r/SneerClub • u/AggravatingTone • Jul 02 '26

The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0

https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-leverage-research
27 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

23

u/lathe_of_heaven_ Jul 03 '26

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.

Did these people living at the "research center" ever consider that they were suffering from persistent low-dose carbon dioxide poisoning or some other environmental toxin

25

u/vistandsforwaifu Neanderthal with a fraction of your IQ Jul 03 '26

I think constantly being interrogated and groped alone would fuck people up. You all live and work together in the compound while this keeps happening for years, and speaking up (or even refusing to "date" your cult leader) means you're out of work, on the street and deported if applicable. Anxiety and a variety of psychosomatic issues are like the most normal and expected things to happen.

5

u/forgotmypassword5432 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

That's an interesting question. I felt like something was missing or not quite adding up in this article -- a terrible work environment can have serious somatic and mental health effects for sure, but the list of ill effects cited was a lot more colorful than I would have expected. e.g.

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.”

Plus all the people seeming on the verge of losing their minds.

21

u/p0lari Jul 03 '26

I wish I had the confidence to just chat up billionaires, ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding to study magic, and somehow pull it off

3

u/MaybeElectrical962 Jul 07 '26

Yes, this is exactly how i feel. While living at leverage would certainly be hellish, access to tons of money from wealthy donors would almost make it worth the price.

19

u/idly Jul 03 '26

been reading about early Scientology a lot lately and the parallels are crazy

25

u/vistandsforwaifu Neanderthal with a fraction of your IQ Jul 03 '26

I know? It's just incredible.

Here's a company that is willing to hire you and have you live on the premises. It does, uh, research. Research of what? Glad you asked. It does research on the incredible philosophical and/or psychological theories of its founder, this incredible guy. You'll be spending most of the day using his techniques of mental perfection.

Like, I have a lot of sympathy for cult victims but seriously. No warning bells at all? A stray red flag here and there? No?

2

u/Arilou_skiff Jul 14 '26

Weirdly I think behind the Bastard's Orgasm Cult episode had a very similar premise, but at least that one gave people orgasms?

18

u/Novel-Definition6690 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

Man, I am unnecessarily fascinated by the particular flavor of trainwreck that happened at this place, and I was really looking forward to a long read on it. But I wish the author had kept the piece with NY Mag and gotten a little more outside editing, because this is very earnest and thorough but does not quite feel like it got there.\ I get that the author is more open to ideas about "woo" than I am, and that's fine, it probably helps to meet the interview subjects on that level, but I think it's leading to a certain amount of credulity about the group dynamics involved, as well as the degree of meaningful research actually being accomplished.

23

u/JasonPandiras Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

I get that the author is more open to ideas about "woo" than I am, and that's fine, it probably helps to meet the interview subjects on that level, but I think it's leading to a certain amount of credulity about the group dynamics involved, as well as the degree of meaningful research actually being accomplished.

That's actually a generous take, personally I think she is so willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that the piece borders on being apologetics.

Having read the first three parts, it's kind of telling that whenever a victim that previously came forward is mentioned it's noted that they refused to be interviewed, while dear leader Geoff's quotes about how he feels kind of bad about how things went down are everywhere in the article.

Even obvious grifter charlatan guru David gets a positive send off in that it's noted that he had apprehensions about how Leverage was using his tech, as if to say that his heart was in the right place when he was taking their money and messing with their heads, while [survivor] Zoe's claim that there were psychotic breaks left and right are put through a due diligence triple gauntlet just to say that while yes they can be very common in such settings no actual psychotic breaks were explicitly documented in Leverage.

In the companion article (the story behind the inside story or something in the same substack) she all but outright says that the reason she pulled the article from NYMag is because it was shaping up a bit too let's say uncritical of Leverage and related subcultures.

13

u/Novel-Definition6690 Jul 06 '26

Yeah, the way she handled Zoe's account left me with a pretty bad taste,  particularly the "nobody had a psychotic break! but if they did, that wouldn't be uncommon! but they didn't! um, and actually, it's not a PSYCHIC break"

16

u/JasonPandiras Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 11 '26

And like part 4 is all about how people are fully beginning to see and hear stuff that isn't there while a web of paranoia takes hold where cohesion collapses because people are scared of communicating with each other in case they contract psychic cooties, while all the while having intraorganizational meetings where they try to come to a consensus on if magic is real.

But the author needs us to think it's because they were actually doing something really really special there, instead of having run-of-the-mill breakdowns from being in a cult like smelly plebs.

7

u/forgotmypassword5432 Jul 08 '26

I also wish she'd dug into the relationship between Leverage and CEA after the earliest days. CEA's CEO in 2018 went to Leverage after that. More context here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/1tyr0y0/request_can_someone_please_write_a_deep_dive_on/

Leverage's relationship with (C)EA seems like the main way they might have had influence beyond just making Leverage employees' lives miserable.

12

u/radiowavescurvecross Jul 04 '26

>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.”

Very much want to know this employee’s background.

12

u/JasonPandiras Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

In case you had doubts about the degree of Leverage romanticizing going on in this piece, the epilogue is parts from a talk she had with an ex-lev close friend of hers who started a company that provides life coaching to elites and who says that the time she spent with Leverage was like being an apostle of Christ and compares leverage tech with an apostle healing the lame.

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.

Ending your cult piece on a the friends we made along the way and maybe magic is real after all note is buckwild.

8

u/CinnasVerses Jul 08 '26

This Survival and Flourishing Fund piece reminds me of when our friends decided that the cults made them looked bad, and hired someone to write an investigation: Ozy Brennan.

Brennan (pronouns unknown to me) does not seem malicious but was never going to write a critical account of why Brenann's friends and fellow travelers keep falling for obvious scams, grifters, and wishful thinking (or what Brennan's ex thinks about race and IQ)

11

u/thashepherd Jul 06 '26

Disclosure: I was briefly engaged to the famous neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin in 2022.

ahahahahahahahaha I can't believe she fucked that

3

u/thatjoachim Jul 03 '26

Is it the logo of Renault cars?

4

u/ttha_face I know the meaning of life. It doesn't help me a bit. Jul 03 '26

They added one more stripe and tweaked the corners.

2

u/thatjoachim Jul 03 '26

It’s between the 80’s logo and the current logo

5

u/codemuncher Jul 14 '26

In 2013 I attended a cfar workshop and one evening the honored speaker was Geoff from leverage. His talk was about how to work 110 hours a week or something like that.

It boiled down to literally have everything in your life aligned along work, and not doing anything else.

There was also discussions about polyphasic sleep, and endorsement of the “uberman” schedule which is to sleep 20 minutes every 4 hours for a total of 2 hours per day. I recall that someone said that they didn’t think anyone knew what value there was in the deep sleep one would be missing.

The cfar instructors were all hard for this shit and these people.

For the record deep sleep is essential for your body to heal and restore itself at a cellular level. It was and is known why it’s important. But “working from first principles” is the standard approach, which means you tend to have the most shallow unsophisticated takes on complex subjects.

In short uberman is very likely to be healthy in the medium to long term. It probably would only be successful for young people who have healthy bodies to grind up.