This story you’re about to read has quite the backstory. I originally signed a contract with New York Magazine for this project, but eventually, I chose to pull the story and publish independently on Substack. However, while I am publishing independently, this story has been fact-checked by professional magazine fact-checkers, and I stand by its veracity.

Thank you to the donors who supported my work on this project, including Joanna and James Bregan, and the Survival and Flourishing Fund Speculation Grant. If you would like to help me do more independent writing, including but not limited to journalism, please consider getting a paid subscription to my Substack or making a tax-deductible donation to my magazine.

A note about photos: Nevin Freeman, a former Leverager who went on the record for this story, offered to let me use his photos of life at Leverage. Nevin has a lot of photos, but we decided not to use most of them, because we thought it would take too long to get permission from everyone in every photo. (This story was originally intended to be a New York Magazine print story, so I spent most of its production assuming that the magazine would put the story through its internal illustration process; I only recently started looking for images that I could use on Substack.) I am hoping that more Leveragers will give permission in the future to use their photos, so I plan to come back to this story in a few months, and add more photos at that time. If you spent time at Leverage and you’d like to contribute photos to this story, feel free to get in touch.

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The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0

There are more things in Heaven and Earth…
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet

In 2016, a twenty-eight-year-old scientist named James Dama entered the recruitment pipeline at Leverage Research. (Disclosure: James was one of my major sources for this article, and he is also a close friend.) During the recruitment process, James received a boilerplate warning, the same one issued to all candidates at the time, which was outlined in a Leverage internal handbook.

“Self-improvement is not always easy,” went the text in the handbook. “Psychological self-improvement can be quite painful. Everyone who joins should anticipate that the process of self-improvement will involve serious emotional challenges. Does this make sense?” Then the recruiter listed “side effects” the Leverage psychology techniques appeared to cause: twitching, physical shaking, severe depression, paranoia, dreams and nightmares, and sexual arousal.

Before James arrived at Leverage, he earned an undergraduate degree from Caltech, then a PhD in chemical physics from the University of Chicago, and he got partway through a fellowship in molecular physics at Columbia University in New York City. Along the way, he grew disillusioned with academia. He saw spectacular burnout and occasional suicides among his peers. He learned that fraud allegations riddled his field. (The fraud that James first heard about in 2014 was related to Alzheimer’s research, and became a public scandal years later.) He explored political movements on both the far left and the far right, and grew uncomfortable with the academy’s narrow expectations around political ideology. One of the many internal programs at Leverage Research was a brand-new startup incubator. James thought he might transfer his physics research into a commercial context.

At its establishment in 2011, Leverage was an early node in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which advocates for using research and reason to do the most good most effectively. Yet, even among EAs, it was sometimes hard for non-Leveragers to figure out what Leverage employees did. Leveragers had a broad mandate: “You can work on stopping the degradation of modern society, figure out how to ensure artificial intelligence goes well for humanity, develop the key to ending human aging, find som…