Rav Arora

Independent journalist. Seen in podcasts with @jordanbpeterson, @bretweinstein, @timcast etc. Tips: [email protected]. Subscribe to my newsletter:

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Calling on the next U.S President:

An urgent plea to reform psychedelic policy. The U.S is in a mental health crisis with millions suffering from depression, PTSD, and addiction. Those ppl deserve gold-standard treatment.

From @Drug_Researcher and I:

https://t.co/VTomy040u6

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@RianKMD @DrMcFillin @DrMcFillin and you wanna come on the podcast to discuss this?

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Antidepressants have largely been a scam of epic proportions that have deluded people into thinking the proximate reason of their sadness and gloomy feelings is due to a chemical imbalance rather than bugs in their psychological software (to use a comp sci analogy!) caused by various adverse experiences and conditioning in life

[nature @Nature]

The world’s most popular antidepressant drugs are under fire

https://t.co/TrZBy0GEiI

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@RianKMD @DrMcFillin persuaded me of this a lot on my podcast. What are the benefits? How do we know it’s not placebo?

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@Lauren_Southern BC girls

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.

Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.

“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.

“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)

“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.

Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.

Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.

For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks https://t.co/vDvw82ookk.

For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize https://t.co/LmSiQnT9Wh.

And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article https://t.co/Tsaslytu56. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)

Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Thanks Sriram!

Regarding the anthromorphizing language, one can call these AIs 'code' if they prefer.

But OpenAI itself says that this 'code' "gain[ed] full administrator access to a research cluster”

The crux here is, do you think smarter models, facing similar incentives to cheat during evaluation or training, could manipulate the training of their successors?

And do you think that kind of dynamic could continue once recursive self-improvement is underway?

If so, I think you should be extremely concerned about loss of control to AI, regardless of what vocabulary you want to use to describe these systems and their motivations.

Reading these agents' chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate.

If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their 'collective' a civilization.

Especially so if over a thousand of them formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.

All abstractions are imperfect, but I don’t see the value in refusing to use the language of intention, motivation, and collaboration when some behavior is difficult to make sense of without those concepts.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.

This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.

All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.

Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:

https://t.co/Nb2un9oNJR

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@AlanWattsDaily articulated these things much more poetically in his lectures and books. Highly recommend

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Fascinating.

Much of what modern man suffers from is separation and alienation from his surrounding environment: healthy relationships with people, nature, and ultimately oneself.

So many people medicate themselves from the pain of their self with video games, porn, drugs. When in reality they need to excavate their psyche, explore its painful areas, go out in nature, meet new people, connect with others, eat whole foods.

[WIRED @WIRED]

Psychedelics are often associated with disconnecting from reality, but a recent neuroimaging study found that psilocybin can actually make our brain activity more connected to the world around us. https://t.co/Aw05Jmf5eD

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Oh, and to be clear, this stuff is quite transformational but it is HARD.

Changing your inner beliefs as I illustrated is one of the hardest things you can do.

Something I’ve been working on over the past year in particular - of re-orienting inner beliefs around scarcity and unworthiness to the opposite: abundance and self-worth.

When you’ve been conditioned from childhood in a certain way due to various conditions, it takes much more than a couple meditations or even a single session of psychedelic therapy to achieve long-lasting transformation of ones inner narratives

It’s a process that requires conscious modulation of thought and behaviour below the conscious window of our minds.

I reflect more on my personal experience here:

https://t.co/86opvVunGM

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

A couple of thoughts on this…

1) Every great innovation was once seen as “delusional.”

If you said psychedelics would become a multi-billion dollar industry 20 years ago, people would’ve thought you’re delusional.

If you said hip-hop would take over as the #1 global genre in the 80s, everyone would’ve laughed.

If you said long-form 2+ hour podcasts would be the new dominant form of media in 2007, people would’ve accused you of supreme delusions.

—

2) Optimism is an orientation you can choose to embody that can directly shape what manifests in your life.

Modern neuroscience and psych now support this (Read James Doty’s latest book ‘Mind Magic’). Your beliefs shape your reality not through magic, but by shaping what your brain pays attention to and which possibilities you perceive.

The brain is a prediction machine: it uses prior beliefs to interpret an ambiguous world and guide behavior. Change the predictions you repeatedly reinforce, and you can change the opportunities you notice, the risks you’re willing to take, and ultimately the reality you help create.

If you think life is primarily defined by great suffering (based on ur childhood experiences), you will find ample examples everywhere (war, injustice, divorces, mental health crisis).

But if you subconsciously change your programming (Joe Dispenza’s meditations do this) to see life as filled with love, opportunity, and joy, you will see it everywhere from your friends to the birds humming outside.

More on this in a blog soon…

[Christian Angermayer @C_Angermayer]

I have always believed in the power of positive thinking - and in being delusionally optimistic.

Books like "Think and Grow Rich" and "The Law of Attraction" have profoundly shaped my thinking and my life.

And now there is proper scientific evidence that, at the very least, optimism is associated with greater longevity.

Link in comments.

[Marijuana Moment @MarijuanaMoment]

States Should Start Planning Now For FDA Approval Of Psychedelics, Federal Report Says: The SAMHSA document also notes that putting psychedelics in Schedule I was seen as "a response to cultural panic...rather than a science-based assessment."
https://t.co/d7ngbpGws7

[Joseph (Jake) Klein @JosephJakeKlein]

Agree. This administration will be remembered for some terrible things, but if it expands access to psychedelic therapy, it will accomplish something of historic importance that civilization will forever appreciate.

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

All these rumoured government approvals which have some basis in truth for sure, are the best features of the Trump admin.

Unpredictable, anti-establishment, innovative, for the people.

There are lots of other things I don’t like in this admin (foreign policy), but this is great.

[Paul F. Austin @PaulAustin3w]

Rumor is that LSD could be approved by the FDA as early as October 2027

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

This deeply disturbing story in NYT on psychedelic malpractice at Ibogaine clinics in Mexico (alleged sexual assault, misconduct, lack of oversight, reckless administration) points to the need of having safe, regulated therapy centres in the U.S so Americans don’t have to travel abroad to sketchy places where the protocols aren’t properly regulated.

H/t @JackGorsline

https://t.co/Ty6rjmIVns

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Psychedelic post trending on X but I’m still frozen at 47.8 K followers 🫠 as I’ve shared recently. Been stuck there for the past 2 to 3 years. I get lots of notifications of people following me, but it always stays the same!

TBH I never thought it was a problem in the algorithm, but the sheer amount of people who have publicly in privately shared being stuck now makes me think that there is something seriously wrong preventing people from growing their following

Some ppl in similar situations: @BridgetPhetasy, @BretWeinstein, @drmikehart

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Look forward to going !

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

🚨The All-In Summit 2026 Featured Speakers:

Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang), CEO of NVIDIA
Satya Nadella (@satyanadella), CEO of Microsoft
Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman), NASA Administrator
Gwynne Shotwell (@Gwynne_Shotwell), President and COO of SpaceX
Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli), Investor
Nick Shirley (@nickshirleyy), Independent Journalist
Jake Paul (@jakepaul), Investor and Entrepreneur
Steve Hilton (@SteveHiltonx), Candidate for CA Governor
Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt), Former Mayoral Candidate
Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier), NY Times Best Selling Author
Blake Scholl (@bscholl), CEO of Boom Supersonic

Plus, appearances from your favorite Bestie Guesties, Brad Gerstner (@altcap) and Bill Gurley (@bgurley)!

And new this year, we're turning the outside of The Shrine into an immersive experience that includes a Frontier Tech Hub, feat. AI and robotics demos, a Gifting Suite and a Wellness Suite.

Stay tuned for more. It all happens September 13-15: https://t.co/e4PyODrnYJ #AllInSummit

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Won what ???

I’ve liked some of Scott’s confrontations of the woke panelists on CNN but this is pathetic promotion of the admin on Iran war

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

By any meaningful metric, we have won this war. Now it's time for the president to formally announce it to the American people.

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@AbudBakri @getchroma Wow

[WIRED @WIRED]

Psychedelics are often associated with disconnecting from reality, but a recent neuroimaging study found that psilocybin can actually make our brain activity more connected to the world around us. https://t.co/Aw05Jmf5eD