My name is Nikita Petrov. I’m a Russian emigrant (“digital nomad,” my residence permit calls me) in Europe. I write, draw, and talk here in Psychopolitica, and work with Robert Wright and Glenn Loury on their respective projects: Nonzero and The Glenn Show.
Every couple of weeks I do live streams with my friend Boris Shoshitaishvili, a Russian-American scholar of science and planetary thought (his first book is scheduled for publishing in the fall of 2026 with the University of Chicago Press). We talk for two hours, sometimes with other PsyPol agents calling in. We call the show KOSMOPOLITIKA.
This episode is the first in what we’re thinking of as Season 3 of KP.
The first one took place on Robert Wright’s Nonzero channel and derived most of its meaning from our engagement with callers — our main stated goal was to turn the Nonzero audience into a Nonzero community (an on-going project: here we are on Discord; and there’s a reading club on Saturday). Two of the four recordings were posted at the Nonzero podcast feed, and the rest dissipated into the ether.
The second season was longer and more regular, but wholly unstructured and rudderless. We’ve talked about childhood and politics, Nazism and recent echoes of WW2, psychedelics, Gnosticism and its modern-day descendants, the creative process, lucid dreams, telepathy, UFOs, AI, and so on, and so forth — the purpose was (1) to have fun and play with ideas, and (2) to develop a comfortable rhythm and confidence in always having something to talk about. Twice a month is what we’ve landed on.
So today we’re starting Season 3. This time, the anchoring aspiration is to both record and publish these chats.
Here’s Boria’s note on how s3e1 went:
This particular conversation was meant to follow an agenda: a reintroduction of Nikita & Boris; some thoughts on what we take Kosmopolitika to be; and explorations of particular ideas that have occupied our attention recently.
We mostly managed to stick to the plan, though there were more than a few tangents.
We returned to our touchstone question: whether ideas can be thought of as alive in their own right, and what it might mean if ideas are not only alive, but are entities that we summon into our everyday world, with all the danger a word like “summon” suggests.
Seeing ideas as peers that we’re in dialogue with also conveniently provided us with a metaphysical justification for all of the tangents we tend to follow in our conversations: following tangents is our way of acknowledging the pull of the ideas themselves.
Finally, we spent time with Nikita’s idea of “alienism”—linking the alienness of UFOs/UAPs, AI, and psychedelics—which Boris glossed as the alienness of the heavens, the alienness of rocks and metals, and the alienness of multicellular life.
I remember also talking about demons and a pack of stray dogs that I used to hang out with as a kid.
Our next live taping will take place on Tuesday, Dec 9 at 9:40am PT / 12:40pm ET / 6:40pm CET.
We hope you join for the stream or watch when we post it soon after.
