TL;DR

Lydia Laurenson’s article is a long, semi-sympathetic insider reconstruction of Leverage Research 1.0, an early Effective Altruism/rationalist-adjacent organisation founded by Geoff Anders in 2011. It argues that Leverage began as an ambitious “world-improvement” research project trying to understand psychology, talent, institutions, and social change, but gradually slid into high-intensity psychological experimentation, bodywork, occult-adjacent frameworks, internal paranoia, and interpersonal dysfunction. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The core mechanism: Leverage people believed they had discovered unusually powerful “introspection tools” for debugging beliefs, trauma, motivation, and competence. Early results reportedly felt dramatic: reduced anxiety, altered bodily states, possible headache improvement, better performance, etc. This fed the idea that they might “crack” human excellence and even create “masters” — a pitch Geoff reportedly made to Peter Thiel-linked funders. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The failure mode: the group mixed workplace + communal living + romantic entanglements + amateur therapy + founder authority + funding pressure + metaphysical speculation. Bodywork and “intention” practices produced reports of shaking, panic, nausea, paralysis-like states, tinnitus, nightmares, “metaphysical unease,” and people being “taken out” for hours or days after sessions. Some wanted to slow down; others thought they were near something important and kept going. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The infamous “demons” angle is presented less as literal Hollywood demons and more as Leverage people trying to describe strange, contagious-feeling psychological/imaginal patterns: “introjections,” intrusive internal models, shared nightmares, “intention objects,” or psychic/occult-seeming interpersonal phenomena. Laurenson does not fully debunk this; she treats it as potentially meaningful psychological/spiritual territory while remaining ambiguous about ontology. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The article pushes back somewhat against the simple “Leverage was just a cult / everyone went insane” narrative. Laurenson says she found little evidence of professionally diagnosed psychotic breaks, and several former members dispute parts of Zoe Curzi’s viral account. But it still depicts Leverage as a psychologically unsafe, boundary-dissolving environment where some people were seriously harmed and later felt the official inquiry “whitewashed” what happened. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

Leverage 1.0 effectively dissolved in mid-2019 when Geoff Anders concluded the ecosystem had “ceased to fulfill its function” and restructured it. The current Leverage Research is smaller, no longer communal, and is informally treated by many as “Leverage 2.0.” Many alumni scattered into startups, coaching, Palladium/Bismarck/New Right circles, EA-adjacent projects, and other ventures. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

One-sentence version

Leverage Research 1.0 was an EA/rationalist-adjacent attempt to invent a science of human transformation that generated some apparently powerful effects, then overloaded its own social/psychological containment vessel and collapsed into trauma, occult framing, internal conflict, and unresolved ambiguity about whether it had found something real, dangerous, delusional, or all three.