Page 66 of The Session

“Well, let me know when you have time for me to come visit you,” Holly said.

The last time they’d spoken, Holly had said she wasn’t sure when she’d be able to find the time to see him. Now she was ready to hop on a plane.

Mark felt a little hurt. Was the problem that he hadn’t been interesting enough for her before?

“That would be great. Let me get a sense of what the next few days are going to look like. Right now, they have me traveling around a lot,” he said.

“On private jets, no doubt. What exactly are they having you do?” Holly asked.

Mark didn’t have a good answer. He struggled to find the right words and finally said, “I’m mainly consulting.”

“For what? A youth athletic program?”

Mark couldn’t tell if it was his ego or the way she said it, but the tone didn’t sit right with him.

He wanted to blurt out that he’d just given a private coaching session to the son of a head of state, but he felt like she didn’t deserve to know that.

“Coaching-related things. Listen, I’ve got to run, but I’ll figure out a good time for you to come see me,” Mark said.

He realized he wanted to get off the call because talking to Holly wasn’t making him feel better—and that made him feel even guiltier.

“Be careful, okay?” Holly said.

“You too,” Mark replied, then hung up.

Mark sat down, crossed his legs, and stared at the silver moonlit waves as they gently flattened across the beach in front of him. Had all of this made him an asshole? Or was he just seeing, for the first time, how much Holly looked down on him?

He sat with it for a while and came to the uncomfortable conclusion that it was probably a little of both.

He also understood why he wasn’t trying to put more distance between himself and Summit Strategies, despite all the warning signs. It wasn’t just Kevin, or the idea of getting to know his father. Intentionally or not, they’d laid out an intricate game in front of Mark, with winners and losers.

Mark was best at coaching people on the field, but he also taught his players board games like chess and Dungeons & Dragons.

College and professional sports were littered with ethical and legal land mines, from substance abuse to players and coaching staff getting pulled into organized crime and throwing games. Mark always knew he would have to navigate around that.

For the moment, he was fixated on the game of Summit Strategies, and he was determined to win.

He pulled out his phone again and bought every audiobook he could find on Amazon about or by Max Lightman and Summit Strategies. And he started listening.

Infrastructure

Max Lightman was a philosopher, a prophet, a genius, a con man, and a criminal, depending on who you asked. Mark’s impression was that all those things could be true at the same time. Echo, Summit Strategies, and his other enterprises reflected that.

When Mark first took Tru up on her offer to learn more about Summit Strategies, he hadn’t expected things to move so fast. He was certainly looking for a change of pace from the situation he’d found himself in, and the speed with which Summit changed his life impressed him. So, despite his growing suspicions about the organization, he still felt a sense of loyalty to it.

As grateful as he was to Summit, after spending the better part of the night researching the company as thoroughly as he could—digging into obscure corners of the web, some of them only available on Archive.org—he came away with complicated feelings about both the organization and his father.

The official condensed bio was that Max Lightman was destined for a career as an anthropologist when he dropped into the class of Arnold Feingold, who was teaching at a small New England college, and became impressed with Feingold’s research into learning strategies. Max took the money he had been saving for a trip to Africa and used it to help Feingold start a research organization. They secured a government grant to launch the Missouri Literacy Project, a program aimed at improving reading and educational outcomes for children and adults living in rural communities.

Through the Missouri Literacy Project, they conducted numerous studies and experiments on improving learning outcomes and by their account had a number of science-backed successes that educators and others weren’t ready to embrace.

This ultimately led them to corporate America, which was eager to try out methods that could help with workforce training, productivity, employee morale, and marketing.

The alternative history was that while the Missouri Literacy Project had some interesting results, Lightman vastly overstated them and used the project as an entry point to sell sales training and other services to businesses—engaging in high-pressure sales and other manipulative practices, like selling penny stocks to the elderly.

Lightman produced a series of books, audiotapes, and videos on topics ranging from self-improvement to sales techniques, presented with his charismatic, dramatic flair. Often dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, he portrayed himself as an extremely successful CEO who spent half his time on the road riding a Harley and the other half on his island coaching captains of industry. He projected an image that those clients wanted to become.

Never having met his father, Mark was able to read the various descriptions of the man somewhat dispassionately, though he found himself trying to justify the numerous examples of questionable behavior. Beyond close calls with the government, including a major IRS investigation in the 1980s, there were reports of numerous extramarital affairs, and of how Echo and Summit used NDAs to silence—and pursue—former employees.