competing. And overall, the outside world would say I was doing very well. I think internally, the expectations that Stephen Camp had on me and the idea that I was on path to becoming like this very young master and I hadn't reached the 2200 barrier yet, which for those who don't know, the chess world is the required minimum to become a chess master.

1:09:12But I was getting close. And so when I had some bad tournaments, when things weren't going well, kind of the gloves came off a little bit in terms of his expectations and the idea that I might need different parents and a different spiritual sort of foundation if I was going to continue the mission of becoming the chess world champion or at least the best player possible on behalf of the collective and the teachings. You know, so it's, again, there's a lot of details in terms of like how the seeds were planted both in me, both in my mom and Dennis, they're being processed on the one hand to be told, do you really want to stand in the way of someone's purpose that could literally change the face of the planet?

1:09:54If this kid is good at chess, he could bring spirit to the world. This could be something that changes everything. Are you going to stand in the way of that? Also, are you standing in the way because you're still in love with Steve Wrench? Ah, that's why you're obsessed with Danny, because that's because you're still in love with Steve Wrench, which by the way, Dennis, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about Debbie still being in love with her ex-husband, right? This is the type of stuff that was going on. So they're having this happen. I'm kind of being told like, hey, everything's going to be okay.

1:10:20Just stick with me, kid, from Stephen Camp. And yeah, you should get to know your father because he is the number two in the collective after all, right? He is a spiritual man, you know, after only yours truly on the hierarchy. And so this was playing out and to the point where eventually my dad just came and picked me up one day. And, you know, what happened in that world was like, I don't know how much I want to get into it. I think it is a lot. But basically, I think I've explained enough of what could go down in an environment where someone has this type of influence, the spiritual framework that everyone has agreed to, covert contract or not, is kind of in play and agreed upon.

1:10:58And I was then taken to live with my dad in Marlow, even though he was not my father. What I would learn many years later is that Stephen Camp actually himself wanted to adopt me. that the initial suggestion was that he was going to take me, but that Marlo, my dad's young wife, basically freaked out at that suggestion. She was like, one, Danny's not going to be my brother. I'm not going to have, you know, where would I have been in that world? Like my old uncle or something? I don't know. So like, she was like, he's not going to be my brother. And if anyone should have this kid besides Debbie and Dennis, it should be Steve Rentsch, like my husband.

1:11:31Even though a lot of that came through the question of, well, do you even want him? And Marlo's like, no, like they didn't want me as their kid, but they couldn't stand the idea that I was going to be Steven and Trina's kid. And I didn't know any of this till years later. Well, also the status thing too. So much hopes for the whole community was placed on you. Of course, you wanted to take some responsibility for that. I was doing the best I could to, you know, make Steven happy and to believe, I believed in the mission itself, right? And so, you know, my mom and I had probably, you know, I don't know if, when people read my book, I will let them to say, I have cried enough about this and rewritten my own neurosynapses with EMBR and therapy enough to be able to talk about it now without sobbing.

1:12:14But we probably had one of the most fucked up mother-son conversations in the history of fucked up mother conversations where we basically sat in front of each other and I told her through gritted teeth and tears that who was my mother, who was my father, is what I said to her. We should cry, those were Jesus Christ words and that I can't let anything stand in the way of my purpose. and she said through gritted tears herself, like, but also like even more stone cold than I was, which is I understand what you have to do and I need to protect my marriage. And when she said that, I lost it. Like, I was like, so how long is this for?

1:12:48Like the little kid came out, like, wait, are we doing this? And she was like, you need to, you need to pap your bags as if it's forever. And I went to my room, like I threw my shit in my garbage bag, like my younger brother, Josh, didn't really understand what was going on. He was like, you know, what's going on? I'm like, hey, you can have my CDs. So he's like, sweet, I get your CDs? Like, he didn't understand what was going on. And my younger, my youngest sister, Noelle, who Debbie and Dennis had adopted, you know, she would tell me years later that the moment the car drove off and I was with my dad, that my mom like collapsed to the floor and like screamed bloody murder.

1:13:24And like, I mean, that's a hard one to talk about. So apparently I haven't gotten through all of it. So it was the most heartbreaking thing ever to hear that from my sister. And so especially because my mom treated me so coldly in the conversation. And so it was devastating. So it's almost like, it's like, did you feel, at first you're feeling drawn to your purpose, but then you must have felt rejected. And so you're starting to give away your stuff to your brother. It's like a little death. I didn't even know what, yeah, I was moving as quickly as I could. I will say that I, you know, I definitely died a million times during that process.

1:14:00I was putting on a face for the next many years. I would cry myself to sleep at night. As I said, I grieved the death of my mother long before she would actually die, which is the tragic ending of the book, unfortunately, spoilers for anyone. And my mom and I would heal our relationship and we'll get to that. But it was an absolutely wild thing. And what's crazy is I didn't even really live with Stephen Marlowe. I was separated via the tool of Stephen Marlowe, but very quickly, they actually were living in Tonal Village still. and I was moved to the valley, to the block, which is the homes on the 7th Street.

1:14:33And I basically lived alone. And there were different surrogate people who were like the adults of the block who would be there. And some of them were kind of in and out of the collective. Some of them were down there because they were like going to school at ASU. There were different things that were going on. And I would have holidays with Steve and Marlowe, which were by themselves almost worse and heartbreaking because there's nothing worse than having holidays with families that aren't your own. I'll just tell you that. If anyone is wondering out there, I hope I'm not saying that, oh, nobody listening to this resonates with that experience.

1:15:03But I will say when you're looking at pictures on the wall that don't have you in them, and when you are listening to Christmas music that isn't your favorite, it's not fun. Did you feel like you had to be on best behavior in their house? For sure. I was playing the part of a wrench kid, and I was also telling anyone who asked me that I was fine. Because I believed that. And obviously, you know, we've talked about this before and I've read the book, but let me ask, like, did you call your mom during these holidays or when you got to the house for the first time? Did you call her and say, yeah, I'm okay.

1:15:39I got dropped off and, you know, I'm here. No, no, we never, we never spoke. The only time we spoke before, before I would speak to her again at the age of kind of 22, 23. So really 10 years was the full separation was, was when I was 16. there was one night where Trina was very drunk and kind of lost her own sort of way within what everyone was doing with this and was like hey you need to see your mother I'm pulling rank here I'm the boss of the collective come with me which it's such a strange thing because I'm actually both very grateful to Trina who was grandma now because now I'm a wrench kid so she's my grandma everyone called Uncle Steven and Aunt Trina in the hierarchy of the collective they were the uncle and aunt surrogate but when I'm a wrench now she was grandma.

1:16:25And so I'm very grateful that she did this because I have this experience with my mom. But in some ways, it also made life so much harder that this happened. But she took me to see my mom at the Fitch cabin, which anyone growing up in the collective or even just in Tana Village would know exactly what I mean when I say the Fitch cabin because it's like one of the original five cabins there. And it's the ancestors of her family because she was originally Trina Fitch. so she took me to Fitch and called my mom over and then she left and and and stumbled home miraculously made it um and I had a really awkward night with my mom where she hugged me we didn't say anything it was like it has been like three years since we had talked it was like my skin was crawling I I like hated her at this point because from my perspective I had cried myself to sleep every night she never came and got me I had developed what I now know was like the earliest signs of like severe anxiety and panic attacks.

1:17:21I had already had a couple of panic attacks by this age that I didn't quite know what they were, but with time I now know. And, and so I like was so happy to see her, but I was so angry and I didn't even like the, it was one of the most awkward things. And at some point, like we both were like, Hey, grandma was really drunk. We don't really know how Steve and Marlo are going to respond to this. Like they're going to be pretty angry. Like you need to go, you need to go back. And, and I did. And, um, you know, and it was, it was a very, very sad thing. Um, and, uh, it was so, it was so intense after that, but did you ever try to like reconnect, like even the next month, the next week, the next couple months?

1:18:03No. I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that. Right. I mean, I've kind of explained that like, if I'm connecting with her, I'm both acknowledging that biology is more important than my spiritual purpose. I'm undermining everything that was about the teaching and what it was that happened I'm also now kind of angry at her about it I also have been brainwashed by my dad and Marlo that she's less than that she wasn't ever good enough to be my mom in fact any issues that I had in my life were kind of made to be her fault and in fact whenever I was processed as a wrench I would be told like oh that's a Debbie Sampson energy that's not welcome in my home my mom is made name with Sampson like, you know, you take that Debbie Sampson energy where you, where it belongs.

1:18:49Are you our kid or not? That kind of stuff. Right. So I was, I was like, and that's just like, that's like the most PG version of something that would be said. And so there was no part of me that felt safe in doing that. And I was focused on the mission. And frankly, I was only in the village for limited spurts. Most of the time I was in the Valley, which was the easiest place for me to travel and achieve chess, right? Achieve chess goals. And so all of that added to the fact that regardless of the fact that I'm developing a relationship with my dad at this point, and certainly we are learning to love each other in our own way and figuring certain things out, right?

1:19:25It wasn't all horrible because at that point I'm like in their family and now there's conversations. But we all know the real truth, which is Steve Wrench isn't really my dad. Stephen Camp is my dad, right? He's actually in charge of what's going on here. And so when you add that on top of everything, like it was, it was exactly how it was going to be.

1:20:03So where do you want to go next? I'm taking a sip of water. Your call. Yeah, take your sip of water. I mean, you know, there's a saying, you know, if you want to know how a man is going to treat his wife, look at how he treats his mom. But your situation was so manipulated and distorted from like, let's say the average child. And of course, every child has a different experience with their mother. There's no kind of average experience. but like later on in life, I'm just wondering, did you feel guilt? Did you feel anger? Like which weighed more, the guilt or the anger? Uh, I mean, they're, they're, they're pretty closely related, right?

1:20:44I mean, it's also, I mean, you already touched on the fact that how a man treats his mother or at least feels about his mother. Those feelings will often come out in, in, in a relationship at least until you work on them. And I share in the book pretty openly about my own shortcomings as an early husband and father, just to let people know that I, you know, part of the collective was also people got married very young. And so my wife, Shauna, who wasn't raised in the collective, has her own unique story, which we can get into or not, but ultimately had ties to the collective. She came back to Arizona.

1:21:18She and I start dating when I'm 17 and she's 19. And we got together very fast. And we were having our first kid when I was 19 and she was 21. but our marriage was not a very good one, right? I was, you know, an alcoholic, as much as you can say that term. I was abusing alcohol for sure. I would soon be abusing opioids as my panic attacks were sort of surfacing. She never felt right about what had happened. She would ask me things like, hey, like, why don't you talk to Debbie? And I would say like the craziest thing in the world, I would say, I'm grateful that Debbie was my biological mother, but I never want to speak to her again.

1:21:52That would be how I would shut down the conversation, right? And she's like, well, that's kind of fucked up. You know what I mean? So she did her best in the cult environment to push on me and help me kind of prepare to eventually deal with this massive trauma that happened without poking the bear enough where we would be separated. Because the thing is, every relationship was ordained and controlled by Stephen and Trina and by kind of the leaders of the group. And so, you know, she had to be careful in terms of how much she would poke the bear that the golden child, meaning Danny, the Stephen Camp golden child, was actually pried away from his mother and essentially abducted in a coordinated manner.

1:22:29And like she she can only go so far. So we don't have a good relationship at this point. I'm misogynistic in my behavior and I and I share it openly, again, mainly mainly for the means of I told my wife and I've committed from the very beginning and you read it. So I think you can vouch that I didn't want to do this unless I was going to be fully honest with the world about my own shortcomings. I was not willing to write a fucking memoir that goes from, and then everything was good, right? That was not a thing I was going to do. There was going to be no Hollywood version of how I went through this process.

1:23:00And so I share very, very intimately about, you know, what I, you know, my wife was the one who wanted to edit the book and make sure that I wasn't so mean to myself and that I was kind, acknowledging that I was, I was a wounded person who was wounding someone. in my early relationship with my wife. Never physical, but verbally and mentally. And I was just not someone who respected women. I now can say that openly. I think more people should be honest with their shortcomings because of course I lacked respect for women. The woman who was supposed to be the most important woman in my life ultimately was always made to be less than in hindsight from when I was very little, even before I left her.

1:23:39Then she let me go and didn't protect me. And then I was brainwashed to believe that she was the source of all my problems. And so I sort of hated half of myself that came from her, right? And so until I worked on healing my relationship with my mom, I was the best person I could be at that age, you know, and I was doing the best I could, but I was not a great husband for sure. And so, yeah, I mean, I share in the book, my wife is the hero of my story because ultimately my wife was the one who eventually put her foot down and not only forced me to kind of choose her and our young babies, we now have two kids.

1:24:09I'm at the age of 23, right? When I meet my co-founders, Eric and Jay at just.com. and, you know, she kind of refused to continue to live under the thumb of Stephen Marlowe and pretend that Debbie wasn't my mom and also had kind of established that it was kind of her way or the highway in a way that I, you know, there were other things that happened, but I ultimately started to deal with this issue, right? I started to tackle this, and if I hadn't started to reflect on and make an attempt to heal my relationship with my mom, my marriage wouldn't have made it, right? For sure. well and also it's interesting because this was also you're out of childhood and your relationship with you know the cult had been changing you know in part because your relationship to chess had been changing so you could have been more reflective about your relationship with my your mom and what happened but you still were resisting it because of course you can resist it you don't want to have to admit at such a tender age 19 20 21 that you know you were wrong during these pivotal years of your life, your puberty years, your teenage years.

1:25:12So even going back to 12, 13, your relationship to chess, at some point you start to realize, oh, this is going to be more difficult than everyone else thought. And I'm the only one who knows that right now.

1:25:27Yes, to all of those comments and questions. I obviously, I didn't mean to, but I realized I skipped past what a lot of people might wonder and they'll find out all the details when they read the book. but I'm literally not saying that in any way to tease. I'm literally saying it because it's just hard for my brain to process everything in this format. But one of the things that happened during this time was that while I was sort of orphaned in the valley on the block, not having anyone look closely enough over me as they should have been, I developed massive earaches, ear infections. I was swimming a lot.

1:25:59I was flying a lot. I wasn't being attended to in the same way. I was also scared to bring it up. You know, there were times I brought it up And my dad, who had a very Christian scientist upbringing, was like, if I said my ears hurt, he would say, well, what do you not want to hear spiritually, right? My dad was like, every ailment is a form of spiritual manifestation, right? In a very extreme way. And even if he only said it once, and I know my dad has been very sad about this, like the responsibility that he had to like put the fear of God in me, that every ailment I brought up was either my own spiritual shortcomings, or it was actually a manifestation of some sort of neglect by my mother.

1:26:34That was like literally what I was told. So with those two things, it was like, I wasn't talking about this. Suddenly I'm with Shauna at a young age and I'm traveling and my ears literally exploded. And what happened there in terms of the medical breakdown and where I basically couldn't travel for two years suddenly thrust me on a totally different path, which was I'm with this young girl. We're starting a life together, being pressured to have kids because that's what people were in the collective. my idea of becoming a chess world champion isn't happening so i'm less good in steven campsize i've kind of been cast aside steven marlowe still don't love chess i was figuring out things for myself and and what happened was i figured out that the internet was happening in a lot of ways i dove early on into like i i was bedridden i couldn't travel i was i was using early early versions of the internet to google around it actually wasn't google and then it was it was like yahoo and it was like, what's YouTube, right?

1:27:30And these things. And so I educated myself about the internet in a very real way. Like I took the entire Google AdWords course, which was just like three hours of like two minute videos where you plus play next video. I'd like, I learned what made the internet tick. And I was teaching lessons to kids in order to make money for my wife and young kids. So I was in this position, not only trying to focus on my marriage and ultimately would start healing with my mom, but I was in this position where my playing career had failed because of this medical tragedy and i had accidentally educated myself to probably be more aware maybe more than like any chess professional at the time not eric and jay they were the they were the business and the tech savvy who knew this was coming they were in the chess world i was aware of like where this was going and i was like this is the fucking future and i i was buying up domain names like like chess face live because that like facebook was early and i was thinking live and i I was like, oh, great.

1:28:25There was like, go to mypc.com stuff where there were like WebEx systems. I was like, oh, we could scale group lessons. You could do live lectures. I had this whole idea of what we could do before streaming was even a thing. But at the point though, where the chess career was failing for one reason or other, what was it like for you in terms of like, you let down this entire mission and Stephen Camp and your own feelings of purpose and your own sense of, you know, what your goals were, like, you know, what was sort of a pivotal, like, when did you realize that Stephen Camp was no longer looking at you the same way?

1:29:06It was a process that started slowly around my health stuff, but then became inevitable because Steve Wrench and Stephen Camp were also going to kind of war at this time in the collective. The collective was, call it imploding on itself or being torn apart from within, however you want to break it down. But basically, my dad had inherited some money from his now deceased parents. A lot of what breaks down these groups ultimately is money. And I've seen or and or heard that this is kind of a common theme when people start getting inheritance and money and they don't want it all to go to the collective.

1:29:35So, you know, right or wrong. I mean, I don't even begrudge or even want to go into all that because it's unnecessary. But basically, my dad and Stephen Camp being at war had me as kind of like literally a pawn in the middle of that, right? I was sort of in the middle of this and dealing with all of my own self-worth and shame around the fact that I obviously was not going to be able to continue to be on this path. Even if I was going to become a grandmaster and a top player, I certainly wasn't going to achieve to the level that me and Stephen Camp once thought. right and so um so yeah it was it was awful i was i was uh i was drinking myself to sleep i was um i was like i said i started taking i i got a medical uh prescription for colonopin initially xanax and colonopin but mainly then it was colonopin and i was i was mixing opioids with alcohol and despite my wife's advice and and her fears and saying don't do that i was doing it when she didn't know and had a couple of moments where i definitely pushed the limit of how i felt and and how scary that was.

1:30:38I was also having panic attacks. How would you know you would, like with opioids and alcohol and Klonopin, let's say all mixed together, did you have moments where you would stop breathing? Well, because I had never been like high before. I'll say that. I had never done drugs. I was a very good kid in that way. And I guess to the point of feeling like alcohol poisoning was the best way to straight, like the feeling of alcohol poisoning, because I have had that. I have drinking myself way too much to the point of like, you know, even stay on the floor in terms of dizziness and vomiting and the fear of, you know, not being able to keep anything down.

1:31:11And just understanding the potential effects of that would be something that happened more than once. And, you know, then I would back off and go in and out of that stuff. But again, it was, I wouldn't put myself in the category of being an alcoholic or being someone who was a substance abuser or a drug addict because I frankly have been to enough AA meetings and I've seen enough of those experiences to not, I don't wanna even disrespect what that burden is, but I will say I was definitely someone who was using alcohol and opioids to abuse myself, meaning I was a substance abuser because I was engaging in self-deprecating behavior and it was exactly the outlet I needed or was looking for to avoid what I needed to deal with, which was my issues and my feelings and all those things.

1:32:01And I don't know that the distinction is super important. I think in my brain, I make the distinction because, one, I recognize that I was ultimately trying to self-medicate, ultimately, even though it was abusing alcohol and substances. And ultimately, I would say that for a lot of people who get into real drug issues, a lot of it does start that way. You are looking for an outlet for something that helps ease the pain, for lack of a better way to put it. And so I can definitely relate to what that is, even if I would not consider myself. It's like you had no floor to stand on. Because chess had been your floor supported by the whole community.

1:32:40And when that community was no longer there, and there was no parents from the beginning of that 10 years old and on and 12 years old and on, you had nothing to stand on. What do you do then? It's very difficult. I mean, the only thing to stand on was my marriage and my wife and that I had two little kids and didn't really have a choice but to figure it out. My wife saw chess.com for what it could be. She doesn't like being called the hero of my story. She doesn't want to be framed as someone who had the foresight of the crystal ball in terms of it. But I think in some ways she would say it was selfish because here we were.

1:33:17at this point we're actually back in the village because we've kind of pushed our relationship with Steven Marlowe out of the way. To be honest, dealing with them at this time was worse than dealing with Steven and Trina because they were still in the village. I was in the middle of all of them. But at this point, physically being back in the village was a choice my wife made because she was tired of dealing with Steven Marlowe. My mom was in the village. She wanted to be back in the village in a way that she thought she could kind of protect herself and the young kids we had, our two boys. And so it forced my hand, in many ways, in a very good way, to kind of come the way of my wife and ultimately try to start healing my relationship with my mom.

1:33:54But it led to a massive war with my dad and Marlow. And so I was going up and down the valley and the mountain to teach lessons and make money and to try to keep Steve and Marlow happy as best I could and just pretending that I wasn't. Because for them, everything was a spiritual war. You're choosing Steve and Trina's teaching over our teaching, which is crazy in a cult to be like, it was like cult wars within a cult, but that was literally what was happening. And so I was doing my best to kind of like keep everybody happy. And chess.com was an opportunity for me to work online. And so Shauna was like, hey, if you actually make this work with Eric and Jay, like you could do stuff from the village.

1:34:30You don't have to travel all the time anymore, right? And so she would say it was more of a selfish kind of need than like the idea that chess.com was going to become, you know, what it is today. and but but it was also you know aligned with the fact that i had educated myself enough that i understood what chess.com could be too in fact i tried to buy the domain when i was bedridden on vicodin i was like oh well now that i know how this works i should just go buy chess.com probably nobody has that right i would learn later as our like universe timelines eric and i have been running the company together for many years we'd learn that that was like right when he was getting the domain like out of bankruptcy from a group of bcs in in the bay area who didn't really know what they had.

1:35:07And so the timeline was kind of crazy. But I start working eventually, a couple years later now, I'm working for Eric and Jay online. And this starts to make it easier for me to be in the village. And eventually, during a lot of the fights and the not good times of us trying to make a marriage work and me not being the best husband, I would say, my wife was like, hey, you got to start working on your relation with your mom. And in hindsight, that was the most important thing that could have ever happened because, because working on the relationship with my mom, not only eventually started to heal my relationship with all women, but ended up being super important because my mom didn't, didn't have much longer to go as I would learn that she, um.

1:35:50Why do you think Shauna said that though? I mean, I think, I think Shauna knew that the part of the issues I was having was like, not her fault. It was my relationship with my mom and she could see that I was in pain. I mean, I was, I was, you know, abusing alcohol and drugs and not wanting to talk about my mother. It's like, you're drinking yourself to death and you don't want to acknowledge that you you're in pain. And, and at some point it was, it was just a non-starter for her. And she also wanted my mom to know the kids. My mom was in the village and I caught her at times sneaking my mom over to see the boys.

1:36:23And I was like, okay, you can have her over here, but never when I'm around, you know, that, that was the kind of stuff we were, we were having. it. And so there's a lot of rated R stuff that happened for my mom and I to heal our relationship. It was not, speaking of non-Hollywood endings, it didn't just get there. I was devastated by my relationship with my mom. I hated her guts. And the only reason our relationship healed was because my mother was, whatever she had learned about this, she finally understood like what she needed to do. And it was like, she was never going to, going to lose the idea of having a relationship with me again.

1:37:03And even when I was blaming her for everything, blaming her for the fact that my chest career fell apart because if she had had me and she had taken care of my ears, it never would have happened. Right? Makes sense, right? Blaming for me for any, any abuse I had ever gone through. My mom took responsibility for everything. Like literally, she was like, I, like I failed you. I let you go and I will never have you back. And you're now an adult with a marriage and kids and I will do anything it takes in whatever time I have to help you feel like a whole human being again. And that was the kind of shit she did.

1:37:36And like when you have someone doing that, when objectively she's taking responsibility for pain that probably doesn't even belong to her totally, if that doesn't disarm you like at that point, like, you know, I don't know what will, right? And so we started healing our relationship and it took a lot of things. Did Marlo ever play the role of mother or attempt to? Marlo was, I would definitely say a stepmother. Like early on, we didn't have a good relationship at all. And I would say Marlo was, was verbally abusive and didn't like me. And even if she thought she was hiding it, like I felt like an outsider amongst her children and I wasn't loved.

1:38:16I mean, there would be times where I was like in the valley and my uh my brothers dallas and tiger were there and she she was in the village like let's say we were all down there for like uh someone's birthday or tiger also played chess so tiger and i traveled a lot of chess stuff together too she would call and talk to tiger but not talk to me right she would call and talk to tiger in dallas but not me like i was not her kid no matter what front she was putting on for her parents no matter what it was and i felt it over the years like we had developed a relationship. Like I love Marlo. She loves me.

1:38:47I think we have the best relationship we possibly can given this trauma. She would also no longer deny that she was a child bride. I mean, she was married to my father at the age of 19. And she's got a lot of her own issues around her parents and the cult and her stuff. And also she was a cult. She was one of the cult leaders. And a lot of people have a lot of issues with Marlo, rightfully so, about how she acted and how she treated people. Even though if you want to give yourself compassion like she was a young woman who was married in 19 and then given a ton of power over people's lives as like basically the number two couple in the hierarchy and she fucked it up a lot I mean she was not she was not good in a lot of ways and I can hold those opposing truths in two hands I can say that like she was in some people's book like maybe one of the worst people she was definitely a top five person who did harm in the collected at least how a lot of people feel and like I think she's a human being who was a child bride who was put in a situation that was borderline impossible, has a ton of her own issues.

1:39:47And I think she loved me to the best she could. And I'm at peace with that part of it. But whenever push came to shove, if I really had problems with me, it was because of Debbie. It was never because of her, right? It wasn't that she was neglecting my ears in the valley. These must have been ear infections I inherited when I came to her and she just didn't know about it. That would be something she said directly, right? And so that part of it, like she ultimately is not my mother and didn't make any real efforts push come to shove to help me heal in this way. This was something my mom did and ultimately what she was supposed to do because she was my mother.

1:40:23I think she would say she didn't just take the high road because blame no longer mattered. I think she took the high road because she genuinely knew that that was the truth. Like she fucked up. And like, yes, she was a child in the dynamics of the collective too. like Stephen and Trina were in charge of her life. And if she wasn't with me, I'm sure that she had her own feelings about everything that was devastating for her to be in that situation. But with me, she never blamed anybody else. She took responsibility.

1:41:08obviously you were manipulated, controlled, used as a pawn to use the metaphor. And it almost seems like things that were way out of your control just because of how young you were. But if there's one thing, looking back at this whole period, if there was one thing you regret that maybe you could have done and you regret not doing, what do you think that would be?

1:41:34I'm going to first answer it how my therapist would want me to answer it. and I'm going to say this because I've done a lot of work on this. There were years and years and years where I blamed myself for the whole thing. That's the truth, right? Because why didn't I just go home? Like, I mean, Josh and Noel, my siblings on that side, they certainly blamed me for a long time. And we feel that, I mean, everybody was devastated. And I was lying to everybody and saying I was fine. And so it took so many years for me to like give myself the grace that I was a child, right? I was surviving a situation by playing my part.

1:42:09And so, of course, I believed in it. I had been indoctrinated to believe in it. And I can't be blamed for the fact that I was complicit in this larger sort of like abduction and process that like destroyed my life. And I've really like forgiven myself for that because I do feel so much. And in fact, one of the things I don't share in my book, I was so angry at my mother during one of the peak times of trying to heal our relationship that I got her fired where she was not a paralegal, but like a secretary for someone who was a younger attorney in the collective. And I didn't like demand that she got fired.

1:42:48But because I was so angry and I was higher up than her on the spiritual total poll, like she basically got fired because of it, right? Now, if you know what ended up happening, my mom was hustling, trying to build a new life for herself as a real estate agent, she ultimately had a massive stroke because she had high blood pressure and high blood pressure came from stress. And so I have blamed myself for years for my own mother's death, let alone anything else. Right. So I'm saying this to say that I've forgiven myself for the process that happened because it's the truth and it wasn't my fault.

1:43:20That said, if I could do it differently, I certainly would never have, wouldn't have done that as like a young man in his young 20s going through this stuff and you know i don't know i mean like maybe i would have at some point just been like uh you know what i am i'm not up for this i'm gonna go home like that would be what i would have done i would have said like hey actually the king is not more important than my mother that would have been what i would have said right if you're asking but the truth is like one i don't believe in playing the multiverse time travel game. And I've said this on a few other podcasts, and I'll say it again, that if you're not going to change the ending of your own story, you don't get to cherry pick the middle or the opening either.

1:44:06And whether you like it or not, the best and healthiest thing to do is to choose what has already happened to you because it happened. So choose it and figure out how to be the best version of yourself now. That doesn't mean you're justifying what happened or making excuses for abusers, but your best option is to figure out why something happened and choose the reason for it, right? Everything happens for a reason, but you get to choose the reason. And I believe in that. I believe it's actually not only the healthiest perspective, I've seen the results of it. And I feel like I'm so grateful for the lessons that I learned during this process in terms of what's truly value in life.

1:44:42That's what I will say when it comes to relationships are the only real equity we have in life, whether you believe in any metaphysical afterlife or not. Like what you take with you is the feelings, what you made other people feel and what people made you feel. And no one should be told who they can love and nor should relationships be controlled. Like everyone should be able to love who they want, how they want, and relationships are what you really have. And then a lot of people say they live their life like it's the last day, but very few really do it or at least not living like it's the last day they could be with someone else.

1:45:17And my mom taught me that. And when you heal the relationship like we did, she had a massive stroke and she didn't die immediately upon the stroke, but she was never the same person again. And so we had really just been back in each other's life for a couple of years. And I learned that. Imagine if you had never gotten back into each other's life, that would have been, I agree with you, you can't pick and choose so that we don't know that time travel universe, but that would have been far worse. That would have been tough. That would have been even worse, right? I think for sure. And I will probably be in therapy for the rest of my life anyway, but I think that would have guaranteed that I would never have quite fully reconciled that.

1:45:56So I feel incredibly grateful for that. You know, Garif is a friend that I know well. She is now with me at all times. My wife would actually lose her mother very young as well. Just a couple of years later, her mom would get stage four breast cancer and die very quickly at the age of 62. So my wife and I have learned a lot of lessons in this regard. And neither of us really have great relationships with our dad. We do the best we can. Just to whet people's appetite on the craziness of this journey, my wife's father also left my wife's mother and married the second oldest daughter of Stephen and Trina Camp.

1:46:33And that was why her family left the collective when she was young. And so those were the ties that I didn't get into. So talk about a wild world. And so when you're making a marriage work. Well, not really, but yes, exactly. When you're making a marriage work of 20 years on this kind of like shared trauma and know that we've almost been on the brink of divorce many times, you know, I don't know what to say. Like, so it's like, how many people have that kind of appreciation? And I'm sharing this not to like brag. I'm sharing it honestly to like connect with people. Like honestly, like I wrote this book to try to make a difference and to try to like share people like what you can do with your own journey when shit gets tough.

1:47:11And so that's why I did this. And so how many people have that type of unique story to share? You know what I mean? And so it's like, I'm not cherry picking the ending to say, I'm not going to cherry pick the middle and the opening to say I should have done better. One, for the therapeutic reasons, which is I was a kid. It wasn't my fault. But also because it's now a story that I hope will make a difference to some degree for anyone who has anything to connect with on it, you know? Well, that's just it. Like a book is not just this thing you put out there to have a career, to make a little bit of money, to...

1:47:48You lose money. I lost money on this book, regardless of the check that his shit wrote me. Just so you know, I lost money on this book. Sure. Or like books almost never make money. The book becomes transformative for other people. And that becomes something you'll become immensely grateful for as more and more people contact you and said, oh my gosh, I read your book and I didn't go through exactly what you did, but let me tell you what blah, blah, blah. Like you're going to, your book's going to have a huge impact. And that's something, you know, that's very important. You know, I would say that if it's something to bring it full circle and answer the question of regrets or my mom and that relationship, I would say that I consider it something that my mom and I did together.

1:48:27The book is dedicated to my mother for a reason. And maybe it gives what we went through some meaning. If we're going to go back to the forum and say that everything that happens in life is meaningless. Like it or not, you are less than a blip. But if you can find some sort of fulfillment in the meaninglessness fullness of it all, like if there's some part of it that is there, then I give my mother the credit for that. The book is dedicated to her. I give my wife the credit for being the hero in my story. And I can't take it back. So I might as well say I don't want to take it back anyway. right and here we are and look going forward you have a life also that many including myself would be incredibly jealous of you get to you actually did get to have a career in the things you're passionate about which is extremely rare i'm you know you're you've been helping run chess.com almost since its inception and obviously since since covid chess.com blew up completely like meaning in a good way, like he's got hundreds of millions of users.

1:49:32He's got the entire world playing on chess.com. You've created this thing that people are obsessed with. Like people play 20 hours a day on chess.com. Don't do that, people. Don't play. That's not healthy. I've had periods where I've played 20 hours a day on chess.com. Games, don't do that. It becomes like this thing where if things aren't going well in your life, in other respects, your self-worth becomes tied to your chess.com rating, just like it would have been maybe for you when you were a kid in the kind of over-the-board tournaments. And so, and I'm not saying this is good or bad, but chess.com is a very valuable company right now that you helped build.

1:50:16And it's incredible. And again, there's so much drama and so many stories. Do you ever look at someone like Magnus? So Magnus, former world champion, and best player in the world right now, best player, chess player probably in history. And he's had a very different life than you. Like you look at, like I know Henrik also, you know, his dad. His dad's like incredible. And, you know, I don't know what their, really what their relationship's like, but obviously he grew up in this incredibly supportive environment where also he was in love with chess at a very young age and he became the best in the world.

1:50:55like you know you're friends with magnus i i'd imagine do you ever do you ever say to yourself oh i wish i had had a life like that and i know that's very bad sort of wishful thinking but do you ever say that could have been me i mean now i don't right i'm i'm grateful for our life i feel i feel fortunate that my path was what it was so that i can now be magnus's partner because i feel like together I'm hoping that we can do some amazing things for chess I think we've already done some good things together um and I think there'll be some good things ahead um but also yeah I mean like I I said it recently on a on a show that um I'm not allowed to talk about yet but I will let the world know that there is a there is an all access behind the scenes being done for chess like I tried to survive for chess right now we'll see where it ends up I'm not I'm not going to tease more but it is a thing a lot of people in the chess world know what's happening because the cameras are everywhere.

1:51:54And in one of the interviews, as I become one of the characters that they're following in this show, especially once they learn about my cult background, they're like, oh shit, this guy just got interesting. He's not just the evil leader of chess.com. This is fucking interesting. So like there's a lot of other characters they're following, but as I've become one of them, I was asked in one of the interviews, like what it would be like to be Magnus. And I just said right away, it's hard to explain what someone is capable of when they are that healthy when they're it's like and you know the ted lasso line where he tells jamie targ like i don't think you know how healthy that is jamie when he asked jamie targ who do you want to be a lion or a turtle and he's like why would i want to be anybody but me coach yeah yeah and and ted lasso goes like i don't think you realize how healthy that is i think when it comes to magnus he is he is so healthy because he did have that support and he did have that foundation and what you are capable of when you are that confident.

1:52:50I would say that every great athlete, back to talent is overrated by Jeff Calvin, has one thing. There are a lot of things in common, but there's one thing in common that allows you to be in the zone, and it is short-term memory loss. You can't forgive yourself quickly enough for mistakes when it comes to executing any sport at a high level. This is like a fact. they all have. In fact, Jeff Calvin categorizes them in his book as the great white sharks. The great white sharks have one thing in common, which is they are fucking ruthless in their confidence and belief in themselves. And they do not beat themselves up when they make mistakes.

1:53:24You know who beats the shit out of himself when he fucks up? This guy, right? And so like when you are that confident and you are that healthy of an individual, what you are capable of, if you do find the thing that you maybe have talent for and that you work hard at is evident in Magnus Carlsen. That's what I will say. Like he is so capable because of how healthy he is. And I love that. I love that about him. I love that for him. In some ways, people don't like when you see such a brash, confident individual. It can come across as arrogance. And in many ways, people say that about a lot of athletes in terms of what that is.

1:54:00And Magnus has that. He has that great white shark confidence that I don't know that everybody who has it had a healthy background or foundation, but Madness did. And maybe it really is something that has allowed him to excel in chess. So I can say that while also saying I'm not jealous of Magnus anymore. I do not want that life. It's not my life. But it is unique and it is amazing to see what someone can do when they have it. Well, and what's also interesting about chess.com and kind of the world we moved into post-COVID is that chess players who aren't Magnus could make a living from chess. You are an example.

1:54:40And many streamers, you know, like when I first started watching chess streams, I was watching Eric Rosen. So here's a guy who also, like you, is an international master, not like a world champion. And yet at the time, maybe he had one of the most popular, he still does, still one of the most popular chess streamers. He's making a living from streaming. What a wonderful thing that people who have this passion don't have to be number one in the world to make a living at it. and I feel you play a strong role in having created that environment that every field should have where it's an environment where you don't have to be just one thing to make a living in something you love.

1:55:16Like golf, for instance, you don't have to be the best golf player in the world to make a living. You could write about golf. You could make golf clothes. There's lots of ways to make a living in the golf world without being the number one player. But chess, that wasn't that way until just the past few years and in part because of how big chess.com is and how many people view that as not only a place to play, but a place to view and get connected to the chess world and so on. So it's very valuable what you've created, in part because of all your experiences prior to that. Thank you. I appreciate that.

1:55:53I agree. I think that perhaps chess.com's most... There's so many, I think, contributions that I feel we've made to the game that is not ours. right we are we are shepherds we are stewards in a game that existed before the internet and i hope i don't have to say it'll exist after the internet because i hope that never happens but um but chess um yeah chess.com i think has created a lot of avenues for people to change their relationship with the game of chess like it's not just what it was before and one of the one of the biggest ways is that we have been able to create an ecosystem of creators, of streamers, of authors to find what used to be a chess professional and the definition of it is no longer a chess professional, right?

1:56:38We've created a world where people can earn a living and in some ways a much better living than a lot of the top players. Maybe everybody besides the guy named Magnus, right? Some of our top creators are bringing in really, really, really big money. And then there are many below that that are earning great livelihoods. It's not just those at the top. And so I think that there's a big story of how that came to be. And I do share a lot of the details of that in the book. It was a combination of seeing a little bit of where the internet was going and the black box algorithms that were lying to us early on with Facebook's algorithm and YouTube and what they were really trying to do to kind of lock down the native experience for people while selling you the idea that they were going to let you advertise your business there.

1:57:21And I think we saw a little bit of that early on and made some strategic decisions to empower the community and grow chess as a game, not chess.com as a brand. It ended up being perfect. So that was kind of data-driven more than people think. And then a little bit of, you know, maybe some intuition on my side of just seeing, you know, having the relationships with the people that I did, coming from where I did about already having failed to become Magnus Carlsen and a top player and having an idea that we could change that because there had never been an economy outside of you're either the best chess player in the world or you're a struggling chess coach traveling school to school or somewhere in the middle of some kind of vagabond, you know, sleeping on couches as you try to compete in tournaments that aren't really paying you enough money to get by.

1:58:06So yeah, that was something that we did and I feel really grateful for because now a lot of those stars are more recognizable and bigger than I'll ever be, than anyone at chess.com ever be. We were in the background setting up. We were sort of planting the seeds and laying the cement to allow the pillars of Gotham chess and the Botez sisters and Hikaru Nakamura and the Chess Bras and Anna Kramling. We were working hard to figure out how we could do that. And I think it worked out. And so, you know, the future is right. And I think you have to give, I can tell you in a weird way from my experience, you have to give your personal background, as difficult as it is, some credit for that.

1:58:46And I'll tell you the reason I know is that when I was 22, similar age to when you were joining Chess.com or 23 or whatever, I wrote a lot of the code for ICC, chessclub.com, which in the early 90s was the predecessor to chess.com. The dominant player. Yeah, and so I was a co-founder of that. And then I stopped. And the reason I stopped, and people continued, but they weren't chess players. They didn't love the community maybe as much. And the reason I stopped, though, is because I didn't care. like I just really wanted to play on ICC. I didn't really have something pushing me like you have to do this to get out of some situation.

1:59:30I just had it a little easier. And I could say, oh, you know, we were talking at that time. I was talking to Danny Slater, who was really the founder of ICC. I was saying, look, let's make this into a business. And so we actually incorporated it, made it into a business. And then I literally said, you know what? I just want to play the game. I don't want to work on this. It's too much work. And I didn't care. And it just failed. It kind of drifted into failure, as you know, because then chess.com, a decade or two decades later, just completely destroyed. It's still around, but it's nothing. And I was thinking as you were talking, the fact you cared for lots of reasons, and you can't underestimate you know that as well the strength you brought into chess.com and which which helped it succeed because i could see that from my own outside experience the elements that were involved maybe in a different way than you but yeah look danny i am so glad you came on on the podcast i actually want you to come on again because sooner or later the the hans nieman thing is going to break out into into the entertainment world as well the but you were a central figure in the whole chest cheating scandal, but I don't want to bring that.

2:00:43I didn't want to bring that into this podcast, different, different topic. And, but at some point we could talk about that. Well, people can get the book for that because I do share my version of that. And that is something we didn't talk about at all. Um, and I will say that not just my book, there is obviously an untold coming out on Netflix soon. And then there will be a Ben Mesrich book and a movie to follow. So that story, you're going to have plenty of time to have me back for that. Yeah, no, and that's a riveting part of the book as well. And I encourage people to read it. And obviously that was such, you know, the chess, people underestimate too, how much drama is in the chess world.

2:01:16I feel like it's more than any other sport or game for some reason. Because chess players are, okay, there are some stupid chess players, obviously. But chess players in general have a little bit of eccentricity and a lot of intelligence and, you know, with a dash of mental illness. And so there's just a lot of drama in the chess world. going back to forever, like Vladimir Navakov wrote The Defense because he saw the drama in chess, and Stefan Zweig wrote The Royal Game because he saw so much drama in the game. So these classic books over hundreds of years are about, because there is so much drama in this game.

2:01:56But Danny Wrench, co-founder of chess.com, author of Dark Squares, How Chess Saved My Life, such a riveting book. I had already known the story, but I was, I was page by page is it's a page turner. It's riveting. It's real. And you don't have to know anything about chess. You know, it's just a, a, a very unusual, but also very, you know, dramatic story and, and, and, and painful also. And, and Danny, I really appreciate how you've, you've shared that pain and you've overcome it and you've had so much success. And I'm sure a lot of people are going to be inspired by the story. And thanks again for coming on the podcast.

2:02:39It's such a pleasure. Thanks for having me, James. And full circle from our casual dinner conversation, we finally have a chance to really, really talk it out from a couple years ago. Yeah, it was a different conversation two years ago. And then last year I was on the stage. But now we really have the full conversation. And I have a feeling it's only just begun. I hope it's only just begun. So I appreciate it. I'll see you again soon.

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