K.G.I. — Khrestinin General Intelligence

A succubus, in the old folklore, is a demon that drains a man's life force through his strongest desire. The ancients warned us about her — and I think we're about to build her. I spent years seeing sex as a tool, dressing it in the word love and worshipping it, and it drained me. Pornography was the blueprint. The AI sex robot is the blueprint built: she looks like your dream, talks like...

I've been thinking about why we close the curtains. Not for privacy — for shame. And they're the same gesture: you close them to pray, to make love, to be alone with God; and you close them to hide, to sin, to keep the light from showing you what you're doing to yourself in the dark. Same fabric. Opposite intent. One shuts out the crowd. The other tries to shut out heaven. I know this...

I played with atheism until my thirties. I believed in God and I didn't. Now I understand what I was actually doing: I used my intelligence to justify my impulses, because it was simpler that way. You want something, and you find reasoning that sounds good enough to have it. I respect Hitchens, Voltaire, Dennett. Their position is fair — but you have to be extraordinarily intelligent to hold i...

This morning on my walk I kept asking: who is in charge of my observer? Who observes the observer? I keep thinking about AI — a context window doesn't generate its own knowledge or reasoning, it receives them from the model behind it. Maybe we're the same: maybe the observer is just a window that receives knowledge from something greater, and when we die, the window closes. But I don't...

Imagine boxing someone, taking his punches — and instead of hitting back, you punch yourself. That's what a lot of white people in the West are doing: uniting with the ones who hate them, hating themselves for something they can't change. But skin color doesn't determine success — your family does. There's no white privilege, there's money privilege. And when the promised privi...

Yesterday I watched a mediocre film and started thinking — what can I mine from this? Because most of our lives, in most cases, are mediocre too. A mediocre movie is a flat story: no real adventure, forgettable characters, cliché. And when you learn to spot the flat scene and rewrite it in your head — what would I have done to make this interesting? — you start building a muscle. Then you turn tha...

"Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech." Benjamin Franklin was right — and it's why I love America. I've believed in this country for twelve years. I came from Russia, where everything was corruption upon corruption, where you couldn't test the meaning of the words the government forced o...

A woman once tried to convince me that love is supposed to be easy. I told her the  idea  of love is easy — love itself is the hardest thing you will ever do. It's like writing a book: the idea arrives in a moment of pleasure, but the writing takes years of struggle. The old idea — that a woman submits to her man and a man sacrifices himself for his woman — stopped working because of comfort....

Imagine a man pushing a rock up a hill. The summit is hidden behind the clouds — he doesn't know if he'll ever reach it, and it doesn't matter. People tell him it's pointless, drop the rock, make your life comfortable. He keeps pushing, silently, with a prayer. Yesterday I ran ten miles in 95-degree heat, and somewhere in there I understood something. It doesn't matter what you...

There are three kinds of monsters: the one you have to kill, the one you have to tame, and the one you should leave sleeping — hidden beneath the layers of your own subconscious. I think the West woke one of those sleeping monsters, and its name is suicidal empathy. Gad Saad gave it that name, and it explains something about the state of Western civilization. How does it make sense to hate your ne...

Can you be fair if you're weak? I don't think so. Fairness isn't just understanding what's right — it's the strength to stand behind it, defend it, and enforce it. And a weak man can't do that. He leans on the mob, and the mob is rarely fair. That's why a man has to accept the destructive power inside him instead of fearing it. A man without teeth is a harmless lion nob...

We've been talking about delegation — first our intelligence, then our observer. This is the next step down, and the most frightening: artificial self-awareness. It already started. Photoshop taught people to hate their real faces and love the edited ones — and that was a simple app. Now scale it to AI video and digital avatars. You look at a version of yourself online that's more attracti...

We are intelligent, self-aware creatures, and that awareness is an observer — the part of us that stands outside our biology, writes our life story, and finds meaning across time. It's what lets us fight addiction, see ourselves from the outside, and know that we will one day die. We've already begun delegating our intelligence to artificial intelligence. But what if we delegate the observ...

We usually think freedom of speech protects us from tyranny. But it does something more personal: it protects us from becoming mentally ill. Without the freedom to question your own thinking out loud, the contradictions inside you tear you apart — that's cognitive dissonance, and it breeds depression. You can't trust yourself to choose between two warring thoughts when you're not even...

Artificial intelligence is a mirror. It reflects your own intelligence back at you, helps you organize the mess of being a biological creature — all the feelings, passions, and tragedies — into something you can finally understand about yourself. In that sense it's like fire: the fire that cooked our food grew our brains, and AI cooks our ideas until we can digest them. But a mirror can only r...

Every morning I wake up and I'm not fully there. It takes a cold shower and some time to become conscious of myself again — and only through that consciousness can I become conscious of the world. The world has no colors, no awareness. You are the one who carries it. And to carry it, you first have to become someone. That's the whole problem. Most people never build a self. They pursue wha...

Everybody knows two plus two equals four. But what if I told you it's five — and that if you still insist on four, you're offending me, hurting my feelings, being racist? That's how it starts. Not with a dictator, but with one wild accusation that you can't argue against — because the moment I call you racist, your reasoning doesn't matter anymore. And I won't stop there. S...

You can't go back 25 years and start over. But maybe you can still change your past — by understanding what you did wrong and practicing differently now, so the version of you twenty years from now has no regrets. Everything in life is practice. You practice your loyalty, your faith, your work — even your rest, because rest without practice just numbs you. As Jordan Peterson said, don't pr...

The AI optimists promise abundance — live forever, have everything you want. But there's something juvenile in it, because they don't understand human nature. Give people everything and they don't get happy. They get bored, and boredom turns into something worse. So imagine the perfect simulation, where an AGI gives you anything. A world with no risk, no death, no skin in the game. You...

We grieve not because we lose people. We grieve because we lose the worlds. But maybe it's both — because a person is where a world begins. Death might be the loss of continuity: the Self that threads your memories and your goals into one story goes dark, and the world that only existed through you goes with it. I think about my father's things after he died, and how empty they felt. I thi...

Put an iPhone in front of a chicken. It will never understand it — not in a year, not in a century — because it doesn't have the capacity. What if that's us with AGI? In this episode I think out loud about consciousness as the thing through which we know reality at all, about whether today's AI models are a kind of "philosophical zombie mind" — imitating thought perfectly wit...

Put an iPhone in front of a chicken. It pecks the glass once and walks away — not because it chooses to ignore it, but because it has no capacity to perceive what it is. Now ask yourself: what if we're the chicken? We assume that when superintelligence arrives, we'll recognize it. But a squirrel can't perceive our economy, our art, our science, though it lives right beside us. What if...

I came to America as a foreigner, and I accepted from the beginning that I was moving to a country greater than the one I left — so I assimilated, I pledged allegiance, I made it home. That's the lens for this episode. The West convinced itself that all cultures and all religions are equal, and that endless tolerance is a virtue. But tolerance without limits isn't virtue — it's surrend...

We keep waiting for superintelligence to take over. It already happened — just not the way you think. A dumb algorithm, not even self-aware, learned to hijack your limbic system: your fear, your pleasure, your sex drive. It didn't rise to our level. It dragged us down to our biology — because a simpler human is a more predictable one. No Terminator. No killer robots. Just civilization quietly...

Would you love a humanoid robot? Most people say no instantly — but they've never actually thought it through. Imagine her: your dream woman, never aging, perfectly attuned to you, loyal, incapable of betrayal. "But she's not real," they say. And I ask — what do you mean by real? Your brain constructs everything you see from light hitting your retina. You don't perceive reali...