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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.
[00:00:00]
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
Published on 1 year, 6 months ago