Why You Can Not Allow Nerds to Congregate with Austin Chen

Manifold:

The Taco Party:

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.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] 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 Manifund, 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 per natalism, right? But last year was the first ever manifest conference.

This is the flagship conference and the one only of manifold. And it was one of the best gatherings we've ever been to in terms of the California 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 mana fund.

And I just wanted to kick this off with

Malcolm Collins: why? No, hold on. We got to kick it off with a good question. Okay. I think that

Austin Chen: was a great question. The

Malcolm Collins: good question is [00:01:00] around the betting pool that was put around when a a sex party would form at last year's event. Oh my God. Orgy.

Yes. Yeah. Can you speak to that? What happened there?

Austin Chen: 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 want it to be a place where instead of the more standard platforms, Metacliss, PolyMarket, Kaoshi, which all have like prediction markets or forecasts. But all of their forecasts and prediction market was like gatekept. 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 like out there, sketchy, like raunchy degenerate, like 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 [00:02:00] 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 that 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 cover.

It was like somebody who was one of our users was like, there's a bunch of like really spicy things happening. The like rationalist EA crowd is famous for the very loose, like norms on like sexuality, like polyamory, that kind of thing. Maybe there'll be an orgy. It's a thing that has probably ever happened before in like other rationalist parties or something like that.

And there's just like a market for it. And every prediction market can also be viewed as like an incentive market, where if you have inside 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 And I think that's basically what happened here.

So I'm like enterprising, like user in our community was like, it probably wouldn't be that hard to get together with the minimum viable orgy. If we can get three people to agree to come [00:03:00] over and have sex. I think they did this off the light, hidden campus. Then we can resolve this market correctly.

So that's my best guess of what happened.

Malcolm Collins: And Elo is one of the speakers. 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 I that, because you have people like Eliezer Youkowski again coming this year, you get more of the anti AI side, whereas generally our audience is very pro AI accelerationist.

Yeah, but you also get a lot of accelerationists there yeah, we

Austin Chen: have, for example, Brian Chow coming, who is of the Alliance for the Future 2. 3 that's established. He's been on our podcast.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he has. 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 and

Simone Collins: You've partially answered the question, which I think is, so we're [00:04:00] getting there. And I think we need to dig deeper here is a lot of the people who follow this podcast and who liked 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

Malcolm Collins: bigger element Simone is that prediction [00:05:00] 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. Which is genuine intelligence. And so it sorts for genuine intelligence and then within prediction marketplaces, it sorts for degenerates with genuine intelligence, which is our audience.

Simone Collins: 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?

Austin Chen: So the first question what they have in common.

I think taking it back, like a lot of [00:06:00] who comes to the conference is where does the conference get marketed? And who does this seem appealing to? 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 trying to model Yeah. Which is this the crowd for me vibe. And we're trying to position manifest as really hard to say I sometimes say like manifests 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 a 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 guest 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 [00:07:00] natalism, fertility culture crowd, which is you two, obviously, and Richard Kanania and like Robin Henson, who talk about these kinds of topics extended Tesla people like that they, Often talk to each other.

I think there's some sites like reference each other. You like go on each other's podcast 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 like natural affinity for like markets, economics, prediction markets, especially they're like, they're in full force.

Startup crowd, of course, the tech startups, the I think there was one other, there were

Simone Collins: tons of machine learning people also learning

Austin Chen: people. I view that as a bit of an outgrowth of like startups slash there's an irrationality. There's a biotechnology sorry. It was the one that was on my mind, especially in the, like the polygenic screening, the yeah.

A lot of times yeah, we met the guy

Malcolm Collins: doing the tooth thing at the last one. Yes.

Austin Chen: Yes, that's right. And he's coming again. I got the two thing on me personally, actually Lumen, Lumen

Simone Collins: Bioworks is the name of the company. Yeah it's Aaron. Who has, he's a friend of Ayla.

Malcolm Collins: He was like one of her secretary type people, I think for a while.[00:08:00]

Yeah, they've

Simone Collins: worked together for a while, but for those who are not familiar with Lumen, Lumen Bioworks, this is basically a swab you can do on your teeth. But. 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?

Austin Chen: Theoretically 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. Cause I haven't gone in and Oh, that gets swabbed here. to test it. So I think I got swabbed like about six months ago and like now definitely I should be able to figure it out, but I haven't yet.

I'm getting, going in for a dental appointment, like into another week or so. So maybe I can tell you then if it like,

Simone Collins: we'll check with you in with you at at manifest. You should have a prediction market around your

Austin Chen: Oh, that definitely makes sense. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: So something I wanted to dig in here is this nonprofit thing that you're

Simone Collins: Yes.

Can you tell us more [00:09:00] about ManaFund?

Austin Chen: Sure. Oh, sorry. There's another question. I don't know if you generally want to go back. Oh, no.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Where can people, yeah, where else are these people congregating? In the Bay Area, we've heard a lot of people say it's harder to find. Our Discord,

Malcolm Collins: Simone, on our Discord.

I'm gonna put the link below.

Simone Collins: 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, try to create

Malcolm Collins: that dating market that we promoted on our podcast. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But then there wasn't enough people. It didn't have a big enough sample.

So yeah. What are your thoughts there?

Austin Chen: Yeah. And there's a, I two different questions. Even like one is like a question for just hanging out and finding a community. And one is like finding, I guess there's a sense in which like, you don't necessarily want us to be different too.

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 dot love. And it still exists. You can still go to the site. I think it's still a pretty good resource.

The pitch for manifold dot love right now is it's like an open database [00:10:00] of like date me docs, which is like pretty in depth profiles with like photos and rough, like bios. And then like answers to a bunch of like questions about that, like pretty key to like understanding the personality of a person.

So check it out. If that's one place I would immediately recommend people to look a little bit for potential partners, manifold dot 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 like people like 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 like cook tacos, usually like 20 or like 40 people will show up. We'll do some kind of event afterwards, like karaoke. Your house where?

Malcolm Collins: What city people might reach out?

San

Austin Chen: Francisco. San Francisco. Okay, good to meet you. I'll link to like a recent invite where the address is on so people can look at it and think if it's like close by. It's like basically middle of San Francisco. I would love Simone and Malcolm, if you two are ever in town on a Tuesday, to come for you to come by.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I would love that, 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 [00:11:00] are at the 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.

Austin Chen: Yeah, for Taco Tuesday, I also put the invite on a manifold market. Every week it is like, how many people will show up? And you can bet on more than 10, more than 20, more than 30.

And it is just like an open invite on the internet where my address is on there. But like the people who are manifold users who think Oh, I might enjoy coming to talk to you. They tend to also just be like quite like intellectual, like fun to talk to. So that's why I would promote that as like maybe a great place to merge the manifold and be like Simone and Malcolm, like audience 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 is 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 [00:12:00] 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 would say. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One

Simone Collins: 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 being popular.

Like somehow magically being popular. It is about being the one who organizes the thing and takes the initiative and does the work. And it's a lot of fricking 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. Yeah, I very much agree with

Austin Chen: that. I want to double down on that. I think a lot of [00:13:00] people or a lot of like people I know, like friends are Oh, 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 can 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 to my friends during COVID who are just like wanting to hang out more often.

So we're like, okay, we're going to show up and we're going to do 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. And yeah I think like social events Like starting from a small as like a gathering to as large as like a conference are still like pretty under provided, 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 and said 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 [00:14:00] manifest.

Malcolm Collins: 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. They don't really put in the effort to make it actually happen on a big scale. And then when it pitters out, they're like that's why I never try anything because they don't really immerse themselves in making it happen.

And I think that's a dispositional 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 can 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 [00:15:00] be tackling life this way.

Austin Chen: That's 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 it'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 a scholar kind of 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. 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 like, 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 making people happy.

I think Empathy is probably like a really key point of like how to make a event like [00:16:00] 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, Oh, it's fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: We take the exact opposite perspective. Oh, okay. Okay. Nevermind. You host events 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 months we'd put together 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 to not have to do it that frequently. And that is what motivated a bit. That is

Austin Chen: so interesting. Actually for me, my [00:17:00] motivation came very differently.

It's 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 to them.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So

Austin Chen: 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'm actually very You clearly can though.

Malcolm Collins: 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.

And so they're just not fun to be around. No one wants to be around that nihilistic BS. And then the pronatalist communities, like the one fine. Community that's adjacent to those circles. It's still not overcome with that. So they're too

Simone Collins: busy raising their kids. So they're not hanging out.

Malcolm Collins: The 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 [00:18:00] 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 Zambank been freed.

Austin Chen: I don't know if I like agree with you, like all the way on the idea that like irrational had been like corrupted per se, or I think you definitely use like 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 like very automatic or that's not even the right word. Like it's still very good hearted, but EHE explicitly has like a metric around effective altruism global. This is like the premier it runs like two or three times a year global conference of effective altruists where a lot of them like 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 [00:19:00] 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 EHE Effective Altruism Global and VibeCamp. I'm not sure if either of you are familiar with VibeCamp. Yeah, we've been

Malcolm Collins: to VibeCamp. I was not a fan. It was well organized, but I didn't the people that it draws were not intellectually additive to me.

Austin Chen: Interesting. So my disclaimer is that I've actually not been to Vibe Camp. I was just like using the 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 elements of The playfulness of Vibe Camp.

Playfulness. Yes. Yes, exactly. Those are the things that I wanted to have in full force. I think we did okay last year and hopefully we'll do even better this year.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So now let's talk about the nonprofit before we end, cause I really want to understand this better. What is this?

Austin Chen: Yeah ManaFund is [00:20:00] independent 501c3 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 then it'll be hosted on the internet. So that's one thing that's pretty different between like Manifun and most other grant makers, where like most other grant applications are done like like in private behind closed doors, like you'll fill out like a Google form or something, and then somebody will read it, and like in a few weeks time you'll get like a yes or no response.

Instead on Manifund we're like, you apply for a grant there. It goes, anyone can leave a comment, like talk about what they like, what they didn't like about your application and then anyone can donate to it by 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 a safety on our sites can choose to like directly fund applications that they find particularly compelling. Yeah, this is the thing that I'm spending more of my time working on and [00:21:00] like I'm like worried, like in your heads Simone, Malcolm, you're like, Oh this seems like just like worse than the manifold thing.

Like, why are you like doing this instead? So I'm gonna 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 jump on the election.

That's like an example of a question. I was like one, very popular to 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 was some idea that oh, we can use prediction markets for everything.

I can make a hundred choices in my day to day life via prediction markets. And I don't think we've quite gotten there. I think even in the scope of trying to decide what features manifold should work on, which is like pretty important and has a high amount of uncertainty and has a lot of trying to figure out what the future will hold.

Yeah. We're, it's pretty hard [00:22:00] to operationalize a prediction market to like, 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. It might be like very popular but it might be a good business in the way that like 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 like trying to find a thing that will change the world. And it's not exactly clear if this grant making thing is like. On the path there, but I'm hoping that

Malcolm Collins: 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.

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 movement.

But Sam Baikman freed because the EA movement like really over [00:23:00] invested in appeasing Sam Baikman freed for a while because he was such a major donor. He was like 90 percent of all the funds in the space. And because he was really just using the movement to support, like to whitewash his reputation with democratic politicians.

It meant that really everything that they were drawn to was like mainstream and democraty. And it led to those sentiments growing and growing was in the movement until recently, like even Nick Bostrom saying it, Oxford got shut down. Like you, what was this institute that got shut down?

It was like a couple of weeks ago.

Austin Chen: Yeah, sorry, like very quickly know a disagreement, which I don't think we have time to get into. I actually like strongly support Sam Bacon free, like even now. I don't know I can say, I think I wrote but yeah, it's like

Malcolm Collins: 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. But I think the downstream effects of his prioritization had a major memetic effect on the movement as a whole. [00:24:00] Not

Simone Collins: 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. And

Malcolm Collins: when that one force disappeared from the movement as a motivator, the movement 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 [00:25:00] Alexander and I think like Richard Hanani or something like 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. It's just a hole in the market right now that was created by the current position.

You can 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.

Austin Chen: I hadn't quite put it in those words before, or but I think like the way you just said things right now, [00:26:00] like Malcolm, it all fits into place.

I do think those are 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. 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 Manifold to be the place where like they come and apply to work on the cool project.

Simone Collins: 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. And so there's this kind of need for a community and affiliation, but there's not one that seems to adequately represent things.

And I, what I like about manifold associated projects and events and things is that. They're very much for their, they're independently driven. They're, in this case, we're looking at largely crowdsourced grants, which is really cool. I know my, we have to wrap up soon, but I didn't want to ask like how the mechanics work.

So if someone is [00:27:00] 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 because that's something I worry about with all E.

A. 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. Okay. Amazing. 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 like any project that they want to.

We have a lot of AI safety products, 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 Aaron Actually, that's not true.

Aaron was originally a investor in manifold as well. So in some sense, like this is like people who are interested in like similar things get to know each other already. But anyways we're interested in [00:28:00] finding things like Lumina probiotics and a lot of other cool, like techie, I would love to find like somewhat more like pronatalist, like initiatives, they don't really apply to Manifund.

So hopefully some of your listeners will look at this and think Oh so you can go to manifund. org M A N I F U N D. org to check it out look at some of the existing applications. And apply for funding. Again, go for it.

Malcolm Collins: I was gonna say, there was actually a number that got funded recently, and they were all out of the Scott Alexander Fund.

Austin Chen: That's right. And that was a little bit different. We have two standard grants. One is direct grants, which is the more typical 501c3 funding. Another are 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 a hundred thousand dollars for the best pronated list products. Maybe if you want to do pronated impact certs to 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 percent of my project for 1, 000. And then if I end up winning, 5, 000 or [00:29:00] more, your investment will have made like a return on investment. That's like roughly an impact certificate. It's a separates out the like assessing whether the project was good, which is done at the 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.

Simone Collins: I love that. That's super cool.

Malcolm Collins: 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. Absolutely.

Simone Collins: Oh, this is really cool. Okay. Where should people go? If they want to register for manifest while there's still time,

Austin Chen: There is still time. It is a manifest that is is the website.

I can go there. Check out who's coming to speak. We'll have a schedule up like probably in the next couple of weeks. . You can buy your tickets now and save 100. You'll, it'll be a great time. And manifest is not just like the two and a half day conference that it was last year.

 Manifest beyond the like two [00:30:00] 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 con 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.

Simone Collins: Less online, right? Yeah. Alas, no. It's hard to get away from the kids that long.

Austin Chen: Yeah. We have a whole 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 two want to bring your kids, I would love to meet your kids, but I don't know if that's like practical for you two.

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 [00:31:00] person growing up in the next generation can provide people with a perspective that cannot be easily gained from other avenues in our society right now.

Yeah, there's actually

Simone Collins: 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'd 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 the

Malcolm Collins: most popular things was all the kids would get together and they would prep for a speech.

They were going to give it a group and then they would be grilled by famous people. And actually, Oh, my responses were so good that Bill Clinton did an entire speech just about me at one of the Renaissance weekends saying [00:32:00] that if this is what the future is going to be, our country is going to be great if we have more people like this young river sniffer, Malcolm Collins.

Simone Collins: The important thing about this is that it, 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. 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 a 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.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly. So everyone, please remember to check out. 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 7th to June 9th. So hopefully you see us there in [00:33:00] Berkeley. That's in the Bay Area. It's 30 minutes outside of San Francisco.

It's one of the big group houses. Not group house. It's almost like sprawling campus. It's absolutely gorgeous and super modern with crazy cool furniture and all these cool niches.

Malcolm Collins: That's what the group houses often look like.

Simone Collins: Oh, not the ones I was

Austin Chen: Just the one. Yeah. A light hidden campus is amazing and we're so grateful to be able to host it there again.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I've never really seen a place quite like Light Haven before. It's it's like never Neverland meets startup World Bay area. Malcolm, you never socialize. I live in the Bay Area. I do not think this is

Austin Chen: true.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I don't think that's true. I grew up in the Bay area, Malcolm.

I don't know what you're, you weren't invited to all the crazy rationalist parties, Simone, 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 was 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 Manifest feels more open and fun and playful. [00:34:00] And then of course, also Manifund. 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 of weeks. And yeah, can't wait to see hopefully some of the people following this podcast as well.

Austin Chen: Thank you so much for having me on. It was great getting to chat with you. I'll see you at Manifest.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Have a spectacular day.

Austin Chen: Okay. Ending

Simone Collins: recording.

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