The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0
Between 2011-2019, Leverage Research explored the deep psychology of Effective Altruism and Silicon Valley, then suddenly dissolved among rumors of "demons." What happened?
This story you’re about to read has quite the backstory. I originally signed a contract with New York Magazine for this project, but eventually, I chose to pull the story and publish independently on Substack. However, while I am publishing independently, this story has been fact-checked by professional magazine fact-checkers, and I stand by its veracity.
Thank you to the donors who supported my work on this project, including Joanna and James Bregan, and the Survival and Flourishing Fund Speculation Grant. If you would like to help me do more independent writing, including but not limited to journalism, please consider getting a paid subscription to my Substack or making a tax-deductible donation to my magazine.
A note about photos: Nevin Freeman, a former Leverager who went on the record for this story, offered to let me use his photos of life at Leverage. Nevin has a lot of photos, but we decided not to use most of them, because we thought it would take too long to get permission from everyone in every photo. (This story was originally intended to be a New York Magazine print story, so I spent most of its production assuming that the magazine would put the story through its internal illustration process; I only recently started looking for images that I could use on Substack.) I am hoping that more Leveragers will give permission in the future to use their photos, so I plan to come back to this story in a few months, and add more photos at that time. If you spent time at Leverage and you’d like to contribute photos to this story, feel free to get in touch.
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The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0
There are more things in Heaven and Earth…
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
In 2016, a twenty-eight-year-old scientist named James Dama entered the recruitment pipeline at Leverage Research. (Disclosure: James was one of my major sources for this article, and he is also a close friend.) During the recruitment process, James received a boilerplate warning, the same one issued to all candidates at the time, which was outlined in a Leverage internal handbook.
“Self-improvement is not always easy,” went the text in the handbook. “Psychological self-improvement can be quite painful. Everyone who joins should anticipate that the process of self-improvement will involve serious emotional challenges. Does this make sense?” Then the recruiter listed “side effects” the Leverage psychology techniques appeared to cause: twitching, physical shaking, severe depression, paranoia, dreams and nightmares, and sexual arousal.
Before James arrived at Leverage, he earned an undergraduate degree from Caltech, then a PhD in chemical physics from the University of Chicago, and he got partway through a fellowship in molecular physics at Columbia University in New York City. Along the way, he grew disillusioned with academia. He saw spectacular burnout and occasional suicides among his peers. He learned that fraud allegations riddled his field. (The fraud that James first heard about in 2014 was related to Alzheimer’s research, and became a public scandal years later.) He explored political movements on both the far left and the far right, and grew uncomfortable with the academy’s narrow expectations around political ideology. One of the many internal programs at Leverage Research was a brand-new startup incubator. James thought he might transfer his physics research into a commercial context.
At its establishment in 2011, Leverage was an early node in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which advocates for using research and reason to do the most good most effectively. Yet, even among EAs, it was sometimes hard for non-Leveragers to figure out what Leverage employees did. Leveragers had a broad mandate: “You can work on stopping the degradation of modern society, figure out how to ensure artificial intelligence goes well for humanity, develop the key to ending human aging, find some way to end factory farming. You can work on whatever you want, so long as you’re smart, benevolent, and driven enough to convince us you can handle that level of responsibility,” one of the first employees, Nevin Freeman, recalls telling new recruits.
Researchers had enormous day-to-day freedom, which another employee called similar to “tenure.” But almost all Leveragers devoted hours to studying self-examination using techniques forged by its founder, a charismatic analytical philosopher named Geoff Anders. Geoff developed his own theory of psychology while earning his philosophy PhD at Rutgers; Leveragers sometimes combined his system with alternative systems popular in the Bay Area, including spiritual meditations and ideas from popular therapeutic schools. Few had any professional training in either the academic or therapeutic versions of psychology. Leveragers generally referred to their basket of techniques as “introspection tools,” and these formed the basis of their Psychology program.
During James’s recruitment, he received a demo from a guest lecturer who specialized in bodywork, a form of alternative medicine. That demo, James says, was “completely shocking.” The lecturer “had me lay down and just put his hands very lightly on me. And I had a massive qualitative change in experience… I felt as if I had been asleep for a month, and just woken up fresh. And I had no caffeine tolerance anymore.” This was both notable and surprising, because James was previously reliant on caffeine. Normally, he needed two or three cups per day, but: “That biochemistry had just gotten reset, apparently. I tried to drink a little bit of caffeine and I was jittery.”
James felt cautious about Leverage. He thought the work environment, which resembled a college dorm, was “sloppy and immature.” But by the time Leverage found him, James, who is a soft-spoken man both driven and intense, was already craving a path out of academia. After the demo, he felt sure that “there is something real here.” He thought he could learn about the Psychology toolkit on the side, while pursuing scientific work in a startup context. Plus, during a Leverage workshop, he met a funder from the PayPal Mafia, a powerful and legendary Silicon Valley clique. From this, James concluded that Leverage had legitimate high-level connections that could help him build a new future for himself. So in 2017, James moved across the country to California.
Upon occupying his new room in the four-story Leverage building on Lake Merritt, James sometimes heard screams and hysterical crying through the walls, only to be assured that these were standard outcomes of the Psychology program. This was unsettling, but worse, the startup incubator he’d moved to join soon fell apart. James began working full-time with the Psychology program — temporarily, or so he thought.
In the Effective Altruist community, Leverage held “mystique,” according to a former employee. It didn’t help that some employees lost touch with their previous friends and families. One community member observes that “a lot of people dropped off the face of the Earth when they started working at Leverage.” Rumors swirled. Since Peter Thiel was an early funder, a local wit dubbed Leverage “Peter Thiel’s MKUltra” — a semi-joking reference to the 1950s CIA program MKUltra, which studied mental change and mind control by experimenting illegally on human beings. (Peter Thiel declined to comment for this story, as did every other Leverage funder I contacted.)
By 2018, gossip spread that Leverage was using vivid language like “séance” to describe research activities, and talking about “demons.” In 2019, Geoff Anders suddenly restructured most Leverage departments, and almost all the employees departed. This sparked more whispers, but those soon quieted due to the 2020 pandemic. Then, in 2021, came the first detailed public discussion of life at Leverage: An ex-researcher named Zoe Curzi posted a personal essay on Medium that was over eight thousand words long. She explained how her time working at Leverage was haunted by fear of “mental invasion,” and that she exhibited many symptoms on a “list of Post-Cult After-Effects,” as well as symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Zoe also wrote: “I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific ‘demons’ I felt I’d picked up from other members of Leverage. If this sounds insane, it’s because it was… In addition, I’ll be honest — I experienced real effects of these ‘demons.’ ”
Zoe Curzi’s post caused a sensation. Discussion threads popped up across EA fora. Was Leverage a cult? What did they mean by “demons”? If employees got PTSD, then who was responsible? One EA group went so far as to offer a bounty to anyone who could tell them more about what happened at Leverage. Another ex-employee, Cathleen, posted her own account in response: “Psychology is a wild thing and as far as I can tell, it is as vast as it is deep,” Cathleen wrote. “And if you’re trying to actually figure it out, both in vastness and in depth, it seems quite likely that you’re going to discover very strange things along the way.”
I never worked for Leverage, but I experienced a segment of their recruitment pipeline in 2017: I received an interview request from a Leverage subgroup called the Human Advancement Project. The interviewer told me he’d heard I was an “epic person.” He said I was one of a select group of people they were interviewing, to determine what made us epic. Obviously, I was flattered, and I instantly agreed to the interview. I also attended parties and got to know several employees. They got to know me, too: Years later, a Leverager told me there’s “a file” on me in the Leverage archives.
Despite my interest in Leverage, I did not try to get involved in 2017. I lived nearby in San Francisco, but my boyfriend at the time was traumatized by growing up in the Church of Scientology; he insisted that I stay away from Leverage. Yet despite his warning, I was curious. I’d had a surprising spiritual experience in 2016, which shifted me from an agnostic to a believer in God. By the time I heard about Leverage, I was fascinated by mysticism, meditation, and witchcraft. By 2020, my spiritual practice yielded disorienting results: vivid dreams, weirder-than-usual hunches, intense visualizations, trance-like states, and more. I sought balance by discussing these with an accredited therapist, who said I was fine, and by getting advice from friends, including friends from Leverage. This was when I began to understand what might be meant by the word “demon.” And those discussions with former Leveragers formed a basis of shared experience, which eventually led sources at Leverage, including Geoff Anders, to trust me with this story.
Part 1. Founding Myths
During our on-the-record conversations in 2024, Geoff Anders tells me that he originally planned his life course in his teens. His first step was to “study philosophy and figure out stuff in philosophy as best I could,” Geoff says. “Then I would figure out things in psychology as best I could, so as to understand individuals, and then use that to help me understand groups and societies. And if all of that went well, then you would understand how the world worked, could come up with good interventions, and you would also know how to put together teams and equip them with resources.”
In 2024, Geoff shows me a document he made to represent this plan. The document is simple, black-and-white; it contains about ten rectangular boxes with lines connecting them. In the first box, which represents his initial goal, Geoff wrote: “Answer all philosophical questions.” This box is connected to later boxes that hold later goals, things like: “Understand the structure of our society,” “Determine the path to the best society,” and “Amass sufficient resources.” After a few more boxes, the final box — Geoff’s final goal — is: “Improve the world as much as possible.”
Growing up, Geoff was inspired by stories of revolutionaries like Lenin and Gandhi, and the ways they changed the world; but most “revolutions were bloody, and not all of them worked.” Given that fast revolutions tend to end tragically, Geoff concluded he had to learn more about the world before trying to change it, and to iterate slowly. He was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic Foundation, which is set in a distant future that imagines humanity spread across millions of planets. In Foundation, a lone mathematician predicts the fall of this Galactic Empire, followed by thirty thousand years of interstellar barbarism, but his equations tell him they cannot save the old Empire; he therefore forms a secret society of scientists that shepherds humanity across centuries, hoping to reduce the predicted dark age to a single millennium.
At age thirteen, Geoff says, he woke up one day and realized he was a Christian. By age sixteen, he was reading Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. He read Spinoza, whose philosophical axioms include clauses like: “All things which exist, exist either in themselves or in something else,” and who tries to use that sort of argument to prove the existence of God. To this day, Geoff feels that Spinoza is “awesome,” displaying an almost childlike joy when discussing the 1600s philosopher. Yet Geoff also felt that Spinoza didn’t do a good enough job, so, during free periods in high school, Geoff liked to sit in the middle of a public study area, surrounded by books and paper, “coming up with better proofs for the existence of God.” Soon he read Kant, who became his favorite philosopher. Eventually, Geoff came to feel that he was not a Christian. Still, he wanted to do something really good for the world.
As Geoff studied at Penn, and then earned a PhD in analytical philosophy at Rutgers, he became involved in the newly forming Effective Altruist movement alongside his then-wife, another idealistic philosophy professor. The movement was so new that many participants didn’t call it EA yet. It emerged from several overlapping communities, including futurists, Silicon Valley technologists, and the rationality community (sometimes called rationalists). Geoff’s wife quit academia in 2011 and went to work at an organization called GiveWell, which evaluated the effectiveness of charities. She was later profiled in Strangers Drowning, a 2015 book about altruism by Larissa MacFarquhar, which contains several notable cameos from early EA. The book mentions Geoff and describes him as determined “to come up with an original moral theory and an original theory of the human mind, and he was going to start from scratch. His ultimate plan was to create an ideal world.” Geoff says the book’s portrayal has factual inaccuracies and feels like “a caricature.”
Geoff founded Leverage Research in 2011, and incorporated in 2012. (He and his early employees considered two potential names: “Leverage Research” or “World Improvement Network,” i.e., WIN.) At that year’s Singularity Summit — an event co-founded by Peter Thiel, the futurist Ray Kurzweil, and the AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky — Geoff pitched Jaan Tallinn, a software billionaire and early EA funder. In Jaan’s New York hotel room, Geoff described his thesis: The main bottleneck for solving the world’s most entrenched problems was not a lack of money, ambition, or technology. It was a lack of insight into human behavior.
The pitch was broad and open-ended, but Geoff cut a persuasive figure. He’s tall, with a rigorous and methodical way of speaking, and he already had collected a small group of loyal employees despite having no funding. During that meeting, Geoff showed Jaan a spreadsheet that tracked Geoff’s work activities, clocking over a hundred hours each week. Soon he secured $100,000 of initial funding from Jaan, then further hundreds of thousands from Peter Thiel.
Nevin Freeman, who was employee #5, says that Leverage “self-selected for people who didn’t place their faith in existing institutions,” who wanted to build something better. Not all Leveragers arrived by way of the emerging EA scene, but many did. Before he found the scene, Nevin was enrolled in a master’s program in transportation engineering with the purpose of addressing climate change, until an article on treehugger.com led him to the rationality forum LessWrong. This in turn led Nevin to a visiting fellowship at Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI, formerly known as the Singularity Institute), then to a startup job. He began donating half his salary to fund people working on AI issues; after he met Geoff, Nevin redirected his money to fund Geoff, then joined Leverage.
Leverage Research initially occupied a New York City brownstone. But after Geoff and his wife divorced in 2012, Geoff moved the fledgling organization to a large house in Oakland, California. (Geoff’s ex-wife declined to comment for this story.) In 2013, the team created EA Global, the first EA community conference, and hosted it in their home. A promotional summary video shows a bare-bones living environment full of whiteboards; it features Peter Thiel and Holden Karnofsky, a GiveWell co-founder who later co-founded the EA grantmaking organization Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy). The moral philosopher Peter Singer also video-called into the event, having delivered a landmark TED talk about Effective Altruism earlier that year: “Reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want,” he said at TED. “It does help us put perspective on our situation, and I think that’s why many of the most significant people in EA have backgrounds in philosophy, economics, or math.”
In about a year, Leverage outgrew the house and moved to a four-story apartment building on the shores of nearby Lake Merritt. They called the building 454 because that was the number in its address. Geoff founded or advised multiple organizations across the years, as did other Leveragers. Some were nonprofits, while others were for profit. It all coalesced into a sprawling community they called “the ecosystem,” which sometimes managed to pull in people from completely separate organizations where no Leveragers held any official role. This included the UK-based Centre for Effective Altruism; one CEA employee, Tyler Alterman, began living at 454 in 2014, then later switched to working at Leverage.
Another Leverager from Geoff’s original team was an Englishman named Oliver Carefull. Oliver discovered Leverage after he decided to work on “collective intelligence” and became interested in the business concept of “learning organizations,” organizations that prioritize continuous transformation of employees as well as the organization itself. During its early years, the Leverage ecosystem developed a distinct sensibility Oliver now describes as “very pluralist, almost to a fault.” As another employee puts it, “Leverage was actually the most diverse and heterogeneous place I’d ever encountered, full of people who thought for themselves and pursued their own form of virtues.” If a new recruit operated under very different mental frameworks compared to other Leveragers, this was a plus, not a problem.
One clear example of this pluralism arrived in the form of a charismatic, self-assured Slovenian man in his twenties. Samo Burja grew up in former Yugoslavia and lived through the cataclysm when the country fell apart. He wanted to study social stability. When he joined Leverage in 2015, Samo was already involved with the burgeoning neoreactionary movement, an online right-wing subculture with tech overtones, which was somewhat interconnected with the rationality community.
Somehow, this diverse group had a great time. Employees attended each other’s birthday parties, dressed up for dinner parties, sang sea shanties together, produced plays and concerts with in-house talent, played paintball together, and went out to Denny’s at two in the morning. A rotating cast of visitors amounted to a Who’s Who for their social context: Geoff says that guests ranged from the hacker and activist Aaron Swartz, to anti-aging entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, to Dario Amodei, who went on to found Anthropic. A few employees tried alternative practices common in the Bay Area, including psychedelics and nootropics (“smart drugs”), not to mention alternative sexual practices. A small group helped organize a Burning Man camp called Paradigm. Simultaneously, more neoreactionaries were hired over time, which formed an odd synthesis.
Some neoreactionary guys mocked other parts of their workplace as a “witch cult” or complained that feminist colleagues persecuted them for their political viewpoints. (To be clear, none of the women they described as witches self-identified that way.) Other neoreactionaries objected to the open relationships common at Leverage. Eventually, in 2018, a neoreactionary group that had multiple members at Leverage made monogamy a requirement for members in good standing, which some thought odd given that more than one neoreactionary, including Samo, were in open relationships, as was most Leverage leadership, including Geoff. (Disclosure: I was briefly engaged to the famous neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin in 2022. Notwithstanding the Leverage neoreactionary contingent, Curtis was not part of Leverage, and he is not part of this story.)
Despite internal tensions like the “witch cult” vs. the neoreactionaries, most Leveragers got along well during this period. Inside 454, people were always ending projects, starting new ones, and collaborating freely. Geoff designed Leverage to pursue multiple avenues in parallel. He didn’t want to impose structure; he wanted to see how people self-organized. Rules, structure, and jargon only became official if they seemed necessary, a practice sometimes called “minimalism.” The ever-changing roles and relationships became so confusing that, in 2014, Geoff designated The Wall, a space in 454 where color-coded employee photos were hung up and grouped by their connections. As teams shifted, the photos moved around too.
“Early Leverage was very, very idyllic,” says Emily Crotteau, a fine-featured blonde who joined in 2015. “I was learning a lot. I was growing a lot. I was connecting to people… Leverage was giving people a lot of permission to try things that they wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere else.” Emily graduated from Reed College in 2013 with an interdisciplinary major in mathematics and biology. She immediately earned acceptance to a biology PhD, but deferred it because she worried academia would “silo” her. She discovered the rationality community via a famed Harry Potter fanfic written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, then volunteered at EA Global in 2015, where several EA organizations tried to hire her. Emily chose Leverage because she felt they were the most intellectually disciplined, most focused on “root causes.”
Early Leverage was fun, but many Leveragers took their work very seriously — which sometimes struck onlookers as ridiculous. When Tyler Alterman moved into 454 in 2014, he recalls asking himself if they were all “just live action role-playing some grandiose dream.” The Leverage operations team invested tons of effort in logistical areas that assumed they were building something important. One such area was information security, which convinced Tyler that they at least thought they were serious: “The feeling was that even though, at that moment, there wouldn’t be any hackers trying to break into our systems… in ten years, there might be intelligence services trying to investigate different people and like, hack them.”
Then there was the Leverage funding network. Within weeks of moving in, Tyler went to the kitchen late one night and ran into a tall guy in pajama pants and blue-light-blocking glasses with “crazy hair,” illuminated by the fridge light as he drank milk “straight from the carton.” Later, Tyler heard that the guy was a famous, multi-millionaire tech founder, maybe even a billionaire, who’d casually stayed over for the evening. This experience “moved me along the spectrum from Leverage being completely delusional to, like, maybe Leverage being onto something, if they were able to convince someone like that,” says Tyler. “I think the truth was that Leverage was onto a bunch of things, and it was delusional, and it was closely intertwined.”
When Emily joined in 2015, she spent her first month living with Tyler in a roomful of bunk beds they called “The Barracks.” They both went through the first iteration of “Basic Training,” a program Leverage began that year for incoming employees. Emily studied Leverage organizational history, as well as Geoff’s psychological theory, Connection Theory. She also reviewed summaries of research areas the group had already covered, like “what to take seriously in the AI space.” During Basic, Geoff worried about new trainees learning proprietary information, such as donor lists. He ended up testing the group’s “information management” skills: He instructed long-standing Leveragers to withhold certain information from the trainees, which was difficult since the trainees lived at 454; then he instructed the trainees to learn the secrets if they could. (The incumbents succeeded at keeping the secrets, so the trainees learned them after Basic.) This presaged the work environment they were about to join.
Emily recalls that the group was alert for cult warning signs. She says that, as part of the effort to not become a cult, they watched and re-watched a classic YouTube video titled “How to Start a Cult.” They also watched the 2011 documentary Kūmāré, which is about an Indian-American filmmaker who decided to impersonate a wise guru hoping to demonstrate that cults are fake, but who thereby accidentally created a close-knit spiritually flavored group, whose members found it meaningful and helpful.
Gradually, themes emerged. One research area most Leveragers ruled out early was artificial intelligence, which they concluded was impossible to pursue safely. But there was a lot they didn’t rule out. Several people studied meditation and other woo-woo stuff (sometimes abbreviated woo); some hoped to achieve spiritual enlightenment and share the process afterwards. Meanwhile, before he arrived at Leverage, Samo had already started researching a subject that he called “Great Founder Theory,” delineating the process by which exceptional people scale their impact through organizations; once at Leverage he created a research group that became the department of Sociology.
Across a range of projects, regardless of specialty, there was one thing nearly everyone collaborated on: improving themselves, while refining the shared Leverage introspection toolkit. In groups, in pairs, or alone in their rooms, the researchers sat with notebooks and whiteboards, diagramming every corner of their mental landscapes, seeking ways to “debug” behaviors they deemed undesirable. For most, the Holy Grail was a way to work harder, work smarter, accomplish bigger goals, or otherwise transcend the limitations they felt held them back from changing the world. When they needed more space to work, Leverage rented offices across the street from 454. One was conveniently a former psychotherapy studio, already outfitted with soundproof double doors for joint sessions. Neighbors would occasionally see people in their twenties and thirties walking between the two buildings barefoot.
Geoff believed that academic psychology was not a real science like physics, but that it could be. He had studied the philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s ideas about paradigm shifts, and did not believe there was a coherent psychological paradigm to be shifted; instead, he believed there was a field to be founded. While getting his philosophy PhD, he drafted a first attempt that he called Connection Theory, which he describes as “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.” What follows, then, is that any person’s problematic behavior can be changed, because “if you actually get the logic of what’s producing the problematic set of beliefs or actions,” then you can intervene in that logic. (One might suggest that Geoff converged on an idea employed by many self-help teachers: the concept of limiting beliefs, that is, unconscious beliefs that impoverish people’s lives by preventing them from doing something because they believe it’s not okay for them to try.) He developed a technique he called “charting,” which involves drawing box-and-arrow diagrams showing the interconnections of a person’s actions and beliefs.
Initially, researchers applied charting to behavior that seemed intuitively related to underlying beliefs. Nevin recalls applying it to understand the root cause of his social anxiety — the way he’d always “feel very uncomfortable, just like, walking past people on the sidewalk or on the street.” He introspected on his discomfort, discussed his observations with a colleague, and traced the discomfiting sensation to his underlying beliefs about how society designates some people as creepy. The pair concluded that he had “irrational” beliefs about society and creepiness, and discussed the subject in detail, until Nevin felt that his irrational beliefs had changed. “I remember, in that moment, feeling an extreme bodily sensation of, like, waves of tingliness and relaxation happening, where I just suddenly felt much more calm,” Nevin says. It was an “immediate, very strong, emotionally felt, different state of mind.” Afterwards, when he went out in public, he felt notably less anxious.
Soon, they found more surprising ways to use the method. Charting sometimes revealed buried cosmological ideas, or spiritual imagery that researchers found startling; but initially that seemed like the least of its applications. In 2017, a group of Leveragers became obsessed with a computer game called Super Hexagon that depends on fast-twitch reflexes, and discovered they could use charting to improve their twitch reflexes and get higher scores. In 2016, a researcher who suffered from recurring cluster headaches — the multi-day incapacitating kind — decided to try charting her beliefs about the headaches. Since age seven, she’d sought various medical interventions, until one day she spoke to a doctor who shared a hypothesis that cluster headaches relate to the occipital nerve. At 454, she asked colleagues for help introspecting on the nerve using charting, and concluded that she held an underlying belief about how the nerve related to attention. At the end of this session, the researcher had the feeling her headaches were cured, so she marked the date on the calendar. In 2024 she tells me that, over eight-plus years, the headaches are much better; she no longer loses days to the pain.
Simultaneously, Leveragers observed undesirable effects during charting sessions: bouts of shaking that could last hours; hysterical screaming and crying, with no identifiable cause. But most felt that the undesirable effects were beside the point. They felt thrilled by the positive changes that seemed suddenly within reach. If reflex speed and cluster headaches could be affected by changing their beliefs, then what else was possible with sufficient introspection? How brilliant, how effective, how great could they become?
The department of Psychology soon intersected with the key mythos of Silicon Valley — a myth so potent, compelling, and widespread that it’s hard to see for what it is: The Myth of the Founder.
“We felt we might be able to crack the code on what makes a handful of people super-competent while the rest just muddle through. How can Elon conjure and run several moonshot companies at once, while most founders can’t get their boring SaaS startups off the ground? To us the answer was: personality,” says Nevin. “Elon-haters will point out that he’s a dick, and this point was not lost on us. We had a lot of conversations about how to turn people into masters of their craft without giving them the chip on their shoulder that most master-level people somehow pick up.”
This also presented a potential solution to a different problem. Leverage was a nonprofit, but Geoff had raised money from Silicon Valley funders. What return could these funders expect from a nonprofit philosophical research program? Geoff knew that in Silicon Valley, most venture capitalists who fund startups “believed that talent is essential for companies, and that if you have the best people, you win.” In 2015, the Leverage team created Paradigm Academy, a for-profit organization within the ecosystem, wherein Geoff says they hoped to identify a “training formula” for excellence. The academy’s proposed business model was a long-term income-sharing agreement with its trainees, since they assumed some Paradigm trainees would become high earners. (At the time, some Silicon Valley educational programs, like coding schools, promoted a similar income-sharing model.)
In 2017, during a fundraising meeting for Paradigm Academy, Geoff promised Peter Thiel an appealing use case for the Leverage introspection tools. Geoff and his colleagues would either find and recruit ten “masters” who excelled at a discipline, or create ten masters using their cognitive toolkit, within three years.
Part 2. Body and Energy
Leverage had an influential funder who was interested in esoteric subjects like energy work. In 2015, he persuaded some Leveragers to meet with Anna-Lisa Adelberg, creator of an energy healing school called Luminous Awareness Institute. The meeting took place at one of the funder’s houses, perched on dramatic cliffs in the North Bay, waves crashing underneath. “The first thing we see when entering the VC’s house is Anna-Lisa in a trance-like state doing tai chi-like gestures,” says Tyler Alterman. “My personal reaction was ‘oh no, this is going to be complete hippie nonsense.’ ”
Tyler is a charming young man with impish eyes. Before joining Leverage, he worked on cognitive science and social psychology, at labs ranging from Yale to the University of Chicago. He left amid escalating concerns around the “Replication Crisis,” a philosophical conflict within the academy: Scientists have long believed that for research to be reliable, it must be replicable, i.e., that a good scientific study ought to have the same results when executed by a different scientist; but during the Replication Crisis, it became clear that replication was far rarer than many thought.
A year before he met Anna-Lisa, Tyler moved into 454. Around that time, he recalls taking a “lake walk” with Geoff: The building sat on the shore of Lake Merritt in Oakland; the lake took about an hour to circumnavigate by foot, making it a useful span for walking meetings. (Emily, years later, remembers that lake walks took precisely “an hour and eleven minutes.”) As Geoff and Tyler walked, Tyler explained that he’d had a “crisis of faith.” Geoff responded he had serious doubts about the legitimacy of the entire field of psychology. Then Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?
This was an interesting question for Tyler, because as he puts it, “the gold standard in cognitive science is randomized controlled experiments” with a control group. But if Tyler found an unexpected but massively obvious effect, like a pill that made him levitate, then would he still need a randomized controlled trial to believe that this obvious effect actually existed? In Tyler’s words, he and other Leveragers came to believe that “if you adopt this scientific mindset of looking for large effects, then you can just go around and find a lot of things that scientific people won’t be paying attention to, and possibly mine some of the important secrets of the world.”
Tyler and many colleagues felt skeptical of any hint of woo. But when they met Anna-Lisa, they agreed to stay the night anyway. “The next day, Anna-Lisa and her assistant practitioners gather us in a circle,” Tyler says. “We start out all making the same ‘huh!’ sound while synchronously throwing our hands toward the group. At the start, I made eyes with other Leveragers as if to say ‘get a load of this!’ but eventually, I started entering a trance-like state. Then Anna-Lisa brought me into the center and started waving her hands around my body, snapping, making little breathy sounds. I felt sensations starting to move through my body that made me shake. According to people watching, my body was instantaneously responding to even gestures that she made behind my back, which I couldn’t see.”
Tyler continues: “The next part was kind of a blur. A lot of twitching. I somehow ended up on the ground with my eyes closed, in a state I wouldn’t describe as either conscious or unconscious. Tranced-out I guess. When I ‘woke up,’ I couldn’t believe what I saw. I had arrived with all these people I considered to be hyper-rational nerds who were emotionally inexpressive, to the point where many people who visited Leverage came away with the impression that it was full of ‘robots.’ But now all these people were cathartically weeping, shaking, etc. One guy I thought of as the paradigmatic Rational Person now had his shirt completely unbuttoned and seemed to be lamenting on the couch like a melancholic king. Afterwards, everyone was, of course, like: ‘WTF was that?’ ”
After this meeting, several Leveragers, including Tyler, signed up for the Luminous Awareness program, which was not full-time but took place at intervals over the course of two years. The program cost each attendee about $10,000; some researchers had this cost subsidized by Leverage or by a funder. (Anna-Lisa Adelberg did not respond to requests for comment, and died of cancer in 2025.)
Since 2011, the introspection tools had expanded into a vast shared practice, integrating therapeutic techniques like Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing. (Internal Family Systems is sometimes called “parts work,” as it posits that every human mind is composed of “parts,” each with its own characteristics and preferences.) After some years, the researchers began to suspect that both attention and intention were core to their efforts towards personal change. They concluded that the psychological mechanism enabling people to resolve issues like cluster headaches involved deploying attention, so they converged on a methodology that required capacity to focus on internal aspects of the self. But soon after they met Anna-Lisa, circa 2016, Leveragers started running into strangely blocked areas within their minds where it seemed hard to focus.
As Geoff describes the Psychology research process to me in 2024, he frames it as a history of “discoveries.” He says their introspection tools are analogous to physical tools like microscopes, in the sense that most humans could pick up a Leverage introspection tool and use it to see things differently. Meanwhile, their broader social context encouraged language from computer science and engineering; not all Leverage employees had scientific or mathematical training, but most did. Eventually, some Leveragers would label the boundary they saw within their psyches “the partition,” named after the computer science term for when a hard drive is divided into separate parts so each part can operate independently. (Like every other mental model within Leverage, this one was subject to internal disagreement, and some people theorized multiple “partitions.”)
Because Leveragers believed in the great potential of psychological change, naturally it became important to access seemingly cordoned-off areas of the psyche, to explore or to reprogram them. A student of other psychological and spiritual models might call mental space Leveragers now sought to understand “the unconscious,” or “the Abyss.” If more Leveragers had been following certain spiritual teachers or methods, they might have learned ideas about containment, such as “perimeters” — or “protection” practices, ranging from prayers to ritual cleansings. But, as many a serious practitioner could tell you, it’s hard to say whether any of that would have been truly protective, in the end.
At any rate, due to their commitment to minimalism and direct observation, most Leveragers avoided using language or models from external schools of thought to describe this blocked-off cognitive territory. For some, the minimalism went further than abstraction: It resulted in a shared lack of vocabulary around basic emotions. Emily says that “emotion was taboo as a technical concept; it wasn’t included in Connection Theory.” According to some former Leveragers, this put the group in the position of trying to process shared emotions, including emotions from their relationships with each other, while lacking fundamental language for it — all while determinedly intending to access the deep unconscious.
In 2017, the same funder who brought them Anna-Lisa Adelberg sent them another esotericist, whom I’ll call David. David told Leveragers he’d created his own method of “bodywork” (which is defined by Merriam-Webster as “therapeutic touching or manipulation of the body by using specialized techniques”). As with Anna-Lisa, Leveragers felt initially skeptical. Most had never heard of bodywork, and David either could not, or did not want to, describe his methods in language others could understand.
Nor were David’s training and past well documented. According to Geoff, David described having gone “to the East” and found old masters whose lineages were not being passed on; he claimed he’d convinced these aging spiritual masters to teach him. A former Leverager remembers David claiming he could heal or cause cancer with a touch, “cause bones to heal, like 6x to 10x speed,” or “induce seizures or hallucinations” with bodywork, as well as organ failure. (The person I’m calling “David” did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this article. Someone who knows David tells me he was “traumatized” by his time at Leverage.)
Despite these lacunae, Leverage offered David a visiting lecturer position after a demo at 454. Under his tutelage, bodywork became a major part of the Psychology program. But his methods sometimes had worrying side effects, and many Leveragers found him hard to communicate with. Tyler, who was so impressed by David that he asked to become David’s “apprentice,” says that “despite the fact that I was putatively his apprentice, he never taught me anything bodywork-related. He exclusively spoke to me in little paradoxes and riddles.” One former employee recalls signing up for a one-on-one bodywork appointment with David, where David asked the employee to lie on a massage table and applied pressure to their heart with his hands. The employee says they were then “extremely sick for multiple days, like extremely nauseous.” The Leverager elected not to do further bodywork with David, but agreed to help David with logistics, since he was a valued teacher. “I’d show up trying to be professional, asking, ‘What sort of things would you like me to communicate to the group?’ ” says the ex-Leverager. In response, David “would take a whiteboard marker and like, draw a tic-tac-toe board, and stare at me, and not speak.”
David was designated a “master” within Leverage, along with Geoff Anders, Samo Burja, and a man who spent years at Leverage developing his own school of meditation. (The fourth “master” now describes himself as “enlightened” in a social media bio, and did not respond to outreach for this story.) The title “master” carried an unclear but powerful status within the ecosystem. An ex-Leverager says that “masters” had a perceived “halo” and there was a shared “blind spot around people’s character and ethics that led to empowering people with questionable morals.” This halo effect made it hard to give masters negative feedback. Worse, the tricky power dynamics permeated their whole lives: Many ecosystem members lived in buildings controlled by Leverage leadership; those from foreign countries had visas dependent on their Leverage jobs.
Those who held the title “master” were widely gossiped about, and sometimes ran into interpersonal problems. In the case of Samo, some colleagues thought him a harmless flirt, but others were discomfited by his sexual behavior. A male ex-Leverager says he recalls a moment when Samo unexpectedly showed him a naked photo of one of Samo’s girlfriends, which he found uncomfortable (Samo denies this). One woman went so far as to file an official complaint against Samo alleging sexual abuse and misconduct. When asked about the complaint in 2024, Geoff says there was an internal investigation, which concluded that Samo “acted with bad judgment.” (The author of the complaint declined to comment for this story. Samo responded to my request for comment in writing: “The complaint was filed by an ex-girlfriend, not a coworker. It was an unfortunate and messy interpersonal conflict. I deny any wrongdoing.”)
Masters often found themselves at loggerheads. Geoff and David each bragged to their colleagues about how they psychologically manipulated the other, or complained about issues for which they blamed the other. According to one Leverager, David “was routinely missing entire days just to meditate on his kidneys and was claiming they were failing,” which David attributed to Geoff causing him bodily harm via deliberate psychological manipulation. David also had tension with Samo, who was in an open marriage while also dating a woman who worked with him in the Sociology department. The woman trained with David while working with Samo; in late 2017, she and David went on retreat together to discuss metaphysics, then embarked on a relationship. Following the retreat, she came home and broke up with Samo.
Shortly after the breakup, Samo’s ex-girlfriend tried to use a technical scraping tool to retrieve files from a Leverage server. She planned to use the files for her work, but while scraping them, she triggered an alert, which made it look like she was deliberately violating the Leverage information management policy and hacking their files. This incident collided dramatically with pre-existing internal paranoia about the Leverage information management policy. The ensuing altercation tipped tensions over the edge, and David and his new girlfriend departed their Leverage gigs shortly thereafter.
Though David’s time at Leverage was brief, he looms large in many memories. In 2024, multiple former Leveragers tell me that David believed Leverage was a force for evil. Some think he deliberately tried to destroy Leverage from within. While David chose not to speak to me for this article, I was able to confirm that he did not feel Leveragers shared his moral values, and that he felt he couldn’t transfer his skills to people who did not share his values. He believed his mastery could be badly distorted if he tried to transmit it without transmitting the values that informed it.
Regardless of David’s intentions, adding bodywork to the Leverage toolkit had surprising consequences. From the beginning, non-monogamy was common and accepted within Leverage; but bodywork provided a new, confusing, and plausibly professional context for intimate physical contact. And Leveragers soon determined that they could combine bodywork with other techniques to bypass the partition — a move that arguably, finally, allowed them to dive into the uncharted waters of the deep unconscious.
Part 3. Practical Magic
Core researchers on the Psychology team developed reputations for being skilled with particular introspection tools. James Dama, for example, took to charting upon his arrival in 2017, and ended up co-writing a manual called “Chart Logic & Core Mechanics.” Emily Crotteau seemed uniquely gifted at bodywork, and she co-developed a method that grew popular inside Leverage, with which a close colleague would chart a subject while Emily touched and “read” their body. Sometimes Emily was able to intuit hidden ideas within the person’s mind using this method, ideas the person was unaware of until Emily surfaced them. This might include deep beliefs, but she occasionally “found” less coherent things, like symbols or fragmentary visualizations.
Occasionally, the team uncovered seemingly intersubjective… things. Geoff recalls one bodywork experiment: “My hand is on the person, and I’m paying attention internally, and I find that I have this vivid visual imagination of this warehouse. In the warehouse, there were conveyor belts, and packages on the conveyor belts moving around through different entries and exits. I described this to Emily [and another colleague], and they both exclaimed: ‘You found the warehouse!’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we also found a warehouse with, like, conveyor belts, and packages moved around in different places.’ Like, that’s weird.”
Many examples were similarly weird, though some were good. James had joined Leverage in the first place partly because he was impressed by a bodywork demo with David, which appeared to reset his caffeine tolerance. But Emily increasingly found herself enduring bizarre side effects, like headaches or crippling anxiety, after bodywork experiments. She noticed that others had frequent aftereffects, too.
“The phrase being ‘taken out’ started getting used a lot,” Emily says, if a Leverager felt unable to follow through on normal duties because they were still recovering from a bodywork session. Worse, the word “emergency” was becoming common, as it was used when an employee was in an extremely bad state (screaming or convulsing, for example) and then required hours or days of help.
On July 4, 2018, Emily called a meeting to discuss bodywork norms and safety. In a discussion outline, she listed negative effects she’d seen in bodywork subjects (bad headaches, fever, nausea, fear, “overwhelm,” and “inability to be around people”) as well as practitioners (bad headaches, exhaustion, nausea, and “metaphysical unease”). During the meeting, Emily learned that her list wasn’t long enough: Colleagues were seeing panic attacks, paralysis, tinnitus, rashes, allergic reactions like runny noses, “aversion to physical touch,” and “persistent unpleasant visual imaginations” after bodywork. She was horrified, and her immediate recommendation was to slow down the research. But soon after the meeting, Geoff rebuked her.
According to Emily, Geoff suggested that she “had done something bad because I was making [other Leveragers] less willing to experiment,” through her attempt to warn the others about bodywork dangers. According to Geoff, he believed that Emily and her friends — a tight-knit group that included James — were trying to “monopolize” bodywork. The elephant in the room was funding pressures. Bodywork was an excellent way to impress funders quickly, so slowing down research might mean slowing a promising funding pathway. And there was still Geoff’s promise to consider, the promise he’d made a year before, the promise to find or create ten “masters” using the introspection tools.
Emily loved Leverage, but she considered leaving. She chose to stay because “I was thinking, it’s probably gonna get really bad,” and she refused to abandon her colleagues. She was not alone in this assessment. A number of Leveragers tell me that they exhausted themselves and did things they believed were psychologically dangerous, because they cared deeply about each other and wanted the organization to survive.
In desperation, therefore, Emily spread her research net further afield. She read a 1930 manual titled Psychic Self-Defense, whose author, Dion Fortune, was a female occultist who originally studied psychoanalysis. Around this time, James recalls, another bodyworker visited Leverage to give them advice, and “brought crystals and herbs and stuff like that, and arranged them in the room. It actually seemed to make a difference.” They kept the crystals.
Years later, when Zoe Curzi wrote her viral Medium post, Zoe mentioned “former rationalists using crystals” as an example of “how out of control this got.” Zoe also wrote that Leveragers performed “séances,” and stated that “I believe at least one person had a full-on psychic break from doing this work in this environment.” (The phrase “psychic break” is in Zoe’s original text, but this is not a recognized medical phenomenon, so I think she meant “psychotic break.” Zoe declined to comment for this story.) As I spoke to Zoe’s ex-colleagues, they expressed support for her; some are grateful that she broke the silence around Leverage. At the same time, many felt that things Zoe said about other Leveragers were inaccurate. Some disputed the “séance” characterization, admitting that they used that word but adding that they felt Zoe misrepresented the activity. A former Leverager from Zoe’s working group says: “I respect Zoe’s experience, and I acknowledge that I couldn’t possibly have known everything that went on. But a lot of the concretes and specifics that she pointed to were diametrically opposed to what I feel actually happened.”
During my research for this story, I got in touch with the person most likely implicated by Zoe’s “psychic break” comment, who denies that they had a break and says they communicated strangely with others in the Psychology program during that time because that was the internal norm. I also spoke to the person’s boss, who says the person seemed fine and performed normally at their job throughout that period. Additionally, no one has tried to claim that any Leveragers were officially diagnosed with a psychotic break by a professional psychologist. In short, I found little evidence of psychotic breaks at Leverage. With that said, high-intensity self-improvement programs and spiritual schools sometimes result in psychotic breaks, even programs that only teach meditation. Many programs of this type, including Landmark Forum and numerous meditation retreats, require attendees to sign waivers listing psychosis as a possible outcome.
Psychosis and similar risks are widely discussed among woo people. Unfortunately, people who dismiss woo as fake — like many employees at Leverage 1.0 — often do not realize risks like this exist, until it’s too late. So, while it does not seem that a psychotic break happened at Leverage, psychotic breaks occur regularly at similar programs, including programs that cultivate reputations for being harmless.
Regardless of whether anyone experienced diagnosable insanity at Leverage Research, many behaved strangely. Emily recalls sitting in her office at 454 one day, in August 2018, when another employee showed up unexpectedly, with no meeting on the calendar. According to Emily, the person said they’d discovered something “extremely powerful” and was afraid that “things” would “attack” as a result. They asked Emily to teach them “occlumency,” a Harry Potter term, which is defined on the Harry Potter website as “the act of magically closing the mind against intrusion.” Emily says she wanted to help, but she wasn’t sure how, so she asked what the person had been researching lately. The person did not touch her or physically interact with her, but Emily found their verbal response “extremely nauseating… it super-duper freaked me out.” She told the person she “didn’t understand” and suggested that they proceed more slowly. She did not, however, teach them occlumency, “because I don’t know how to do that.”
Uncanny interpersonal situations arose that seemed almost impossible to untangle. Emily recalls a time when one, then two, then three separate women came to her and said they’d had “very similar nightmares of being raped or sexually harmed by a persona, or being, or energy, that looked a lot like a person in the group.” The situation, Emily says, seemed bad “from a research perspective, but also from the community care perspective.”
Emily and her colleagues thought perhaps the nightmares were caused by negative unconscious behaviors from the person in the nightmare. “We did try to talk to the individual who was sort of implicated in the dreams. And that was weird, sort of unsatisfying,” she says. If the person didn’t think they were causing nightmares, then did it make sense for concerned colleagues to ask them to introspect more, just in case a cause lay beyond their awareness? Or was it unfair to continue interrogating them, asking them to self-examine?
Was Leverage now firmly in the realm of psychic powers and magic? Who knew? A few Leveragers, including James, had prior interests in woo, but most had never previously considered the possibility that the occult corresponded to something real in the real world. Yet, to an observer experienced in this stuff, their trajectory might seem inevitable. Focus, attention, and unconscious exploration are all essential to most woo frameworks. It’s also common for groups exploring these skills to end up in strange scenarios with unpredictable intersubjective phenomena.
As things got weirder, some Leveragers ran for the exits, but others felt they were making progress and didn’t want to stop. James, for example, had long suffered terrifying recurrent nightmares. Before Leverage, he tried a range of medical, meditative, and therapeutic approaches; he’d managed to find workarounds, enough to have a functional social presence and to earn his PhD at a prestigious university. But now that he had the Leverage Psychology toolkit, James wondered if he could finally heal.
In mid-2018, James was in an open relationship with two women. One was a long-term girlfriend with a job outside Leverage, whom he hoped to marry. The other was his superior in the Psychology department. One day in 454, a colleague came to him and said that his Psychology girlfriend had an emergency — she was spasming, screaming, and kept getting worse. After James went to help her that day, he began to re-experience “nightmares, psychosomatic pain, and catatonic episodes” that he hadn’t for years.
Over the ensuing weeks, bodywork brought some relief, but when James introspected on these new emergences of old problems, he found something disturbing: Had he been sexually abused as a young child?
“I was experiencing memory recovery, which is not reliable,” James says. The fragmentary memories implicated a local person in the place where he grew up, not his family. He kept introspecting, trying to understand. Simultaneously, he also understood that the memories could be false, which added to his confusion.
James grew touchy, frequently enraged. He lashed out at people, including his former PhD advisor, who emailed him about a paper. “I responded in an unhinged way,” says James, and he didn’t hear back. He began having panic attacks and became scared to drive. During a conversation with his primary girlfriend, he had a panic attack, then “judged himself incompetent” to continue the relationship and broke up with her. But he didn’t want to turn away from what he was learning. And all across Leverage were dozens of similar stories: Breakdowns, heartbreaks, commingled with occasional shining breakthroughs.
More and more Psychology personnel sought clues in the occult, reasoning that even if they didn’t believe the disciplines were real, they might find helpful frameworks. Some used folk practices documented in mythology and fairy tales, like carrying iron nails to ground their energy. Others shared around books like The Lover Within by Julie Henderson, a manual of tantric sexual energy. Throughout all of this, Leverage continued hiring, despite Emily, who had once led recruitment efforts, suggesting they stop. On August 16, 2018, both brand-new and long-standing employees attended a group meeting where they began to discuss the question of “magic.” As shocked newcomers tried to process what they were hearing, Emily cried.
During this period, Nevin was busy researching options for a financial technology play, hoping to found a business that would earn enough to support ecosystem projects. He still helped out off-and-on with Psychology work. “People started playing around with these practices where they were trying to, like, ‘read’ information off of one another at a distance. Like, you would stand several feet away, hold your hand up and try to sense information,” Nevin recalls. “And I remember asking them to just do some basic experiments to validate that this was possible at all. I was like: ‘Okay, put the person on the other side of the wall, and all you have to do is tell me whether they’re even there or not.’ ” Colleagues brought him examples they thought proved their techniques, but Nevin was still skeptical: “None of them were ever quite satisfactory to me, because I could always tell a story where they had somehow gotten the information some other way.”
Nevertheless, Nevin felt he was still benefiting from the introspection toolkit. And, to this day, he believes his colleagues were on the trail of something real. “Had the research continued, they would have ultimately done, I think, a very good job of making sense of the area and coming up with theories and testing them.”
Most of the dramatic events at Leverage can be framed as totally mundane — as resulting from humans doing human things in an unwise manner. After all, it was a workplace where many employees lived together, and had multiple overlapping romantic relationships with their colleagues, while also essentially acting as each other’s therapists. One especially intense incident occurred in early 2018. Geoff had long had open relationships around Leverage. Generally, his relationships were fairly transparent both to their participants and to other Leveragers. But at the beginning of April 2018, one person Geoff was involved with, who was also his employee, found out that he’d gotten into a secret romance with another colleague he practiced bodywork with. The revelation left those around Geoff reeling — in some cases merely confused; in others, betrayed and devastated.
When I ask Geoff about this in 2024, we are on a video call, and I see his eyes fill with tears. He says that this was “the worst thing I’ve done,” though, being Geoff Anders, he swiftly adds, “it depends how you measure. I’m not a utilitarian, but like. On the virtue level, it was bad.” Geoff also acknowledges that his actions might be partially attributable to the cognitive changes he was attempting, and that perhaps as a result of psychological experimentation, “during this time, my own reasoning did not work nearly as well.”
The impact from this sort of thing was both professional and psychological. Sometimes it was a mix of both: Many Leveragers believed Geoff’s decisions about who received organizational resources were affected by his romantic choices, for example. But it wasn’t just Geoff. In the close-knit ecosystem community, where all kinds of boundaries blurred, where many performed unofficial therapy for each other while yearning for deep personal change, such secrets were not just an internal currency for maneuvering within the group — they also affected what seemed psychologically possible. Had they really seen what they thought they saw? What feelings, ideas, or mental frameworks could plausibly be managed with a bodywork or charting session? Could jealousy, or a broken heart, be “cured” with the Leverage toolkit? Was it reasonable for leaders to require specific psychological interventions of their subordinates? In this high-pressure context, where the researchers were themselves the subjects, did it make sense to set limits on what they were trying to be?
Nobody knew.
Part 4. Intention War
As experiences like “the warehouse” and the shared dream piled up, Leveragers began to call certain sensory things — things they could perceive in the mind’s eye; things that, sometimes, seemed to have a will or function of their own — “intention objects.” No one felt sure of the true nature of things they were now sensing. While many were slow to adopt words like “demons” or “angels,” others felt that those words fit things they could newly perceive.
Tee Barnett was recruited to Leverage in 2018 after co-founding an EA organization in Vancouver called Rethink Charity. He spent some time in Zoe Curzi’s working group, which was separate from James and Emily’s group. Tee remembers that this subgroup used language like “demon” to describe certain intention objects, as well as occult terms like “entity” or “egregore.” (He also emphasizes, as does every other ex-Leverager, that people had “heterogeneous beliefs about what was going on” and sometimes beliefs varied within subgroups.)
Some members of both subgroups reached a preliminary conclusion that certain intention objects were contagious. This led to terrifying new questions, like how they could protect themselves from “catching” “objects” from other people — especially other Leveragers.
Among Leveragers who worked there towards the end of 2018, many speak of a multi-month period called “The Intention War.” Said “war” was objectively brief, but subjectively long for those who experienced it, and most of those involved became acutely paranoid. As Tee’s subgroup began to fear malign intention objects more and more, it became hard for him to maintain relationships with people outside the subgroup. Tee says that colleagues told him that “I was unintentionally passing intention objects, sort of like a germ.”
Tee’s group developed a process for cleansing themselves of intention objects via collective meditations lasting ten to fifteen minutes. He found the meditations surprisingly helpful, but the group’s other expectations, less so. “Regardless of whether I could even sense it or not, they would claim they could sense that I picked up an object, and that I was unintentionally passing it to them. So they asked me not to interact with a good friend of mine. I took a stand at that moment, and I said no,” says Tee. He left his subgroup: “I’m very epistemically curious about a lot of this stuff, but I draw the line at being controlled on that basis.”
It didn’t help that there were pre-existing fault lines throughout the ecosystem, as employees already had competed for years over social status, romantic partners, and so on. If it was possible for angry Leveragers to attack or deliberately infect each other using intention objects, then what were their options for defense? And what if someone sparked an internal epidemic? To make matters worse, they weren’t even close to a basic level of agreement that any of this was happening in the first place. Tee notes that “the different epistemic statuses during the ‘Intention War’ period made it much more difficult to resolve differences, precisely because those who didn’t fully believe in the intention stuff would find it hard to charitably negotiate with those who were fully bought into something that makes even the interaction tough to have. Imagine Person A believes in germ theory and Person B doesn’t. If Person B is sick and still wants to interact closely, Person A may resist. Person B will not understand that in the slightest, and furthermore, that Person A believes in ‘invisible pathogens’ that Person B can’t see could color their perspective about how seriously to take Person A.”
James had earned his PhD in chemical physics, and he had experience modeling diseases from the perspective of academic science. He began researching ideas like “introjection,” a word defined by the American Psychological Association as “the process of absorbing the qualities of an external object into the psyche in the form of an internal object or mental representation (i.e., an introject), which then has an influence on behavior.” One phenomenon that Leveragers interpreted as a minor example of “introjections” was the common experience of hearing someone else’s voice repeating in one’s head, following a passionate discussion. James says that “we were basically realizing that we were in the territory of the evil eye and witchcraft, and stuff like that.” In November 2018, Geoff gave an internal presentation discussing how “magic” was intersecting with their research; the presentation was recorded and later got posted on the Leverage YouTube channel. During the presentation, Geoff gave examples like a bodywork session in which the bodyworker found themselves with an image resembling a demon in their mind’s eye.
Working with a few colleagues, James says he developed a model “like a virus model, where the host replicates the introjection.” He read about Wilhelm Reich, a Freud disciple who defected from mainstream psychology to develop his own style of energy and bodywork, and he learned about “cases of introjective contagion of the kind we ended up seeing at Leverage.” James also felt that he found useful ideas while researching the “spiritual ontology” of the Desert Fathers, a third-century ascetic Christian movement; he wondered if the Desert Fathers’ theories of temptation could help.
In late 2018, James “put together a coalition representing all the major subgroups. I’d have meetings with all these representatives and disseminate information, claims about evidence and claims of containment. We tried to create a clearinghouse and some shared language for it.” They “found that the contagions were generally working on specific emotional vulnerabilities, psychological vulnerabilities. If you looked at a particular case, and found out what the vulnerability was, you could basically proactively talk to people about those psychological vulnerabilities and have them do a little bit of trauma work or do a little bit of spiritual — whatever their favorite modality was, and basically get an immunity.”
In other words: Some Leveragers spent months, even subsequent years, interrogating their own and each other’s minds, convinced that finding and healing their own psychic vulnerabilities was the best way to prevent the spread of dangerous psychological material. Regardless of its accuracy, this mentality may have contributed to PTSD symptoms. As Zoe Curzi later wrote about her Leverage time: “I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded.”
In 2023, well after the events in this story, the famous therapeutic modality Internal Family Systems released a book called The Others Within Us. The author, Robert Falconer, describes a phenomenon he calls “unattached burdens” — which, he notes, could also be called “demons.” I heard about this book after a former Leverager read it, then texted me to let me know that the book’s methodology is very similar to methods their subgroup devised for intention objects in 2018. Yet there appears to be no shared staff between IFS and Leverage, which suggests that the two communities converged on similar methodologies independently.
Another person, reflecting on their work at Leverage, sent me this statement: “What links us together? Is it just genetics and culture, or is there more? Just as neuroscientists studied mirror neurons in the 1980s and 1990s, psychologists like Carl Jung theorized ideas like the collective unconscious a half century before. These days, people sometimes talk about this phenomenon in terms of the ‘hive mind.’ Taken further, some scientists have tried to study apparent psychic phenomena, including at Stanford and Duke University…. In some sense, there’s no question that we affect each other deeply — the question is how. Unfortunately, as Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman once pointed out about the field of trauma, from time to time the study of certain subjects becomes taboo. This is especially true of psychology and the social sciences, where topics that conflict with existing social structures can become inconvenient and therefore suppressed.”
Leveragers who spoke to me stand by their “intention research,” although they often disagree with each other’s models, or are uncertain about how to describe it. The Leverage website currently contains a bunch of white papers written during and after the Psychology program; but not everyone agrees that these are good summaries.
Part 5. How It Ended
In the years preceding the Intention War, Nevin Freeman was hard at work to identify plausible income-earning projects. With Tyler Alterman and several others, his working group arrived at the notion of “stablecoins,” which are intended to be less volatile than most cryptocurrencies. Nevin’s team was early to market, founding a financial technology company in 2018 that is now called Reserve (they originally tossed around other names with very different vibes, like “Fathom” and “Flamingo”). By early 2019, Reserve was not yet successful in an economic sense, but some team members decided to check out the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
The Leverage contingent did not have “white badges” for the WEF, but they had “hotel badges” that got them into side events, so they managed to meet plenty of people around Davos. Several felt unsettled by what they perceived as predatory energy manipulation, including an event Geoff attended that, he says, “seemed like a dark ritual. They had chanting and drums, and the main person was able to guide the attention of the audience in a very shocking and impressive way.” Emily got “a cool backpack” from the conference swag.
Not everyone was impressed. Upon returning home, a Leverager named Jonah Bennett, who had just co-founded a right-wing magazine called Palladium, wrote that “Davos is not the place where original thought is developed. Nor is it a place of rigorous analysis,” and “when talking to many attendees, I had the distinct impression that I was talking to overgrown student government representatives.” Appropriately for someone who traveled with colleagues from a cutting-edge financial technology company, Jonah added: “If I could ask [Klaus] Schwab [founder of the WEF] a single question, it would be this: if you knew in 1971 that the WEF would eventually be occupied by hordes of low-rent blockchain grifters, would you just fold up the whole thing? The blockchain community, though it contains a few interesting projects, is dominated by obvious scams, and so received an appropriate amount of contempt from traditional finance at Davos, whose scams are much more subtle and institutionalized.”
Reserve was on an upwards trajectory, but the Leverage ecosystem was struggling. Several subgroups began seeking outside funding sources. Although the Intention War was winding down, tensions remained high: There was no generally accepted theory of intention objects, and eerie effects were still occurring. Secrets and betrayals, both romantic and professional, remained rife.
Few Leveragers were seriously committed to a spiritual or religious practice, though some had strong meditation habits. In 2019, that began to shift. Nihal Singh, a Leverager who takes his Sikh faith seriously and did an impressive job staying out of the Intention War, told the others he believed “the best remedy to a lot of this was orthodox religious belief.” (Nihal now clarifies that “I would not myself term the intention-related practices precisely ’spiritual’ or ‘religious’ in nature. Even so, for some, they did raise questions recognizable to students of religious and spiritual experience.”) Some Leveragers began attending Roman Catholic services, including Latin Mass. Others studied Sikh classics in Nihal’s reading group, Athenaeum, where he also led discussions about Western philosophy.
Meanwhile, at a rationality community event, Emily met two monks from a non-traditional Buddhist order. She was excited by their conversations because activities “at their monastery rhymed with stuff we were getting into with the bodywork and Intention War.” She invited the order to stay at 454. But before they arrived, Geoff suddenly restructured the Leverage ecosystem.
Geoff traces this decision to a conversation he had with one of the Psychology leaders in mid-2019, in which she seemed “worn down” and “miserable.” Soon afterwards, on June 30, Geoff called a meeting at 454, in the room where everyone’s position was posted on The Wall. There, he remembers addressing the entire group, telling them that the ecosystem “had ceased to fulfill its function.” Then Geoff turned away and began taking personnel photos down from The Wall. “I cried the whole time. It was so upsetting that I completely forgot that anybody else was there in the room,” he says. “Then I remember looking up, and they were all there. They were still all there. They were all standing there, looking at me.”
Emily says that her boss’s statement sounded, to her, like the organization was transitioning, rather than effectively dissolving. “Many people didn’t expect the dissolution to ‘stick’ until we returned our building keys and stopped being allowed to use the gym.” It didn’t end quickly: The Buddhist order Emily had already invited was allowed to use 454 post-restructure; several Leverage subgroups continued working out of the space until the lease ended in early 2020.
As 2020 wore on, the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a broad social realignment. The resulting Leverage diaspora mingled with a larger trend of Silicon Valley employees moving within or away from the Bay Area. I met and became close to several Leveragers during this time. My professional work was on pause, so I spent hundreds — maybe thousands — of hours in 2020-2021 on spiritual practice. In late 2020, I began independently sensing stuff that seemed “demonic” during interactions with some Leveragers, and I felt happy that my Leverage friends seemed able to help me make sense of it. (I was also regularly seeing an accredited therapist, who said I was fine.) In early 2021, I arranged my first in-person meeting with Geoff Anders, because I had begun worrying about how the Leverage toolkit might cause harm within my community — especially given that many former Leveragers from the Psychology program became coaches after they left Leverage, and were teaching their methods to an increasingly large number of people.
I spent much of the next year talking with Leveragers and other spiritual practitioners about what it all meant, including a Roman Catholic exorcist. I was very impressed by the exorcist, but his take was that we should all convert to Catholicism, and most of us did not convert to Catholicism. However, many of us stay in touch to this day. Thus, I already knew many Leveragers when Zoe Curzi’s post came out. The rationality and EA communities took her claims seriously. Some readers felt that Zoe’s story showed that Leverage was uniquely problematic, while others wrote about related concerns at other organizations within their social context.
Geoff conducted an internal inquiry, whose findings he published in 2022. “Many of the negative experiences at Leverage 1.0 arose from the challenges of being part of a complex, emotionally intense, and unusual project with difficult social elements, as well as the challenges inherent to psychological self-improvement,” the report concluded. “We expect to continue reflecting on its lessons.” Several ex-Leveragers tell me that they felt bitterly disappointed by the inquiry, including Emily and James. They participated in the inquiry process hoping to contribute to internal accountability, but they now feel that it “whitewashed” Leverage 1.0.
Geoff still heads an organization called Leverage Research. It now describes itself as “forging better futures with revolutionary science.” The current organization is much smaller, and the employees don’t live together. Geoff emphasizes that he’s currently in a monogamous relationship and intends to stay that way. Most people who know the backstory call the current organization “Leverage 2.0,” but Geoff recently remarked to me that he’s still following his original plan.
Aside from Geoff, the only Leverager named in this article who currently works there is Oliver Carefull. Oliver missed the Intention War entirely, because he left for several years to recover from cancer. He says he went back to Leverage, despite all the terrible things he heard, because his colleagues are exceptional and brilliant, and because he believes Leverage became a real “learning organization.”
Dozens of projects began at Leverage 1.0, and many are still going. The money from Reserve did not come through in time to support the Leverage 1.0 ecosystem, but Nevin continued to work on it; in 2019, they launched a cryptoasset called Reserve Rights (RSR). Today, Nevin is still CEO, and as of late June 2026, RSR has a market cap of over $60 million. Tyler moved to New York, and in 2023, he joined a creative group called Fractal Collective. He’s writing a science fiction novel titled Psychofauna, inspired by his time at Leverage.
Politically, Leverage has punched above its weight, though liberal Leveragers may wince to think of it. While at Leverage, two neoreactionary employees named Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett co-founded a magazine called Palladium. Their parties have drawn Peter Thiel, the musician Grimes, and other luminaries from the “tech right” or “New Right.” Samo is now Editor-in-Chief of Palladium; he also runs a research and analysis firm called Bismarck, and published “Great Founder Theory” on his website in 2020.
In some ways, the larger Effective Altruist movement grew into a spectacular success. EA philanthropies now control many millions of dollars. EA philosophy is extraordinarily influential in the field of artificial intelligence. But the movement changed over the years, and early contributors don’t always feel at home there. Despite the contributions of Leverage to EA, many longtime EAs distance themselves from Leverage, and some call it a “cult.” For their part, many Leveragers now distance themselves from the rationality and EA communities, while criticizing problematic behavior by people like Sam Bankman-Fried (an EA cryptocurrency founder who went to prison in 2024 for fraud) and the so-called “Zizians” (a small group of rationalists who, as of 2025, are allegedly connected to six violent deaths). Regardless, there remains an undeniable shared intellectual lineage — and many shared community members — between Leverage and EA.
Psychologically and spiritually, the impact from Leverage 1.0 is less clear. Nihal Singh founded a Sikh online journal called The Vital Anjan, and went on to Oxford for postgraduate study. There were multiple Leverage marriages. Emily and James, who spent most of Leverage 1.0 dating other Leveragers, married each other in 2024, and Emily changed her name to Emily Dama. James asked me to give a toast at their wedding, which I did with great respect; Tee gave a toast, too.
Numerous former Psychology employees work as independent coaches for private clients. James is one of them, and he is also privately researching “history and theory of the economics of human capital.” Tee and Emily co-founded a large coaching program called Supercycle. (Disclosure: Supercycle featured me as an “established creator” in a sub-program called Reconstellation.)
Neither James nor Emily feel they have fully recovered, and some other ex-Leveragers feel similarly. James still has such severe panic attacks that he cannot drive and has trouble working. Emily has difficulty describing her troubles in standard English, and says her “energy body” was severely damaged at Leverage. Both feel deeply hurt and abandoned by their colleagues.
A question people ask me a lot, about Leverage, is what I believe really happened. Does it count as a spiritual group, or a cult? What could Leveragers possibly mean by “demons”?
Often when I answer this question, I think of a famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” — a line said by Hamlet as he speaks to his extremely rational friend Horatio, after both are startled by Hamlet’s father’s ghost; a line widely cited by those of us who suspect that materialist rationality is a more limited philosophy than its adherents are prone to believe, though of course, it has plenty of advantages.
As a writer who was trusted by this group in a journalistic role — a role in which I’ve tried to be neutral, despite my many biases — I’ve done my best to quote Leveragers directly, to describe Leverage 1.0 without putting words in their mouths. At the same time, I have my own strong opinions, shaped by my own spiritual and cognitive practices, and I couldn’t help framing the story based on those. I can’t say I know exactly what a demon is, because there are more things in Heaven and Earth. But I do think it’s plausible that trauma patterns in a human psyche can become self-reinforcing and self-justifying; that sometimes, as we interact with those patterns, we might reify and anthropomorphize those patterns, and sometimes maybe we can even heal that way. This strikes me as a psychological hypothesis that could be true as a description of a treatment modality, regardless of ontological demonic realities. Maybe there are spiritual powers that can help with such healing — or maybe describing reality that way can, sometimes, help.
As Emily and I wrap up our on-the-record interviews in 2024, she says: “I read the Bible for the first time two years ago. Everyone always talks about the Gospels, but I loved the Letters and the Acts, because I was just like: I was there. This is what Leverage felt like. And in the Acts, there are these moments where, like, Peter heals a lame person using the Holy Spirit, where he just commands the man to get up, and he gets up, and then he’s kind of like: ‘What just happened?’ ”
In other portions of the Bible, Emily continues, “they’re trying to figure out what the Holy Spirit is. Like, it heals people. How do you deal with it in the right way to be able to bring the healing goodness to people? … And it’s like — you know it works. Because like, the man did walk, right? It’s not nothing!” She laughs with both wonder and chagrin, a combination I’m very familiar with.
“You’re trying to find the language that produces the most consistent effects that allows the good thing to happen — that allows you to talk to your peers — that allows you to keep alive the possibility for the good thing. And it’s like. Well. I totally identify with that.”
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Credits
This article will appear in Issue Two of my print magazine if I raise enough money. You can make a tax-deductible donation to that effort here.
Fact-Checking: Angely Mercado (Substack) and Dale Brauner (LinkedIn)
Legal Review: Michael Wolfe (Substack Defender)
On-The-Job Training: New York Magazine (backstory here)
Copyediting: Claude AI (copyedit transcript here)
Aside from copyediting, I did not use AI as part of the writing process for this story.
Thank you to the fiscal sponsor for The New Modality: Independent Arts & Media, a San Francisco 501(c)(3) (website)
Thank you also, so much, to my paid subscribers here at Solar Light, and to donors who helped me cover this project, some of whom I am not naming at their request. An explicit thank you goes out to donors Joanna and James Bregan, and to the Survival and Flourishing Fund Speculation Grant.
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A Note About Comment Moderation
As of publication day, I’ve decided to paywall comments on this story — i.e., the post is free to read, but if you want to leave a comment below, then you need to be a paid subscriber to Solar Light. Refer to my comments policy if you would like to know more about how I think about this.
Commenters: Please make the effort to be kind. I will be aggressive in moderating comments if I feel commenters are being cruel, manipulative, or anything else that is not cool. I reserve the right to delete comments, and/or to close comments entirely if comment moderation starts feeling like it’s too much for me.
If you have ever been employed by Leverage Research, then I will give you a year’s free “paid” subscription to Solar Light if you ask for one, so that you can comment here and read my full archive. I am willing to extend this courtesy to anons or people writing under pseudonyms, as long as I have some way of confirming who you are behind the scenes. Also, I’m always willing to give free “paid” accounts to people who have left interesting comments in the past, or who interact awesomely elsewhere on social media — just ask!
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"charming young man with impish eyes" here, AMA
Thank you for seeing this project through, Lydia – it has been a long time! I appreciate the needles you've threaded here and I especially appreciate the way you've told the story to make new room for future follow up rather than closing it down.
It's been utterly bizarre to live through! Definitely not what I expected when I signed up for a startup incubator program.