Leverage: My Ties to a Silicon Valley Cult

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the inner workings of Leverage, a now-infamous Silicon Valley cult that operated from 2011 to 2019. The couple delves into the group's origins, its novel business model, and the factors that led to its eventual downfall, highlighting the dangers of mysticism and the importance of grounding one's understanding of reality in objective truth.

Malcolm and Simone examine Leverage's initial goal of creating highly effective, cooperative individuals to solve global problems and generate revenue for the organization. They discuss how the group's embrace of mysticism, led by its charismatic leader Jeff Anders, ultimately undermined its mission and led to psychological damage among its members.

The conversation also touches on the vulnerability of certain communities, such as the Effective Altruism and Rationalist movements, to cult-like influence, the ethical implications of Leverage's power dynamics, and the potential pitfalls of well-intentioned individuals who prioritize their own subjective experiences over objective reality.

Throughout the discussion, Malcolm emphasizes the critical importance of basing one's understanding of reality on confirmable, rule-based knowledge rather than mystical experiences, arguing that even the most well-intentioned individuals can perpetrate evil if their understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: 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, she mentions it in pieces, that people who, We're other people's direct subordinates. So you needed to meet with them. 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.

You think that didn't create an intrinsic pressure to have sex with them?

Simone Collins: Well, when you put it that way

Malcolm Collins: The, the thing that I find interesting about leverage about the only thing I find interesting is the novel business model novel business model for a cult, but, but the novel business model itself was sort of cheesing the Silicon Valley environment at that time period. Everybody has the intentionality of being a good person. How good you intend to be has no correlation with how good you are. How good you [00:01:00] are is dependent. On your understanding of

Simone Collins: reality.

Oh, and that's, you know, a really good example of this because we don't just have to s**t all over mysticism.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, since you were, oh, we 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 colts a lot.

And so I thought we could go over a recent colt that formed and fell apart and theoretically is reformed and is still alive and operational today. And I can get your analysis.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So this is going to be the leverage video. Now something I should note to our audience about us and leverage. Is we have a lot of connections to leverage, like I know at least a dozen people who were in this cult, in it or just involved

Simone Collins: or they knew

Malcolm Collins: someone involved or in it.

So yeah, so I, I, if you were in the [00:02:00] effective altruist community or the less wrong or rationalist community, In the Bay Area in the like well the period I was there, God, if I can remember when that was like early two thousands. I wanna say.

Simone Collins: We met in 2012. You were there from 2012 to 2015.

Malcolm Collins: No, I was there before we met Simone for years.

Okay, so

Simone Collins: you were there, you well then, no. You graduated college 2010. So theoretically you were there from 2010. Dates didn't really matter. 2015. And leverage during, we'll say leverage 1.0, which is leverage and paradigm. Failed cult that we're going to be talking about existed from late 2011, early 2012 through 2019.

So there was definitely. Overlap while you were in the Bay Area. Perfect

Malcolm Collins: overlap while I was in the Bay Area. I 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?

Which is interesting. Some people

Simone Collins: openly call it a cult. Most seem to not.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, no, you, you, people who are in it actively. [00:03:00] 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. While they were involved? Yeah, that was common. You're like, oh, I'm going to go hang out at the cult headquarter. 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, Who joins a cult as a lower order member knowing that it's a cult?

Well, for the same reason that I'm interested in cults, in a way. 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, 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.

[00:04:00] Maybe that could be used for benefit. 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. And that is, that is what really interested me about, about the topic.

And I think that they saw the same thing and there was this sort of cool Underground stigma to talking about it that way, or thinking about it that way. Like, Oh yeah, I hang out with this cultist, you know, Eric's

Simone Collins: saying that you're, you're in a gang. Maybe it's a little cache. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: 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.

So that's

Simone Collins: so interesting. Cause I, I, I wasn't. One, you were there, you were in the Bay Area during early leverage days. 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, [00:05:00] but yeah, it's, I had no idea.

That's really fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: So read to me, I I've been watching some leverage content recently, so I have some idea but read to me.

Simone Collins: 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. It's just best to turn to Zoe. K. Medium write up my experience with leverage. 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.

One of my supervisors would regularly talk about this as a daunting, but inevitable strategic reality. Obviously we'll do it, but, and succeed, but it seems hard. 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.

So here's an organization. A, a cult, it turns out, as you would say, [00:06:00] that is keen on taking over the world. That, that's its plan. Which actually isn't necessarily a red flag.

Malcolm Collins: So a lot of people here people in my organization, we're talking about eventually taking over the world. Look, the world needs taking over.

I've got a plan to take over the world. So you're, you're, you're flagging this as not bad. Not bad. No, again, this is one of those categories where like, fine, you want to take over the world? Take over the world. And you do need to, but, but I would say that the group was stupid. It like, like actively stupid.

The more you'll hear about this group, the more you'll be like, Oh, wow, there must have been a really large number of stupid people in like the early singularity EA and rationalist community. And it's like, there still are. Yeah. But like astoundingly stupid like the idea that you're like, okay, well, we're going to take over the world one day.

So let's study military tactics

Simone Collins: like that is not that was one person. And this was a minority. I'm just saying, but they were there were people who had their own opinions in there. And yes, it was, it was a thing, but yeah, so that, that is one place where it went [00:07:00] off the rails and that is a spicy detail, but I guess you're going to play Liz Lemon in this and be like, is it a deal breaker?

And this for you, not a deal breaker. Yeah. Domination. Also, I think it's, it's uniquely ballsy for a cult. Normally they're just like, we're all going to go to heaven or something, so good for them. Zoe also very conveniently has a numbered list, which is, I think, very EA rationalist community, of a taste of how out of control this got.

So I will read to you. To give you a picture of where the culture eventually ended up, here's a list of some of the things I experienced by the end of my time there. One, two to six hour long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub faction alignment group would attempt to articulate a demon which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our system using debugging tools.

Malcolm Collins: Deal breaker? Well, no, so this is actually interesting to talk about [00:08:00] debugging. So something you'll often have in groups that are attempting to. Manipulate you psychologically and it's important to know because like, okay, if you could actually rework your personality in your brain, which I believe you can, like, would you not want access to those tools and somebody else to make sure you didn't utilize them in a way that was deleterious or cause negative downstream effects?

Sure. I think the real core is who's setting the goals. So with something like debugging, it is very easy to brainwash someone. If you are in the room with one other person who is asking you about your past and who you are expected to often admit sins to, that's another thing that's really important.

Especially if you have to look at them in the eyes for long periods of time this can very easily brainwash people. All right. It was a technique that I looked at, I learned, I was like, could I, like, where should you notice this? So whenever you're in a group and this is something that's happening that [00:09:00] group has developed, often organically, a form of brainwashing.

Oh, so without

Simone Collins: intending it, this can all be Yeah. Sometimes it just happens

Malcolm Collins: accidentally. Like you have a group of people who are trying to like talk through things, right? Like trying to work on themselves, like do interpersonal work. And so they get in groups of two where they talk through things.

And then, Oh, accidentally they decided to do this in a hierarchical way because they wanted people who were more competent. To be sort of helping the people who are less competent. And now that hierarchy ends up self expanding because everyone who's doing it is supposed to recruit more people to do it.

And now, oh, you accidentally just evolved a cult. Cults do not need to be started malevolently. Now in In Jeff's case because I know a lot about Leverage, I do believe that he intentionally googled brainwashing techniques. Oh gosh. Just because they, they look like they were a collection of obvious brainwashing techniques.

But yeah, this is why you see this in Leverage right here, which is actually very similar to Theaton readings.

Simone Collins: [00:10:00] What's, yeah, debugging sessions sound like audits from Scientology.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Or Catholic

Simone Collins: confessions, I guess.

Malcolm Collins: I'd say they're quite a bit different from Catholic confessions. Actually, I can go into how they're different from Catholic confessions and why Catholic confessions are so uniquely healthy among cultural subgroups.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, let's compare and contrast.

Malcolm Collins: When you go to a Catholic confession, you are Taking the things that you, like the sins you feel you committed. Okay. You are volunteering those to a external party who you don't know. So you cannot accidentally become influenced by them as an individual, which is very important.

You are unloading them more to like an amorphous entity. The church. No eye

Simone Collins: contact. You can't see them. You don't. Theoretically know who they are, but you probably do.

Malcolm Collins: It's pretty hard for an individual priest to use this system to manipulate an individual. So that's, that's one thing that's really important because of how [00:11:00] simplistic the interaction is.

I give you my sins. You tell me what I need to do to make them not important anymore. Now, psychologically, this has a lot of benefits doing this because now you're taking the things that are psychologically weighing you down and you are, Giving them to an external entity, but they are not saying those things don't matter, or you should learn to not care about those things, which is what modern psychology does, which I actually think is pretty psychologically unhealthy.

Those things do matter, and here is how you play pennants for them. And it's an easy physical act, like saying a prayer a number of times, or doing prayer beads, or something like that.

Simone Collins: It's

Malcolm Collins: a very eloquently and well designed psychologically healthy system. Now, psychologically unhealthy systems will often have you in these stories do full personal narratives, often with the goal of discovering quote unquote trauma or where thetans bind it to you.

That's what they do in psychology. You mean Scientology. Scientology, that's what they're [00:12:00] looking for, some sort of inciting event that they can then say, Ah, this is why you have these problems, and you need me to deal with this inciting event. They will usually choose something tied to your parents or birth culture as the inciting event, because it makes it easier to draw a distance between you and your birth culture.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: So if you, if you see a group that's doing that, what they are trying to do is drive a wedge between you and your, your support network while also recontextualizing yourself as needing that group being dependent on that group. All right, keep going with the list.

Simone Collins: Well, you haven't even commented on one of the most interesting elements of this, which I think is the group faction that she alludes to here.

Keep in mind that Zoe is talking about how the debugging sessions weren't just this type of audit that you're describing, Scientology style, but this is one in which the alignment group of which Zoe was a member was attempting to articulate a [00:13:00] demon That it infiltrated their psyches from one of their rival groups.

Do you think that these rival groups were intentionally created? They, I don't, I've not heard of them in any cult environment, but I have heard of them in that one psychotic study where they took a boy's camp and made them hate each other and things got so violent they had to stop the study. You recall this, right?

Malcolm Collins: Very interesting. So, I know. I think that the rival group thing naturally evolved. And it, it actually evolved because sort of an inefficiency and the way the group, the organization was created.

Side note here. I find it odd that they thought that they could create these. Ultra. Cooperative and efficient humans with their techniques. And yet the people acting within their organization that were demonstrably less.

Good at cooperating with each other and less efficient than people outside of their organization. Like to see around you, everything collapsing and not realizing that the [00:14:00] psychological techniques that you are implementing. Or. Markedly worse. Then even the terrible psychological techniques that pervade our society today.,

Malcolm Collins: so first we should talk about the demons. So they believed in two types of things at different parts of the, the story here.

One was demons and one was objects.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: They are both Basically, like, concepts that one person can create and plant in another person's mind. So it's like memes or ideas, or even moods. Yeah, there's, well, you and I would contextualize them as like a packaged meme, but they don't. They sort of see it more like a bomb or a security camera that somebody placed in their brain that is like watching them and will like give them like vibes of like who planted it there.

Or that demons I think also can enter from the other world and, and engage with them. So something that is very important in understanding leverage is you wanted to create an integrated philosophy of everything, right? [00:15:00] And Jeff Anders

Simone Collins: did, yes.

Malcolm Collins: Jeff Anders did. And The way that he decided to do that was what I would actually call sort of bog standard mysticism.

And so what is he combining? Which is bog standard mysticism. If people know what I mean, bog standard mysticism is the belief that there's some sort of supernatural like extra Real reality that's beyond our fabric of reality and that is also God, that extra, that, that medium, that ultra reality is actually God, and that, that reality can be engaged with through certain types of corrupted mental states, what those states are depends on which group of mystics you're with and He came up with honestly pretty bog standard mystical beliefs, like demons exist and stuff like that.

The core thing that makes Leverage different from other groups in the way that it formed and the way that it was structured is that it paid its members to be members. So Leverage would pay you to live in a Leverage house and you had to commit to live in a Leverage house for a year. And So who's going to do that?

[00:16:00] First of all, you know, it's, it's, it's people who are already, you know, on the outskirts society. Often, you know, they don't have a family where they're living. They don't have a you know, a support.

Simone Collins: Common themes seem to be that these are recent grads who may have had some short term jobs, like Zoe, for example, had done some acting.

She'd done some admin work and that was kind of it. So she didn't have a big career already started. No one who could do something easily. That's

Malcolm Collins: what you think. No, she was, I can tell from the profile. She was a quote unquote actor who was paid to give acting classes once a week. No, she was being paid around.

Keep in mind, these were all like big polyamorous houses. She was being kept for, to be used for sex.

Simone Collins: Well, I have to say legally, this is all very alleged. And you're

Malcolm Collins: No, no, I'm telling you, like I under

Simone Collins: I'm saying from a legal standpoint, Malcolm. Okay, yes. This is alleged and we are not slandering

Malcolm Collins: Are like competent individuals, like many people in these groups, they would get.

So it was hard to get into leverage. Because you know, [00:17:00] it, it was a closed resource. It was like a cult that paid you to be a member, gave you housing and gave you access to well connected wealthy individuals.

Simone Collins: Okay. Well, and people, I think genuinely thought they were saving the world. They didn't think that they were being used for things.

Malcolm Collins: It, it was a cult playing on the easiest difficulty conceivable. So it did a lot of inefficient things that a normal cult that couldn't afford to pay its members wouldn't have done. Now you're asking, how did a cult get a bunch of money to pay its members to participate because they sold itself to wealthy people as a group that was going to do, like, systemic functional research on this mystical realm.

Like, mystical perennialism is a thing. Fairly common philosophy, even what is mystical?

Simone Collins: Wait, define mystical perennialism. This is new to me.

Malcolm Collins: Radialism means they believe there is some truth in every religious tradition. Mysticalism is [00:18:00] that your fabric of reality thing I mentioned before. And so they basically told these wealthy people, we are going to do systemic research.

this other side of reality on like you know, mystical truths. That is not like a terrible idea if you're actually going to do like evidence based research, but we're doing evidence based research. The real con, and this is interesting, this caused the whole thing for the structure to be inverted, if you are contrasting it with a traditional cult.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: A traditional cult recruits people and takes their money.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The source of income,

Simone Collins: Comes from the recruits, the converts.

Malcolm Collins: Right? Yeah. They used converts who they were paying to be converts and paying to house to sell a product up to wealthy people. Part of this product was you know the research that [00:19:00] they were doing.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But part of this product was also the humans that were being brainwashed.

Simone Collins: Yes, and we should clarify that. The mission of the, well, obviously the mission of the cult was to save the world, but the general project that they established at least for leverage 1. 0 leverage 2. 0, who knows was to create extremely highly effective people who are also cooperative.

So apparently it's a misnomer that they're trying to learn how to sort of mint Elon Musk's because Elon Musk is not very cooperative. But they were trying to basically. Meant very highly effective people. And there was this premise, at least stated that it would be possible to take the right type of person.

And they apparently vetted people for this before offering them these paid positions and housing who could, through all of this coaching, through this, these, these debugging sessions, et cetera, become these people [00:20:00] just. To provide context. So the

Malcolm Collins: goal, I, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, so the, the, basically you can also give it as a cult startup.

It was pitching to these rich people, yes, we're going to do this mystical research. And that was what most of the rich people who funded it were actually interested in was the mystical research.

But they also were pitching it sort of like a startup, like, well, we're going to figure out how to make these ultra effective people who then send money back to the central organization. Like that was the idea when they say cooperative, they mean subservient, like that they're going to continue to support this organization and its mission that turned them into these uber mitches.

What their goal was, was to create spiritual uber mitches that could out compete within competitive capitalist economies. Other individuals. And that was like their game plan. Well, of course they failed to do that because they, they, they, we can talk about why they failed, which I think it's actually a very specific reason why they failed.

And they have changed their business plan with leverage too. They've actually moved to a crypto product. And so what they do is this crypto [00:21:00] product. Is they have moved from because most of the wealthy people that they otherwise could raise money from like they could with leverage one Now know that one they are a cult to jeff is just an incompetent buffoon like i'm, sorry, like everything i've heard about him his theories.

They are bog standard mystic cult they are not sophisticated ideas They are not even sophisticated. It's like a guy picked up a book on brainwashing and then read a few. He is not a bright guy. He's really

Simone Collins: charismatic enough to get all of these people to sign on, to get all of these people to hold him with a very high level of reference and to raise a Enough money to do multiple times

Malcolm Collins: hard if I wanted to start a cult by brainwashing people in the way He started this cult.

I could have done that ages ago

Simone Collins: Why didn't you

Malcolm Collins: because my goal was always to free people?

Simone Collins: Hmm. It was all right. Yeah your whole Yeah, the thesis was can you use cult methods on yourself to become a better person not? [00:22:00] Coerce other people, right?

Malcolm Collins: Not coerce other people to be your servant.

Simone Collins: You're ruining our evil reputation.

Stop.

Malcolm Collins: I know I will actually, well, people could argue like, remember, like a lot of people know, you know, I flipped with over a hundred people. I got really, really good at getting people to sleep with me. One of the things I implemented in that process were some of the brainwashing techniques. Oh, okay. Okay, there you go.

Simone Collins: Bringing it back. Thanks, Malcolm. Bringing it back home. Bringing it back. Well, it's not that I

Malcolm Collins: never utilized these techniques in my life. Yeah. I just had no interest in creating a self replicating memetic set. Yeah. I may have to some extent, you know like when I was younger and horny, all that, I was not the most ethical person in the world.

Like I could definitely be a better person. You're an addict to

Simone Collins: anything you will do on ethical stuff. And I think most young horny men could be argued. To be yeah, so

Malcolm Collins: I look at these these sort of sessions that he's talking about and I did this With girl very easy like like and then and then you realize oh like and this happened to me [00:23:00] When you can get sex whenever you want with anyone you want it gets really boring.

And you think that's how he turned

Simone Collins: to world domination?

Malcolm Collins: No, I don't think he, I, I, I think that we'll talk about what, what he screwed up. It wasn't the world domination that screwed up. It wasn't even the goals that screwed up. It was the touching mysticism that ruined everything.

Simone Collins: Back to the themes.

Malcolm Collins: Well, if you look at the things he did, when other people would give an idea, he would always shoot it down and then maybe like give it again, repackage to the next week or something. Only ideas that came from Jeff were allowed to be thought of as serious ideas was in this group. Yes. According to Zoe, but that's what I've heard as well.

Yes. So if this is true if, you know, Jeff just shoots down ideas all the time and everything like that, that's very easy to do when you adopt a mystical framework. It is one of the core problems with mystical frameworks. If your access to truth is supernatural, i. e. it is achieved through states that only you can achieve, well, this causes a [00:24:00] problem.

Either you can't communicate with anyone else's source to truth, So there's no cross interpretability, or one individual has access to a source of truth above all other individual source of truth. So if Jeff sort of disagrees with your belief about like the way psychology works, or the way whatever works, because he has mystical fortification for these beliefs, he's able to just lean on that.

And so, there can never be any real study or advancement in a meaningful context. That could be the way that you see this as a secular person. And like, people need to understand my hatred of mysticism is both theological and secular. Clearly, that's why mysticism is so bad. But from a theological standpoint, I could say, well, okay, so suppose they had good means and they were trying to tap into this mystical realm.

Why did it read with like, everyone I know who was involved in this was like, this really messed me up. Like, [00:25:00] this is not just a her thing. Like, Everyone I've heard of who's involved with it. It's like, yeah, this was really,

Simone Collins: even, even the, those who seem to be defending it. Report having gone through a lot of healing after it and are no contact with most of the people who were involved.

So yeah, kind of damning.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah so no, I don't think, I, I, I, and you don't just get this here. I actually argue that Stanford has a weird evolved cult in it called Touchy Feely. It's a, yeah, it's a class

Simone Collins: that basically is a cult. You are.

Malcolm Collins: I started it and I was like, wait, you're trying to brainwash me. You started taking class.

Simone Collins: You didn't start the class.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I started taking the class. And I just was like, these are all brainwash techniques from the eighties that you're using right now. And if you talk to people who completed it, they'll be like, it's the best thing ever. It transformed me for life. It blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, because there was a bunch of brainwash techniques from the eighties that like, we are taught now in psychology.

Make sure you never do this. It can cause dependency. And keep in mind,

Simone Collins: these are, they were uniquely long classes. They typically took place at the end of the day. They would, people would come [00:26:00] home crying, that kind of thing. This is not a normal class. No, no,

Malcolm Collins: no, no. They, they would intentionally sleep deprive you.

They were at the end of the day, they were in an incredibly emotionally charged situation where like you really couldn't win. It was, it was stupidly, obviously just brainwashing. And I do not know. I wanted to bring this up, but I knew I couldn't bring this up because so many people have gone through the brainwashing session that if I was like, you know, that's a brainwashing seminar.

You sent me to, they'd be like, but all of our top staff at Stanford business school has gone through the brainwashing thing and they love it. They say it's actually become the focus of their entire lives. And I'm like, okay, well. Listen but touchy feely isn't as bad. It's just brainwashing to indebt you for your entire life to a corporation.

The Stanford business school, but leverage is bad because I actually don't think that the type done within Stanford causes that much damage. The type done within leverage is incredibly damaging. Because it's mystical brainwashing [00:27:00] that levels one person's personal and subjective experience of reality above other people's, which always leads to deleterious outcomes and prevents any real research from taking place.

That's why all they have are their quote unquote notes and they've never gotten better at anything. And it's such a shame too,

Simone Collins: because that whole apartment building they were living in could have been this incredible. Psychological research study.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, but what's really cool. You can still do it, like find all their notes and then do a study on it.

Cause it's interesting. But if you look at, um, the theological perspective on the mystic, it's like if their hypothesis was true and you could study the mystical realm and use it to improve people. People like these would have ended up all successful, or at least some success cases, instead of all severely psychologically damaged.

So if I'm outside of my Some have gone on to be

Simone Collins: successful, I think.

Malcolm Collins: Not wildly as far as I've heard. I've heard of people like getting out. I don't know anyone who's successful and thinks positively of it.

Simone Collins: You're going to take this part that I'm about to say [00:28:00] out, right?

Malcolm Collins: That doesn't matter. I said, anyone who's successful has a non positive perception.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. I thought you were saying anyone who came out wasn't successful. That's what I heard.

Malcolm Collins: No, no. Okay. Anyone who came out, I should clarify the successful people who came out of it typically have a negative perception of it.

If it was able to work. So, so then the question is, and they would say it did psychological harm to them. So then the question is, okay, if they're right in these mystical beliefs, because they actually are contacting some sort of, then what they have demonstrated is you should never attempt to do this because you will release real demons.

Simone Collins: Well, actually funny aside, and I feel like this must be some kind of Bay area contagion. I feel like my father participated in things almost exactly like this in the seventies and eighties in the Bay Area, like in the same, like five mile vicinity of leverage. Because I remember my dad, one, like he went to these like psychic worship workshops.

And he was in a, he went through Est which is a little cult like as [00:29:00] well. And I remember him telling me at one point when I was a kid, when I was trying to ask him about all this psychic stuff, he's like, yeah, man, like we were messing with some pretty dangerous things. You have to keep in mind that when you open your mind to these things, like they can get in.

And I just took that away to like, I, I contextualize that as a kid quite helpfully is this is what happens when you allow yourself to believe something and fear something that then it actually you get really afraid of it, but I think he actually got, I think these people thought bringing up demons and I think having leverage.

Why is this always in the Bay Area?

Malcolm Collins: Most long lived philosophical traditions culturally evolve prohibitions against this form of mysticism. Now, you can say that there is a theological truth for them or you can say they did this for secular reasons. But it's just, oh, by the way, people might be like, not Jews.

I'm like, actually, yes, Jews. If you look at the Kabbalah. Sorry, hold on, what's the word I'm looking for? If you look at the word Baal Shem you get the Baal Shem Tov, the guy who originally started the, the [00:30:00] recent Hasidic sect, Baal Shems used to be thought of as mostly con artists within Jewish communities, and were generally looked down upon.

That's why he's called, like, the, the good Baal Shem. Like the, the, so, so when Kabbalah originally started, it was fighting against an upstream fight not Kabbalah, but when the Kabbalistically, the, the extremely Kabbalistically influenced sects of Judaism began to gain prevalence they were fighting against evolved mechanisms that said you should think of these sorts of things as huckstery.

They just overcame it. But generally, every group in, in history is like, yes, if you touch the realms of chaos, your mind gets corrupted. Don't do it. And that's a good theological framing for a secular truth, which is when you engage with these sorts of mystical concepts, it always leads to negative externality.

It just doesn't

Simone Collins: go well. Yeah, just

Malcolm Collins: don't do it. And people will say, when I'll talk to religious people about this, they'll be like, no, it causes negative externality. Fanaticism. It causes a fervent belief. It causes, you know, visions, which [00:31:00] reaffirm a person's face. And it's like, yeah, but all those negative things are happening in leverage too.

Like all of the good stuff you're getting is getting from the non mystical side of things. The mystical, like those things, the fanaticism, which is created by whether or not it's this realm of evil, or it's this realm of mental corruption, or it's this just completely, you're allowing some people to say that their subjective experiences of reality trump other people's subjective experiences of reality and everyone should be engaged in their own.

It's always going to lead to these negative externalities, which is why I'm so anti mystic. But something that's interesting here is the framing of this for a lot of people. I think the, the people who are at the high levels of this. What they see as the collapse reason is that they accidentally unleashed a bunch of demons.

Simone Collins: Wait, people actually believe that? They don't just think that people devolved into weird social What's the word when you have a schizophrenic break? Psychosis?

Malcolm Collins: No, no, outsiders who are secularists believe psychosis. And, [00:32:00] and if you look at what they did, it was basically like a house. Insiders who left

Simone Collins: don't think it was psychosis?

Malcolm Collins: I'll explain.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So basically everyone involved was like a house where almost everyone else, they were the strict hierarchy and within the hierarchy, people were just constantly watching you, taking notes on you as if you were their test subject. So they had this sense of superiority over everyone else.

Well, in many cases,

Simone Collins: their financial compensation and role in the house was contingent on them working on you. So yes, they kind of had to do it.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, yes, but but keep in mind this cycle if you know that like everyone you're interacting with is like writing about you at the end of the day, like, oh, here's this and trying to understand you and your motivations if you can't see how that would be psychologically harmful in mass, like you just don't understand human psychology, like, of course, that's going to lead to negative externalities.

Of course, it's going to lead to everyone attempting to you. sort of overanalyze everything they're doing in the movement, having this sort of panicky self reflection and an existential dread, [00:33:00] and it will cause the creation of little cabals that are going to fight against each other because Wow, hence

Simone Collins: these, these groups,

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Because you need teammates to sort of protect you and everything like that. In this incredibly hostile environment where everyone is constantly psychoanalyzing you, but is untrained to do so. Well, so then I can give

Simone Collins: you, I can give you a quote from a taste of how out of control this got, which is number two, which is related to this.

Just to give an example to people from a firsthand account, quote, people in my group commenting on a rival group having done magic that weekend and clearly having. Powered up and saying we needed to now go debug the effects of being around that powered up group, which they said was attacking them or otherwise affecting their ability to trust their own perceptions.

Number three related as well. Accusations of being thrown around. Oh, sorry. Accusations being thrown around about people leaving objects similar to demons and other people and people trying to sort out where the bad object originated. [00:34:00] if it had been left intentionally or malevolently or by act slash subconsciously.

Malcolm Collins: So as, as a secularist, when you put on a secular hat and you're approaching any of this, it's very obvious that this would lead to psychological breaks. Yeah. Like this is obviously a psychologically unhealthy environment. However, these people are not secularists. When you have entered this community, you have accepted that there is some other Like supernatural realm that you are studying.

Yeah, well, she gave the

Simone Collins: definition of objects. Would that be helpful?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, go for it.

Simone Collins: Objects were something that became a topic of study at leverage, about which Jeff gave presentations. Aside from Simone, do you think Jeff intentionally created the concept of objects? Or this was just something that he No, it's

Malcolm Collins: a stupid, obvious concept.

Okay. Jeff is just not that bright. I'm sorry, but anyway, continue.

Simone Collins: They were considered to be sort of like autonomous psychological bits that you could accidentally or purposefully leave in another person's mind to affect or control [00:35:00] them. If intentional, it might cause them to subtly view you a different way, make more real or less real certain concepts, change their experience of the passage of time, say, or make them more susceptible to mind reading.

Attempts in the future, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: This is just meant to stoke paranoia. Like, I don't think that he, he may have been trying to snook paranoia, but it's also just not a particularly novel or complicated concept he he's describing like a self replicating memetic package, like a, a meme bomb basically, but that's not the way he sees it

Simone Collins: as a mystical.

To your point of things going off the rails because they went mystical. I think it's also helpful to give these additional examples. She presented. As an example, just how mystical they got. Cause some of those could probably be construed as, Oh, they're doing this weird psychological research. They're just trying to use weird words to explain a phenomenon that they're trying to coin as psychological researchers and they'll publish it.

But here she says. [00:36:00] And number four, people doing seances seriously. I was under the impression the purpose was to call on demonic energies and use their power to affect the practitioner's social standing. So seances, she also has number five, former rationalists clearing their homes of that energy using crystals.

And this is where I think your point about mysticism is really strong, Malcolm extra strong because rationalists were, it was like, it was like a different Bay Area cult, but the standard of that religion. Was just how much based on scientific research, your life was being lived to a great extent, you know, just how completely reasoned and non mystical you were and the fact that someone could go from being a rationalist to using crystals to clear their homes of bad energy.

That's

Malcolm Collins: wild. Well, I mean, but that can happen. When you engage with the mystical, you allow for forms of truth to come from [00:37:00] things other than objective evidence and objective reality. And so you're like, wait, really? People who were in this, even afterwards, still believe that they were just attacked by demons?

Like, of course they do. As soon as you open yourself to these sorts of explanations, and you're trying to explain why these bad things happened to you when you were engaging in these environments, you're going to come up with mystical explanations for it.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: that's what they did. They thought they were attacked by demons that they had accidentally summoned.

Oh,

Simone Collins: yeah. And what's so notable too is that, This was so damaging to the members of the group. So to provide her number six, seven, and eight on this list, which give, I think, good illustrations of how people came away damaged to your earlier point and prove your earlier point. Number six, much talk and theorizing on the subject of intention reading.

Which was something like mind reading. Jeff gave multiple presentations on this, which of course, like you said, would have people acting [00:38:00] weird and feeling paranoid seven, I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup who unfortunately were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires for me.

That were mostly definitely not in my interest. Eight, I personally prayed for hours, most nights for months to rid myself of specific demons. I felt like picked up from other members of leverage. If this sounds insane, it's because it was, I was completely. Oh, It was a crazy experience unlike any I've ever had.

And there are many more weird anecdotes where that came from. Again, it's a really good read and you should read it the whole thing. But yeah, but I think, yeah, this, this hammers home your entire point, that it was the mysticism that brought them off. This is

Malcolm Collins: why you don't engage with mysticism. You could have done something like this.

That could have been quite interesting without the [00:39:00] mysticism.

Simone Collins: Well, and to that point, I'd love for you to open up. A one of their very, very early plans. It's a, it's a flowchart.

Malcolm Collins: Open it up here

Simone Collins: because I think this can show how such a well intentioned and Widespanning projects that I'm sure this was pitched to some of the people who donated initial funds to leverage 1.

0 got really excited about. And the plan Malcolm, you'll probably include some of this on the screen. The, the end, the goal was global wellbeing. So yeah, they, they probably really did intend to take over the government cause you kind of can't do all of the things that they wanted to. Which included

they were going to really solve everything. Education, ensure universal access to excellent educational resources. They were also going to cure disease and ensure universal access to recreational and artistic opportunities. They were going to provide basically universal basic [00:40:00] income and access to social goods.

And they were going to. Eliminate all harmful governments somehow which is probably where their whole, we have to take over the government thing came over and reduce risk of global catastrophic events, which also would probably need to involve governmental control while also minimizing harmful norms.

That is to say, quote, have everyone choose to remove all harmful social rules that can be removed, unquote, which is, you know, Also very coercive and creepy, per our standards but still, like, these people basically just wanted to fix the world and make heaven on earth, right? Like, that was it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I, it's very clear.

Their, their plan is eventually, I mean, they were trying to create a memetic structure, very similar to, to what I'm trying to do, in a way that could eventually become the dominant memetic structure on earth. When instead, what I'm trying to do is create a memetic structure that can become a a reach a stable optimum with other rheumatic structures that allow people different from them to exist.

Which is, [00:41:00] which is quite different from their goal in that respect. So it's not true world domination. And the, just the core difference is, is they engage with mysticism. They engage with saying we're going to do all this, but we don't need to have the secular backing. Like whenever I give a theological position, I always say, and here's the secular reason you would take the same position.

They didn't need to do that.

Simone Collins: They didn't. And when you look at this flow chart, there's nothing, at least I haven't looked at every single box on it, but there's nothing to me that reads mysticism in the beginning. In fact, it, what it seems to more or less be is we're going to make the world perfect by our standards at least.

And we're going to do so by creating incredibly effective people and have those people create nonprofits. And businesses. That get more resources and get more control until eventually we run absolutely everything and have infinite resources and can solve all the problems. That was it. [00:42:00] And of course they started with trying to create the world's most effective people.

Cause they felt like that was the most limited resource. You couldn't start an amazing nonprofit. You couldn't start an amazing business and solve market problems and find arbitrage opportunities if you didn't have these high agency cooperative people. And so. And it seems to, I

Malcolm Collins: disagree with you on that's why they started with that.

Simone Collins: Really? Okay. Why do you think They sold them as a

Malcolm Collins: revenue source. That was the core reason they wanted to create effective people.

Simone Collins: Well, that's part of it. Yeah. Is that they would generate the nonprofits and the companies that created revenue, but those were also supposed to be the nonprofits and the companies that did the research that cured disease and created amazing education.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it was a plan for creating power based on the hypothesis that if they expose people to the mystical realm, it improves them instead of destroys them. And what we saw is the hypothesis, the opposite turned out to be true. When you, it engages mystical realm for both secular and theological reasons, it destroys your soul.

Whatever you want to say, or your brain or your ability [00:43:00] to think rationally. And so now we need to look at what they've become with leverage 2.

Simone Collins: 0.

Malcolm Collins: So leverage 2. 0, because now most competent, rich people who are in any way connected to Silicon Valley ecosystem, you know, they know that this doesn't work at the very least.

They know that whatever Jeff did last time, summoned a bunch of demons, you know, even if they believe that everything else happened and they're just not going to work with him again.

So now he needs to find another way to get money to fund this. Now, he is not quite smart enough to start a real cult to start a real cult.

He'd have to start a group that, you know, funded from its members, like the people who were going through it were both competent and believed in enough to fund it. Which is, which is a hard thing to do. You know, one way you could do that is exhaust your members. Well, it's like them to give everything to you when they joined the cult.

But then you need to constantly recruit new members to keep things basically running and that's stupid Like if you're going to create a really effective cult, you need the people to be able to earn money while still paying it. Now what he's doing now is a crypto iteration where he is trying [00:44:00] to build the cult into the product, you know, still pay people to be a member.

And then fundraise through making the product exclusive and cool enough that people want to engage with it, you know, through this belief that they're going to have a lot of access and everything like that in the future, which is doable when you're dealing with. You know, bog standard mystics. I think when people begin to see mysticism, like leverage and stuff like that, coming from an external force, they can begin to see why I have so much, ah, when I see it was in their own world, right?

Like they see me walk up and encounter mysticism and, and whoa. And they don't get why I'm doing that because they're like, but this has been here for a couple hundred years at this point, you know This has always been part of this tradition. They're like, no, it just came a couple hundred years ago. What are you doing?

That's the dangerous bomb you're wielding. And with leverage, it's the same, right? Like or not with leverage, it's the same. With leverage, it's a good external way to [00:45:00] see how mysticism can destroy otherwise well intentioned individuals. The problem is that if you move, remove mysticism from what they were doing, then what he was doing was just psychology and education, which is sort of like what we're doing, right?

If you look at the Collins Institute, it's like, how can we at scale create more effective people, but we are doing it with a completely different framework than him, which is saying, but what if we can do it in a pluralistic way where they're able to maintain their birth culture? So, so instead of doing what he did, where like you go into his educational system, you go into his psychological framing and you need to adopt Everything he subjectively believes about reality, you need to presume is true.

Simone Collins: Yeah, everything he did seemed to be very unifying and unified.

Malcolm Collins: Whereas, and this is the problem with mysticism, you know, it leads in that direction, right? Like, well, if this is ultimate truth, then everyone has to believe it. Whereas we take the exact opposite of that. We're like, well, [00:46:00] truth emerges from different ideas competing in an ecosystem.

And so that, that, that causes us to say, well, we'll create an education system. We'll eventually take over the world with the Collins Institute. It's called the Institute at that point. You've got leverage versus the Institute. But we will be able to be efficacious in the way that we lay this out.

You know, I think we make our fans lives better because we basically lay everything out for them. Like when he would do something like do all the things and that could potentially brainwash whatever I suggest, like brainwashing techniques. I'm like, this is a brainwashing technique. Here's how you might be able to use it to benefit yourself, but be careful.

But yeah, to, to the mystical thing, I think through leverage, somebody can see why They may have blind spots in things that are just like culturally and ancestrally close to them and not understand why we view them with such antagonism and fear and, and genuine fear. Like, like I, I view mystical engagement as really dangerous.

And I don't think that [00:47:00] everyone who engages with it is like permanently damaged. But I think that when you, when you like at the community began to engage with it like this and certain individuals can like Jeff can then utilize this to brainhack people pretty quickly. And then there was a pushback, which was like, this isn't a cult.

It's a, here's all the cult things we do.

Simone Collins: Why do you think they started trying to distance themselves so vehemently from the cult branding if you indeed are correct about them being so open about it in early leverage?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, now keep in mind, a lot of groups, you go to early Singulitarians, they're like, we're a cult.

You go to early, they may have meant it kind of jokingly, but with leverage it was taken differently because like they obviously were a cult. And keep in mind, you know, these are, everyone has to live in the house. They're all poly, or a lot of them are polyamorous. And they're being paid by the house and you could be fired if you don't please your superiors.

Like to, you don't [00:48:00] see how this would basically lead to a garden of sex slaves. There's really nothing else that could come out of this. That was the, always the end state. As soon as you structured things this way well, I mean, no, just think, I'm not saying like, everyone in Leverage is a perfect saint, okay?

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, she mentions it in pieces, that people who, We're other people's direct subordinates. So you needed to meet with them. 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.

You think that didn't create an intrinsic pressure to have sex with them?

Simone Collins: Well, when you put it that way,

Malcolm Collins: and then the house is run by this stud, right? Who's like, well, You know I am the number [00:49:00] one, you know, enlightened guy of all enlightened guys, and I have access to truth and I can basically kick anyone out who disagrees with me in any meaningful way.

The, the thing that I find interesting about leverage about the only thing I find interesting is the novel business model novel business model for a cult, but, but the novel business model itself was sort of cheesing the Silicon Valley environment at that time period. To hustle ultra wealthy people not, you know, it's that impressive to me that somebody was able to hustle ultra wealthy people with bog standard mysticism.

Like, no, no, not really. Are ideas like objects, sophisticated ideas? No. Do they give you a better understanding of reality? No. Like nothing that came out of leverage was sophisticated or, Like, even from a completely malevolent perspective, other than his marketing and sales skills. [00:50:00] But that was mostly cheesed by the environment he was in and all the dumb EA people.

And this is the other thing about like the EA community. The EA community singularitarians, they like think of themselves as smart but they get brain hacked way too easily. They're like one of the easiest communities to brain hack. And this is what I see with the AI apocalypticism movement. Actually recently I've been trying to understand that movement better and we'll do a different episode about it.

But one thing I've noticed is I started to be like, There's these people who I respect and see as smart and they believe this person who is obviously a charlatan and does not think using logical structures. And so then I dug into it and I was like, Oh, everyone who I respect who believes in is autistic and he's just hacking their autism.

Simone Collins: Oh dear. I don't think that Zoe comes across as autistic.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think that this was totally that, but it was like, I'm a well meaning person who wants to make the world a better place. Okay. Come into the system. And then they [00:51:00] begin to define truth differently than the way a person who is a steeled in the monotheistic traditions would, which is it's, it's about rules and laws and predictability and using faith and, and, and your ability to understand reality, to better predict future states of reality.

They just throw all that out.

Simone Collins: They say.

Malcolm Collins: Truth comes from your subjective experience, and now when our subjective experiences clash, truth comes from the hierarchy, where the subjective experience of the person at the top of the hierarchy matters more than the subjective experience at the bottom of the hierarchy.

And that's really what I mean when I say mysticism. So when people are like, what do you really mean when you say mysticism? I mean all truth. And all philosophical systems where an individual subjective experience of reality has more truth than their objective engagement with that reality.

Simone Collins: Interesting.

I think one of the final things that you often say about people going off the rails [00:52:00] is that when people believe that they're good and they're right that they're far more likely to end up doing very evil things. So, I don't necessarily think that Jeff or other leaders in this organization is wrong.

Meant to do harm or to act selfishly. In fact, a really common theme among everyone writing about their experiences is that they legit thought they were going to save the world. They were going to go down in history books. They were doing such important work and it was really scary to them, this concept that they could be kicked out because then it's like you could have mattered so much, right?

And, and what makes me think that that. Kind of mindset really pervaded this is the fact that in her account on in defense of attempting hard things Kathleen writes. About her current state, her current life. Quote, it's painful for me to share all of this. And it's also inconvenient. I have important work to do on my current project that a lot of people are counting on me to do [00:53:00] carefully and quickly, which is already pretty overwhelming for me in my current state.

And which unfortunately can't be paused while I figure out What might make sense to say publicly that will steer people toward what seems to be more accurate beliefs. And you can just see this sense of urgency and importance and everything that she's writing, that she thinks that she's doing something urgent and essential, and it's weird reading it because I, I read it and I think, Oh, you're in leverage right now.

Right. But no, she's not, she's no contact with leverage people. She's doing her own next thing now, but she still maintains this mindset of, well, it almost seems like someone who's like, On 24, you know, who's like, they have to save the world. The world's about to blow up and it only depends on me and everyone's well,

Malcolm Collins: you're believing her that she's no contact with leverage.

She might still keep in mind, you know, if she's defending them, this is why I don't, I don't know anyone who contacted leverage that defends leverage. Everyone I know who was involved with leverage said either one of two things, either. It [00:54:00] was a deleterious cult, or it was all real, but they let demons into the world.

Those are the only two opinions I have ever heard. Oh no. I have never heard anyone be like, Oh yeah, it was a good project, just a little wrong headed in a few areas. But this is a

Simone Collins: sentiment that I see pervades rationalism, effective altruism, AI apocalypticism, that I am right, I am fighting for good.

Anyone who thinks that I'm doing the wrong thing or whatever is, is wrong, misguided, evil, ignorant, et cetera. And that there's a lot less internal criticism, even though everything about leverage was about questioning yourself and breaking yourself down to build a better self, which is really interesting to me.

And I just feel like that perception that you're fighting on the side of good and that you're doing good. Can be really dangerous or even if you just think that you're, you're out to do good because Zoe in her account keeps talking about these instances in which people kind [00:55:00] of accused her of, of placing bad objects in them, you know, and she was seen with a lot of suspicion after a period of time.

And 1 of the reasons her experiences were so bad was that the community really started to demonize her and fair her to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Okay. And accuse her of all sorts of things. And she genuinely believed it because she was in this terrible position. And she was like, Oh God, what have I done wrong?

I can't believe this. But I think even she thought that she was a good person and that may have just led to this. led her to be victimized more. I don't know, but I just feel like that's another theme going on here. This

Malcolm Collins: is the problem. It's people fighting to be good people that creates most of society's problems.

You should be a great person and a great person is often a bad person.

Simone Collins: A

Malcolm Collins: great person doesn't care about what is good and bad. They care about what must be done. For what must come to pass. Alexander the Great. You know, Catherine the Great. These are not good people. Or even

Simone Collins: Ivan the Terrible.[00:56:00]

Malcolm Collins: But that'd be fun. One day I'd become the type of Malcolm the Great. But no, you want to be a great person, you know, that requires, and this is, this is Like, I understand what you're saying, but you can develop this sort of mindset around anything. You can develop it around climate change. You can develop it around, you know, the question is, is are you basing your beliefs about the world?

And this is, this is the problem. It's too many people decide how good they are of a person based on their intentionality. Hmm. Everybody has the intentionality of being a good person. How good you intend to be has no correlation with how good you are. How good you are is dependent. On your understanding of

Simone Collins: reality.

Oh, and that's, you know, a really good example of this because we don't just have to s**t all over mysticism. We [00:57:00] can also s**t all over antinatalism is the Sandy Hook shooter. He thought that he was doing a favor to all of these young children who were tragically shot because. Life is suffering and it's terrible that their parents brought them into the world and it would be terrible if they lived full lives and were exposed to all the horrors of being alive.

And he thought he was doing good, right? Hitler thought he was doing good too. I don't know if Genghis Khan thought he was doing good though. I don't know about that. This is

Malcolm Collins: why it's so important when people are like, why do you care about all this philosophy stuff? Why do you care about like the nature of good and evil?

The true nature of reality, et cetera. That needs to be like your top question because how good of a person, how good your life ends up being, ends up not being determined by how good you tried to be. It ends up being determined by your understanding of reality. You know, I was just on a show and somebody was like, and we'll do a longer episode about this.

But he asked me, well, there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for [00:58:00] love in your system. And I said, yeah, there is it. Because love isn't a compass that points to good love often points to evil. And if you're using the wrong thing as a compass, no matter how hard you follow it, you could be the most evil person ever.

People who live for love often end up living lives of evil. Okay. Because they misunderstand reality. They misunderstand the consequences of the things that they're doing. And that's why this is so critical. And it's so critical with these people, whereas they thought they were good people because they were trying to be good people extra hard without understanding everyone does that.

You need to understand. When I say understand reality, I mean, understand society, understand the way other people think, understand philosophy, all the things we talk about on the show that is understanding reality, right? If you're understanding there is wrong, then you end up evil every time.[00:59:00]

Simone Collins: Depressing, but still fascinating. And a dumpster fire that I wish I was able to watch more closely. Probably not though. Actually, it seems to involve a lot of socializing.

Malcolm Collins: And this, this comes to why the mysticism thing is so important to us. Because if we have this framing, if you are getting an understanding of reality from a non confirmable space, from a space outside of rules and reason and knowledge.

Oh, then

Simone Collins: there's no way you'll know when you teeter into the world of evil.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. So you always do. Anyway, love you.

Simone Collins: I love you too. What would you like to say?

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