Leverage： My Ties to a Silicon Valley Cult
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss cults and their impact on the culture of Silicon Valley. We cover a cult that fell apart, reformed, and is still operational today. We talk about why cults exist and why they have a stigma attached to them.
Transcript
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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.
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She mentions it in pieces that people who were other people's direct subordinates, so you needed to meet with them.
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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.
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You think that didn't create an intrinsic pressure to have sex with them?
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The thing that I find interesting about leverage, about the only thing I find interesting, is the novel business model.
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They're a very novel business model for a cult, but the novel business model itself was sort of cheesing the Silicon Valley environment of that time period.
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Everybody has the intentionality of being a good person.
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How good you intend to be has no correlation with how good you are.
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How good you are is dependent on your understanding of reality.
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Oh, and that's a really good example of this because we don't just have to shit all over mysticism.
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So Malcolm, since you were a wee 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 cults a lot.
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And so I thought we could go over a recent cult that formed and fell apart and theoretically has reformed and is still alive and operational today, and I can get your analysis.
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Yeah, so this is going to be the leverage video.
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Now, something I should note to our audience about us and leverage is we have a lot of connections to leverage.
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Like, I know at least a dozen people who were in this cult.
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So, yeah, so if you were in the effective altruist community or the less wrong or rationalist community in the Bay Area, in the, like, well, the period I was there.
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God, if I can remember when that was, like, early 2000s, I want to say.
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No, I was there before we met, Simone, for years.
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And leverage during, we'll say leverage 1.0, which is leverage and paradigm.
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The failed cult that we're going to be talking about existed from late 2011, early 2012 through 2019.
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So there was definitely overlap while you were in the Bay Area.
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Now, a few things that you should note is a big fallout of this is a lot of people in this cult take umbrage was it being called a cult, which is actually now, was it publicly being known as a cult?
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I should note that normatively, like, of the time when I was in Silicon Valley, and everyone I know after my time in Silicon Valley, everyone who touched it called it a cult.
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You're like, oh, I'm going to go hang out at the cult headquarter.
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Yeah, this, this, we're not a cult is some new, they like, well, at least the younger lower order members knew it was a cult, but like, it was.
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Who joins a cult as a lower order member knowing that it's a cult?
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Well, for the same reason that I'm interested in cults, in a way.
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Oh, they have this idea of, well, maybe we can construct a true metaphysical understanding of reality and like a better way of ordering our brains and the way we relate to reality and through that improve ourselves.
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Like, when I studied cult psychology, the thing that interested me about cult psychology is I was like, these people are able to significantly alter their self identities.
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Like, if our self identities are that malleable, then why not build a framework that an individual can just sort of pick up and use to rewrite who they are in the same way cults do that to people.
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And that is, that is what really interested me about, about the topic.
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And there was this sort of cool underground stigma to talking about it that way or thinking about it that way.
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Like, oh yeah, I hang out with those cultists, you know.
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Or it's almost like saying that you're, you're in a gang, maybe.
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So I, I will note that this modern framing of we're not a cult is just out of nowhere and likely due to the negative repercussions they've had of being likened to a cult instead of saying, well, we are a cult, but we're cool.
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Cause I, I, I wasn't one, you were there, you were in the Bay Area during early leverage days.
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So maybe at the end of leverage, when things started to fall apart after 2015, things were different and they started getting a little more self-conscious, but yeah, it's, I had no idea.
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So reading to me, I've been watching some leverage content recently, so I have some idea, but read to me.
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So to really understand how things went off the rails, which is where I think Malcolm really wants to delve in here and where I think things get interesting.
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It's just best to turn to Zoe Kersey's medium write-up, my experience with leverage.
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I'll give you some highlights just to give you a picture of how this went off the rails and why this was a cult from Zoe quote, people, not everyone, but definitely a lot of us genuinely thought we were going to take over the U S government.
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One of my supervisors would regularly talk about this as a daunting, but inevitable strategic reality.
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Obviously we'll do it, but, and succeed, but it seems hard.
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Another supervisor bemoaned with some performative unease that the necessity of theories about violence and military skill, because they just couldn't see any other way we could get to world takeover level.
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So here's an organization, a cult, it turns out, as you would say, that is keen on taking over the world.
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So a lot of people in my organization were talking about eventually taking over the world.
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So you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're finding this is not bad, not bad.
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Again, this is one of those categories where like, fine, you want to take over the world, take over the world.
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And you do need to, but, but I, I would say that the group was stupid.
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The more you'll hear about this group, the more you'll be like, oh, wow.
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There must've been a really large number of stupid people in like the early singularity EA and rationalist community.
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And I was like, there still are, but like astoundingly stupid.
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Like the idea that you're like, okay, well, we're going to take over the world one day.
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I'm just saying, but they were, there were people who had their own opinions in there.
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Uh, and yes, it was, it was a thing, but yeah, so that, that is one place where it went off
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the rails and that is a spicy detail, but I guess you're going to play Liz Lemon in this
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Also, I think it's, it's uniquely ballsy for a cult.
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Normally they're just like, we're all going to go to heaven or something.
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Zoe also very conveniently has a numbered list, which is, I think very EA rationalist community
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So I will read to you to give you a picture of where the culture eventually ended up.
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Here's a list of some of the things I experienced by the end of my time there.
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One, two to six hour long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub-faction alignment group
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would attempt to articulate a demon, which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival
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groups, its nature and effects and get it out of our system using debugging tools.
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Well, no, so this is actually interesting to talk about debugging.
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So something you'll often have in groups that are attempting to manipulate you psychologically.
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And it's important to know because like, okay, if you could actually rework your personality
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in your brain, which I believe you can, like, would you not want access to those tools?
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And would you want somebody else to make sure you didn't utilize them in a way that was
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deleterious or caused negative downstream effects?
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I think the real core is who's setting the goals.
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So with something like debugging, it is very easy to brainwash someone.
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If you are in the room with one other person who is asking you about your past and who you
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are expected to often admit sins to, that's another thing that's really important.
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Actually, if you have to look at them in the eyes for long periods of time, this can very
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I was like, could I like, where should you notice this?
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So whenever you're in a group and this is something that's happening, that group has developed
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Like you have a group of people who are trying to like talk through things, right?
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Like trying to work on themselves, like do interpersonal work.
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And so they get in groups of two where they talk through things.
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And then, uh-oh, accidentally they decided to do this in a hierarchical way because they
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wanted people who were more competent to be sort of helping the people who were less
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And now that hierarchy ends up self-expanding because everyone who's doing it is supposed
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And now, oh, you accidentally just evolved a cult.
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Now, in Jeff's case, because I know a lot about leverage, I do believe that he intentionally
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Googled brainwashing techniques just because they look like they were a collection of obvious
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But yeah, this is why you see this in leverage right here, which is actually very similar
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Yeah, debugging sessions sound like audits from Scientology.
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I'd say they're quite a bit different from Catholic confessions.
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Actually, I can go into how they're different from Catholic confessions and why Catholic
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confessions are so uniquely healthy among cultural subgroups.
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When you go to a Catholic confession, you are taking the sins you feel you committed, okay?
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You are volunteering those to an external party who you don't know, so you cannot accidentally
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become influenced by them as an individual, which is very important.
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You are unloading them more to like an amorphous entity, the church.
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You don't theoretically know who they are, but you probably do.
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It's pretty hard for an individual priest to use this system to manipulate an individual.
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So that's one thing that's really important because of how simplistic the interaction is.
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You tell me what I need to do to make them not important anymore.
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Now, psychologically, this has a lot of benefits doing this because now you're taking the things
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that are psychologically weighing you down and you are giving them to an external entity,
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but they are not saying those things don't matter or you should learn to not care about
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the things, which is what modern psychology does, which I actually think it's pretty
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Those things do matter and here is how you play penance for them.
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And it's some easy physical act like saying a prayer a number of times or doing prayer beads
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Very eloquently and well-designed psychologically healthy system.
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Now, psychologically unhealthy systems will often have you in these stories do full personal
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narratives, often with the goal of discovering quote unquote trauma or where thetans
00:11:59.340
That's what they're looking for is some sort of inciting event that they can then say,
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ah, this is why you have these problems and you need me to deal with this inciting event.
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They will usually choose something tied to your parents or birth culture as the inciting event
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because it makes it easier to draw a distance between you and your birth culture.
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Um, so if you, if you see a group that's doing that, what they are trying to do is drive a
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wedge between you and your, your support network while also recontextualizing yourself as needing
00:12:35.660
Well, you haven't even commented on one of the most interesting elements of this, which
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I think is the group faction that she alludes to here.
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Keep in mind that Zoe is talking about how the debugging sessions weren't just this type
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of audit that you're describing Scientology style, but this is one in which the alignment
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group of which Zoe was a member was attempting to articulate a demon that had infiltrated their
00:13:04.760
Do you think that these rival groups were intentionally created?
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They, I don't, I've not heard of them in any cult environment, but I have heard of them
00:13:11.800
in that one where they took a boy's camp and made them hate each other and things got so
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So I know, I think that the rival groups thing naturally evolved and it actually evolved because
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sort of an inefficiency in the way that the organization was created.
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Side note here, I find it odd that they thought that they could create these ultra cooperative
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And yet the people acting within their organization were demonstrably less good at cooperating with
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each other and less efficient than people outside of their organization.
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Like to see around you, everything collapsing and not realizing that the psychological techniques
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that you are implementing are markedly worse than even the terrible psychological techniques
00:14:14.120
So they believed in two types of things at different parts of the story here.
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They are both basically like concepts that one person can create and plant in another
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Yeah, there's, well, you and I would contextualize them as like a packaged meme, but they don't,
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they sort of see it more like a bomb or a security camera that somebody placed in their brain
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that is like watching them and will like give them like vibes of like who planted it there
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or that demons, I think also can enter from the other world and, and engage with them.
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So something that is very important in understanding leverage is he wanted to create an integrated
00:15:02.900
And the way that he decided to do that was what I would actually call sort of bog standard
00:15:08.880
And so what is he combining, which is bog standard mysticism.
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If people know what I mean, bog standard mysticism is the belief that there's some sort of
00:15:21.900
And that is also God, that extra, that, that medium, that ultra reality is actually God.
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And that, that reality can be engaged with through certain types of corrupted mental states.
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What those states are depends on which group of mystics you're with.
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And he came up with honestly pretty bog standard mystical beliefs like demons exist and stuff like
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that. The core thing that makes leverage different from other groups in the way that it formed and
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the way that it was structured is that it paid its members to be members. So leverage would pay
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you to live in a leverage house and you had to commit to live in a leverage house for a year.
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And so who's going to do that? First of all, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's people who are
00:16:01.480
already, you know, on the outs with society. Often, you know, they don't have a family where
00:16:05.200
they're living. They don't have a, you know, a support.
00:16:07.320
Well, I think common themes seem to be that these are recent grads who may have had some
00:16:12.120
short-term jobs. Like Zoe, for example, had done some acting. She'd done some admin work and that
00:16:17.740
was kind of it. So she didn't have a big career already started. No one who did could do something
00:16:26.000
No, she was, I can tell from the profile. She was a quote unquote actor who was paid to give acting
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classes once a week. No, she was being paid around. Keep in mind, these were all like big
00:16:35.780
polyamorous houses. She was being kept for, to be used for sex.
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We'll have to say, legally, this is all very alleged and you're-
00:16:51.820
The other people in these groups are like competent individuals. Like many people in these
00:16:56.260
groups, they would get, so it was hard to get into leverage because, you know, it was a
00:17:00.640
closed resource. It was like a cult that paid you to be a member, gave you housing,
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and gave you access to well-connected, wealthy individuals. Okay?
00:17:10.300
Yeah. Well, and people going into it, I think genuinely thought they were saving the world.
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They didn't think that they were being used for things.
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It was a cult playing on the easiest difficulty conceivable. So it did a lot of inefficient
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things that a normal cult that couldn't afford to pay its members wouldn't have done.
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Now you're asking, how did a cult get a bunch of money to pay its members to participate?
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Because they sold itself to wealthy people as a group that was going to do like systemic
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functional research on this mystical realm. Like mystical perennialism is a fairly common
00:17:50.740
What is mystical? Wait, define mystical perennialism. This is new to me.
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Perennialism means they believe there is some truth in every religious tradition.
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Mysticalism is a fabric of reality thing I mentioned before. And so they basically told
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these wealthy people, we are going to do systemic research on this other side of reality, on like
00:18:11.640
a, you know, mystical truth. That is not like a terrible idea if you're actually going to do like
00:18:17.660
evidence-based research, but they weren't doing evidence-based research. The real con, and this is
00:18:23.820
interesting because this caused the whole thing for the structure to be inverted. If you're contrasting
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it with a traditional cult. Okay. A traditional cult recruits people and takes their money.
00:18:35.200
Yeah. The source of income comes from the recruits, the converts, right? Yeah.
00:18:43.320
They used converts who they were paying to be converts and paying to house, to sell a product
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up to wealthy people. Part of this product was, you know, the research that they were doing.
00:19:00.580
Yeah. But part of this product was also the humans that were being brainwashed.
00:19:08.160
Yes. And when we should clarify that the mission of the, well, obviously the mission of the cult was
00:19:15.800
to save the world, but the general project that they established, at least for Leverage 1.0,
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Leverage 2.0, who knows, was to create extremely highly effective people who are also cooperative.
00:19:27.320
So apparently it's a misnomer that they're trying to learn how to sort of mint Elon Musk's because
00:19:32.400
Elon Musk is not very cooperative, but they were trying to basically mint very highly effective
00:19:37.140
people. And there was this premise, at least stated that it would be possible to take the right type
00:19:43.640
of person. And they apparently vetted people for this before offering them these paid positions and
00:19:50.100
housing who could, through all of this coaching, through this, these, these debugging sessions,
00:19:58.060
et cetera, become these people just to provide context.
00:20:01.900
So the goal, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, so the, the, basically you could almost think of it
00:20:05.480
as a cult startup. It was pitching to these rich people. Yes, we're going to do this mystical
00:20:11.560
research. And that was what most of the rich people who funded it were actually interested in,
00:20:14.880
was the mystical research. They also were pitching it sort of like a startup. Like,
00:20:18.780
well, we're going to figure out how to make these ultra effective people who then send money back
00:20:23.240
to the central organization. Like that was the idea. When they say cooperative, they mean subservient,
00:20:27.780
like that they're going to continue to support this organization and its mission that turned them
00:20:33.460
into these Ubermitches. What their goal was, was to create spiritual Ubermitches that could out
00:20:39.720
compete within competitive capitalist economies, other individuals. And that was like their game plan.
00:20:44.940
Well, of course they failed to do that because they, they, they, we can talk about why they failed,
00:20:50.660
which I think it's actually a very specific reason why they failed. And they have changed
00:20:54.320
their business plan with leverage too. They've actually moved to a crypto product. And so what
00:20:58.800
they do is this crypto product is they have moved from, because most of the wealthy people that they
00:21:03.900
otherwise could raise money from, like they could with leverage one now know that one, they are a cult
00:21:09.540
to Jeff is just an incompetent buffoon. Like, I'm sorry, like everything I've heard about him,
00:21:15.280
his theories, they are bog standard mystic cult. They are not sophisticated ideas. They are not even
00:21:22.740
sophisticated. It's like a guy picked up a book on brainwashing and then read a few, he is not a bright
00:21:29.200
guy. He's really charismatic enough to get all of these people to sign on, to get all of these people
00:21:33.540
to hold him with a very high level of reference and to raise enough money to do multiple times.
00:21:40.280
Brainwashing someone isn't hard. If I wanted to start a cult by brainwashing people in the way he
00:21:44.640
started this cult, I could have done that ages ago. Why didn't you? Because my goal was always to free
00:21:51.540
people. It was to give them the tools. Oh, right. Yeah. Your whole, yeah. The thesis was, can you use cult
00:21:57.100
methods on yourself to become a better person, not coerce other people, right? Not coerce other
00:22:03.220
people to be your servant. You're ruining our evil reputation. Stop. I know I will actually,
00:22:10.320
well, people could argue, like, remember, like a lot of people know, you know, I slept with over
00:22:13.980
a hundred people. I got really, really good at getting people to sleep with me.
00:22:18.320
One of the things I implemented in that process were some of the brainwashing techniques.
00:22:23.200
Bringing it back. Thanks, Malcolm. Bringing it back.
00:22:25.060
Bringing it back. It's not that I never utilize these techniques in my life. I just had no
00:22:30.700
interest in creating a self-replicating memetic set. I may have, to some extent, you know,
00:22:37.260
like when I was younger and horny, I was not the most ethical person in the world. Like,
00:22:41.120
I could definitely be a better person. If you're an addict to anything,
00:22:44.340
you will do unethical stuff. And I think most young horny men could be argued to be addicts.
00:22:49.560
Yeah. So I look at these, these sort of sessions that he's talking about. And I did this
00:22:53.400
with girls. Very easy. Like, like, and then, and then you realize, oh, like, and this happened
00:22:58.940
to me, when you can get sex whenever you want with anyone you want, it gets really boring.
00:23:04.380
You think that's how he turned into world domination?
00:23:07.940
No, I don't think he, I think that we'll talk about what, what he screwed up. It wasn't the
00:23:13.540
world domination that screwed up. It wasn't even the goals that screwed up. It was the touching
00:23:17.480
mysticism that ruined everything. Um, back to the themes. Well, if you look at the things he did,
00:23:24.960
when other people would give an idea, he would always shoot it down and then maybe like give
00:23:28.520
it again, repackaged to the next week or something. Only ideas that came from Jeff were allowed to be
00:23:33.380
thought of as serious ideas was in this group. According to Zoe. Yes. According to Zoe, but
00:23:39.780
that's what I've heard as well. Yeah. So if this is true, if, you know, Jeff just shoots down ideas all
00:23:46.100
the time and everything like that, that's very easy to do when you adopt a mystical framework.
00:23:49.560
And it's one of the core problems was mystical frameworks. If your access to truth is supernatural,
00:23:55.940
i.e. it is achieved through states that only you can achieve. Well, this causes a problem. Either
00:24:00.740
you can't communicate with anyone else's source to truth. So there's no cross interpretability or
00:24:06.380
one individual has access to a source of truth above all other individual source of truth.
00:24:11.660
So if Jeff, it sort of disagrees with your belief about like the way psychology works,
00:24:15.480
the way whatever works, because he has mystical fortification for these beliefs, he's able
00:24:21.220
to just lean on that. And so there can never be any real study or advancement in a meaningful
00:24:28.360
context. Um, that could be the way that you see this as a secular person. And like people
00:24:35.740
need to understand my hatred of mysticism is both theological and secular. Clearly that's
00:24:41.920
that's why mysticism is so bad. But from a theological standpoint, I can say, well, okay,
00:24:50.060
so suppose they had good means and they were trying to tap into this mystical realm. Why did it read
00:24:55.520
with like everyone I know who was involved in this was like, this really messed me up. Like
00:24:59.040
this is not just a, her thing. Like everyone I've heard of who's involved with it. It's like, yeah,
00:25:03.560
this was really, even, even the, those who seem to be defending it report, having gone through a lot
00:25:11.520
of healing after it and are no contact with most of the people who were involved. So yeah,
00:25:16.780
kind of damning. Yeah. So no, I don't think I, I, I, you don't just get this here. I actually argue
00:25:23.320
that Stanford has a weird evolved cult in it called touchy feely. Um, yeah, it's a class that
00:25:28.980
basically is a cult. I started it and I was like, wait, you're trying to bring, you started taking
00:25:33.480
class. You didn't start the class. Yeah. I started taking the class and I just was like, these are
00:25:37.800
all brainwash techniques from the eighties that you're using right now. And if you talk to people
00:25:41.720
who completed it, I'll be like, it's the best thing ever. It transformed me for life. It blah,
00:25:44.940
blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, because there was a bunch of brainwash techniques from the eighties
00:25:48.000
that like, we are taught now in psychology, make sure you never do this. It can cause dependency.
00:25:53.320
Yeah. And keep in mind, these are, they were uniquely long classes. They typically took place
00:25:57.260
at the end of the day. They would, people would come home crying, that kind of thing. This is not
00:26:01.980
a normal class. No, no, no, no. They, they would intentionally sleep deprive you. They were at the
00:26:06.160
end of the day, they were in an incredibly emotionally charged situation where like,
00:26:09.540
you really couldn't win. It was, it was stupidly, obviously just brainwashing. And I do not know,
00:26:15.720
like I, I, I wanted to bring this up, but I knew I couldn't bring this up because so many people
00:26:19.640
have gone through the brainwashing session that if I was like, you know, that's a
00:26:23.260
brainwashing seminar you sent me to, they'd be like, but all of our top staff at Stanford
00:26:27.900
business school has gone through the brainwashing thing and they love it. They say it's actually
00:26:32.700
become the focus of their entire lives. And I'm like, okay, well, listen, but touchy feely isn't as
00:26:41.100
bad. It's just brainwashing to in debt you for your entire life to a corporation, the Stanford
00:26:46.200
business school, but leverage is bad because I actually don't think that the type done within
00:26:51.620
Stanford causes that much damage. The type done within leverage is incredibly damaging
00:26:55.860
because it's mystical brainwashing that levels one person's personal and subjective experience
00:27:02.900
of reality above other people's, which always leads to deleterious outcomes and prevents any
00:27:08.100
real research from taking place. That's why all they have are their quote unquote notes and they've
00:27:13.000
And it's such a shame too, because that whole apartment building they were living in could have
00:27:18.580
been this incredible psychological research study.
00:27:23.740
Well, no, but what's really cool, you can still do it, like find all their notes and then do a study
00:27:29.120
on it because it's interesting. But if you look at the theological perspective on the mystic, it's like
00:27:35.680
if their hypothesis was true and you could study the mystical realm and use it to improve people,
00:27:40.480
people like these would have ended up all successful, or at least some success cases,
00:27:45.700
instead of all severely psychologically damaged. So if I'm outside of my sector-
00:27:52.520
Not wildly, as far as I've heard. I've heard of people like getting out. I don't know anyone
00:27:58.040
You're going to take this part that I'm about to say out, right?
00:28:01.280
That doesn't matter. I said anyone who's successful has a non-positive perception.
00:28:05.220
Oh, okay. I thought you were saying anyone who came out wasn't successful. That's what I heard.
00:28:08.420
No, no. Okay. Anyone who came out, I should clarify, the successful people who came out
00:28:12.880
of it typically have a negative perception of it. If it was able to work, so then the question is,
00:28:17.640
and they would say it did psychological harm to them. So then the question is, okay, if they're
00:28:21.960
right in these mystical beliefs, if they actually are contacting some sort of, then what they have
00:28:26.640
demonstrated is you should never attempt to do this because you will release real demons.
00:28:31.580
Well, actually, funny aside, and I feel like this must be some kind of Bay Area contagion,
00:28:36.720
I feel like my father participated in things almost exactly like this in the seventies and
00:28:44.280
eighties in the Bay Area, like in the same, like five mile vicinity of leverage. Because I remember
00:28:51.560
my dad, one, like he went to these like psychic workshops and he went through Est, which is a
00:28:58.360
little cult-like as well. And I remember him telling me at one point when I was a kid,
00:29:02.940
when I was trying to ask him about all this psychic stuff, he's like, yeah, man, like we were messing
00:29:08.380
with some pretty dangerous things. You have to keep in mind that when you open your mind to these
00:29:11.500
things, like they can get in. And I just took that away to like, I contextualize that as a kid quite
00:29:17.380
helpfully is this is what happens when you allow yourself to believe something and fear something that
00:29:21.860
then it actually, you get really afraid of it. But I think he actually got, I think these people
00:29:27.220
thought that bringing up demons and I think having leverage, why is this always in the Bay Area?
00:29:32.800
Most long-lived philosophical traditions culturally evolve prohibitions against this form of mysticism.
00:29:40.200
Now you can say that there is a theological truth for them, or you can say they did this for secular
00:29:44.420
reasons, but it's just, oh, by the way, people might be like, not Jews. I'm like, actually, yes,
00:29:49.500
Jews. Look at the Kabbalah. Sorry, hold on. What's the word I'm looking for? If you look at the word
00:29:55.700
Baal Shem, you're going to get the Baal Shem Tal, the guy who originally started the recent Hasidic
00:30:00.640
site. Baal Shems used to be thought of as mostly con artists within Jewish communities and were
00:30:05.880
generally looked down upon. That's why he's called like the good Baal Shem. So when Kabbalah originally
00:30:12.700
started, it was fighting against an upstream fight. But when the Kabbalistically, the extremely
00:30:20.640
Kabbalistically influenced sects of Judaism began to gain prevalence, they were fighting against
00:30:25.700
evolved mechanisms that said you should think of these sorts of things as huckstery. They just
00:30:30.100
overcame them. But generally every group in history is like, yes, if you touch the realms of chaos,
00:30:37.160
your mind gets corrupted. Don't do it. And that's a good theological framing for a secular truth,
00:30:41.860
which is when you engage with these sorts of mystical concepts, it always leads to negative
00:30:46.620
extra. It doesn't go well. Yeah. Just don't do it. And people will say, when I'll talk to religious
00:30:51.600
people about this, they'll be like, no, it causes fanaticism. It causes a fervent belief. It causes,
00:30:58.800
you know, visions which reaffirm a person's face. And it's like, yeah, but all those negative things
00:31:02.980
are happening in leverage too. Like all of the good stuff you're getting is getting from the non-mystical
00:31:08.300
side of things. The mystical, like those things, the fanaticism, which is created by whether or not
00:31:15.160
it's this realm of evil, or it's this realm of mental corruption, or it's this just completely,
00:31:21.200
you're allowing some people to say that there's subjective experiences of reality, trump other
00:31:25.140
people's subjective experiences of reality, and everyone should be engaged in their own. It's always
00:31:28.660
going to lead to these negative externalities, which is why I'm so anti-mystic. But something that's
00:31:32.840
interesting here is the framing of this for a lot of people. I think the people who are at the high
00:31:38.980
levels of this, what they see is the collapse. Reason is that they accidentally unleashed a bunch
00:31:44.100
of demons. Wait, people actually believe that? They don't just think that people devolved into weird
00:31:48.880
social, what's the word when you have a schizophrenic break? Psychosis? No, no, no. Outsiders who are
00:31:56.920
secularists believe psychosis. And if you look at what they did, it was basically like a house.
00:32:02.080
Insiders who left don't think it was psychosis? I'll explain. Okay. Okay, so basically everyone
00:32:09.360
involved was like a house, where almost everyone else, they were the strict hierarchy, and within
00:32:14.760
the hierarchy, people were just constantly watching you, taking notes on you, as if you were their test
00:32:19.460
subject, so they had this sense of superiority over everyone else. Well, in many cases, their financial
00:32:24.240
compensation and role in the house was contingent on them working on you, so yes, they kind of had to do it.
00:32:29.320
Yes, yes. But keep in mind this cycle, if you know that everyone you're interacting with is
00:32:34.340
writing about you at the end of the day, like, oh, here's this, and trying to understand you and
00:32:39.020
your motivations. If you can't see how that would be psychologically harmful in mass, you just don't
00:32:44.180
understand human psychology. Of course that's going to lead to negative externalities. Of course it's
00:32:49.120
going to lead to everyone attempting to sort of overanalyze everything they're doing in the
00:32:54.540
movement, having this sort of panicky self-reflection and existential dread, and it will cause the
00:33:01.780
creation of little cabals that are going to fight against each other, because you sort of need-
00:33:07.680
Because you need teammates to sort of protect you and everything like that in this incredibly
00:33:12.020
hostile environment, where everyone is constantly psychoanalyzing you, but is untrained to do so.
00:33:16.940
Well, so then I can give you a quote from A Taste of How Out of Control This Got, which is number
00:33:21.560
two, which is related to this, just to give an example to people from a firsthand account.
00:33:26.880
Quote, people in my group commenting on a rival group having done magic that weekend and clearly
00:33:32.540
having powered up and saying we needed to now go debug the effects of being around that powered up
00:33:39.100
group, which they said was attacking them or otherwise affecting their ability to trust their
00:33:43.620
own perceptions. Number three, related as well, accusations of being thrown around.
00:33:49.060
Oh, sorry. Accusations being thrown around about people leaving objects similar to demons in other
00:33:55.400
people and people trying to sort out where the bad object originated and if it had been left
00:34:01.400
intentionally or malevolently or by action slash subconsciously.
00:34:07.060
So as a secularist, when you put on a secular hat and you're approaching any of this, it's very obvious
00:34:13.540
Yeah. Like this is obviously a psychologically unhealthy environment. However, these people
00:34:18.180
are not secularists. When you have entered this community, you have accepted that there is some
00:34:23.760
other like supernatural realm that you are studying.
00:34:28.760
Yeah. Well, I mean, she gave a definition of objects. Would that be helpful?
00:34:34.260
Objects were something that became a topic of study at Leverage about which Jeff gave presentations.
00:34:39.120
Aside from Simone, do you think Jeff intentionally created the concept of objects or this was just
00:34:47.900
Jeff is just not that bright. I'm sorry. But anyway, continue.
00:34:50.960
They were considered to be sort of like autonomous psychological bits that you could accidentally or
00:34:55.840
purposefully leave in another person's mind to affect or control them. If intentional,
00:35:01.880
it might cause them to subtly view you a different way, make more real or less real certain concepts,
00:35:06.840
change their experience of the passage of time, say, or make them more susceptible to mind-reading
00:35:16.620
This is just meant to stoke paranoia. Like, I don't think that he may have been trying to
00:35:21.140
stoke paranoia, but it's also just not a particularly novel or complicated concept. He's describing like
00:35:27.360
a self-replicating memetic package, like a meme bomb, basically. But that's not the way he sees it.
00:35:35.280
To your point of things going off the rails because they went mystical, I think it's also
00:35:40.660
helpful to give these additional examples she presented as an example, just how mystical they
00:35:45.740
got. Because some of this could probably be construed as, oh, they're doing this weird
00:35:50.360
psychological research. They're just trying to use weird words to explain a phenomenon that they're
00:35:54.760
trying to coin as psychological researchers and they'll publish it. But here she says, number four,
00:36:00.620
people doing seances seriously. I was under the impression the purpose was to call on demonic
00:36:06.000
energies and use their power to affect the practitioner's social standing. So seances.
00:36:12.040
She also has number five, former rationalists clearing their homes of that energy using crystals.
00:36:18.540
And this is where I think your point about mysticism is really strong, Malcolm, extra strong, because
00:36:23.260
rationalists were, it was like, they were like a different Bay Area cult, but the standard
00:36:28.640
of that religion was just how much based on scientific research your life was being lived to a great
00:36:35.860
extent. You know, just how completely reasoned and non-mystical you were. And the fact that someone
00:36:43.520
could go from being a rationalist to using crystals to clear their homes of bad energy,
00:36:50.680
that's wild. Well, I mean, but that can happen. When you engage with the mystical, you allow for
00:36:58.020
forms of truth to come from things other than objective evidence and objective reality. And so
00:37:03.340
you're like, wait, really? People who were in this, even afterwards, still believe that they were just
00:37:08.620
attacked by demons. Like, of course they do. As soon as you open yourself to these sorts of explanations
00:37:14.600
and you're trying to explain why these bad things happened to you when you were engaging in these
00:37:21.880
environments, you're going to come up with mystical explanations for it. And that's what they did. They
00:37:28.620
thought they were attacked by demons that they had accidentally summoned.
00:37:32.420
Yeah. And what's so notable too, is that this was so damaging to the members of the group. So
00:37:38.960
to provide her number six, seven, and eight on this list, which give, I think, good illustrations of how
00:37:45.600
people came away damaged to your earlier point and prove your earlier point. Number six, much talk in
00:37:51.280
theorizing on the subject of intention reading, which was something like mind reading. Jeff gave multiple
00:37:56.620
presentations on this, which of course, like you said, would have people acting weird and feeling
00:38:00.500
paranoid. Seven, I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally
00:38:06.140
invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup, who unfortunately
00:38:12.400
were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires for me that were
00:38:17.760
mostly definitely not in my interest. Eight, I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid
00:38:27.040
myself of specific demons. I felt like picked up from other members of leverage. If this sounds
00:38:32.680
insane, it's because it was, I was completely, Oh, it was a crazy experience. I'm like any I've ever
00:38:39.940
had. And there are many more weird anecdotes where that came from. Again, it's a really good read and
00:38:45.160
you should read it the whole thing, but yeah, but I think, yeah, this, this hammers home your entire
00:38:51.140
point that it was the mysticism that brought them off. This is why you don't engage with mysticism.
00:38:55.900
You could have done something like this. That could have been quite interesting without the
00:38:59.720
mysticism. Well, and to that point, I'd love for you to open up, um, a, one of their very,
00:39:05.900
very early plans. It's a, it's a flow chart. I'll open it up here. Because I think this can show
00:39:11.060
how such a well-intentioned and wide spanning project that I'm sure this was pitched to some
00:39:19.900
of the people who donated initial funds to leverage 1.0 got really excited about. And the
00:39:27.400
plan, Malcolm, you'll probably include, uh, some of this on the screen. The, the end of the goal was
00:39:33.440
global wellbeing. So yeah, they, they probably really did intend to take over the government
00:39:38.940
because you kind of can't do all of the things that they wanted to, which included, they were
00:39:44.120
going to really solve everything. Education, ensure universal access to excellent educational
00:39:48.780
resources. They were also going to cure disease and ensure universal access to recreational and
00:39:55.500
artistic opportunities. They were going to provide basically universal basic income and access to
00:40:00.780
social goods. And they were going to eliminate all harmful governments somehow, which is probably
00:40:07.360
where their whole, we have to take over the government thing came over and reduce risk of global
00:40:12.540
catastrophic events, which also would probably need to involve governmental control while also
00:40:17.680
minimizing harmful norms. That is to say, quote, have everyone choose to remove all harmful social
00:40:22.700
rules that can be removed, unquote, which is also very coercive and creepy per our standards. But still
00:40:29.580
like these people basically just wanted to fix the world and make heaven on earth, right? Like that was
00:40:34.120
it. Yeah, no, I, it's very clear their, their plan is eventually, I mean, they were trying to
00:40:40.640
create a memetic structure very similar to, to what I'm trying to do in a way that could eventually
00:40:46.460
become the dominant memetic structure on earth. When instead, what I'm trying to do is create a
00:40:51.120
memetic structure that can become a, um, a, reach a stable optimum with other memetic structures that
00:40:57.280
allow people different from them to exist, which is, which is quite different from their goal in that
00:41:01.840
respect. So it's not true world domination. And the, just the core difference is, is they engage with
00:41:09.100
mysticism. They engage with saying, we're going to do all this, but we don't need to have the secular
00:41:15.400
backing. Like whenever I give a theological position, I always say, and here's the secular
00:41:21.360
reason you would take the same position. They didn't need to do that. They never did it. And when
00:41:26.740
you look at this flow chart, there's nothing, at least I haven't looked at every single box on it,
00:41:32.360
but there's nothing to me that reads mysticism in the beginning. In fact, it, what it seems to more or
00:41:38.260
less be is we're going to make the world perfect by our standards at least. And we're going to do so
00:41:44.660
by creating incredibly effective people and have those people create nonprofits and businesses that
00:41:51.160
get more resources and get more control until eventually we run absolutely everything and have
00:41:55.840
infinite resources and can solve all the problems. That was it. And of course they started with trying
00:42:01.360
to create the world's most effective people. Cause they felt like that was the most limited resource.
00:42:05.100
You couldn't start an amazing nonprofit. You couldn't start an amazing business and solve
00:42:10.000
market problems and find arbitral opportunities. If you didn't have these high agency cooperative
00:42:15.660
people. And it seems to, I disagree with you on that's why they started with that. Really? Okay.
00:42:20.500
Why do you sell them as a revenue source? That was the core reason they wanted to create effective
00:42:24.260
people. Well, that's part of it. Yeah. Is that they would generate the nonprofits and the companies
00:42:29.980
that created revenue, but those were also supposed to be the nonprofits and the companies that did the
00:42:34.280
research that cured disease and created amazing education. Yeah, no, it was a plan for creating
00:42:40.560
power based on the hypothesis that if they expose people to the mystical realm, it improves them
00:42:46.080
instead of destroys them. And what we saw is the hypothesis, the opposite turned out to be true.
00:42:51.660
When you, it engages mystical realm for both secular and theological reasons, it destroys your soul
00:42:57.060
or whatever you want to say, or your brain or your ability to think rationally. And so now we need to
00:43:02.400
look at what they've become with leverage 2.0. So leverage 2.0, because now most competent rich people
00:43:08.500
who are in any way connected to the Silicon Valley ecosystem, you know, they know that this doesn't
00:43:13.140
work. At the very least, they know that whatever Jeff did last time summoned a bunch of demons, you
00:43:18.200
know, even if they believe that everything else happened and they're just not going to work with him
00:43:21.520
again. So now he needs to find another way to get money to fund this. Now he is not quite smart enough
00:43:27.920
to start a real cult. To start a real cult, he'd have to start a group that, you know, funded from
00:43:32.480
its members. Like the people who were going through it were both competent and believed in enough to
00:43:37.640
fund it, which is, which is a hard thing to do. You know, one way you could do that is to exhaust
00:43:42.080
your members wealth, like them to give everything to you when they join the cult, but then you need
00:43:46.040
to constantly recruit new members to keep things basically running. And that's stupid. Like if you're
00:43:50.420
going to create a really effective cult, you need the people to be able to earn money
00:43:53.460
while still paying it. Now, what he's doing now is a crypto iteration where he is trying to build
00:44:00.540
the cult into the product, you know, still pay people to be a member and then fundraise through
00:44:07.360
making the product exclusive and cool enough that people want to engage with it, you know,
00:44:12.140
through this belief that they're going to have a lot of access and everything like that in the future,
00:44:15.140
which is doable when you're dealing with, you know, bog standard mystics. I think when people begin
00:44:21.120
to see mysticism, like leverage and stuff like that coming from an external force, they can begin
00:44:27.160
to see why I have so much, ah, when I see it within their own world, right? Like they see me walk up
00:44:33.840
and encounter mysticism and, and, uh, and they don't get why I'm doing that because they're like,
00:44:40.960
but this has been here for a couple hundred years at this point, you know, this has always been part of
00:44:45.900
this tradition. And I'm like, no, it just came a couple hundred years ago. What are you doing?
00:44:51.260
That's the dangerous bomb you're wielding. And with leverage, it's the same, right? Like,
00:44:57.360
or not with leverage, it's the same. With leverage, it's a good external way to see how mysticism
00:45:01.200
can destroy otherwise well-intentioned individuals. The problem is, is that if you move, remove mysticism
00:45:08.900
from what they were doing, then what he was doing was just psychology and education, which is sort of
00:45:15.540
like what we're doing, right? If you look at the Collins Institute, it's like, how can we at scale
00:45:20.920
create more effective people? But we are doing it with a completely different framework than him,
00:45:29.260
which is saying, but what if we can do it in a pluralistic way where they're able to maintain
00:45:33.120
their birth culture? So, so instead of doing what he did, we're like, you go into his educational
00:45:37.840
system, you go into his psychological framing and you need to adopt everything he subjectively
00:45:43.120
believes about reality. You need to presume is true. Yeah. Everything he did seem to be very
00:45:46.820
unifying and unified. Whereas, and this is the problem with mysticism, you know, it leads in that
00:45:53.000
direction, right? Like, well, if this is ultimate choice, then everyone has to believe it. Whereas
00:45:57.360
we take the exact opposite approach, right? We're like, well, truce emerges from different ideas
00:46:02.700
competing in an ecosystem. And so that, that, that causes us to say, well, we'll create an education
00:46:07.640
system. We'll eventually take over the world with the Collins Institute. It's called the Institute at
00:46:12.420
that point. You've got leverage versus the Institute, but we will be able to be efficacious
00:46:17.060
in the way that we lay this out. You know, I think we make our fans' lives better because we basically
00:46:22.340
lay everything out for them. Like when he would do something like do all the things and that could
00:46:27.380
potentially brainwash, whatever I suggest, like brainwashing techniques, I'm like, this is a
00:46:31.720
brainwashing technique. Here's how you might be able to use it to benefit yourself, but be careful.
00:46:36.920
But yeah, to, to the mystical thing, I think through leverage, somebody can see why they may
00:46:42.660
have blind spots in things that are just like culturally and ancestrally close to them and
00:46:47.460
not understand why we view them with such antagonism and fear and genuine fear. Like, like I, I view
00:46:54.820
mystical engagement as really dangerous. And I don't think that everyone who engages with it is like
00:47:01.540
permanently damaged. But I think that when you like at the community begin to engage with it
00:47:08.340
like this and certain individuals can like Jeff can then utilize this to brain hack people pretty
00:47:14.340
quickly. And then there was a pushback, which was like, this isn't a cult. It's a, here's all the
00:47:20.540
cult things we do. Um, why do you think they started trying to distance themselves so vehemently from the
00:47:26.340
cult branding? If you indeed are correct about them being so open about it in early leverage.
00:47:32.280
Yeah. Now keep in mind, well, a lot of groups, you go to early singularitarians, they're like,
00:47:36.780
we're a cult. You got to early, they may have meant it kind of jokingly, but was leverage. It was taken
00:47:42.220
differently because like they obviously were a cult. Um, and keep in mind, you know, these are,
00:47:47.460
everyone has to live in the house. They're all poly or a lot of them are polyamorous and they're being
00:47:52.180
paid by the house and you could be fired if you don't please your superiors. Like to it, you don't
00:47:59.540
see how this would basically lead to a garden of sex slaves. There's really nothing else that could
00:48:05.720
come out of this. That was the, always the in the state. As soon as you structured things this way.
00:48:13.740
Well, I mean, no, just think, I'm not saying like everyone in leverage is a perfect saint. Okay.
00:48:19.640
You would then have somebody who is supposed to constantly be watching over you, who is allowed
00:48:24.800
to have sex with you. Cause that often happened. She mentioned it in pieces that people who were
00:48:30.080
other people's direct subordinates. So you needed to meet with them. You needed to do these life
00:48:33.900
counseling things where they would debug you and you could get fired if you didn't please them.
00:48:38.800
And you would lose a home and a source of income and have a big blink spot on your resume.
00:48:44.120
You think that didn't create an intrinsic pressure to have sex with them?
00:48:48.060
Well, when you put it that way and then the house is run by this stud, right? Who's like, well,
00:48:58.200
you know, I am the number one, you know, enlightened guy of all enlightened guys. And I have access to
00:49:03.980
truth and I can basically kick anyone out who disagrees with me in any meaningful way. The, the thing
00:49:09.920
that I find interesting about leverage, about the only thing I find interesting is the novel business
00:49:15.580
model novel business model for a cult, but, but the novel business model itself was sort of cheesing
00:49:22.440
the Silicon Valley environment at that time period to hustle ultra wealthy people. Not, you know,
00:49:29.240
it's that impressive to me that somebody was able to hustle ultra wealthy people with bog standard
00:49:34.220
mysticism. Like, no, no, not really. Are ideas like objects, sophisticated ideas? No. Do they give you a
00:49:44.640
better understanding of reality? No, like nothing that came out of leverage was sophisticated or like
00:49:52.740
even, even from a completely malevolent perspective other than his marketing and sales skills.
00:50:00.580
But that was mostly cheesed by the environment he was in and all the dumb EA people.
00:50:04.920
And this is the other thing about like the EA community, the EA community and rationalists and
00:50:09.520
singulaterians, they like think of themselves as smart, but they get brain hacked way too easily.
00:50:15.260
They're like one of the easiest communities to brain hack. And this is what I see was the AI
00:50:19.520
apocalypticism movement. Actually recently I've been trying to understand that movement better and
00:50:23.660
we'll do a different episode about it. But one thing I've noticed is I started to be like,
00:50:27.820
there's these people who I respect and see as smart and they believe this person who is obviously a
00:50:35.260
charlatan and does not think using logical structures. And so then I dug into it and I was
00:50:41.160
like, oh, everyone who I respect who believes him is autistic and he's just hacking their autism.
00:50:47.640
I don't think that Zoe comes across as autistic.
00:50:51.260
I don't think that this was totally that, but it was like, I'm a well-meaning person who wants to make
00:50:56.540
the world a better place. Okay. Come into this system. And then they begin to define truth
00:51:01.080
differently than the way a person who is a steeled in the monotheistic traditions would, which is
00:51:08.220
it's, it's about rules and laws and predictability and using faith and, and, and your ability to
00:51:16.080
understand reality, to better predict future states of reality. They just throw all that out.
00:51:19.680
They say truth comes from your subjective experience and not, and now when our subjective
00:51:24.760
experience is clash, truth comes from the hierarchy where the subjective experience of
00:51:29.580
the person at the top of the hierarchy matters more than the subjective experience at the bottom
00:51:32.360
of the hierarchy. And that's really what I mean when I say mysticism. So when people are like,
00:51:36.340
what do you really mean when you say mysticism? I mean, all truth and all philosophical systems
00:51:41.900
where an individual subjective experience of reality has more truth than their objective
00:51:49.060
engagement with that reality. Interesting. I think one of the final things that you often say
00:51:57.360
about people going off the rails is that when people believe that they're good and they're right,
00:52:04.360
that they're far more likely to end up doing very evil things. So I don't necessarily think that Jeff
00:52:09.860
or other leaders in this organization meant to do harm or to act selfishly. In fact, a really common
00:52:18.280
theme among everyone writing about their experiences is that they legit thought they were going to save
00:52:24.040
the world. They were going to go down in history books. They were doing such important work. And it was
00:52:28.700
really scary to them, this concept that they could be kicked out because then it's like you could have
00:52:33.200
mattered so much. Right. And what makes me think that that kind of mindset really pervaded this
00:52:39.560
is the fact that in her account on in defense of attempting hard things, Kathleen writes about her
00:52:49.040
current state, her current life, quote, it's painful for me to share all of this. And it's also
00:52:54.560
inconvenient. I have important work to do on my current project that a lot of people are counting on
00:52:59.300
me to do carefully and quickly, which is already pretty overwhelming for me in my current
00:53:03.200
state and which unfortunately can't be paused while I figure out what might make sense to say
00:53:08.180
publicly that will steer people toward what seems to be more accurate beliefs. And you can just see
00:53:13.580
this sense of urgency and importance and everything that she's writing, that she thinks that she's doing
00:53:18.620
something urgent and essential. And it's weird reading it because I read it and I think, oh, you're in
00:53:24.920
leverage right now. Right. But no, she's not. She's no contact with leverage people. She's doing her own
00:53:29.740
next thing now. But she still maintains this mindset of, well, that almost seems like someone
00:53:35.120
who's like on 24, you know, who's like, they have to save the world. The world's about to blow up and
00:53:40.780
it only depends on me. And everyone's well, you're believing her that she's no contact with leverage.
00:53:45.720
She might still keep in mind, you know, she's defending them. I did. This is why I don't believe
00:53:50.260
anyone who contacted leverage that defends leverage. Everyone I know who was involved with leverage said
00:53:56.900
either one of two things. Either it was a deleterious cult or it was all real, but they let
00:54:03.860
demons into the world. Those are the only two opinions I have ever heard. I have never heard
00:54:08.840
anyone be like, oh yeah, it was a good project. Just a little wrongheaded in a few areas.
00:54:14.080
But this is a sentiment that I see pervades rationalism, effective altruism, AI apocalypticism
00:54:20.900
that I am right. I am fighting for good. Anyone who thinks that I'm, you know, doing the wrong thing
00:54:27.680
or whatever is, is wrong, misguided, evil, ignorant, et cetera. And that there's a lot less
00:54:35.560
internal criticism, even though everything about leverage was about questioning yourself and breaking
00:54:41.740
yourself down to build a better self, which is really interesting to me. And I just feel like
00:54:46.440
that perception that you're fighting on the side of good and that you're doing good can be really
00:54:51.360
dangerous. Or even if you just think that you're, you're out to do good because Zoe in her account
00:54:57.480
keeps talking about these instances in which people kind of accused her of, of placing bad objects in
00:55:02.580
them, you know, and she was seen with a lot of suspicion after a period of time. And one of the reasons
00:55:07.280
her experiences were so bad was that the community really started to demonize her and throw her to
00:55:12.140
the bottom of the social hierarchy and accuse her of all sorts of things. And she genuinely believed
00:55:17.060
it because she was in this terrible position. And she was like, Oh God, what have I done wrong? I can't
00:55:21.100
believe this. But I think even she thought that she was a good person and that may have just led,
00:55:26.120
led her to be victimized more. I don't know, but I just feel like that's another theme going on here.
00:55:31.120
And this is the problem. It's people fighting to be good people that creates most of society's
00:55:37.280
problems. You should be a great person and a great person is often a bad person. A great person doesn't
00:55:45.220
care about what is good and bad. They care about what must be done for what must come to pass.
00:55:53.020
Alexander, the great, you know, Catherine, the great, these are not good.
00:55:57.320
Or even Ivan, the terrible, but that'd be fun. And one day I become the type of Malcolm, the great.
00:56:06.500
But no, I, you, you, you want to be a great person, you know, that requires, and this is,
00:56:10.880
this is like, I understand what you're saying, but you can develop this sort of mindset around
00:56:15.660
anything. You can develop it around climate change. You can develop it around, you know,
00:56:19.880
the question is, is, are you basing your beliefs about the world? And this is, this is the problem.
00:56:26.360
It's too many people decide how good they are of a person based on their intentionality.
00:56:36.360
Everybody has the intentionality of being a good person. How good you intend to be
00:56:43.720
has no correlation with how good you are. How good you are is dependent on your understanding of
00:56:53.360
reality. Oh, and that's, you know, a really good example of this because we don't just have to
00:56:57.560
shit all over mysticism. We can also shit all over antinatalism is the Sandy Hook shooter. He thought
00:57:03.920
that he was doing a favor to all of these young children who were tragically shot because life is
00:57:11.420
suffering and it's terrible that their parents brought them into the world. And it would be terrible
00:57:16.300
if they lived full lives and were exposed to all the horrors of being alive. And he thought he was
00:57:21.260
doing good, right? Hitler thought he was doing good too. I don't know if Genghis Khan thought he was
00:57:26.200
doing good though. I don't know about that. This is why it's so important when people are like,
00:57:30.620
why do you care about all this philosophy stuff? Why do you care about like the nature of good and evil,
00:57:34.880
the true nature of reality, et cetera? That needs to be like your top question because how good of a
00:57:40.980
person, how good your life ends up being, ends up not being determined by how good you try to be.
00:57:48.480
It ends up being determined by your understanding of reality. You know, I was just on a show
00:57:53.480
and somebody was like, we'll do a longer episode about this. But he asked me,
00:57:57.420
well, there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for love in your system. And I said, yeah, there isn't
00:58:05.260
because love isn't a compass that points to good. Love often points to evil. And if you're using the
00:58:12.120
wrong thing as a compass, no matter how hard you follow it, you could be the most evil person ever.
00:58:20.040
People who live for love often end up living lives of evil. Okay. Because they misunderstand
00:58:28.220
reality. They misunderstand the consequences of the things that they're doing.
00:58:34.120
Hmm. And that's why this is so critical. And it's so critical with these people,
00:58:38.200
whereas they thought they were good people because they were trying to be good people
00:58:41.840
extra hard without understanding. Everyone does that. You need to understand. When I say
00:58:47.260
understand reality, I mean, understand society, understand the way other people think,
00:58:50.280
understand philosophy, all the things we talk about on the show, that is understanding reality.
00:58:54.060
If you're understanding there is wrong, then you end up evil. Every time.
00:58:59.400
Depressing. But still fascinating. And a dumpster fire that I wish I was able to watch more closely.
00:59:09.520
Probably not though, actually. It seems to involve a lot of socializing.
00:59:12.640
And this comes to why the mysticism thing is so important to us.
00:59:15.020
Because if we have this framing, if you are getting an understanding of reality from a non-confirmable
00:59:23.120
space, from a space outside of rules and reason and knowledge.
00:59:25.340
Oh, then there's no way you'll know when you teeter into the world of evil.