Leverage Accounts
If you’d like to submit information or accounts of your experiences relating to Leverage Research or Geoff Anders, please email anonleverage@gmail.com. I’m considering all submissions anonymous by default unless otherwise stated, and will be keeping any non-anonymous email addresses fully private.
If you feel your account might be too identifiable, one strategy is to break your account up into multiple parts and submit with some time between them.
If you’d like to verify basic facts about your anonymous account (for example, a claim that you worked at Leverage for two years), you can do this privately through me and I’ll include “I independently verified there is evidence present for [claim]”. Just mention what you’d like to verify and we’ll figure it out from there. I am not prepared to verify complicated claims.
Besides optional verification, all accounts will be posted here, with minimal vetting to ensure posts are on-topic and relevant. Please try to keep submissions to accounts of what happened as opposed to arguments or rebuttals. The inclusion of an account here is not an endorsement, and does not mean the information was vetted for accuracy.
New posts will be added at the top.
Submission: A PDF of information-sharing policy that was distributed at Leverage
Submission: “Geoff told people that they were the only ones that hadn’t signed the NDA. 25/40 people signed it.
Beverage Research was a recruitment front.
The hiring deal included the expectation of being CT charted.
There was never any reaching out to people with the dissolution, prior to Zoe’s post.
There was lots of pressure to believe our own PR.
There briefly was an Occult Studies group.
Interactions with Energy Healers started before 2018.
Geoff was giddy about ‘mind wizard (psychological) battles’”
Submission: “I spent a couple years on Paradigm salary and several more living or working with Leverage people.
Even though Leverage did eventually feel culty from the inside, what was strange about it was that there weren’t exactly the traditional markers of a cult:
1. Geoff was indeed a charismatic leader, but I didn’t find him manipulative or controlling. Instead he would earnestly exhort people to think for themselves and have greater personal agency. But this didn’t work — I felt like most people there were trying to make themselves look more like Geoff. (I thought that the problem was that he was negligent about how this was going on. My take is that he didn’t like to think of himself as having that effect on people.)
2. Members of Leverage did grow distant from non-Leveragers in the “outside world,” but there was no pressure to do so. It was more like how rationalists end up not wanting to interact with non-rationalists because they don’t know how to connect with someone who doesn’t share their worldview.
3. There was experimentation with esoteric phenomena, but from a typically materialist scientific attitude.
4. There was the standard culty narrative that we were preparing to save the world, but the means of doing so mostly involves the plot piece of “enormous amounts of careful thinking, and then double-checking that careful thinking” similar to EA.
5. People generally had a hard time entertaining the idea of leaving to find other work, but I never heard of any pressure to stay. (That said, I do think the Leverage world saving narrative added it’s own pressure — if you left, you’d see yourself as letting the world down. Even worse, you might become a “normie” or “NPC.”)
So was it “a cult?” I dunno. I think this word gets abused. But it *was* am unhealthy environment where most members seemed to be having a bad time most of the time and a few people came away seriously traumatized.
For my part, I had a net good experience there.
• I thought the group attracted some extremely smart and earnest people who I still count as friends.
• My independent projects were well-supported.
• For the most part, I got to be completely in charge of my own schedule. (Though I think this was not true for some other people starting in 2017.)
• I think Leverage was in fact doing interesting work in applying a rigorous lens to poorly understood mental phenomena, like what woo people call “energy” and what laypeople call “vibes.” I think any group trying to investigate this stuff, even with a rationality lens, is going to run into problems. I’m grateful to have gotten exposure to this research.
That said, toward the end, things did indeed go off the rails, in many of the ways Zoe talks about and more. This was exacerbated by a culture where people often had their research group leader as also their therapist and friend.
The main bad part for me was being part of a culture where everything we did had to be indirectly or directly instrumental to the goal of making the world good. Again, this was never enforced, but it was the vibe. It resulted in all sorts of ridiculous things, like people telling themselves that they were playing challenging video games as a way to improve their stamina in the face of challenge. I mean, yeah, maybe, but sometimes you can actually just chill and enjoy video games. Falling into this mindset, I was constantly thinking questions like, “Is this person from SF that I’m dating interfering too much with my productivity?” I’m still working on shaking this mindset. It’s not one that’s specific to Leverage, it was just especially rampant there.”
Submission: “Like Zoe, I also experienced changes in emotional regulation, trance states, avoidance, dread, feelings of being fundamentally “defiled” or “ruined”, self-hatred, shame, new difficulty in trusting others, distrust of therapists, and derealization.”
Former Leverage/Paradigm Employee here. Shocked to read this as I went through it too and thought I was alone in that (before having read Zoe’s post) and thought it was only the two of us (before having read this submission).
Submission: Like Zoe, I also experienced changes in emotional regulation, trance states, avoidance, dread, feelings of being fundamentally “defiled” or “ruined”, self-hatred, shame, new difficulty in trusting others, distrust of therapists, and derealization. The overall feel and timeline she described are similar to my own experience.
While at Leverage/Paradigm I was aware of many distressed people and multiple people who reported paranoia or even claimed omnipotence. Geoff prided himself on knowing every detail about the organization and training effort. Leadership, trainers, and other ecosystem members reported people’s notable psychological changes to him.
Submission: I have known Geoff Anders as a casual friend for over 6 years and attended a few Leverage workshops in 2015–2017 or so, and at least one party. As someone on the periphery, I found everything fun and interesting and had no issues myself.
Submission: An anonymous account who wished the content of their submission to not be published here. The valence was measured and negative.