Why You Can Not Allow Nerds to Congregate with Austin Chen

This episode discusses the unique intersection of intellectual discourse and social gatherings among tech enthusiasts and prediction market aficionados.

1. Manifold supports a libertarian, decentralized approach to prediction markets, encouraging open participation without moderation.
2. Conferences like Manifest serve as hubs for high-level intellectual discourse among attendees who value heterodox and analytical discussions.
3. The discussion on prediction markets reveals their utility in organizing social behavior and incentivizing specific outcomes, like the controversial orgy.
4. The episode reflects on the broader social dynamics at play within the rationalist and effective altruism communities, particularly around issues of sexuality and social norms.
5. Austin Chen's initiatives, including Manafund and conference organization, aim to foster environments that support unconventional and high-agency individuals.

1: Introduction and Background

Simone and Malcolm introduce Austin Chen and discuss the upcoming Manifest conference, focusing on its significance and the ethos behind its creation. Simone Collins: "We are very excited today to be joined by Austin Chen. He is one of the co-founders of the prediction market Manifold."

2: The Nature of Manifold and Prediction Markets

Austin describes the foundational philosophy of Manifold and how it differs from other prediction market platforms by allowing more open and decentralized participation. Austin Chen: "We're a prediction market platform where anyone can create any question."

3: The Social Dynamics at Conferences

The hosts and guest delve into the social and intellectual dynamics at conferences like Manifest, emphasizing the mix of fun and intellectual rigor that defines these gatherings. Malcolm Collins: "You get more of the anti AI side, whereas generally our audience is very pro AI accelerationist."

4: Community and Connection

Discussion on where like-minded individuals can find each other and form connections, both intellectually and socially, within the Bay Area and beyond. Austin Chen: "I run, like, an event called Taco Tuesday... usually 20 or 40 people will show up."

5: Closing Thoughts and Future Projects

The episode wraps up with insights into Austin's future projects, including Manafund, and reflections on how to foster vibrant intellectual and social networks. Austin Chen: "I'm going to run the event. I actually really can, though."

1. Engage openly in intellectual discussions to foster genuine intelligence and innovation.
2. Participate or initiate decentralized platforms or events to explore and test unconventional ideas.
3. Attend niche conferences to network with like-minded individuals and expand your intellectual horizons.
4. Consider the social implications of your projects and how they can influence community dynamics.
5. Leverage prediction markets not only for economic but also for social experimentation.

In this engaging conversation, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Austin Chen, co-founder of the prediction market platform Manifold, to discuss the upcoming Manifest conference, the newly launched grant-making entity Manifund, and the unique community that has formed around these initiatives. Austin shares his insights on the diverse group of intellectuals, tech enthusiasts, and "degenerates" that make up the Manifold user base, and how the platform's open, decentralized approach sets it apart from other prediction markets. The hosts and guest also delve into the challenges of creating vibrant social events and communities, the importance of taking initiative, and the potential for Manifund to fill a gap in the current intellectual landscape.

People

Austin Chen, Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins

Companies

Manifold, Manafund

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Austin Chen

Content Warnings:

None

Simone Collins
Hello, everyone. We are very excited today to be joined by Austin Chen. He is one of the co founders of the prediction market Manifold, though now he is transitioning to work on Manafund, which is their sort of independent grant making entity, which is so excited. But what he's doing right now, as he's transitioning, is prepping and ramping up for basically the conference of the year for us. We're really excited for it, aside from natalism conference, which we're also very excited for, because pronatalism, right.

But last year was the first ever manifest conference. This is the flagship conference and the one and only of manifold. And it was one of the best gatherings we've ever been to in terms of the caliber people, in terms of execution. So you're planning for this. We wanted to bring you on to talk about this, to talk about Manifold, to talk about Manafund.

And I just wanted to kick this off with why, hold on, we got. To kick it off with a good question. Okay. I think that was a great question. Is around the betting pool that was put around when a sex party would form at last year's event.

Oh, my God. Orgy. Yes. Can you speak to that? What happened there?

Austin Chen
Would you like to know more? So this is, I think, an outgrowth of manifold's, like, very, like, libertarian philosophy to take, like, very many steps back about what is special about manifold. Right. We're a prediction market platform where anyone can create any question. And this was basically from the very beginning, we wanted to be a place where instead of the more standard platforms, metaclass, polymarket, Cauchy, which all have, like, prediction markets or forecasts, but all of their forecasts in particular are gatekeeped.

They're, like, approved by the moderators of the platform. We were like, we don't want this. We want more of a decentralized, like, anyone can ask any question kind of system. So I think even from the very early days, we had a lot more of the out there, sketchy, raunchy, degenerate crowd of people, but also a lot of people who are, like, just very interested in prediction markets for their own sake, like, prediction market nerds. When you put those two together, you get, like, all kinds of weird questions.

Will there be an orgy at manifest? And I think the New York Times famously covered this maybe in a little bit more, like, depth than I would have hoped, because you know me, I'm like, I'm so excited to be on the New York Times, except my name is now associated with this orgy that happens but, yeah, I don't know if there's, like, too much more about that than what they covered. It was like somebody who's one of our users was like, there's a bunch of really spicy things happening. The rationalist EA crowd is famous for the very loose norms on sexuality, polyamory, that kind of thing. Maybe there'll be an orgy.

It's a thing that has probably ever happened before in other rationalist parties or something like that. And there's just a market for it. And every prediction market can also be viewed as an incentive market, where if you have incentive information, or especially if you have the ability to make the outcome of the market happen, in this case, if you have the ability to make an orgy happen, then it's a very natural thing to bet up, will there be an orgy? And just arrange an orgy? And I think that's basically what happened here.

Some, like, enterprising, like, user in our community was like, it probably wouldn't be that hard to get together. Like the minimum viable orgy. If we can get three people to agree to come over and have sex, I think they did this off the Lighthaven campus, then we can resolve this market correctly. So that's my best guess of what happened. And Elo is one of the speakers.

Malcolm Collins
She's one of the speakers this year, too. Yeah, that's right. And also, before we go further, to get this all at the beginning, if you happen to live in the Bay area and you are a fan of ours and you're not going to one of the natal cons or something, because I think that's going to be in Austin again. This is a great place to meet up because we're going to be there speaking. And the types of conversations that were happening at the event last year are very similar to what goes on in our discord with, speaking of, if you haven't seen our discord, go check that out.

With the one caveat, that because you have people like Eliezer Yukowski again coming this year, you get more of the anti AI side, whereas generally our audience is very pro AI accelerationist, but you also get a lot of acceleration. Yeah. We have, for example, Brian Chow coming, who is of the alliance for the future 501 C three. That's established. He's been on our podcast a number of times, and we've done his a number of times, too.

Yeah, he's great. So, Simone, you can now ask the question that you want. Yeah, you've partially answered the question, which I think is. So we're getting there. And I think we need to dig deeper.

Simone Collins
Here is a lot of the people who follow this podcast and who, like this podcast, are really starved for intellectually interesting conversations, not just heterodox. There's a lot of people throw around the word heterodox thinker a lot, and that tends to sometimes just mean that someone's a contrarian and they just like to troll people or say things that sound controversial. Whereas the people who follow this podcast, who really love it, are like, I just want to really discuss something from first principles with people and really have an intellectual conversation. And these people are all over the place and manifest. And one thing that you pointed out was that the people who are drawn to manifold because it's more open, are, like, a mixture of, like, very analytical people, like, super autistic, and then, like, also just degenerates, and, like, people who are just willing to be very playful as well.

So that seems to be one element of this, is that you have a bunch of people who are both fun and. And I think the bigger element, Simone, is that prediction marketplaces create a status hierarchy around real world information, because a lot of, quote, unquote, being smart in our society today is based around being able to parrot back a dominant societal narrative. Whereas in a prediction market environment, your knowledge about the state of the world today actually has to be predictive of future states. That's true. Genuine intelligence.

Malcolm Collins
And so it sorts for genuine intelligence, and then within prediction marketplaces, it sorts for degenerates with genuine intelligence, which is our audience. So, Austin, aside from those things, are there any other common characteristics of manifold users and people who attend manifest? And as a second question to this, for those who are starved for these kinds of interactions, who couldn't go to manifest and who just, like, really want to meet people like that, where do you think these people congregate? So the first question, what they have in common, I think taking it back, like, a lot of, like, who comes to the conference is where does the conference get marketed? And who does this seem appealing to?

Austin Chen
And then the next level is who, like, looking at the conference, thinks that, like, the kinds of people who would want to come to this conference are the kinds of people I want to talk to, right. It's like a multi level, like, kind of model, which is this the crowd for me vibe. And we're trying to position manifest as really hard to say. I sometimes say, like, manifest is in one sense, like a conference that, like, is, like, austin's, like, ideal, like, dream conference, where I think, like, a lot of the, like, people who I follow online who like, I think are really interesting. I've tried to create a thing that they would very much like to attend.

And I think it's actually borne out a little bit in that in the process of running this conference, like, I like, try to invite a lot of them, and a surprising number say yes. I think, like, roughly like about half of the, like, speakers and guests of honors who I, like, asked to come have accepted. And for me, this feels like, like incredibly, like, high. I'm like so happy that they are all, like, interested in coming to this kind of thing. There's an effect where with manifest.

I'm also trying to map out the boundaries of some different online communities. I think forecasting it, obviously, but also the natalism fertility culture crowd, which is YouTube, obviously, Richard Hanania and like, Robin Hansen, who talk about these kind of topics. Luxander, Tesla, people like that. They often talk to each other. I think there's some reference each other.

You like, go on each other podcasts all the time. Yeah. That's also like a crowd of people who I, like, learn a lot from and I think have some kind of natural need for markets, economics, prediction markets especially. They're like, they're in full force. Startup crowd.

Of course, tech startups. I think there was one other. There are tons of machine learning people. Also machine learning people. I view that as a bit of an outgrowth of startups and rationality.

There's biotechnology. Sorry, it was the one that was on my mind, especially in the, like, the polygenic screening. Yeah, lots of guy doing the tooth thing at the last one. Yes, yes, that's right. And he's coming again.

I got the tooth thing on me personally, actually, people who don't know Lumen. Lumen Bioworks is the name of the company. Yeah, it's Aaron who has. He's a friend of Ayla. He was like one of her secretary type people, I think, for a while.

Simone Collins
Yeah, they've worked together for a while. But for those who are not familiar with Lumen Bioworks, this is basically a swab you can do on your teeth that should give you basically a mouth macrobiotic environment. That makes it less likely, severely less likely to get to develop cavities. So, Austin, you're theoretically cavity free still, I take it? Theoretically.

Austin Chen
It might take another, like a few months because it takes about a year to fully colonize your mouth. And the other thing is that we don't really know if it's taking it because I haven't gone in and swabbed yourself, sobbed again to test it. So I think I got solved, like, about six months ago and, like, now definitely I should be able to figure it out, but I haven't yet. I'm going in for a dental appointment, like, in another week or so. So maybe I can tell you then if it, like, hasn't worked.

Simone Collins
We'll check with you. In with you at manifest. You should have a prediction market around your. Oh, that makes sense. Yes, I'll do that.

Malcolm Collins
So something I wanted to dig in here. Is this nonprofit thing that you're building? Yes. Can you tell us more about manafund? Sure.

Austin Chen
Oh, sorry, there's another question. I don't know if you generally want to go back to. Oh, no. Yeah, where can people. Yeah, where else are these people congregating in the Bay area?

Simone Collins
We've heard a lot of people say. It'S harder to find our discord, Simone, on our discord. And I'm gonna put the link below. But aside from our discord, where can people find these people? Especially when it comes to finding partners, because people email us all the time saying, yeah, trying to create that dating.

Malcolm Collins
Market that we promoted on our podcast. Yeah, yeah. But then there was, there wasn't enough people. It didn't have a big enough sample. So.

Simone Collins
Yeah. What are your thoughts there? Yeah, and there's like, two different questions. Even, like, one is like a question for just hanging out and finding a community, and one is like, finding love partner. I guess there's a sense in which, like, you don't necessarily want this to be different too.

Austin Chen
You might want them to be, like, pretty aligned. It's, like, nicer to just find love, like, in your community that you're in anyways. Also, famously, we had, like, our own dating product, manifold love, and it still exists. You can go. So go to the site.

I think it's still a pretty good resource. The pitch for Manifold Love right now is an open database of dateme docs, which is pretty in depth profiles with photos and rough bios, and then answers to a bunch of questions that are pretty key to understanding the personality of a person. So check it out. That's one place I would immediately recommend people to look a little bit for potential partners. Manifold love.

But yeah. On the question of where to hang out if you're looking to meet people like this in person, I run, like, a event called Taco Tuesday, and I actually haven't really advertised or pitched it before to people broadly, so I'm unsure if this is a good or bad thing to do. But anyways, it's like every Tuesday at my house, more or less cooked tacos. Usually 20 or 40 people will show up. We'll do some kind of event afterwards, like karaoke.

Malcolm Collins
Your house? Where. What city people might. San Francisco. I'll link to a recent invite where the address is on so people can look at it.

Austin Chen
I think it was like, close by. It's like basically middle of San Francisco. Yeah. I would love someone welcome, if you tour ever in town on a Tuesday, to come, for you to come. Oh, I would love that.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah, next time I'm in the city. I was just there for my GSB reunion. And yeah, I'd actually say that our audience, weirdly, we are at this stage of middling fame at the moment, where pretty much everyone I've met from our audience is really intellectual and high quality. Like, we haven't gotten that many idiots yet. A couple, but not a lot.

Which is fortunate in terms of not accidentally inviting too many weirdos to your house. Yeah. For Taco Tuesday, I also put the invite on a manifold market. Every weekend is like, how many people will show up? And you can bet on more than ten, more than 20, more than 30.

Austin Chen
And it is just like an open invite on the Internet where my address is on there. But the people who are manifold users who think, oh, I might enjoy coming to talk Tuesday, tend to also just be quite intellectual, fun to talk to. So that's why I would promote that as maybe a great place to merge the manifold and the Simone and Malcolm audience. Other places like this, I think there's definitely, like, a, like, rationality community in, like, Berkeley, which you're probably, like, familiar with, or maybe your audience is in San Francisco. There's actually, like, less of one, I'd say probably because San Francisco is a lot more, like, tech heavy.

It's like, bigger. So, like, the rationalist EA people and people who are, like, interested in topics like this are just, like, less. There's less of a concentration of them. They're drowned out by the, like, tech world, I'd say. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. One thing I'm picking up for from you, though, which I think is underrated and which I'm sick of people complaining about because we get this, is you are making all this happen. You are hosting Taco Tuesdays, you are organizing conferences, you are reaching out to your intellectual heroes and the people whose content you like to consume, and the people who you think would be interesting, and you're inviting them to your conference. And I think that is the key, being popular isn't about, like, somehow magically being popular. It is about being the one who organizes the thing and takes the initiative and does the work.

Simone Collins
And it's a lot of freaking work. You're putting a lot of work into all these things. So I think I just want to point that out to people that, like, guess what? This is going to involve a lot of legwork on your end. And if you just want to sit on your ass and show up to something, you're not going to have any of this.

Austin Chen
Yeah, I very much agree with that. I want to double down on that. I think a lot of people, or a lot of, like, people I know, like, friends, want to have a more vibrant social network. I want to go to, like, cool events. And I often try to tell them, like, you could just organize a cool event, or you could just organize an event and it won't start out cool, but that's okay.

Like, you'll get better at organizing better and better events. I think taco Tuesday started as, like, me and, like, two of my friends during COVID who are just, like, wanting to hang out more often. So we're like, okay, we're gonna show up. I'm gonna eat tacos. And we just kept doing it, and we did it for three years.

And that's how it's grown to this thing at this point, which, like, 40 people come to, 30 people come to every single week. Um, and, yeah, I think, like, social events, like, starting from as small as, like, a gathering to as large as, like, a conference, are still, like, pretty underprovided. Like, the, like, market demand for them is a lot higher than, like, the number of events that people can actually go to right now. So I think it would be a great thing if people listen to this podcast, decide, maybe I'll try and manifest to me was like, last year, can I put on a thing on the size of 100 people, 200 people showing up. And I never put a conference together before, but I think I learned a lot along the way.

And this year, I'm, like, very excited for manifest the second time around. I actually, simone, I'm going to take a side here and say that I think that people like Austin and us are, it's a genetic thing. I really don't think you can motivate somebody to be this type of person by just being like, oh, if you. Because I've seen what happens when I try to. Because, like, when I am mentoring young people or some fans, I'm like, oh, you could put something together like, here's a market space where you can put something together and they'll do the initial bit of work, but they don't really follow through.

Malcolm Collins
They don't really put in the effort to make it actually happen on a big scale. And then when it's pitters out, they're like, that's why I never try anything, because they don't really immerse themselves in making it happen. But I think that's a disposition thing where if you're dispositionally one of those people, you're just going to do it anyway. So it's a weird sort of a, it's optimistic perspective. And then I'm like, look, anyone could do this, but not any.

Not everyone is anyone. And because of that, the people who have the disposition to just tackle life this way are already going to be tackling life this way. Funny. I think that's exactly what actually I was going to say, or it was on my mind as well. This brings me back to one of my favorite pieces from Scott Alexander, the parable of the talents, I think, where.

Last year, and he's coming again this year, by the way. That's right. Yes. But I think it was this piece. If not, it was a different, like, Scott Alexander piece that talks about Scott's own reflections on his ability to write really well, and conversely, his ability to not be, like, really good.

Austin Chen
Like, he barely got, like, a d in calculus, I think goes the piece. And this goes to show that different people are, like, very good at different things. But most importantly for Scott, it's not like he, like, tried really hard to become a good writer. It was more that, like, becoming a good writer came naturally. He was just, like, goofing off, and then his, like, random, like, english essays would become, like, the best essays or, like, win, like, state competitions, that kind of thing.

So maybe the way that, like, possibly me and possibly the two of you are, like, feel more naturally drawn towards inviting people to things and hosting events well and make people happy. I think empathy is probably, like, a really key point of, like, how to make event, like, run really well, because you have to really understand how your participants are feeling and what, like, changes you can make to give them a better experience. And I don't know if it's, like, overly robust. We take the exact opposite perspective. Oh, okay, okay.

Malcolm Collins
Never mind for the exact opposite reason. You host events. So when we host events, we generally do it because we do not like spending time around people, we do not like meeting people. And I want to lower the amount of time in my year that I am spending socializing. And so to do that, like one of the things we used to do is every other month we'd put together a, like a party or event in New York to do that.

We were just like, oh, we'll put together these events because we need friends, we need a high powered social network to achieve the things we want to in life. So that required some level of socializing. But what it meant is we basically needed to condense our socializing to be as refined and pure as possible, not have to do it that frequently. And that is what motivated a bit. That is so interesting.

Austin Chen
Actually, for me, my motivations came very differently. I'm also not an extrovert. I actually don't particularly enjoy spending time in social situations. I think maybe this is similar to you two then. Yeah, so that's not why I put on events.

I put on events actually because I think most other people are pretty extroverted, but also are bad at making their own events happen or something like that. Or I just like egoistically think I can run a better event than you can. So I'm going to run the event. I actually really can, though. He's also in a unique time within the marketplace right now of events because the EA community and the rationalist community have been overcome by AI apocalypticism and just gone crazy.

Malcolm Collins
And so they're just not fun to be around. No one wants to be around that nihilistic b's. And then the pronatalist community is like the one fun community that's adjacent to those circles. It's still not overcome with that. So they're, but they're too busy raising their kids so they're not hanging out.

And many of them don't have kids, but they're just like, whatever. But your event, because it's drawing on these marketplaces, it's able to take if you're in this. And the reason I talk about the EA community and the rationalist community is this community, regardless of how polluted the overall ideology has become, is still collecting most of the world's highest agency, highest intelligence people. There's just not a lot of good conferences anymore for high agency, high intelligence people since the corruption of the old EA and rationalist communities, which really only happened after sandbank went free. I don't know if I like, agree with you all the way on the idea that EA rationale had been corrupted per se.

Austin Chen
Or you definitely use stronger words than I would use, but I do think there's a true element, which is I think EEG, for example, is not very fun. It is very automatic. That's not even the right word. It feels very good hearted. EEG explicitly has a metric around effective altruism global.

This is the premier. It runs two or three times a year. Global conference of effective altruists, where a lot of them get together and talk about the different causes they're working on. It is actually like a pretty good conference, like all, like all around. If that's, like a thing that you're interested in.

I enjoyed going, but again, to me, going there feels like a chore, like a job, like work. And I think most people who go feel this way. It is like a professional event, like, focus around networking and learning, but it's not fun. I think, like, when I was crafting manifest, I tried to make it, like, halfway between the EG effect, altruism global and Vivecamp. I'm not sure if either of you.

Malcolm Collins
Like, yeah, we've been to vidcamp. I was not a fan. It was well organized, but I didn't. The people that it draws were not intellectually additive to me. Interesting.

Austin Chen
So my disclaimer is that I've actually not been to vivecamp. I was just, like, using the vibes of vibe camp, so to speak. Like what it felt like people enjoyed from vibe camp. We were trying to combine those two out, have the intellectual caliber of people who go to an EAG, but the, like, fun element of playfulness. Playfulness, yes, yes, exactly.

Those are the things that I wanted to have in full force and manifest. I think we did okay last year, and hopefully we'll do even better this year. Yeah. So now let's talk about the nonprofit before we end, because I really want to understand this better. What is this?

Yeah. Manafund is independent 501 charity, which primarily is like. Like a grant maker and, like a website that people can apply for grants on. So it's a little bit similar to Kickstarter. You can, like, list your application there and, like, submit, and it'll be hosted on the Internet.

So that's one thing that's pretty different between manafun and most other grant makers, where most other grant applications are done in private, behind closed doors, you'll fill out a Google form or something, and then somebody will read it, and in a few weeks time, you'll get yes or no response. Instead, on manafun, where you apply for a grant, there, anyone can leave a comment, talk about what they like, what they didn't like about your application, and then anyone can donate to it. Via our Kickstarter like platform. We've also received some amount of funding from various, like, individual donors and other like, EA sources. So that some people who are on the site just already have a pot of money like, allocated to them to give out.

For example, we have $1.5 million worth of AI safety regranting budget. Six different, like, experts in the field of AI safety on our sites can choose to like, directly fund applications that they find particularly compelling. So yeah, this is the thing that I'm spending more of my time working on. And like, I'm like worried, like, in your head, Simone Malcolm Etrio. Like, oh, this seems like just like worse than the manifold thing.

Like, why are you, like, doing this instead? So I'm going to try to preempt that criticism. Do it. So manifold was like a really compelling idea around prediction markets. And we had a long time to test out, like, specifically how good is a prediction market.

And I think, like, we found it's good for some classes of things, but it's not like the panacea that like, we thought it could be, which is to say they're like, often good for topics that, like, are very broadly popular because they can draw a lot of attention to people, like getting in and like, asking, no, we'll trump on the election. That's like an example of a question. I was like, one, very popular. Two, really easy to understand and resolves, like, relatively soon. Three, these things make for one particular kind of good prediction market.

But I think when I started on manifold, there's some idea that, oh, we can use prediction markets for everything. I can make 100 choices in my day to day life via prediction markets, and I don't think we've quite gone there. I think even in the scope of trying to decide what features manifold should work on, which is pretty important and has a high amount of uncertainty and has a lot of trying to figure out what the future will hold. It's pretty hard to operationalize a prediction market to get that question answered for us. So I think at the end of that, I was like, oh, I think prediction markets might be like a good business, might be like very popular, but it might be a good business in the way that the New York Times is like a good business or something like that, but it's not like enough to change the world.

So now I'm trying to find a thing that will change the world. And it's not exactly clear if this grant making thing is on the path there, but I'm hoping that it will be. I actually think it's a good idea. I think it's a really good idea, and I think it's a better idea than manifest. So manifold.

Malcolm Collins
Manifold. So I'll explain why. So it actually comes from what I was saying. You have to look at the landscape of intellectually alive people and where young ones or up and coming ones in the pipeline are aggregating. And there's just a after the corruption of.

We have an episode that I haven't posted yet because I'm a little hesitant because it calls out a little too many people on the death of the EA movement. But I really want to hear that episode. That sounds great. Sam bacon freed. Because the EA movement, like, really over invested in appeasing Sam Bankman fried for a while because he was such a major donor.

He was like 90% of all the funds in the space. And because he was really just using the movement to support, like, to the whitewash his reputation with democratic politicians, it meant that really everything that they were drawn to was, like, mainstream and democratic. And it led to those sentiments. Growing, and growing was in the movement until recently. Like, even Nick Bostrom's thing at Oxford got shut down.

Like, what was this institute that got shut down? It was like a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, sorry. Like, very quickly note a disagreement, which I don't think we have time to get into. I actually, like, strongly support Sam bacon free.

Austin Chen
Like, even now, I don't know. I can say the thing I wrote, but. Yeah, it's a disagreement. But I don't care about him as a person. So I guess what I'd say is I actually have no beef with him as a person.

Malcolm Collins
But I think the downstream effects of his prioritization had a major memetic effect on the movement as a whole. Not even his prioritization, just the fact that there was any single entity in the space that was giving out what felt like infinite money at the time caused a virtue signal spiral. And that's more what we're referring to. Then when that one force disappeared from the movement as a motivator, the movements went off filter, like, it no longer had its ballast, and then began to spin out into, like, weird culty side projects, which we would argue, obviously you don't like, you are concerned about AI safety, but we argue a lot of the more extreme AI safety stuff has become. And as a result, there's a lot of intellectually active people who are like, I want to dedicate my life to making a world a better place, but I don't feel that will be achieved by going through the mainstream EA organizations and as a result you creating an alternative which is prestigious, which is able to host conferences that get people as diverse as us and Eliezer and Scott Alexander and I think like Richard Hanani or something was that in a recent one like you, you are getting the huge spectrum here, right?

Which creates what otherwise doesn't exist, which is a mainstream nonprofit fund that is not ideologically captured for the intellectually active in our society. And so I don't actually think that you're like, however your fund works. Of course it would need to work through some sort of like selective weird mechanism or it wouldn't appeal to this crowd. But I think that really more what you're capturing here is just a hole in the market right now that was created by the current position. You could say, why don't you guys in the pronatalist foundation fit that hole?

It's because we are too explicitly right leaning for somebody who wants to stay vanilla to donate to. That's why yours doesn't directly compete with ours either. I hadn't quite put it in those words before, or, but I think like the way you just set things right now, like Malcolm all fits into place. I do think there's a lot of things I think I'd probably disagree with you on the like, causes of like why the EA movement is the way it is. But I like roughly agree with your like, assessment.

Austin Chen
It is the case that like, I think there's lots of like really smart, agentic, like, cool people who are just looking at what the EA movement is right now and be like, that's not exactly the place for me. And I would very much like Manafont to be the place where like, they come and try to work on the. Cool projects, I like that too. It seems like one of the most. Common elements of someone who's associated with effective altruism is that they first very vehemently insist that they're not effective altruists.

Simone Collins
So there's this kind of need for a community and affiliation, but there's not yet one that seems to adequately represent things. And what I like about manifold associated projects and events and things is that they're very much for. They're independently driven. In this case, we're looking at largely crowdsourced grants, which is really cool. I know we have to wrap up soon, but I didn't want to ask like how the mechanics work.

So if someone is interested in once this goes live, and I'd love a timeline from you on that too, if possible, putting their project on this. How does it work? Is there a threshold that has to be met before they could get a grant? And do you think it's going to end up just being kind of an AI safety platform for. Because that's something I worry about with all EA adjacent grant making platforms.

Austin Chen
Absolutely. So to answer your question, one, it's already live and it's actually been live for a year and a half. Wow. Okay. A couple million dollars, I think about $2 million worth of like, grants to date.

How it works. The most basic version is anyone can come on and submit an application for any project that they want to. We have a lot of AI safety projects, but we're interested in variety. For example, Lumina, the like we funded, we were one of the, like, earliest funders for Lumina, and that was as a result of them applying on a platform. And I think that's actually how Erin, actually, that's not true.

Aaron was originally an investor in Manifold as well. So in some sense like this, people who are interested in similar things get to know each other already. But anyways, we're interested in finding things like Lumina, probiotics, and a lot of other cool, like techy. I would love to find like somewhat more like pronatalistic initiatives. They don't really apply to Manafund, so hopefully some of your listeners will look at this and think, oh, so you can go to manafund.org, manifund.org to check it out, look at some of the existing applications and apply for funding.

Yeah, go for it. I was going to say there was. Actually a number that got funded recently and they were all out of the Scott Alexander Fund. That's right. And that was a little bit different.

We have two standard grant. One is direct grants, which is the more typical 501 c, three funding. Another are impact certificates. Impact certificates, I'm not sure if you're familiar with or your audience is. They're like equity for charitable projects.

A very rough sketch is that somebody might put up like a large prize, let's say $100,000, for the best pronatorless projects. Maybe if you want to do pernode impact search, should be awarded at the end of 2024. And then in the meantime, somebody can put up a project saying, I'm going to work on this project, I think has a good chance of winning. If you think, if you agree my project has a good chance of winning, you can invest, I will sell you 20% of my project for $1,000. And then if I end up winning $5,000 or more, your investment will have made it like a return on investment.

That's like roughly an impact certificate. It separates out the like, assessing whether the project was good, which is done at this end of the year, to the upfront funding, the job of something like an angel investor as opposed to a grant maker. That's a system that we ran for Scott Alexander on our platform. And it's like a concept that we're very excited about, which I don't think I'll go into more detail now, but that's a impact certificate on. I love that.

Simone Collins
That's super cool. Yeah, that is super cool. And if you are looking for people to be like experts, like you said you had the AI experts. If you want pronatalist people to help distribute dollars on the platform, let us know. And we're happy to take those roles.

Austin Chen
Absolutely. This is really cool. Okay. Where should people go if they want to register for manifest while there's still time? There is still time.

It is. Manifest is the website. You can go there, check out who's coming to speak. We'll have a schedule up probably in the next couple of weeks. You can buy your tickets now and save a $100.

It'll be a great time. And manifest is not just like the two and a half day conference that was last year. Manifest. Beyond the like two and a half day conference, there's also a summer camp a week long. Like people like us just hanging out and like working by day and talking with each other at night.

And then it starts with a two and a half day, like unconference. That's like mostly just like online bloggers. I don't know if you two are going to be attending the rest of those. Less online, right? Yeah.

Simone Collins
Alas, no. It's hard to get away from the kids that long. Yeah, extra week, I think we're offering childcare. It's a thing for less online summer camp and manifold manifest itself. So in case you do want to bring your kids, I would love to meet your kids, but I don't know if that's like practical for you too.

Malcolm Collins
I'd be. We're getting close to the stage where we might start bringing our oldest to things, but I don't think we're going to this time, probably next year because I do want them to, as they are developing, to be able to go. I actually think it'd be really fun, like when they hit seven or so and they can talk to be giving speeches at some events like this. Oh, wow, that'd be great. It would be not like a speech, but like an audience questioning, because I think being able to interact with the mind of a young person growing up in the next generation provide people with a perspective that cannot be easily gained from other avenues in our society right now.

Simone Collins
Yeah, there's actually a conference or retreat series called Renaissance Weekend that was first popularized because the Clintons attended it back in, like, the Clinton era. And it had, it was always very family. It was a very pronatalist, very family oriented. And it was oriented, invite only, focused more on elite intellectuals. And they had a kid portion of it where they did have childcare, they did have a camp renaissance thing that went on.

And both luminaries from the main events would come out and do sessions for the kids. But also kids were encouraged to be involved in, not just attending. One of the most popular things was all the kids would get together and they would prep for a speech they were going to give as a group, and then they would be grilled by famous people. And actually, my responses were so good that Bill Clinton did an entire speech just about me at one of the renaissance weekends, saying that this is what the future is going to be. Our country is going to be great if we have more people like this.

Malcolm Collins
But the river snapper, Malcolm Cullen. The important thing about this is that it helps kids like Malcolm normalize that they can aspire to be like presidents. They can aspire to be like these leaders, these people who start these amazing startups and who do these incredible technical things and who are in biotech and AI and all these other. So I really love that you already are doing childcare. I love that you're doing that.

Simone Collins
And I strongly encourage you to continue because you will produce kids who end up like Malcolm, who have the balls to do stuff that other people aren't willing to do.

Malcolm Collins
It has been fantastic catching up with you, and I hope we draw some traffic to this event and we'll meet some fans when we go this time. Yeah, exactly. So, everyone, please remember to check out. You basically now, if you don't know about these things, already have three amazing things to check out, not just manifest, which is happening 2024, June 7 to June 9. So hopefully you see us there in Berkeley.

Simone Collins
That's in the Bay Area. It's 30 minutes outside of San Francisco. So what are the big group houses? Not group house. It's on this, like, sprawling campus.

It's absolutely gorgeous and super modern with crazy cool furniture and all these cool. Niches often look like, oh, I think. That'S the one yeah, a lighthouse campus is amazing, and we're so grateful to be able to host it there again. Yeah, I've never really seen a place quite like lighthaven before. It's.

It's like never Neverland meets startup world. Bay Area. Malcolm, you never so live in the. Bay area, and I do not think this is true. Yeah, I don't think that's true.

I grew up in the Bay area, Malcolm. I don't know what you. You weren't invited to all the crazy rationalist parties, Simone. Maybe not. I missed some kind of golden age that only Malcolm had access to.

This is true, though. I actually did. So that's. That is one thing. The other is manifold, obviously.

Incredible prediction market and the more fun one, because you actually can do the fun stuff. And I can say that playing around with the other prediction markets I did turned off by the fact that a lot of fun, weird stuff couldn't be there and that it felt really structured and more gated, whereas manifolds more open and fun and playful. And then, of course, also manna fund. Great place to both look at cool philanthropic projects, but also contribute to them and maybe get contributed to. So, Austin, thank you so much for your work.

All the initiative you're taking. Can't wait to see you in a couple weeks. And yeah, can't wait to see, hopefully some of the people following this podcast as well. Thank you so much for having me on. It was great getting chat with you.

Austin Chen
I'll see you at Mad Fest.

Simone Collins
Okay. Ending recording.