Leverage Research

Leverage Research is an organization founded in 2011 by the philosopher Geoff Anders that operated until a 2019 restructuring, recruiting from the Rationalist Community and the Effective Altruism movement to pursue what Anders called the "one true theory of psychology" and a program to remake its members into world-altering "super-people." Former members, most prominently Zoe Curzi, later published detailed accounts describing the group as practicing coercive psychological control, and it became one of several cult formations to emerge from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute social network in Berkeley and California.¹²

Connection Theory and the Research Program

Anders's central construct was "Connection Theory," which he presented as a comprehensive and predictive account of the human mind. Leverage members lived and worked together and submitted to long sessions of "debugging" and "charting," confrontational psychological exercises lasting two to six hours that were aimed at correcting a person's beliefs and psyche so they could become, in Curzi's account, "a sort of Musk-level super-person." Members reported a culture in which Anders was held to be possibly "the only mind who has ever existed who is capable of saving the world" and Connection Theory "the One True Theory of Psychology."¹

The organization also did political and social "mapping" work, attempting to chart networks of influence as part of a long-range plan to take and reshape institutional power. It operated under several names and affiliated entities, including Paradigm Academy and the Leverage 2.0 research operation that succeeded the original group after 2019.²³

Effective Altruism and Funding

Leverage was embedded in the early effective-altruism infrastructure: the organization ran the Effective Altruism Summit in 2013 and the EA Global precursor events, placing Anders's group at an organizing center of the movement during its formative years. Leverage invited CFAR to deliver a version of its workshop at the 2013 summit, knitting the two organizations together at the movement's founding. Its funding came through the rationalist, effective-altruism, and cryptocurrency worlds rather than from a single institutional donor.²⁷

The organization operated near Lake Merritt in Oakland, where roughly half the members lived in a Leverage-run building and signed confidentiality agreements restricting what they could say publicly about the work. It ran a 2016 summer program, the Pareto Fellowship, with about twenty participants, which functioned as a recruiting funnel from the broader rationalist and EA scenes into the resident research community. New members were particularly encouraged to move into the shared building, concentrating the group's social and working life in one location.⁷

The documented link to Peter Thiel runs through the cryptocurrency startup Reserve, co-founded by Nevin Freeman, an early Leverage employee and a co-founder of Paradigm Academy, alongside Miguel Morel, with the stated aim of generating money for non-profit causes including Leverage. Anders advised Reserve and stood to benefit financially if it succeeded, and the venture initially recruited, by one Leverage-side account, "basically a hundred percent" from Leverage Research and Paradigm Academy members. The connection places the Thiel commercial network one funding hop from the Leverage organization, through a crypto venture seeded by Leverage-adjacent founders.⁴⁸

Reserve raised about five million dollars in a 2018 round that drew in forty-three funds and angel investors, with Coinbase Ventures, Sam Altman, and Thiel among the named backers of the dollar-pegged stablecoin. Freeman framed the project in expansive terms, saying he wanted to "create a currency that would outlast empires rising and falling" and to be "one of the people who has a boatload of money and is willing to fund things before they're popular." Morel later left to found the blockchain-analytics firm Arkham Intelligence after a brief involvement with Paradigm Academy's methods.⁴⁹

Cult Allegations and Disclosures

In October 2021 Curzi published "My Experience with Leverage Research," a first-person account of psychological harm at the organization, which circulated widely on LessWrong and prompted parallel disclosures about the adjacent MIRI and CFAR environments. Curzi described group debugging sessions, beliefs about demons and "objects" implanted in members' minds, intense secrecy and information control, and the difficulty of leaving. She republished an expanded account in 2024, stating that she believed Leverage had been harmful enough to her and others that the record should be made public.¹⁵

Members on the payroll were expected to undergo charting and debugging sessions with a supervisory "trainer" who combined the roles of manager and therapist, and to train others in turn, building a chain of psychological authority through the organization. The practice extended to "bodywork" involving physical contact described variously as massage, energy work, or embodiment technique. Several participants who did extensive charting reported lasting dissociation and a sense of psychic fragmentation that they found difficult to reverse. The culture, in the accounts gathered on LessWrong, treated disagreement with Anders's theories or project strategy as a sign that a member simply was not "there yet," foreclosing dissent as a developmental failing rather than a substantive objection.²⁷

The Leverage disclosures, alongside the contemporaneous MIRI and CFAR accounts and the later Zizian killings, established the rationalist and effective-altruism milieu as the common origin of multiple groups characterized as cults. The Vassarite tendency drew from the same recruitment pool.⁵⁶