Leverage: My Ties to a Silicon Valley Cult

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the inner workings of Leverage, a now-infamous Silicon Valley cult that operated from 2011 to 2019. The couple delves into the group's origins, its novel business model, and the factors that led to its eventual downfall, highlighting the dangers of mysticism and the importance of grounding one's understanding of reality in objective truth.

Malcolm and Simone examine Leverage's initial goal of creating highly effective, cooperative individuals to solve global problems and generate revenue for the organization. They discuss how the group's embrace of mysticism, led by its charismatic leader Jeff Anders, ultimately undermined its mission and led to psychological damage among its members.

The conversation also touches on the vulnerability of certain communities, such as the Effective Altruism and Rationalist movements, to cult-like influence, the ethical implications of Leverage's power dynamics, and the potential pitfalls of well-intentioned individuals who prioritize their own subjective experiences over objective reality.

Throughout the discussion, Malcolm emphasizes the critical importance of basing one's understanding of reality on confirmable, rule-based knowledge rather than mystical experiences, arguing that even the most well-intentioned individuals can perpetrate evil if their understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.

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Malcolm Collins: You then have somebody who is supposed to constantly be watching over you, who is allowed to have sex with you, because that often happens, she mentions it in pieces, that people who, We're other people's direct subordinates. So you needed to meet with them. You needed to do these life counseling things where they would debug you and you could get fired if you didn't please them and you would lose a home and a source of income and have a big blink spot on your resume.

You think that didn't create an intrinsic pressure to have sex with them?

Simone Collins: Well, when you put it that way

Malcolm Collins: The, the thing that I find interesting about leverage about the only thing I find interesting is the novel business model novel business model for a cult, but, but the novel business model itself was sort of cheesing the Silicon Valley environment at that time period. Everybody has the intentionality of being a good person. How good you intend to be has no correlation with how good you are. How good you [00:01:00] are is dependent. On your understanding of

Simone Collins: reality.

Oh, and that's, you know, a really good example of this because we don't just have to s**t all over mysticism.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, since you were, oh, we lad you had always wanted to start a cult and run it and it's so sad that you have not realized that dream. But you still studied colts a lot.

And so I thought we could go over a recent colt that formed and fell apart and theoretically is reformed and is still alive and operational today. And I can get your analysis.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So this is going to be the leverage video. Now something I should note to our audience about us and leverage. Is we have a lot of connections to leverage, like I know at least a dozen people who were in this cult, in it or just involved

Simone Collins: or they knew

Malcolm Collins: someone involved or in it.

So yeah, so I, I, if you were in the [00:02:00] effective altruist community or the less wrong or rationalist community, In the Bay Area in the like well the period I was there, God, if I can remember when that was like early two thousands. I wanna say.

Simone Collins: We met in 2012. You were there from 2012 to 2015.

Malcolm Collins: No, I was there before we met Simone for years.

Okay, so

Simone Collins: you were there, you well then, no. You graduated college 2010. So theoretically you were there from 2010. Dates didn't really matter. 2015. And leverage during, we'll say leverage 1.0, which is leverage and paradigm. Failed cult that we're going to be talking about existed from late 2011, early 2012 through 2019.

So there was definitely. Overlap while you were in the Bay Area. Perfect

Malcolm Collins: overlap while I was in the Bay Area. I now a few things that you should note is a big fallout of this is a lot of people in this cult take umbrage. Was it being called a cult? Which is actually now, was it publicly being known as a cult?

Which is interesting. Some people

Simone Collins: openly call it a cult. Most seem to not.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, no, you, you, people who are in it actively. [00:03:00] I should note that normatively, like, of the time when I was in Silicon Valley, and everyone I know after my time in Silicon Valley, everyone who touched it called it a cult. While they were involved? Yeah, that was common. You're like, oh, I'm going to go hang out at the cult headquarter. Yeah, this, this, we're not a cult is some new, they like, well, at least the younger lower order members knew it was a cult, but like, Who joins a cult as a lower order member knowing that it's a cult?

Well, for the same reason that I'm interested in cults, in a way. Oh. They have this idea of well, maybe we can construct a true metaphysical understanding of reality and like a better way of ordering our brains and the way we relate to reality. And through that improve ourselves, like when I studied cult psychology, the thing that interested me about cult psychology is I was like, these people are able to significantly alter their self identities.

[00:04:00] Maybe that could be used for benefit. Like if our self identities are that malleable, then why not build a framework that an individual can just sort of pick up and use to rewrite who they are in the same way cults do that to people. And that is, that is what really interested me about, about the topic.

And I think that they saw the same thing and there was this sort of cool Underground stigma to talking about it that way, or thinking about it that way. Like, Oh yeah, I hang out with this cultist, you know, Eric's

Simone Collins: saying that you're, you're in a gang. Maybe it's a little cache. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I will note that this modern framing of we're not a cult is just out of nowhere and likely due to the negative repercussions they've had of being likened to a cult instead of saying, well, we are a cult, but we're cool.

So that's

Simone Collins: so interesting. Cause I, I, I wasn't. One, you were there, you were in the Bay Area during early leverage days. So maybe at the end of leverage, when things started to fall apart after 2015, things were different. And they started getting a little more self conscious, [00:05:00] but yeah, it's, I had no idea.

That's really fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: So read to me, I I've been watching some leverage content recently, so I have some idea but read to me.

Simone Collins: So to really understand how things went off the rails, which is where I think Malcolm really wants to delve in here and where I think things get interesting. It's just best to turn to Zoe. K. Medium write up my experience with leverage. I'll give you some highlights just to give you a picture of how this went off the rails and why this was a cult from Zoe quote people, not everyone, but definitely a lot of us genuinely thought we were going to take over the U S government.

One of my supervisors would regularly tal