Jack Symes

Like you see these documentaries on Netflix, right, that don't mention the bad things that happen to people. And I think if it corresponds to religious experience, as you pointed out there, they have certain similar comparable analogous properties about them. then it's probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of data.

The Alistair Hardy Research Centre asked for people to write in with their religious experiences and just tell them about them, right? And the researchers were really surprised. Alistair Hardy himself said, I didn't think 5% of these were going to be people seeing the devil or...

having Satan watch over their baby every night or walking down the street and suddenly feel like I'm falling through the circles of hell, terrified for the next several years. These are religious experiences from people from what year was this? This is like the last 30, 40 years or so. I think this data was collected in the 80s maybe.

The data, like they just asked for them to account to give their examples of these experiences. But what's notable is First of all, the phrase religious experience and it being negative is kind of like oxymoronic. Right, we never think of that. Yeah, we don't. And they asked for religious experiences with no mention of negative stuff.

So let's say if it's about 5%, and that's a modest generalization, right, given they didn't ask for it. Let's say it's about 5%. And then you take the number of people that have claimed to have had religious experiences.

Then the amount of people existing in the world now who have had negative religious experiences outweighs the total number of people who are Zoroastrian, Jains, people who are Jewish. We consider them significant minorities. Add all those groups together to the, I think it's in between maybe one or two million people have had negative religious experiences.

and lay out all the boring maths in a bucket hat out of the shirt and say like, look, my point there was, if you're a Christian, then you've sort of got to accept the fact that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones if you want to accept religious experiences. You can't keep pretending there aren't negative spirits in the world if you're a Christian.

But the deeper point there is like, if it's the same for psychedelic trips as it is for religious experiences, then there are a big number of people in the world who are having these experiences And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well. They're scared. They're ashamed. They don't want to talk about the negative.

In my life, I probably know about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs whose lives have fallen apart because of it.

This is good. So are we taking from that 10% of people say that we shouldn't be?

Well, I want to just make it clear, right, so that I've sort of formed an overall view on it, which isn't perhaps as strongly put as I've given there. It's that... I don't want to say that people ought not to be using them or stuff like that. I think in controlled circumstances. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that I don't deny the positive things that come from this.

But there's 76 billion neurons there. Right. And we don't know what they're all doing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's important to differentiate as well, and this happens with the problem of evil and philosophy of religion, is we differentiate between the existential problem of evil, which is really bad things happen to me, so I'm abandoning my belief, and compared to the evidential problem, which is let's look at the big data. Does that give me a reason not to believe? And I recognize that

as a person that I'm strongly influenced by the existential part that people that I care about have been, their lives have been ruined because of this. But then I look at the big data and I think on the whole, it seems like this is a positive thing for people more generally. But I still think that there is a big amount of data there

Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I'd like it to be the case that they were all like that, right? I know a friend who's over in Australia who's abandoned his family after taking these and ran off with a 70-year-old man. This guy's like 30, living in a mud hut now. What was he like before that? Just like me and you right now.

Really? Are you sure? Just from the outside.

Well, I had a housemate when I was at university who was – You know, it seemed from all measures grounded. I was happy enough to live in the room next to him and I was, you know, we got along just like good friends. And, you know, he started taking psychedelics. We left university.

Six months later, he started a Facebook live feed and this guy was like just masturbating in front of all of his friends and family because he was just, he'd lost his mind. Wow. Like these, this horrendous.