Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Disturbing Cult Taking Over Silicon Valley (Inside Davos For The Tech Elite)

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

What happens when Silicon Valley tries to optimize everything, from AI and politics to dating, reproduction, friendship and even human behavior?SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co         Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenzEvery year, hundreds of technologists, rationalists, AI researchers, startup founders and prediction market obsessives gather in Berkeley for Manifest. Officially, it’s a conference about prediction markets. But the ideas circulating there offer a fascinating window into a much bigger worldview that is becoming increasingly influential across Silicon Valley and the AI industry.In this episode of Power User, freelance journalist Alex Bronzini-Vender joins me to explain what he saw inside Manifest and the strange world of Silicon Valley rationalism. We discuss prediction markets, AI existential risk, effective altruism, embryo selection, radical transparency, dating experiments, Manifold, Polymarket, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the paperclip maximizer and why some attendees see markets as a tool for optimizing nearly every aspect of life.We also get into the growing political and cultural influence of the rationalist movement, why Manifest has been compared to Davos, and what happens when ideas that once existed on obscure blogs and internet forums begin moving into the mainstream of technology and politics

Stereotype of these peoples that they're secretive, but in fact, I think that the much weirder fact about them is their commitment to the view that we would all be better versions of ourselves if everyone knew everything about us all the time. Every summer, hundreds of Silicon Valley technologists, rationalists, AI researchers, startup founders, and aspiring intellectuals gather in Berkeley for a conference called Manifest. The conference is ostensibly about prediction markets, but in reality, the truth is much stranger. Manifest as an event serves as a window into an emerging worldview that seeks to optimize every single aspect of human existence, from dating to friendship, to politics, reproduction,

and even democracy itself. And beneath the eccentric surface of this conference lies a very serious ideological project pushed by some of Silicon Valley's most influential technologists and business leaders. Alex Bronsini vendor is a freelance journalist and he attended this year's Conference. Today, we're going to dive deep on what Manifest is, whether it's truly Davos for the tech elite. And what Alex learned from attending this conference were the tech elite debates, like whether to genetically engineer their offspring, how to seduce strangers, do lots of drugs, and ultimately plan to upend democracy. Alex, welcome to power user. Thanks for having me. You attended this event called Manifest, where hundreds of Silicon Valley technologists,

rationalists AI people gather in Berkeley. Can you tell me what is this conference an event? And how did Manifest get on your radar? So Manifest has been on my radar for quite a while, just because it's this, on one hand, kind of fringe culture. But on the other hand, attended by lots of people who are big media figures, big political figures, people like Nate Silver, formerly of 538, people like Kevin Roos, the New York Times, people like David Shore, who ran Connell Harris' Super PAC. So it was interesting to me for the reason that it's ostensibly this kind of conference that's for this kind of fringe culture online that is like on Twitter and on

LessRong, which is the blog that they all gather on. It's this forum. But then on the other hand, that has managed to bring in these people of incredible relevance. And so I was kind of interested in what their vision of the future is collectively. Well, tell me a little bit about who the usuals are. You mentioned some of the more high profile attendees. But how did this conference start out? What was the original conceit for it? Well, it's sponsored by prediction market platform that's called Manifold. They briefly tried introducing real money, but it's really a play money prediction market platform. You can convert your dollars into fake points that cannot really be converted back into dollars on the site, and then you can use them to bet on things that are a lot more

niche, let's say, than what you might be able to bet on on Cal She and Polymarket. So, for instance, you can bet on, will users of Manifold be in long-term relationships by the end of the year? Will they break up? Will they be able to make out with someone over the duration of Manifest? was someone who created one of those markets and it unfortunately resolved to know, which is to say that he did not manage to make out with anyone. You can broadly bet on a variety of things that are much more expansive than usual. And this is really important to their culture, because at least among this specific group of rationalists, which is a term that maybe we'll get around to defining later, they really believe that prediction markets are this thing that can help you optimize your life,

that you submit every kind of decision that you're making to a prediction market. And then it can help you, for instance, understand. In one case, literally I watched a couple, allow a bunch of users on this prediction market to determine their likelihood of staying together for six months. The theory behind this being that if you have a market of people, some of whom have like financial stakes in your breakup, then they will be testing you. And then if your relationship is destined to fail, it will fail more quickly. So they have these kinds of market-based epistemological commitments that they all kind of gather to celebrate. You mentioned the rationalist. Can you define a little bit more for people that aren't

familiar with these people. What are the rationalists? And how has their ideology really crept into Silicon Valley? Because I do feel like this whole group is culturally ascendant in these tech circles. So rationalism really grew out of blogging culture in the mid-2000s. A lot of early debates around AI safety. Now, of course, the AI labs have tons of money, especially I think in D.C., the amount of money that you make to be doing AI policy is so much greater than the amount of money that you are making if you're doing like tax policy or whatever. And so I think that that especially in the last two years, and certainly in the coming few years too, given the impending IPOs of anthropic and open AI, there's been an incredible amount of money that's been infused

into pushing this scene's central concern, which are the existential risks of AI upon lawmakers in Washington. In fact, I think that when we talk about their political influence, something that people manifest were really obsessed with was the failed congressional campaign of Alex Boris in New York's 12th congressional district. Why are they so obsessed with Alex Boris just because he was the safety candidate. He was the AI safety guy. It's something that you kind of need to understand about these people. So like, I think that AI safety is a serious concern. These people believe, at least many of them believe that AI safety is not just five orders of magnitude more important than climate change, let's say, which I would say that, yeah, it probably is a slightly more urgent issue than climate change,

given the pace at which this technology is accelerating. These people believe the order of issues. There's like AI safety way up here, and then everything else is just like peanuts for the rest of us in Normies to talk about. So it's really quite central to the political understanding. And Alex Boris was, I think, someone whom they perceived as a fellow traveler here. It's interesting their view of AI safety, I would say, because these are not people that are out protesting the way that ICE and CPB are leveraging spyware and AI systems to surveil the border. It seems like what they're more concerned about is this ex-risk idea of AI destroying the world. And like, it all sounds very sci-fi fantasy.

And as somebody that covers a lot of the way that AI is used to erode our civil rights and liberties. These people are not engaged in that conversation at all. So maybe you could dive a little deeper on what they mean by AI safety and how that's playing out. Yeah, what they mean by AI safety. And granted, there's a certain level of diversity of thought in this scene. Actually, there's this user on Twitter who goes by Beth Jaisos. I don't know if you're familiar with him.

Yes. He was there. Accelerationist, right? I think it's fair to characterize him as someone who has an extremely high tolerance for the prospect of human extinction induced by misaligned AI. I think he's basically like keep developing AI at all costs. I mean, Mark Andreessen literally cited Beth Jesus as one of his core thinkers of the future in this blog post that he published. So I don't want to make these people out to be more homogenous than they are.

But I think that the horseshoe between a guy like Beth Jaisos and AI safety people is that they all understand the potential risks of AI to be like Elisa Yudkowski, who's another important figure in this scene, kind of foundational thinker, he wrote this book called Harry Potter and the methods of rationality that say Harry Potter fanfic that's tens of thousands of word long and is in fact longer than infinite jest and gravity's rainbow put together. And Guitkowski's kind of scenario, the canonical idea of what might misaligned AI do that doesn't properly understand the importance of human life is the paperclip maximizer, which is to say you're like a paperclip firm, you tell you, I make the most amount of paperclips possible and then it kills all humans to extract the iron from our blood to make paper clips. So I think that the horseshoe here between a Beth Jaisos and one of the AI

Dumer types like Yud is that they both kind of believe that this technology is heading towards this position where it will have this world bestriying power to turn us all into paperclips. In addition to the AI X-risk obsession and their obsession with market forces, I guess like the polymarketification of everything, you write about their other views on humans themselves and I feel like they have a lot of eugenics-related beliefs. systems. Can you talk about how they view humans and like humanity? Because it seems like that's also weird. Yeah, I think that one foundational conviction in this space is a distrust of human cognition. They kind of believe that human brains are these fundamental superstitious things. A lot better if you're naked in the jungle to detect a threat where there isn't one,

then to detect no threat where there is one. I mean, this is kind of their theory of what's going on with human brains. And so we're hopelessly conspiratorial, hopelessly, unable to really accurately process the thing. that are before us. Unlike them who are, you know, just hyper-rational. Well, I think that they too believe themselves to have the flaws as the rest of us, but at least they are cognizant of them and can name them as their Bayesian priors. This is what they call their biases. And what this dovetails, I think, very nicely with are these various schemes to improve human brains and to make humans more trustworthy by bioengineering your child, by doing IVF and selecting the embryo that has the highest IQ.

Which is eugenics, a lot of of it feels. Embryo selection is this evolving science and you want to select the healthiest embryos that it has the best chance of carrying through to a healthy pregnancy. But people in your article were talking about like the ideal male height being five foot nine for some reason. It seems like they have other specifications that are not just like, why is that? Why is five nine ideal? It's because if you're too tall, apparently your heart has to work harder or something. And I think there's elevated cancer risk as well. If you're taller, I'm not certain of this. It may just be because you have more flesh than you have more space to develop tumors.

Got it. But in any case, honestly, the real problem with this stuff seems to be that it's kind of just fake. Right. What I can tell, there doesn't actually exist technology with which you can reliably figure out what the potential IQ of your embryo is. And I guess if they're wasting a bunch of money, it's not like the worst thing in the world. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com.

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Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. Well, there's a lot of money in this space, and I'm wondering if you can dig into that too, because in a sense, these are like really weird fringe beliefs. I think if you speak to you speak to you. most Americans, but these people have a growing amount of power and influence over the tech landscape, right? And it seems like these people also are maybe in positions of power or at least influence

in the AI world. Well, I think to their credit, they were thinking about a lot of the AI-X-risk stuff earlier than other people were and have now managed to intellectually dominate that space in a way that Normies have not. Regarding how they think about power, the really interesting thing I found about the Alex Boris campaign is that a lot of these people were actually really quite frustrated with the way that Boris ran his campaign. For the reason that Boris got an endorsement from Bernie Sanders' group, Our Revolution, he kind of tried to be the labor candidate in that race. He took some sort

of nimbie positions on certain public housing projects in New York. He was talking about fighting price gouging. Why are they against all that? Because I think that they have a lot of center-right economic views. And so they were very frustrated about that. Of course, if they're running in the middle of Manhattan, it doesn't really benefit you, especially against the guy who he was running against, who was Michael Lashar who ended up winning that seat. You're running in one of the most left-wing districts in the country, so of course you have to say some of this stuff. But I think that the way that they think about politics is they don't actually, at least the people who understand the political scene a little better, don't actually think that you're going to ever win in the same way that a DSA person thinks that you're going to win an election by going out and saying,

oh, I'm a socialist, you should vote for me because socialism is awesome. I don't think that there will ever be a rationalist politician who wins by going out and saying, oh, I'm a rationalist and you can, you should vote for me because rationalism is awesome. Because I think that these intuitions that they have are too weird. And I think that another thing that's kind of weird and may not make sense to most Americans that we haven't quite touched on is effective altruism in the way that they reason morally. And in fact, there was this guy there who's a professor who's delivering a talk on if you are a rich person, what's the best way for you to allocate your money as a philanthropist?

This whole movement feels very tied in with effect of altruism, right? Like the rationalist, is it a perfect circle or is there a Venn diagram of rationalists and effective altruist or are those sort of functionally the same belief systems? Well, I think that there are different forms of effective altruism. There are different things that people believe are the highest value interventions that you can make. I was just arguing with the guy on Twitter yesterday who was telling me that the Iraq war was a high value intervention because Iraq's GDP is now higher than it was when we invaded.

Okay. This is not a moral intuition that I think that most EA's share. But I think that there is a certain diversity of thought in what is the highest value thing that you could do, but on the actual metrics for what high value is in terms of improving quality of life and reducing existential risk. These things are broadly shared. But I think that the thing that's so weird about their moral intuitions is that they have this way of reasoning through what the highest value intervention is, where let's say you donate a million dollars towards buying malaria nets. You're going to save a bunch of African

children, right? That's a certain thing. However, you could get the same results by investing, as Sam Bankman-Fried did, a million dollars in space governance, in the high- hypothetical scenario that humanity needs to escape planet Earth and we need good institutions in space, even if there's a one in 10 likelihood of that happening, or even if there's like an infinitesimal chance of that happening, you just multiply the population of Earth by whatever the likelihood of that scenario is, and you get the same expected value of saving a bunch of people in the here now. Adam Becker breaks this down very well in his book, More Everything Forever, which is all about these fantasies that billionaires have of leaving Earth and stuff. And I think the example you gave is a good one,

where it's a lot of theoretical future lives being saved as opposed to actual human lives of people that are living in the earth now. And you can sort of justify anything under that premise of, well, I'm theoretically doing all this future good and it's like, okay, but Kim, people are dying right now. So I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit more about the actual event. Tell us about what it's like arriving and the scene.

Walk me through your experience there. So it's in this converted hotel that's called Lighthaven. Really lovely space, actually. It kind of has this wood, Woodstock-ish vibe or like a Burning Man type vibe, though, over like a much smaller area. If anyone can propose a session on pretty much anything, when I got there, there were two things that first struck me. One, and I don't want to be gratuitously mean to these people, but one was how poor the general condition of the hygiene there was. Just kind of got a face full of that stuff

as soon as I walked through the door. I mean, you can tell from the moment that you get there that, let's say, adult activity is really on people's minds. In terms, terms of adult imagery pasted on walls. I'm trying to tiptoe around this for the YouTube content filter. But there is this attempt to make connection either in a romantic or NSFW way that also is like a main preoccupation in these spaces. I feel like some people that are heavily involved in these spaces. Obviously Yudkowski, you mentioned Nate Suarez, who is the co-author of his book, if anyone builds it, everyone dies. And his partner, who is Ayella, Silicon Valley.

Sally's most notable OnlyFandstar. Can you explain this woman to people that might not have encountered her lore online? I think it's actually pronounced Ayla. Oh, Ayla, sorry. So I had an awesome time with Ayla because she hosted two workshops, one of which was what she calls live polls. She would ask questions of the group like, do you have an above or below average desire to engage in adult activity with your parents?

And then everyone, not everyone. There were actually some people who were like, yes, I do have an above average desire to. But when she first asked that question, we all go to the extreme left of the space. We're meant to arrange ourselves based on how much we agree with the statement in question. And then she kind of scolded us because if it's an above average versus below average desire, it would theoretically need to conform to a normal distribution, right? So we should, in fact, all be in the middle.

So these were the sorts of exercises that I participated in with her. Another one was how clean is your butt right now? Arrange yourself on the room according to that. What's your body count? arrange yourself in the room according to that. This all sounds like a poorly conceived Jubilee video. Why are people traveling to go to this conference to like participate in all of this? Well, I think two things.

One is that the point of this exercise at multiple points was matchmaking. Like arrange yourself based on how mentally ill you are, Y axis, how mentally ill are you? X axis, how attracted are you to mentally ill people? And then theoretically people on one side of the room who are not mentally ill or attracted to mentally ill people should be able to look at the other side of the room and find perfect match. So that's, I think, part of the reason why you pay for this. But then I think more broadly, rationalists are often cast as being like these very secretive cult-like people. The Guardian

ran an article calling Lighthaven, which the venue, a walled, surveilled compound. There's basically a picket fence around. It's not really that walled or surveilled. Stereotype of these people is they're secretive. But in fact, I think that the much weirder fact about them is their radical transparency. What do you mean? Just their commitment to the view that we would all be better versions of ourselves if everyone knew everything about us all the time. I guess radical honesty in that way too. And it's meant to make you really confront yourself. And I feel like they like to ask a little bit troll questions or push things in a little bit of a troll way.

Even just with the IQ stuff, Ella is quite well known for having a take that we should allow AI-generated abuse material of children. Because even though I think a lot of experts were like, that's not going to help decrease offending. She likes to like put ideas out there, I think that sort of challenge convention. So what else took place? I mean, aside from these activities and stuff, what was the conference like around all of that. What else were you doing while you were there? There's so much to talk about and I'm trying to to I want to hear about all of it. Tell me the tea. This is of course a conference about prediction markets as well as a general rationalist get together.

And so there were a lot of people who made their livings just by trading on prediction markets, betting on when will the straight of hormones be open, when will there be an Iran peace deal? Like these kinds of things. Who will be the next person to leave Trump's cabinet? And I had one interaction with the guy who was during this presentation on how can you bet on on geopolitics. When the Trump administration is very actively trying to sabotage our ability to understand what's going on in the world by pumping out all the slop on truth social, and it does seem that the deliberate foreign policy strategy of the Trump administration is Steve Manon's

philosophy of creer velocity, which is to say you put out so much information into the world that your enemies cannot really figure out what's going on. So how do you as a trader on prediction markets? Countenance that, how can you make money in the era of that when at least the theory of what prediction markets are able to do is aggregate reliable information that you are acting upon from the comfort of your home or your office. And one of his answers to like how can we as geopolitics traders read war traders stay on top of this? And the answer, one of his answers was, quote, embrace the slop, which is to say, just trade on whatever Trump posts on truth social. Like,

it doesn't matter. He says, straight of whom moves is open, by straight of hormones is open, straight or form loses closed, by straighter formulas is closed. And something I asked him was, well, okay, if we're just trading on truth social posts, what's the point of, because at least ostensibly the purpose of a prediction market, is to be able to cut through the noise, right? Like you have people who are taking financial stakes in these real-life events, which should at least in theory make us better able to predict in a sober and dispassionate way whether these events will happen.

If we're just swinging from position to position based on whatever Trump is saying at the moment, then what's the utility of that as opposed to just reading Trump's truth social feed? And the answer that this guy had for me was kind of disturbing, though quite interesting, just that in terms of the justification of why is this technology socially beneficial, what value does it provide? Maybe prediction markets help governments figure out how well their propaganda is convincing people. Oh my God. If people are putting money on Trump's latest proclamations on truth social,

the Trump administration can then go and see like, oh, exactly how much credibility do we have? Interesting. These people's views of the world seem so detached in a lot of ways. And it's bizarre. I don't know, especially with prediction markets, there's this paragraph that you write in your piece that I thought was really good. And I want to get into the Davos comparison to, which you make well. But you write everything that looks like freedom at manifest is actually its opposite. Distrust of experts passes for populism.

It's the enthronement of a new and impersonal experts. the market. Their hedonism seems Dionysian. Manifest attendees, vice of choice is ketamine because it's supposedly better for your health than alcohol. Josh, you mentioned this guy, his vulnerability might look like intimacy. It was to him a strategic concession. I thought this was just a very good way to believe and compare Manifest to Davos. And I'm wondering if you can dig into that comparison. What is similar about Davos and Manifest and where do they diverge? Well, I think there's a lot of power at Manifest. Again, there are attendees who reported journalists and important people in politics, there are also these locked off areas that open and close throughout the day,

during which apparently much more important people than the people who are officially on the schedule enter and leave. I was told this by a well-connected rationalist. I don't know if he was pulling my leg or not. I believe it. Otherwise, I don't know why they would be blocking off the areas for private events. So I think that insofar as there's a good Davos comparison to make, it's just that. That this is a place where movers and shakers in tech come together. I think that what's different is that there's this thrilled provocation, this sense of we are not the incumbents. We don't yet control the world. And so we have to be craftier.

But then there's also, I think, the fact that they are like Ayla. Just generally love to provoke. And maybe it doesn't have to do with greater theories of power. But just provocation, testing out weird arguments, testing out counterintuitive moral systems is what gets these people's blood pumping in a a way that it's difficult to imagine, you know, Gavin Newsom thinking that way. It's so interesting to examine their more fringe beliefs and them testing these ideas out. And to me, that's why Manifest seems interesting. It is like a testing ground for new ideas, which maybe Davos is too.

And I think also a testing ground for where the boundaries lie. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff that it seems like they're discussing now that would have been incredibly taboo just a few years ago. But the Overton window has shifted significantly on a lot of these topics. And so having spent time and attended there, I'm curious, what the takeaways are? Like how do you see this agenda playing out in the world? And if this is this testing ground for these ideologies,

what sort of ideologies do you see pervading more into the mainstream or moving in a way that maybe aligns with a discussion that happened at Manifest. I think that the prediction market people at manifest, at least the people who came to the conference from that sphere of the world and were there to shill their prediction market related products, actually felt quite pessimistic about the future of prediction markets. There was a great piece in Bloomberg from a reporter who was there as well as a great piece in WIRE also about the vibe specifically among the prediction market crowd. They actually feel that they've gone too far. We had this technology and we got the regulatory approval for it, but then we ended up using this thing that perhaps couldn't help aggregate useful information to figure out who's going to win the NBA finals or whatever. And the case for making that as a socially beneficial technology is a lot harder. And I think they're kind of scared about what's going to happen after the midterms.

Democrats are going to be back in charge. We've been very friendly with Trump, partially because platform like Polymarket predicted or at least had better odds on Trump winning than Nate Silver did. So I think that they are actually kind of concerned about the future. The thing that I really wonder about this scene is they really like prediction markets, even if they're concerned that they've gone too far, and they really like AI safety. The problem is that in US politics, the party of AI safety and the party of prediction markets are two different parties. The Democrats, and I think this just has to do with psychologically the risk tolerance in the various coalitions.

I think that the Republican Party is the party of free markets, and so prediction markets make a lot of sense as something for them to embrace. Whereas heavy-handed regulation of AI, maybe not so much. On the other hand, Democrats are the party of regulation and of restricting capitalism, at least in modest form. And so that makes their agenda very compatible with AI safety, which is why Bernie Sanders has been so proactive on the issue. But it is not so compatible with the prediction market stuff.

So I think that they're really going to have to decide what's more important to us. Is it our ability to bet on everything and our market-based epistemology or is it our belief in the existential risks posed by AI? I'm so interested to see and I appreciate all your coverage of this so much. I'm so grateful for you joining today and chatting about all this. I can't wait to read your next piece. Thanks for having me. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Power User.

If you like my work, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack at usermag.com. usermag.co or support me on Patreon. I really don't have any sort of consistent advertising on this channel, so my work is entirely supported by you. I cannot continue to report on these things and try to bring nuance to these tech policy conversations without your support. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.