Present at the Creation - by Theo Jaffee and Elan Kluger

SubscribeSign in

Present at the Creation<br>Postscript No. 22 | Theo Jaffee on documenting the Singularity

Theo Jaffee and Elan Kluger<br>Aug 10, 2026<br>∙ Paid

Share

POSTSCRIPT

Kit Knuppel<br>*Two years ago, the chief-of-staff to Anthropic’s CEO declared, “These next five years might be the last few years that I work.” At the time, she spoke for a world that knows far more about the future than the average American. But even before the release of ChatGPT, Theo Jaffee knew that the future was happening in the West. The 21-year-old University of Florida drop-out found his computer science classes in Gainesville pointless; they operated under old assumptions about how to build a career. Come summertime, he left for San Francisco, drawing on connections with former Curtis Yarvin intern Stevie Miller, attending the Manifest conference in Berkeley, and building out his Twitter following. Now Jaffee is the co-founder of Monitoring The Situation (MTS), an Andreesen-Horowitz backed media company that streams interviews of central players in AI and technology all day on X (formerly Twitter). Jaffee is San Francisco’s go-to reporter and AGI discussant, tirelessly cataloguing, describing, and perhaps influencing the future of our world.<br>A Spanish ruler declared long ago, “Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.” But if you cannot be present at the creation — well, at least you can monitor the situation. Below, I talk to Jaffee about becoming “AGI-pilled” and what we should do to prepare for a superintelligence we’re all underestimating.<br>Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*<br>New Critic paid subscribers get access to Postscript, our interview series, Contra, our criticism section, and exclusive New Critic parties for only $30 a year.

Subscribe

ELAN How did you get to the center of the tech world?<br>THEO I went to the University of Florida in fall 2022, and that was when ChatGPT came out. When I saw ChatGPT for the first time, I realized, “Holy shit, this is going to be the future.” I spent the next few months scrolling Twitter constantly, meeting mutuals virtually. I was in Gainesville, Florida, so there was no one to meet in real life; everyone’s in SF or New York. I was reading LessWrong, discovering this whole ecosystem of people, including Curtis Yarvin — I read Yarvin a lot at that time.<br>This was my freshman year of college. I didn’t have an internship for that summer, so I decided — kind of like one of these people I knew from Twitter, Dwarkesh Patel — I would start a podcast where I’d find people I liked on Twitter and interview them. This was summer of 2023, three years ago now. I started interviewing a few people. My first guest was Greg Fodor. Some of the more famous people I interviewed were Zvi Mowshowitz, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, and so on. I did maybe 20 episodes over the two years of the podcast — I definitely should have done more.<br>In August 2023, I visited SF for the first time. I didn’t meet any mutuals then, but I discovered the city and fell in love with the place. I was like, “Wow. It’s beautiful, it’s full of technology and tech people — I definitely need to be here after college.” I don’t love the city as much anymore, but I still love the people.<br>Throughout my sophomore year — fall 2023 through spring 2024 — I continued being really interested in AI and AGI. This was the GPT-4 Turbo era, and then Claude 3 Opus came out around that time, too. I continued reading Yarvin and other right-wing people like Richard Hanania. That summer — May 2024 — I again didn’t have an internship. I had a few thousand dollars, and I figured if I had nothing else to do, I might as well go to SF full-time and do my podcast, hoping something would fall into place.<br>My Airbnb for the summer turned out to be a fake listing, so I had to stay in a hostel with shared rooms for almost three weeks until I found a more permanent place, which was the Minerva building at 16 Turk Street in the Tenderloin — it was ancient, decrepit, had no amenities, and I shared a dorm-style room with one other guy. It was $950 a month. That was summer 2024.<br>When I got to SF, I had about a thousand Twitter followers. I posted some good tweets in the first couple weeks that doubled me to about 2,000, and I started meeting people in real life, partly through Manifold Markets’s Taco Tuesdays, hosted by Manifold. I got to know Stephen Grugett and Austin Chen and, to a lesser extent, James Grugett. I met a lot of Twitter people, tech people, rationalists, in real life. In May, a couple weeks after I arrived, I went to a Scott Alexander meetup at Lighthaven in Berkeley. It was my first time there. I fell in love with the place. There were so many people there I knew from the internet, and the venue itself is beautiful.<br>That weekend was Manifest. I had discounted student tickets. It was the greatest time of...