Announcing Manifest 2026!
Join us in Berkeley, CA on June 12-14!
Manifest is back!
We’re returning to Lighthaven on June 12-14. You can buy your tickets now on the Manifest website, with Early Bird pricing through this Saturday, April 18:
What: Manifest is a festival ostensibly about prediction markets, but secretly about connecting with old friends and people you admire from your favorite niche corners of the internet. It’s a gathering of nerds who want to find the thinkers and practitioners they vehemently agree/disagree with, share a meal around a cozy campfire, and come away with radically new ways of thinking. If you attend, don’t be surprised to find yourself engrossed in a late-night rabbit hole with your future cofounder, a serendipitous nerd snipe from an internet celebrity, and the joy of a crowd cheering (and betting with mana) on a wrestling match between strangers.
Who: 500-650 exceptional people, from many fields, including but not limited to: forecasting, rationality, effective altruism, AI & AI safety, economics, finance, tech, policy, writing, and novel ideas.
When: June 12-14 (Fri-Sun)
Where: Lighthaven, Berkeley, CA (map)
How:
🎟️ Tickets (Early Bird until Sat 4/18!)
To get updates: Join the Manifest Discord
This year, we want to make it even better, focusing on the things attendees have told us they value most: high session quality and variety, well-curated attendees, thoughtful sponsor presence, delightfully engaging activities, easy-to-use scheduling, clear community guidelines, and structured ways to meet and stay in touch with the people you’re supposed to meet.
Email team@manifest.is if you have questions, ideas, or feedback. We’d love to hear suggestions for more excellent speakers or organizations to collaborate with. Help us fill Manifest with the most stellar, thoughtful, kind humans you know!
You’ll hear updates from us as we confirm more of the speakers, sponsors, and plans we’re cooking up. We look forward to seeing you in June!
Highlights from 2025
2025 Talks included:
A Story Telling of Kalshi’s Internal Drama & Decision Making (Noah Sternig)
Reversible Cryopreservation (Laura Deming)
Writing and Slop (Roon, Scott Alexander, Gwern, Alexander Wales)
Life as a Professional Gambler (Anonymous)
Has Trading and Gambling Gone Too Far in the US (Jeremiah Johnson, Isaac Rose-Berman, Christopher Gerlacher)
How Tech Hiring is Changing with AI (Sholto Douglas [Anthropic], Ben Cohen [Substack])
Schools Should Pursue Excellence (Tracing Woodgrains)
How to be Hot (Aella, Chesed)
Check out our YouTube channel for more examples from past years!
Some of our 2025 Events:
Nash Pit: A Prediction Market Game Show
Night Market + Career Fair
Live Polling on Spicy Questions
Speed Friending
Rare & Exotic Drama Games from Australia
Hot Seat w/ Niacin (vitamin B3, which causes a rapid flushing response)
Startup Pitch Competition
Poker tournament with former pros
Speakers & Events
Every year, we’re grateful for the amazing speakers and guests who come out to Manifest!
Stay tuned as we announce the speaker lineup for this year. And if you want to give a talk, or have an idea for an event that needs our input/support, email winter@manifest.is.
Also, anyone is welcome to host a community talk or event! In “un-conference” style, Manifest will release a schedule with rooms and time slots you can add your session to.
Keep an eye out if you have something you’d like to share, we’ll send this calendar to attendees closer to the event (and it can be updated on the fly throughout Manifest, so you can add your talk if the inspiration strikes!)
Sponsors
Interested in recruiting the kinds of folks who find these kinds of intellectual discussions energizing? Or showcasing your company’s work in front of the influential speakers and leaders in attendance? Manifest has you covered. Each year, attendees report having impactful interactions with sponsors and appreciate their presence at the event. They find jobs, form new collaborations, and even switch industries! Email team@manifest.is to learn more and schedule a call.
Career Fair
On Friday, June 12 (the first night of Manifest), Lighthaven will be open and free to the public for our Career Fair + Night Market! This will be an excellent opportunity for even more people to mingle, talk to hiring sponsors, and join the fun for a few hours.
We ask that everyone interested (whether or not you’re attending the rest of Manifest) please register your interest in the Career Fair here.
Festimonials
Don’t just take our word for it; here’s what our past attendees have to say (emphasis ours):
Jake Seliger:
Bess and I went to Manifest, which bills itself as “A festival for forecasting and prediction markets,” a description that may technically be true but fails to capture the spirit; to my eye and experience, it’s maybe more accurately stated as “Substack and Twitter live” or “a mixture of festival-conference-party-Burning-Man for nerds with many interests to show up and enjoy each other’s company.” Bess excitedly exclaimed it to be “Nerd Camp!” with a sort of takes-one-to-know-one gleam in her eye.
Tomie:
I love Manifest. I paid the full price for the full ticket, sucker I am, and my subsidy provided for these swaying bauble lights, these warm soporific nooks, these flames and corridors, these souls brought to Earth together, eyes lighting up at their electric worlds made real.
TracingWoodgrains:
For much of my life, I have poured my attention into tough-to-explain solitary pursuits, finding myself often sitting in quiet corners on the fringes of gatherings wondering if they’re worth the effort. Not so last weekend.
“I really like that Manifest is inspiring in me the ‘Oh, I should make and bring random goofy stickers and swag’ impulse that I’ve had inculcated in me by Defcon” - Dave Kasten
“Maybe the best conference I ever went to, beating all programming conferences, EAG, singularity summit” - MQP
Venue
Just like last year, Manifest will be held at Lighthaven. We credit much of the great Manifest vibes to this beautiful and cozy space. It has fires for literal fireside chats, intimate nooks for one-on-one conversations, spaces for small workshops & big talks, and gorgeous overnight accommodations.
Festival Season! LessOnline —> Summer Camp —> Manifest
Manifest is actually the capstone to a 10-day season at Lighthaven! The weekend before will be LessOnline (June 5 - June 7): “A festival of writers who are wrong on the internet”. It is an unconference with a collaborative schedule, bringing together a “mostly-online subculture of people trying to work together to figure out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI.”
In the days between the two conferences, there will be Summer Camp (June 8 - June 11), a peaceful yet vibrant week of coworking, collaborating, and late-night campfire chats. You might see: Hackathons (or “Forecastathons”), organized discussions, jam sessions, dance parties, tournaments, games of all kinds, camp activities (sardines, s’mores), or multi-day intensive workshops (e.g., CFAR-style).
You can come to any combination of these, but we’re offering a $350 discount off standard pricing if you buy All-Access tickets to all three events, available here.
See you at Manifest!