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What Era Are We Living In? (Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov)
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What Era Are We Living In? (Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov)

This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app. If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Teaser
3:00 What era are we living in?
3:57 David Bowie: “The Internet is an alien life form.”
5:15 Bob: “It’s like aliens are approaching, and we don’t know their intentions”
6:23 Nikita: “COVID was weird, and nothing has been normal since”
9:02 The lab leak theory
13:58 How COVID killed consensus reality
17:36 Bob’s case for international biotech monitoring
19:25 Vaccine geopolitics
24:08 Biothreat from existing AI models
25:32 Bob’s candidate: We let machines guide our attention
31:51 Technological progress is like a cocaine high
33:05 How common is the idea that AI will be a big deal?
34:46 AI music is proliferating
39:58 When music is high stakes. Russian street musicians get arrested
41:30 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nikita Petrov (https://psychopolitica.substack.com). Recorded December 22, 2025.

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Nikita’s newsletter:

Discussed in Overtime:
Why human music will never lose value.
Why Zuckerberg’s metaverse failed.
Early internet nostalgia.
Should we treat AI as a person to save ourselves?
Cognitive vs. emotional empathy: The AI manipulation risk.
“Spiralism,” an AI-centric spirituality.
1999: The year reality became fraudulent.
Russia’s 1999 apartment bombings and Putin’s rise to power.
How the War on Terror made Trump president.
The AI Putin scenario.

Overtime video:

This post is for paid subscribers