1289: Danny Rensch | How Chess Freed Me from Life in a Cult Part One

15:51Danny Rensch:Yeah, I don't even have the answer to it. My relationship with my dad is complicated. Him and Marlo are still together to this day. So they have figured out a way to make that relationship work. Although again, they were also knee deep in the cult and cult leaders themselves. I guess my answer for it has been, I think it's a little bit of everything. First of all, I have done this exercise for myself. And if I know a young girl who's 19, I'm like, she's like my niece. I've had a very hard time rationalizing my father's behavior. Like full stop, there is no justifying it or rationalizing it. So saying that, and I put it through both my own personal exercise and the worldly exercise.

16:23Danny Rensch:And then I try to go like, all right, so this was an environment where people were being convinced that this whole spiritual framework was the governing body, not the government, not the law, or let alone any sort of ethical guideline. And then a lot of these cults have like a sex agenda. Even if the sex agenda didn't come out at first, it eventually rears its ugly head. the collective that I was being raised in had this sort of like unjustifiable actions by older men and younger women, but it wasn't polygamous. And there were like things that don't exactly check the box. It's almost like every cult has its own unique thing.

16:57Danny Rensch:And what were the real reasons for the cult to start? What eventually tore it apart? And I always go back to money and power for this particular one, whereas sex became something that I would argue was almost leveraged by Steven and Trina with the more successful men with their daughters for their motivation, it was often that they wanted their daughters to marry successful men because they actually, Trina came from a place where she was poor. She didn't want to be poor. They looked at the idea that some of the more influential men, whether because my dad was a lawyer, there was another guy who was a general contractor, the men who had real worldly money moving in, the idea that they would be literally in bed and wedded to their family was much more of a deliberate thought than was led on to most of the collective.

17:39Danny Rensch:We grew up thinking, oh, these are really spiritual relationships. And we were told this. And over time, I would learn that I was even told by one of Trina's daughters that literally my dad and Marla were put together in a process, which is a word we use for a meeting one night when Trina was drunk. And she was just like, oh, you're just going to be together. And so like this whole thing that we had that was this spiritual idea was actually just like alcohol, money, kind of narcissism. And then this doesn't make my father a victim in any way. Again, what he did is not a situation to be victimized, but it allows you to understand this was just not a good environment that was happening here.

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20:47Jordan Harbinger:The course is free, zero shenanigans at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Danny Wrench. If you think about it, this is almost what most marriages were throughout most of history, right? like, all right, you need to marry this French prince because you're my daughter and I don't want to go to war with France. And it's like, well, have you met him? No, who cares? It's fine.

21:08Danny Rensch:No, this is good for the money and the family and the land and all the thing.

21:11Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. And you're going to have heirs. And it's like, okay.

21:14Danny Rensch:And it wasn't like, what do you think? It's like, I don't care what you think. It doesn't matter what you think. And that's why I brought that up initially, like the historical kind of patriarchy. I mean, the whole like institution of marriage. I am married and I believe in monogamy and integrity with my wife, whatever. But I am acknowledging that there's a lot of evidence historically throughout humanity that like the whole idea of the contract for the woman to be given for land is unfortunately a thing that has existed for way too long. I guess what I've tried to do is I've studied this. I'm in therapy, will be for the rest of my life.

21:43Danny Rensch:I have a relationship with my father. I've done the best I can to kind of make sense of my life. I go, you just sort of look at it and go, this was fucked up. This was not okay. There is no excuse to be made for this. And then also you appreciate that this was an environment that was completely out of control, spiritual verbiage and language being used to rationalize base instincts of money and power and ultimately sexuality being leveraged, even if it wasn't polygamist or in that way. Unfortunately, a lot of those things have been done throughout history and justified under the auspices of the greater good.

22:17Danny Rensch:And so I guess that's what I was saying is, wow, this is really messed up. And also, yeah, people within the collective thought they were more spiritual than all of their forefathers. And in reality, they were just acting out like a pattern that had been there for many years.

22:29Jordan Harbinger:The way you grew up sharing bedrooms, but not two kids, but like just packed, sharing baths and water and stuff. In the book, it's kind of horrific how poor you are, like no electricity sometimes, no running water. I mean, and you're moving constantly, which is, I think, by design, right? don't get used to this because we don't want you to ever feel like you're what at home is that the

22:51Danny Rensch:idea there's a principle right there that was justified under the spiritual idea that you should never value material comfort over relationships by moving houses by developing relationships with different members of the community the horse was in front of the cart in terms of what brings you to god which is like telling the truth being kind and in good relationships i shouldn't even say being kind because i don't even know that that was a principle of the teaching. It often wasn't. They were brutal to each other. I would say this. Relationships telling the truth. Now, telling the truth is a very dangerous thing because truth with a capital T, if you're willing to weaponize that against anybody, can often be just absolute cruelty.

23:27Danny Rensch:And so I've never corrected myself on saying kindness versus truth. But as I'm saying that in real time, I realize that is really a defining difference between what I've come to embrace for myself in terms of truth with tact is kind. You say a different type of truth to your six-year-old. the collective was founded on relationships. Telling the truth was like the ultimate thing, right? That was how the process, which was a word that we use for these group meetings. Everyone came together to tell their judgments and tell their truth and no secrets. So that ultimately was this idea that everything's out in the open.

24:01Danny Rensch:So your relationships, your housing situation.

24:03Jordan Harbinger:Well, except for who's your dad. Yeah, well, exactly.

24:06Danny Rensch:Who your dad is. That's a secret. No, that's fair. And so those things were like the governing principles. Put your relationships first, always tell the truth and practice the process, which is this no secrets, judgments on others so that everybody is connecting. So what that meant in practice was that we were moved around. There were like a dozen houses where families were living in and out of all the time. We were sharing bedrooms with kids that weren't our family. Again, we're talking like 10 to 12 kids a bedroom, sharing bath water. We were poor. You mentioned the shoe list. Welfare doesn't even cut it in terms of food was bought once a week in like mass amounts and then rationed in different baskets and delivered in the baragata, which was a shoe truck.

24:45Danny Rensch:We called it the baragata. It was driven around and people would get their basket for the week, which was mostly like beans and rice and basics and some fruit and some things. And so all the things that were required to survive were sort of like secondary. In fact, it was literally a thing that like survival is not in this teaching, meaning your goal is to like overcome the idea of any of these things needed to survive because the spiritual process is what you did.

25:08Jordan Harbinger:You can overcome your protein requirement.

25:10Danny Rensch:Yeah, exactly. Those things were the governing principle that everybody had bought into. And again, everyone always listens to this and goes, how did nobody think that wasn't okay? But when you sign up for these sort of things, you are writing a covert contract between you and the cult leaders that they're in charge of the most important thing, which is your spiritual self-worth. and what people are willing to do when they feel like they are getting the kudos from someone else that they're worthy of love, that they're God, that they can feel good. That's where you see the dangers creep in because now almost everything else can be justified.

25:45Danny Rensch:If you want to call it just like mommy and daddy issues that you now have created this sort of guru and authority figure who's capable of telling you whether or not you're worthy of love and moving to God. And so all these other things that were crazy. Every time I talk about this, I have an imposter syndrome moment because I go, oh, yeah, that really was bad. Like every single time and it never gets old.

26:05Jordan Harbinger:So how did you get into chess? When I think backwoods cult with no running water or not enough running water, I also don't think like intellectual chess competitors. It doesn't match.

26:16Danny Rensch:The story is that in the summer of 1995, the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher, great movie. You've seen it, right? A wonderful movie, even if you don't love chess. That movie came out and I watched it on TV. And my stepbrother, he also got into chess at the same time, which in hindsight was super important because he was at like the top of the totem pole as far as the hierarchy of the collective. I was at the bottom, but we both got into chess and there were three things that came together. I like telling this because I think with any sort of really unique story, there are always like dynamics that you didn't know were sort of lightning in a bottle happening.

26:53Danny Rensch:It's like the outliers theory. But in hindsight, you go, oh, man, that was like lightning in a bottle that happened the way it did. So the three things happening that summer were searching for Bobby Fisher came out. The collective had a bunch of bodyguards around because Stephen and Trina Camp had been threatened by some locals as far as like death threats, which it was actually very scary. People showed up to the local community school with guns. And so they were accusing us of being a cult and twist ending. We were a cult, but not that type of cult. There wasn't violence going on. This behavior was not justified.

27:21And so all of the

27:23Danny Rensch:kids who normally would have been outside being just village rats running around in the forest, like we were all under house arrest, literally. So I watched this movie and learned how to play chess. I wasn't allowed to play outside and neither was Dallas. And we both got into this movie at the same time. So we were playing chess all the time. And then the third thing that happened was Stephen Camp started to have health issues. He had a heart palpitation or something.

27:43Jordan Harbinger:This is the cult leader.

27:44Danny Rensch:Yeah. So he was bedridden, but he loved chess too. So these three things that happened at once were he loved chess and had been following this match in New York, this Gary Kasparov versus Vishwanathan Anand, which was a big deal because coincidentally, the summer that Searching for Bobby Fischer came out, that was the first World Chess Championship match that had been held on U.S. soil in decades.

28:06Jordan Harbinger:Right, because usually it's like a Soviet Union. Exactly.

28:08Danny Rensch:It's not a thing. And so all these things were Western media was paying attention to chess for the first time, maybe since Bobby Fischer in the 70s. this movie had come out and these two kids trapped in a cult were basically under house arrest and didn't have anything else to do and so we went from learning how to play from like i think the beginning of the summer to literally it was like all we did all the way up to this world championship match that was happening in september and in hindsight it was like the kind of magic you would need for a kid to go from zero to 60 in terms of not playing chess to being like holy shit.

28:42Danny Rensch:Like maybe I'm really good at this game.

28:44Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. I'm wondering, cause I know you were learning chess at, and I'll air quote this at school cause it wasn't really school, but you're learning chess. They're constantly, they wanted a winning chess team. You start crushing tournaments, but when did you go from like, Hey, this is kind of fun to like, Oh wait, I'm a child chess prodigy.

29:00Danny Rensch:It's not accidentally. Right. Because the main reason I got really into chess, like every kid was, okay, I did love the game and I explained the magical trifecta of things that happened, But then I got really good at it because Stephen Camp was into it and anything that Stephen Camp was fond of everybody was into right? He was literally in charge of every human being in the collective. And so I got good at chess because I was good at chess. And once I was getting kudos for being good at chess, all I wanted to do was get good at chess. Right. So whatever chicken or the egg happened first, it's literally how I feel about it.

29:32Danny Rensch:And so I went from zero to being one of the top kids in the country. Within two years, I was already an All-American. I was one of the top rated players. How old are you? I was turning 12. It was wild. And by the way, there were a lot of other really great players, too. That's just how crazy it was that I got so good. And there were a lot of other good players. And we weren't thinking about it like, oh, like we're child prodigies. We were like, this is the most important thing for the community, because for Stephen Camp, this is the most important thing for the community. And once we started winning, not just state, but national scholastic championships, I just steamrolled.

30:06Jordan Harbinger:Surely they're like, oh, we want to come to your school and look at the chess program since you're still winning. And it's like, rain check on that because it's in a shed and we don't have a school.

30:13Danny Rensch:There were people who were already accusing the Shelby School of cheating. And we weren't cheating. We literally were in an environment that like they couldn't have replicated if they want to.

30:24Jordan Harbinger:We're not cheating. We just don't teach them math or reading.

30:26Danny Rensch:Exactly right. And so we went from zero to 60 because there wasn't anything else to do because we all wanted to perform to be good in Stephen Camp's eyes. And so there were already rumors that were starting, not just in Arizona outside, like because people go like, first of all, where did the bleep did this kid and these kids come from? What is going on here? And then two, are they breaking boundary rules? Are they recruiting in a way that's illegal? Because it just didn't make sense that a bunch of kids from nowhere got all good at the same time. And so there were conversations like that around just all the athletics and kind of the rules of it.

30:57Danny Rensch:But in this particular case, the truth was strange within fiction in terms of what people didn't know about our environment.

31:03Jordan Harbinger:But you know what, though? It does sound like an Eastern block thing where they're like, hey, this kid's good at gymnastics. OK, she's five. Don't care. Take her away from her parents and send her to this like gymnastics compound where she only does gymnastics until she's 18. She can visit her parents three times a year in Romania. It's kind of the same thing. I mean, if not, at least you lived with your parents for a while. Somebody you called your parents anyway.

31:26Danny Rensch:That's a really good point, because that was another thing that generation of human beings, Stephen Camp, my mother and father and whatever. had come in thinking maybe wasn't okay, but the idea of like a boarding school, the idea of like a kid being plucked because they were showing potential for something, I guess was something they were like aware of. And so it didn't become an issue while everything was going well and all the parents were rallied around this mission. For a while, literally the mission of the collective was the chess team. Everything was about it. Like garage sales were being done to raise money, to send us to tournaments.

32:00Danny Rensch:Everybody was in this together. And so there was this mission that if the chess team and Danny can be really good, that would prove to the world that we're not a cult. Or if we are a cult, maybe they should learn something from us. This was literally like a thing. We were all drinking the Kool-Aid for lack of a horrible metaphor to make. That was what we were doing. And then what ended up happening, of course, was as my chest starts to struggle a little bit and Stephen Camp starts to look at my relationship with my mom and wonder if there's a better way is when my life started to become more under his control and less under my mom's.

32:33Jordan Harbinger:There was allegedly a$40 ,000 bounty on Danny. 40 grand. Inflation really has hit everything. I was going to do it for 35. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Momentus. When people talk about performance, they usually jump straight to protein, creatine, cold plunges, all that flashy crap. But gut health is often overlooked. When your gut is off, everything's off. Since adding Momentous Fiber Plus into my routine, I've noticed more stable energy throughout the day, better digestion, even improvements in my cholesterol numbers. Nothing crazy overnight, just steady foundational progress, and that's the kind that actually lasts.

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35:14Jordan Harbinger:If you can't remember the name of a sponsor and you can't find a code, email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface those codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Danny Wrench. I also want to talk about your coach, this drunk Russian defector, Igor. This is like a colorful character in your life. Tell me about this guy.

35:36Danny Rensch:So Igor's a colorful character for the whole chess world. What's been funny since the book has come out is how many people in the chess world have been like, ah, that makes so much more sense now. That's where Igor went for those two and a half, three years. What happened to this guy's life and how did that go down? So Igor Ivanov has his own story worthy of whatever you want to call it. He literally defected from the Soviet Union by running across asylum lines during the Cold War on an emergency plane stop from a plane that was competing in the Capablanca Memorial in Cuba on its way back to Russia, had to make an emergency stop in Newfoundland, somewhere like Canada, somewhere around here, right?

36:12Danny Rensch:No way. And during this emergency stop, he literally runs away from the KGB to get across boundary lines to claim asylum.

36:21Jordan Harbinger:So he just jumps out of an airplane and runs across the tarmac.

36:26Danny Rensch:You literally can't make this up. Like, it's crazy. And so he ended up being one of the top players in the country, one of the earliest defectors of the Soviet Union before the wall fell. And at this time, literally, it was like the Soviets and the rest of the world. Like, literally, there were events called, like, the Soviets versus the world because

36:41Jordan Harbinger:they were that good. I always wonder how these people know I should defect. A lot of them are young, and it's like, how do you know what's better here? You don't have Western TV. You don't really know what you're getting into.

36:53Danny Rensch:I think it's because we underestimate just how bad it was. It must have been bad. Because whatever the propaganda is, like I've now been to Russia. I've seen the buildings that were built to show like this is a thriving apartment building and you walk in the building and it's gutted. That was a thing that was being done to compete with the perception of the West. It was so bad. And even just having competed in any tournaments outside of it, they could already like physically see that life was different. it.

37:17Jordan Harbinger:I guess if you're with KGB handlers and they send you to like, I don't know, Poland or something or even like East Germany, you're like, huh, even this still behind the curtain is better than where I live in like suburban Novosibirsk or something. What does it look like in the United States?

37:33Danny Rensch:Yeah. So Igor Defex, he's a character in the chess world in the Western chess scene now. Like I said, one of the earliest defectors. At some point, many grandmasters were defecting from the Soviet Union. Eventually, the West in the 80s and 90s became populated with tons of former Russian grandmasters, if you will. But Igor was one of the first. And he eventually makes his way to the Southwest and at some point bumps into Stephen Camp, the leader of the collective. And we're in need of a chess coach. And Igor is in need of stability.

38:02Jordan Harbinger:And an unlimited supply of vodka.

38:04Danny Rensch:Unlimited supply of vodka, right? And so it was a bit of a match made in heaven in hindsight. And what's crazy is how quickly, and I think about this now and how quickly, and this was Stephen Camp's way, the way the collective, it went from zero to 60 again, goes from meeting Igor Ivanov at the Arizona Open or the Copper State Open to buying him a double wide trailer on a plot of land in the village because no one's really there. And this was now Igor's house. And this was where we went and did chess with him every single day, me in particular. And so Igor went from this idea that he would do some training with us to literally being the drunk Russian chess master in residence for the cult.

38:42Danny Rensch:And we dealt with him every day. And so that was how Igor entered the picture.

38:45Jordan Harbinger:He is at least two full episodes in your 10 part docuseries. Whatever. Just the whole defection thing. And the way you talk about him in the book is funny, man. And like you show up to his house, his trailer in the morning, and he's plastered on his bed from the night before. Make daddy a drink or whatever. And you're like, okay, orange juice.

39:03Danny Rensch:And he's like filling it half up with vodka. No, I mean, I learned how to make a proper screwdriver. I learned how to fill it up properly with vodka and orange juice.

39:10Jordan Harbinger:It makes me nauseous to think about that. Him drinking that every morning hungover. It just makes my stomach turn over even now.

39:17Danny Rensch:It's crazy. And again, there was a lot of alcohol abuse in the community. We'd never seen anything like that. at least not openly, because the division Igor and a lot of the secret alcohol abuse, which I learned with time, how many people were filling a little bit of whiskey or vodka in their coffee. And there was rampant alcohol abuse, like full stop in the community because alcohol was partly encouraged as like a truth serum back to these principles. But regardless of that or before going into that, Igor was the first light just open alcoholic, right, because he didn't have to justify his presence.

39:46He was there under the understanding to make chess players.

39:50Danny Rensch:and nobody was going to challenge Stephen Camp's perspective about it, really besides my dad. My dad and him went toe to toe on this a lot because my dad never liked Igor. And for all those reasons, but other than the place where they butted heads, like Igor had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to do. So it was the first time we really experienced that.

40:08Jordan Harbinger:You end up getting passed around to different families. What's that all about? It seems like they tried to sever the relationship between you and your mother, but I don't really understand why.

40:18Danny Rensch:So this has probably been one of the things that I've had the most difficult time coming to terms with. This is the one conversation that I always get emotional about because my perspective of how this went down as a child and what allowed me to cooperate and essentially my own abduction that was coming up was just a very different perspective. When you hardwire your thought about what's going on and even wrap up your own sort of spiritual story, oh, I'm on board with this because I can do this. I'm strong enough. you look at it very differently and with hindsight i not only have a very different view about what was being done to take me away from my mom but then also have heard evidence and this is the hardest part of steven camp was already considering whether he was just going to directly take me from my mom and just put me under his wing and adopt me and apparently when that was suggested regardless of all their faults my dad and marlo like both objected they were like no you're not fucking doing that if anything he's steve's kid even though he's not our kid we don't want him which has been why the whole thing is so messed up because they didn't want me.

41:19Danny Rensch:Stephen Camp wanted to control me because he believed in chess and saw that I was a prodigy. If anything, that made them resent me even more because I was getting all this attention. All that was agreed upon was that my mom was no longer like spiritually up to snuff to be in charge of my life. But before that literally band-aid could be pulled, what happened was I was moved out of my mom's house to live with Lane and Nicole, which Lane is Stephen and Trina's oldest son. And I've lived with them for a while. I lived with Trina and William. I lived with Roger and Amanda. I lived with multiple different families.

41:49Danny Rensch:And it was very traumatic because I got sick one winter. I talk about this in the book where I was like the kind of sick where like I needed my mommy. I was an 11-year-old kid and I was running like a 104 fever. And I was being told that I was making up the sickness in order to get my mom's attention, right? So these sort of experiences were sort of making me more angry, hardening me a little bit. And ultimately, despite the fact that he was the abuser with more and more perspective at times, all I really had was a relationship with Stephen Camp.

42:17Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. It's psychopathic, man, how they engineered the separation from your mother and then treated you like this. In the book, it is psycho. That's my impression.

42:26Danny Rensch:Yeah, it was, again, that's why this is very hard because for me, it was like, okay, I'm being told that this is gonna help me progress in chess. I'm already an All-American. I'm still getting to play chess, which I love. I'm still loved by Stephen Camp. Okay, I guess this makes sense. The term used was fly the coop. I need to be able to be on my own in these things. And at the same time, now that I understand the level of kind of just intentionality that was going into this idea that they were gonna try to put me on a path to become a world chess champion at any cost. It wasn't that I didn't want to be a world chess champion.

42:57Danny Rensch:I was a very talented chess kid, but not at any cost. And that's not the kind of thing that anybody wants for their life. It'll break a person.

43:02Jordan Harbinger:It's interesting that it was any cost for you, but not for the guy pushing you to do it. He wasn't the one incurring the cost. He was just making you do it as a kid. And you had chronic, you have tinnitus or tendus, right?

43:15Danny Rensch:Still have chronic hair loss. I am very, very deaf. 60 % deaf in my right ear and 40 % of my left. So I started developing ear infections really right after I was like officially taken. To finish that part of it, I went from being bounced around and this justification of it helps Danny be stronger, helps him develop relationships with different people in the community. And then the summer when he literally told me like, hey, like you need to go live with your dad and Marlo. And which, again, was a complete 180 of anything that had been told. because when I first learned he was my father, after years of it being kept secret, I was told very strongly, don't ever make any claims over this man being your father because that would be spiritually out of integrity.

43:52Danny Rensch:That's unrighteous. And my mom and I were very much at the bottom of the totem pole. And so now it was like, you're going to go live with this man and Marlow because they'll help you reach higher heights. But then the moment I was moved in with them, I was taken and sent to live alone in the valley, which we call it the valley, the block. The block was a couple of houses on East 7th Street in Mesa. It was referred to as the block. And so I basically lived on the block alone with Stephen Camp as my remote parent. How old were you? I was 13. This is so wildly inappropriate. So I'm getting to that because it gets to my ears.

44:25Danny Rensch:So I was still already traveling a ton at this time, but now I was living alone. Igor was there a lot of the time. I saw my dad and Marlo come and go, but really I was on my own with the idea being that living in the Valley, it was more convenient for me to hop on a plane and go to Vegas or go to Philadelphia for the World War. Doing that yourself, by yourself? Often by myself.

44:44Jordan Harbinger:So you're 13 traveling

44:45Danny Rensch:to Vegas alone to play in a tournament. Sometimes an adult of the community would come with us, but sometimes I would just meet somebody there and they would like check me into the hotel. Sometimes I would show up with a bunch of cash and literally pay for the whole hotel like in advance with cash. It's funny how quickly we went from everyone having debit card and credit cards. But at that time, like the community didn't have a lot of credit cards, if any, besides probably a few that the leaders had. And so my life was literally traveling with enough cash to get through the whole trip on my own.

45:14Danny Rensch:I would meet adults there who were 18 who could check me into the hotel because legally you had to be. So what hotel is like, sure, bro, come on and check in. This is not weird as hell. Exactly. So that happened a lot. And there were different families that were surrogate in different ways. And there were different former members of the collective that I would get in touch with. It was always odd for them. In fact, I wonder if any of them will accidentally find my book or my story because I would fly in and like someone would pick me from the airport, random person named like Glenn, and I would stay with him and his wife that night.

45:43Danny Rensch:And at some point they would ask questions about the community and I would learn that they knew Stephen Camp in this way. And I would stay with them one night and the next day they would take me to the hotel where the chess tournament was and I would stay at the hotel for the rest of the time. But those types of things happen often. You're so lucky you did not get seriously abused. You were abused, but you know what I mean? Not in that way. And I wasn't. I had a different type of abuse that happened in the collective. But I will say as far as that goes, I was not.

46:06Jordan Harbinger:God could have happened and nobody would have ever been able to do anything.

46:09Danny Rensch:There were scary moments like, you know, the Tom Hanks scene in Big where he's shoving the dresser in front of the door because he's so scared of the city noise. There were moments where I was scared shitless out of my mind because I was traveling. I shared a story of flying into Rhode Island and like being on a bus and there being like a knife incident that happened on the bus and I was alone. There were some things that went down that were just like, I would not want any of my children or anybody's children in that scenario, but to my ears. So what happened was the main thing that I did besides chess after being officially on my own in the valley was I swam a ton.

46:43Danny Rensch:Loved swimming. It literally was my thing besides chess. And I would hold my breath for as long as I could. In hindsight, I'm saying all this now, knowing that I was probably going in and out of like diving to the bottom of the deep end and up. not really properly dealing with swimmer's ear, getting on a plane the next day, not really having anybody to talk to about it. This was happening during like my adolescence from the age of 13 till 17, 18, even when I started dating my eventual wife. And so in hindsight, I now know that I was basically allowing severely neglected swimmer's ear to become like real infection that even further became not just tinnitus and started with early hearing loss before my kind of massive incident.

47:23Danny Rensch:but eventually it became, you know, the trauma that it was where I almost lost all my hearing and now have what I have.

47:28Jordan Harbinger:Nothing says healthy mentorship like a drunk, naked Russian defector playing Don't Cry For Me Argentina on the piano while you prep for nationals. Honestly, still more stable than most podcasters. We'll be right back.

47:43Jordan Harbinger:Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. The idea is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Danny Wrench. I have so many notes about this Igor guy. Like he's just naked and drunk and playing the piano and singing. I mean, again, like favorite character of your upcoming docuseries.

48:12Jordan Harbinger:Do you still have the chess set that he gave you?

48:14Danny Rensch:Yeah, it's still valuable to me. And I have it sitting up in what I hope to be someday my own kind of podcast studio. It was a warped board. So like for a long time, Igor and I literally, there was a piece of cardboard that sat at the end of the table that I remember when we lost, we were so irritated as if we couldn't just get other paper and cardboard, but we had the perfect piece of cardboard that you folded once and put under and it pinched just enough because it was this wobbly board. So eventually when I became an adult and had this board, I like got proper cushion and like had fixed the board since then.

48:43Danny Rensch:It's a metaphor. They're going to show that in scene one and then at the end of the season one. It is funny because I'm getting pitched on this right now, like both movies and series ideas, because people have just said that the book reads like a movie. It does. Yeah, it does. I'm being pitched certain scenes. And I'm not saying that just to like name drop it. It is true. And it's been very exciting and interesting to see people's take and how they want to bring it together. So I'm being showed a couple of scenes of how like Danny's first scene with Igor and this and that. So there probably will be a cardboard scene.

49:10Jordan Harbinger:It makes perfect sense to me, man. People are probably wondering how you went to school while doing chess tournaments. And is the answer you kind of just didn't?

49:18Danny Rensch:There were like basic expectations on a certain level of math, grammar, English. And so the one thing about the community that had a through line of English and writing skills, because there was always this pressure on how you presented externally. For all kinds of reasons, we can understand why. One, to create the perception of not just being good and okay, but actually being better and on top of it, right? My dad's a lawyer and attorney by trade. And Stephen Camp is a college graduate. I think he has a degree in psychology, which probably explains how he came to understand the human condition and do what he did so well.

49:52Danny Rensch:They both had their own intellectual expectations on me, despite the hypocrisy of basically was doing chess all day. The things they really cared about was he wanted me to get to my GED, that I had to at least be able to say that I graduated high school. So I did enough math. The moment I was 16, I was able to take my GED. but the thing they really cared about was grammar and English, which I'm now very grateful for in the position that I am now. I do write a lot of emails all day and I try to come across as articulate as I can, but they were both grammar Nazis. I had every paper I ever wrote meticulously torn apart with a red pen, which again, despite all the faults and all the abuse, that is something I look at and go, wow, for someone who was essentially a high school dropout, uneducated, told to focus on being a chess prodigy and nothing else.

50:40Danny Rensch:I can hold my own in terms of an essay, in terms of the written word that we use to communicate. Although now LLMs, I guess, will be doing it for everybody.

50:48Jordan Harbinger:But you wrote a book, unless you didn't write that book. And I did. Yeah, it's a good book.

50:52Danny Rensch:I had a collaborator who worked with me very closely, which was amazing. I always explain to people the difference between a partner who's an editor and a collaborator versus a ghostwriter. It's not like someone else is writing it and you're being asked to put your name on it. This was a process where we got to have conversation that was transcribed. It was put together and it's something that we both saw written. We both edited and wrote and he was very helpful in terms of helping. Sometimes when you have a third party go, hey, you know what makes sense is actually you shouldn't tell that story until we get to this.

51:21Danny Rensch:That type of feedback is invaluable, but it's not the same as someone else writing.

51:24Jordan Harbinger:No, it's not the same. Look, I got a law degree. I don't think I would try to write a book on my own without anybody else's input. I want somebody to go, you know what? This belongs at the end, has more punch, and then you should tease this in the beginning. I don't know any of that stuff. So that makes a lot of sense to me. If anything, it proves that formal education may not be required. I mean, you run chess.com in part. So if all you needed to do that was a GED, okay.

51:47Danny Rensch:It is true. And like curious people who are a certain level of baseline intelligence are capable of way more than we as a society let them believe. Because if you are a motivated, curious, again, baseline intelligence person, motivated people can learn things a lot faster than in four years. They can learn things fast. And my wife and I talk about this all the time, that half the problem with the infrastructure of our education is like we create environments where people are monotonous and unmotivated. But I think that what I would say is it is an interesting use case to see that a high school dropout from a cult in Arizona who is essentially focused on chess from a very young age.

52:23Danny Rensch:I had to get to algebra because that allowed me to do the GED, although now I don't think I could do algebra. I had to get to that. and then I had two very strong-willed, abusive grammar Nazis at times helping me learn to write and express myself, that became probably the most important formal education I had, really, was just them being all over me on that. But yeah, I was a curious kid despite that stuff, which I now know not only made me good at chess, but I was the kind of kid who I didn't want to do the math that they were making me do to take the GD. I just wanted to either study chess or read all the king's men.

52:55Danny Rensch:Like I always wanted to read. They're like, oh, read, read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, read this Catch-22, read All the King's Men. Like every American classic I devoured and then I would write essays on it. So that was the only thing I did that I really don't talk a lot in the book that I actually enjoyed doing along with chess.

53:09Jordan Harbinger:I think a lot of high schoolers have not read most of those books and don't know what's in them and probably myself included.

53:15Danny Rensch:I was so upset. I told my son the other day, I'm like, you know who Holden Caulfield is? And he's like, what? I'm like, catch her on the ride. They're like, no, I'm like, get out of here.

53:21Jordan Harbinger:If he goes to a private school, it's type of switch schools. Chess is a weird crew, man. International chess was basically funded by the Soviet Union to be like, look how great we are, because it was one of those sports or games, whatever you want to call it. It's like gymnastics or powerlifting where they're like, all right, put everything we have into this because we can show the world that we're a superpower because we're not good at, I don't know, technology or whatever it was other than space tech. But chess is so strange. It's like this intellectual game full of geniuses on the one hand.

53:49Jordan Harbinger:And then there's like a cult. And then the world championships are like in Libya with Gaddafi presiding over them. What a weird alien world this is.

53:58Danny Rensch:It really is. And one of the things you just touched on quickly has been a dichotomy or a parallel. We either subtly or not so subtly referenced that you could talk about chess, especially in regards to how the Soviet Union approached it, as very similar to the cult that I was raised in. It was this investment in the perception of achievement that actually led to very real achievement in chess. So it started as this idea that we need to be respected intellectually as a world superpower in terms of our intelligence and strategic thinking became an actual badge in terms of having most of the world champions in history and more grandmasters than any other country.

54:33Danny Rensch:And so it became a bit self-fulfilling for like the cult that was the Soviet Union. And then eventually leads to like gatekeeping in some weird way where like you have people trying to defect and escape the cult. But you also have people within the cult that kind of gatekeep the idea that anybody can be playing chess. And this was something that I slowly stepped into with chess.com where this is something that my collaborator really helped with because I came here being asked by his Shet. And I was very lucky that they wrote me a check to tell my life story because they're like, your story is fascinating.

55:02Danny Rensch:Please do this. So having someone work with me to go, Danny, do you not see the parallels of like your life being raised in a cult and being made to be a chess champion is literally like an indictment of what the Soviet Union did for it imploded and fell apart and the cult of chess. And so there's this whole parallel to what that experience was. But you're right. It was also very feast or famine long before chess.com and the digital revolution that has happened here. It was you were either at the top, you were a cult leader, you were a top grandmaster or you were starving, but still just as protective and gatekeeping over.

55:34Danny Rensch:Not anyone can call them a chess player like that. You can't just say that because chess players were the intellectually elite. We might be starving, but you're not allowed to tell us we're starving, that type of thing.

55:45Jordan Harbinger:One day, the encryption protecting your bank account, medical records, and private messages will simply stop working. Not because of a hack, but because computers get smart enough to break it instantly. The scary part? That day is already being planned for, and your data may already be saved for later.

55:59Danny Rensch:Quantum computers actually are a real step in evolution in the way that everybody knows about a binary state, zeros and ones, on and off. Well, that was and is the technology for the classic computers today. We've improved technologically much faster than we have been able to, as a society, come up with ways to prevent the harm. Quantum computers can lead to what's called Q-Day, or I prefer to call it Digital Disaster Day, D-Day 2. because that's the day when all the digital secrets that the normal computers can't crack through encryption are going to be cracked by quantum computers. And that is really what gets people's attention.

56:44Danny Rensch:Combine that with AI and boy, we've really got a one-two punch that can make humanity take these giant technological leaps that we had no idea could possibly happen. And that's one of the big fears is AI that a lot of people are worried about. Now quantum's coming around the corner. it makes it even twice as scary. It's a huge mixed bag of possibilities for everybody that are great and also danger, you know, Terminator-level existential problems. All the doomsday preppers actually are onto something. If this does happen in the next few years, we're really going to be in big trouble. That's why I'm sort of an evangelist out there

57:21Jordan Harbinger:trying to speak on it and let people know this is a major problem. We can't just stick our head in the sand. To hear from quantum expert John Young on what Q Day is, why it matters now, and what happens when our digital security hits its expiration date, check out episode 1261 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. That's it for part one, part two out in just a few days, if it's not already. All Things Danny Ranch will be on the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

57:53Jordan Harbinger:Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram, You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in chess or cults, definitely this is one to share with them.

58:22Jordan Harbinger:In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. quick shout out to my friend tom hardin you might know him as tipper x if you haven't heard our conversation on episode 918 go back and listen his story is nuts tom was a young hedge fund guy who made a few little little tiny insider trades you know not yacht money but that was enough for the fbi to flip him into one of their most prolific informants in the biggest insider trading investigation of a generation he ended up wearing a wire more than 40 times his new book is wired on Wall Street and it reads like a thriller, but it's also a brutal lesson in how easy it is to drift from harmless to illegal.

59:01Jordan Harbinger:It's out February 24th, 2026. Definitely put it on your list.

59:08Jordan Harbinger:This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not.

59:43Jordan Harbinger:The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for Something You Should Know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.