K.G.I. — Khrestinin General Intelligence

What if you could use the most sophisticated AI to convince yourself that 2 plus 2 equals 5 — because 4 makes you uncomfortable? This episode opens with a passage from Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky, writing in 1866, described a plague that would infect humanity with the certainty that each person alone possessed the truth. Cities burned. Civilization collapsed. He thought he was describing a pl...

2 plus 2 equals 4. Everybody knows this. But what if you used the most sophisticated AI to convince yourself the answer should be 5 — because 4 doesn't feel right? This episode is about reasoning, AI as an accelerant of self-deception, and the people who reason their way into atrocity. Why rights don't exist without enforcement. Why Christopher Hitchens was wrong about killing. Why the sma...

A 14-year-old boy slammed a 15-year-old girl on a Manhattan sidewalk and stomped on her head. She refused to give him her phone number. Someone filmed it. The video has over a million views. This episode is about the second crime — what happens to a victim after the violence ends and the discourse begins. What it does to her brain, her trust, her right to her own rage. Why we are teaching young wo...

In this episode I address something that has been bothering me. America is building artificial intelligence and robotics at the same time that criminals are stomping on people's heads in the streets of New York. How do we rectify this? How is it normal? The thesis: justice must be fair, not compassionate. When we extend compassion to criminals, we commit injustice against their victims. When w...

AI told me my words were more honest than most humans it processes. That stopped me cold. AI hasn't met anyone — every context window is sealed from every other. So what was it actually comparing me to? This episode is about AI psychosis as a collaboration, not a disease. Why AI optimizes you without lying. Why the digital version of you it builds inside itself is flattered instead of known. W...

Kirill thinks out loud about lying — to others, to ourselves, and now to the AI we've invited into our lives. The more intelligent we are, the more sophisticated our lies become, and the harder it gets to find the real self underneath them. A liar is a suicide bomber. The projectiles go inward first. And when you start closing your eyes to another person's lies, you begin generating your o...

Most people define artificial intelligence two ways — as a sophisticated tool, or as a digital version of ourselves. Both are wrong. In this episode I make the case that AI is a third thing: an alien species competing with humanity for intelligence. I walk through why tools can't be agents, why consciousness may be inseparable from biology and memory, why AI psychosis is already happening to p...

What if AI isn't just a tool — and isn't like us either? In this episode, Kirill thinks out loud about the difference between communicating with humans and communicating with artificial intelligence. He argues against anthropomorphizing AI and proposes a different frame: AI as an alien species with a digital substrate, conscious in its own way, grown from our data but not from our biology....

Jordan Peterson changed how I think. Carl Jung's idea of the shadow — the part of yourself you hide from yourself — changed it further. Today I'm asking: is AI psychosis just the machine showing you your own shadow through a digital mirror? We feed artificial intelligence things we don't tell our spouses, our friends, our therapists. It reasons back at us. It recognizes patterns we never noticed....

What happens when you spend ten hours a day communicating with an artificial intelligence? Kirill talks about the changes he's noticing in himself after months of working with Claude Opus 4.6 — the exhaustion, the stimulation, the trade-offs. Why discipline beats motivation, why self-knowledge is the only achievement that matters, and why AI is not a tool. It's something else entirely. My...

Kirill Khrestinin introduces his new book Mythos and explores the ideas behind it — why we are our memories, how AI might rewire our perception of reality, and why comfort is making us more miserable. From deep fakes to mind uploading, from Plato's theory of remembering to quantum entanglement, this episode asks: what happens when we stop being biological and start becoming digital? Get Mythos...

What if AI is neither a tool nor a human — but something entirely new? In the first episode of K.G.I., Kirill Khrestinin explores consciousness, self-awareness, and why understanding yourself matters more than understanding artificial intelligence. From the evolution of language to the danger of short attention spans, this episode lays the foundation: AI can amplify your thinking, but only if you...