Expeditions is an experimental fund built around the idea of interestingness, a central theme in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman. We look for independent researchers, amateur inventors, and others following ideas that feel promising, even if their purpose is not yet defined.

How do breakthroughs happen? When we track the origins of scientific discoveries, a pattern becomes clear: the right person, in the right place, at the right time, decides to pursue what sparked their curiosity.

But that's the lucky case. We rarely hear about the times when the opportunity existed, but the person was unable to follow their hunch.

Expeditions exist to reclaim these lost opportunities and give them a proper home.

HOW IT WORKS

Our job is to recognize potential and help it materialize.

Read more about our process, philosophy, and Frequently Asked Questions.

Interestingly different

Here are the Expeditions we have supported. This includes exploratory work as well as retroactive awards for curiosity-driven efforts.

Max Shen

Debug Your Pain

What if pain isn’t really a signal of tissue damage but rather a speculative prediction the body has learned to make, which can be unlearned?

Filipe Natalio

Material Farming

What if we could simply grow the materials we need, without toxic chemicals or genetic engineering?

Jad Rabhi & Loriann Razafimandimby

Homunculus

While everyone is busy chasing artificial intelligence, why don’t we learn how to communicate with biological intelligence directly instead?

Michael Edward Johnson

Theory of Vasocomputation

Unifying Buddhism, phenomenology, and neuroscience into an elegant account of why body and mind were never separate to begin with.

Aastha Simes

Live Longer World

Everyone wants to be healthier; almost no one has time to parse through the snake-oil in health and longevity.

Stephen Le

Conditions of We

Trust is more scarce than we like to think. And yet, our ability to coordinate depends on it. How does trust emerge and when does it break down?

@observing_hades

Folk Science

What if your rare medical problem has already been solved and documented in some obscure Reddit thread buried at the bottom of the Internet?

Mark Hofmann

The Library of Consciousness

A curated vault of 1,000+ rare, weird texts exploring one big idea: that the universe is waking up to itself.

Itay Dreyfus

Niche Design vol. 2

Examining the rise of pseudoanonymity as a vehicle for culture-making.

Cameron Boehmer

The Space Between

Investigating the mechanism behind rouleaux (red blood cell clumping) and the role of structured water in human vitality.

Omar Shehata

Open Memetics

Decoding how ideas travel and take root online — so more people can coordinate consciously and at scale.

Qualities of a good
Expedition

They aren't all necessary, but the more, the merrier.

EVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL

It's “likely to reveal large and unexpected portions of the map.”

OPPORTUNISTIC

It feels like someone should work on this.

ORIGINAL

You're uniquely positioned to work on it.

NOVEL AND INTERESTING

Genuinely intriguing, not just different for the sake of it.

ALREADY IN MOTION

You have already made some steps in the direction or making it real.

PUBLISHABLE ARTIFACTS

Knowledge wants to be free. There is some way to share your findings with others.

DEFIES CATEGORIZATION

By definition, if it fits nicely into existing categories, then it isn't really new.

RUIN VALUE

Even if it fails, we learn something from it.

VIABLE ANGLE OF ATTACK

There exists a realistic way to verify it without burning lots of resources.

APPLY

Do we have a match? Apply or read Frequently Asked Questions first.

We welcome ideas from any field, including those that do not yet have a field to belong to. That said, here are some of the themes we’re currently exploring. If your project fits one of them, we may already be on the same page.

Vitality

Metabolic theory of health · Health as systems and energy, not just biomedicine · Alternative paradigms of health · Bioenergetics · Non-allopathic paradigms of health · Salutogenesis · Positive paradigms of health · Preventative medicine · Eudaimonia · Polyvagal theory · The energy-centric perspective

Cognitive sovereignty

Deception studies · Adversarial epistemology · Developing a healthy relationship with media and technology · Information hygiene · Conscious consumerism · New Literacy · Recognizing scams, propaganda, misinformation, and other deceptive practices

Post-education

Deschooling · Unschooling · Home schooling · Education for adults · New Literacy · Developmental theory · Learning to learn · Self-directed learning systems · Peer-to-peer universities

Consciousness

Investigatingating direct experience · Study of subjective experience · Psychotechnologies · Phenomenology · Nootropics · Obscure psychedelics · Contemporary contemplative practice · Jhānas · Fetters

Collective intelligence

Organizational design · Alternative dispute resolution methods · Game theory of voluntary cooperation · Conversational protocols that prevent coercion · Voluntaryism

Intelligence styles

Recognizing types of brilliance different than yours · Translating between cognitive styles · Neurodivergence-friendly workplace · Nonverbal thinking styles · Polymathic systems thinkers · “Schizo-autists” · Heterodox thinkers · Modern polymaths · Systemic fluid intelligence

Bottlenecks to coordinaton

Theory of mind · Collaborative problem-solving · Finding compatible collaborators · Game theory of cooperation · Constructive conflict

Non‑mainstream epistemology

Electroculture · Grounding · Mind-body connection · Bioelectricity · Placebo · EMF · Bioelectric theory of cancer · Plasma physics · Alternative paradigms of health

Back to embodied basics

Fixing health hazards of modern lifestyle · Healthy artificial lights · Sourcing your own food · Neo-tribalism · Functional movement · Myth, ritual, and symbolic technology · History of early humans · Lindy solutions

Missing links in health

N=1 experiments · Personal science methodology · Personal health · Self-experimentation · Shulginism · Personal diagnostics · Citizen science · First-person science · Mystery disease · Rare disease · Integrating soft evidence · Edge‑of‑science topics where formal research and folk practice overlap

Freedom technology

Privacy tech and protocols · Peer-to-peer networks · Censorship-resistant technology · Anti-surveillance · Investigative journalism · Local-first software · Open Source Intelligence · Trust-minimized collaboration tools · Trust chains

Reframings and basic science

Things with both practical leverage and philosophical bite · Heuristics for navigating fringe claims without going woo or cynic · "Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought." — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Research palette for Spring/Summer 2026

“Sovereign, cooperative humans in complex systems, grounded in body and experience, using both fringe and rigorous tools.”

Karol Majewski (@karoljmajewski)

Program Director, Expeditions

The Analogue Group

Patronage

We find them, you fund them. Help us convert capital into discovery by becoming a patron.

What if we are one experiment away from a potential discovery?

Releasing trauma with 2C‑B, an obscure party drug

Can 2C‑B, Alexander Shulgin's "Great Teacher" be a force multiplier for Trauma-Releasing Exercise (TRE)?

Discovering Censored Science

Discover censored scientific papers by having AI agents examine references between publications.

Psilocybin and paralysis

Investigate anecdotal reports of psilocybin restoring movement in paralyzed patients—and search for a reproducible mechanism.

Cracking endometriosis

Testing safe dietary and lifestyle interventions designed to reverse endometriosis without surgery based on the metabolic theory of health.

Using psychedelics to reverse allergies

Reversing allergies and autoimmune disorders through psychedelics-induced neuroplasticity.