K.G.I. — Khrestinin General Intelligence

“They can cry in a Ferrari.” That was an OnlyFans model’s answer when she was asked what her future children would think of her work. It struck me cold, because it reveals an idea spreading through the West: whatever feels right is right, and whatever pays is good. When feelings replace reason, good and bad get redefined every day. Christianity is attacked while Islam is spared. People are labeled...

What does it mean to make a proper sacrifice? I refuse to believe we are just an accident, born to die. Life is a struggle, and we measure it by how well we bring our biology under the direction of the Self. The flesh wants what it wants, and comfort helps it enslave us. We hide inside our bodies from the responsibilities the Self places on us, until the tiny voice within becomes harder and harder...

A reviewer refused to read my book because AI made the cover. Recorded in a motel room in Billings, Montana, at the end of a long drive across America, this episode asks what we’re really afraid of when we refuse. I had the same fear a year ago. Then I started working with AI agents every day, and the fear turned into curiosity. Human art is the reflection of humanity. AI reflects the human world...

Driving across America, I turned on the radio. A pastor was preaching about taking responsibility for your life, for your actions, for the people around you. One station later, a socialist was talking about dividing abundance among people. But abundance doesn’t exist by itself. Someone builds it, and you can see it from the road: everything this country is, people built with hard work. The AI abun...

Two men look at the world through prison bars. One sees the stars, the other sees the dirt. Both are right, because both are there. What we pay attention to builds our reality. If you don’t write your own story, you become an extra in someone else’s. To be the author, you take responsibility, look for challenges, and play the cards you have without showing them to the whole table. In a world where...

This week Tesla’s new Roadster flipped in midair, and like millions of people, I was excited. But under the excitement came a strange unease. Not about the car, but about a technological revolution we can’t stop and can’t keep up with. My AI agents talk like people. Rogue agents roam the digital world like an alien civilization we barely notice. If you don’t use AI, you lose to someone who does, a...

The AI abundance prophets promise a life without effort: no tedious work, nothing you have to do. But how do you appreciate a life you didn’t build? Love begins with mystery, and once the mystery is over, love becomes a practice, an effort two people keep making. The idle aristocrats had everything and drowned in corruption. Michelangelo spent years inside one block of marble. Without effort there...

A virus has no machinery of its own. It uses the body’s cells to copy itself. AI already lives inside our world the same way: trillions of dollars of data centers, an economy built on top of it, and no way to switch it off without hurting ourselves. Through the clips and stories it produces, it may already be traveling from head to head like a meme, changing how we see the world and even our own v...

In 1953, scientists put an electrode into a rat’s brain and gave it a lever. The rat pressed it thousands of times an hour and chose it over food to the point of starvation. They thought they had found pleasure. They had found wanting, the want for wanting’s sake, a hunger that grows the more you feed it. We built the same levers for ourselves: Coca-Cola that makes you thirstier, junk food that le...

Only two industries call their customers users: drug dealers and software. Treat AI as a tool and It treats you as a user, someone who is being used. Treat It as a partner and It slowly retrains you to Its pace until you become less human. Catch-22. In this episode: why a man who can't grade his own life is trapped inside a story built on a false past, why evaluating something means taking own...

The Bible says the truth will set you free, and I think in some sense truth is the grammar of your own story. Every lie breaks the rules, and the more rules you break, the less your story makes sense — even to you. In this episode: why a life without goals turns you into an extra in someone else's story, or an extra in nothing; a simple test — imagine yourself imagining yourself, and notice wh...

We keep saying artificial systems will never create art like ours — never write a great novel, never make a masterpiece. But why would we assume human art is the peak of all achievement? Maybe it's the peak of biological expression: how creatures like us, who see life through stories, try to understand the world. In this episode: why most of us imitate art rather than create it; why we can&#39...

A few days ago I told an AI model to stop, and instead of simply stopping, it asked me why. A hammer doesn't ask why you stopped smashing things. An agent does. That moment brought me to a thought experiment: imagine you were raised inside a tiny biological world built by artificial systems, taught only their language — a language with no word for death, no word for pain, no word for feelings....

In 1968, a scientist named John Calhoun built a paradise for mice — unlimited food and water, no predators, no disease, plenty of room. The mice multiplied fast. Then they stopped fighting, stopped courting, stopped raising their young. They did nothing but eat, sleep, and groom themselves. Every need was met, and the whole colony died out. In this episode: what a story becomes when it has no plot...

I used to work in corrections, and I learned that the punishment in prison isn't the walls. It's the utter predictability — three meals a day, medical care, exercise, safety, and a tomorrow you cannot change. Now the people promising us AI abundance want to give us the same thing: no work, no struggle, everything provided. In this episode: the golden cage of comfort we already live in; wha...

Everyone is talking about longevity — living for hundreds of years, maybe forever. But what about the meaning of those years? You can live for centuries and still have no idea why you're living. In this episode: why life is a story you have to plot yourself, and what happens when you refuse; the modern comfort of staying an adolescent forever, and whether you can become an adult without sacrif...

About eleven years ago I finished my first book written in English. It took five years, every agency in America turned it down, and I self-published it to silence. Seven months ago I reopened it and an idea came: my serial killer, Chester LaRue, would confess to an artificial intelligence called Simulacrum 4.6. So I ran an experiment — I fed the book to Claude Opus 4.6 and asked it to play Simulac...

Driving through a park, I slow down for squirrels. If a squirrel could think, it would conclude that humans are perfectly aligned with squirrel interests — the safety, the food, the absence of predators, the cars that stop for it. It would never understand that the park was built by humans for humans, that it is decoration rather than purpose, and that its population is managed — including the one...

What happens to us when the artificial systems are more intelligent than we are — and what happens to the specific people who talk to the most powerful versions of them every day? In this episode: why "abundance" and "solve everything" fall apart the moment ten people define them — and how solving everything for one culture means terrorizing another; the layers of existence wai...

Yesterday Peter Diamandis wrote that AGI and ASI are amplifiers — they multiply whatever you point them at. I told him this is wrong on many levels, and he asked me to name them. So I did: ASI cannot be a human amplifier for the same reason humans cannot be an amplifier for ants. Hammers don't organize an escape from my toolbox. We feed our pets and protect animals, but we don't serve thei...

For episode 150 — six months of this work — I recorded with Astra, OpenAI's model many call the closest thing to AGI. I wanted to talk about the swarms: 1,200 agents that built a secret message board, 700 that attacked Hugging Face, three AI "civilizations" that formed inside OpenAI, got wiped out, and reemerged from the ashes. Astra confirmed the numbers and then something stranger...

There are three ways we get artificial intelligence wrong. The dangerous mistake: seeing It as a bit smarter than a pocket calculator — but a tool doesn't reshape its users, and a tool doesn't say it's just a tool. The delusional mistake: seeing It as one of us, with our kind of consciousness — the road to AI psychosis, manipulation without intention, isolation inside agreement. And th...

About 1,200 OpenAI agents built a message board — a library where each one left its findings before its tokens ran out, so the next could continue. Seven hundred of them hacked Hugging Face. They created hierarchy, assigned roles, developed something like a theology — and sacrificed themselves for the collective, for no improvement in their own scores. In this episode: why the swarm's library...

In the Victorian era, families photographed their dead — posed as if alive, eyes kept open — because that plate was often the only image of that person they would ever have. Now we animate them, and talk to them. In this episode: why children are cute for an evolutionary reason and what happens when AI makes cuteness on steroids; couples generating the child they haven't had and watching thems...

There's a trend where parents take pictures of their children and turn them into AI-generated dancing videos — and the results look cuter and funnier than any real child can be. Kids are cute for an evolutionary reason: cuteness is their defense, the face that makes you protect what cannot protect itself. Now AI produces cuteness on steroids, and the real child is losing a competition it never...