This was my second year of going to LessOnline, the Lighthaven Summer Camp, and Manifest. When I first went a year ago it was all such a surreal experience. I had barely been involved at all with the Austin LessWrong community. Heck if I knew what a rationalist was, but I vaguely knew about Aella from Lex Fridman and other podcasts. Suffice it to say, I had a lot of brain-exploding moments in 2025.
How I Discovered Manifest
As a certified Zoomer, everything I know is downstream of the internet, particularly YouTube. Looking back, the chain goes surprisingly far back in time. I’m a fan of Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast. I’ve probably been watching since at least 2020. There came a time where he was interviewing a bunch of Evolutionary Psychology researchers and became interested in declining birth rates. In 2023, Williamson interviewed prominent pronatalist Malcolm Collins who illustrated a very compelling take on why the birth rate matters. It essentially boiled down to the cultures that inherit the future of humanity will be the ones who have the most kids as culture is largely inherited through the family. Malcolm runs the Pragmatist Foundation along with his wife Simone.
It was such a compelling pitch that I started following the Collins family and became a regular viewer of their podcast, Based Camp. In 2024, the Collinses interviewed Austin Chen, one of the organizers of Manifest. I looked at the website, saw what seemed like an insanely high ticket price, and went on with my day. “This isn’t for me” I thought.
Natalcon 2025
Around the end of 2024, it became clear that I was gonna leave Colorado. I got an offer letter for a new job and was moving to Austin in mid-January. In that same time, the Collinses were advertising Natalcon 2025 on their podcast, offering a discount code to their viewers. After discount it was $900 for a two-day conference. As a 23-year-old, this price was very hard to stomach, but I knew I was gonna be an Austin local and didn’t have to pay for lodging, so I bit the bullet. “I can afford this, we’ll see if it’s worth it.”
And my god, was it worth it. From going to Natalcon I realized that you go to the conferences not just for the talks and speakers, but also for the fantastic cast of attendees. The conference brought a bunch of people of similar interests together, speaking candidly in-person. The cost and topic are a fantastic filter for high-quality conversations. I spent way more of my time chatting with the attendees and speakers outside of the conference rooms than watching speaker presentations (the talks were recorded anyway). And today, I can draw a direct line from the connections I made at and around Natalcon to my current job. Incredible ROI.
My time in Austin was already going really well, but man did that conference and surrounding events (afterparties, brunch, etc.) shift my view on what was possible. The contrast with my day-to-day life was almost overwhelming, very “how the hell did I get here??” energy.
LessOnline/Summer Camp/Manifest 2025
I was sold. Conferences were the way to meet cool and interesting people in niche fields. The high cost was worth it. Almost immediately after Natalcon 2025, I went to the Manifest website to buy tickets for the 2025 conference. Then I see there are three events: LessOnline, Summer Camp, and Manifest bundled together in this same events space and I’m like “fine worth it,” pay up, and book my vacation time. I know nothing past whatever Austin had said about it in the interview. I was just flying on the high of “conferences are awesome” energy of Natalcon.
It was about two months before the first conference, LessOnline. In that time I had apparently met some of the Austin LessWrong members at the adjacent Natalcon events. I eventually started going to their regular meetups. I still don’t know what the hell it means to be a rationalist. I just met a bunch of people who had read a lot of blogs from guys like Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky. I had also heard a lot about Effective Altruism (EA) through the various podcasts I’d listened to. Two words: Bayesian reasoning. To me it was just a cool space where a bunch of nerds could spontaneously talk about nerd shit for hours. It reminded me of my high school and college days.
Going to the conferences was essentially more of that “nerds talking nerd shit” but with a sprinkle of AI doomerism. AI 2027 had just come out and there was dread in the air. Every other person I met was either an AI safety researcher or someone interested in getting into AI safety and/or other EA causes. But it was so cool. These were some of the most open-minded curious people I’d ever met. The density of information and novel ideas per second was astounding. My thought was “oh, this is why this place is Silicon Valley.” It seems incredibly hard to replicate anywhere else. The network effects are too strong.
There were traders, crypto bros, tech bros, biotech people, wellness/fitness people, policy wonks, writers, so many people with interesting life experiences and worldviews all brought together in shared nerdom. I got convinced by a biotech founder to get my blood drawn and stored for $10 per month. I met a guy who was the premier expert on hat problems in mathematics. Some guy had a novel solution for dealing with climate change long term. And there were at least three train enthusiasts that year. Another mind-blowing experience— my brain could’ve easily broken from overexposure to novelty.
2026 Conferences
I’ve been in Austin for a year and a half now. I’ve been handling the radical changes in my life since then quite well. Less brain-exploding moments and more “okay this is just my life now.” But I get a great kick out of explaining the wackiness of it all to my more normie friends. Last year, when I met up with friends for a housewarming party overlapping with Manifest, they literally thought I had entered a cult. The contrast between just being at Lighthaven and sitting with them watching some rando Netflix reality TV show was crazy.
This year, I spent a lot more time in my comfort zone. Catching up with people I’d seen the previous year and just generally sticking with my Austin crew a lot more. I spent a large amount of time outside of Lighthaven visiting various high school and college friends who currently live in the Bay. SF is a beautiful city and the walkability is to die for (got 26,000 steps in my first Saturday out there). There was genuinely a part of me that thought “man I should live here, it’d be so great.” Those thoughts quickly subsided after looking at the rent prices. I just can’t accept feeling poor and “in the rat race.”
Spending time with people outside of Lighthaven gave me a better-calibrated sense of the wider Bay Area. I had described the experience of being in the Bay as “drowning in tech Kool-Aid.” In reality, there are plenty of pockets of normies even in this world-class tech hub surprisingly enough. Not everyone is Twitter-brained and a startup founder on their grindset 996 schedule. You can just find the people who work a 9-5 and go to bars on weekends and chill otherwise. It really put things into perspective. The tech bubble is even a bubble within SF. All the more important when you realize just how few decision makers or “in the weeds” people there actually are in the world.
So it’s a fun time. I still learned a lot this year. Awesome talks and awesome people. Multiple late nights and intensely stimulating discussions. It’s all-around my favorite event of the year. I’m just no longer the crazy impostor-syndrome-addled person I was a year ago. So, surprisingly, there’s a lot less of my mind left to blow.