56: Jack Allocca on Altered States of Consciousness, Psychedelic Science and Philosophy of Mind

Jack Allocca – Instagram
Jack Allocca – Email
Somnivore

Rimini
Salvia Divinorum
King’s College –  Pharmacology
Eli Lilly OPharmaceuticals
Rupert Sheldrake
Panpsychism
Quantum Entanglement – Nobel Prize
Quantum Entanglement
Double-Slit Experiment
The Uncertainty Principle
Bernardo Kastrup – Pragmatism
Carl Jung – The Analytic Psychology
Psilocybin – Palliative Care
Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now
Vipassana Meditation
Eleusinian Mysteries
Martin Luther King  – Moral Arc of the Universe
Barbara Marx Hubbard – Conscious Evolution
Metamodernism
‘Science advances one funeral at a time’
Paradigm Shift – Thomas Kuhn
Planick’s Principle
Liv Boeree
Allen Ginsberg – Howl
Tragedy of the Commons
Shadow work  – Carl Jung
Aldous Huxley – Kindness
Harvard Research – Happiness
Observer Effect

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello. Hi, welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I’m so excited to have Giancarlo Allocca. There’s not many Giancarlo around. So Giancarlo is a research fellow at the university of Melbourne, studying altered state of consciousness using pharmacology, neuro imagining and computational neuroscience.

He founded Somnivore Limited, an AI data analytics Company serving neuroscience laboratories. His research span, [00:01:00] neuropsychopharmacology, psychedelic science, sleep science, and consciousness research in wild species like bears, elephant, and birds. Aloka has personally tested over a hundred psychotropic substances and explored over 80 countries, speaking and consulting on psychedelic science.

philosophy of mind, biohacking, AI, and their societal implications. His work has been featured in various media outlets, including print, video, and radio. Oh my God. I’m salivating with this kind of bio. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for being here. 

Jack: My pleasure. 

Giancarlo: So as I was saying before, off record, you know, we, we love to really talk about far off topic, but we have a very conservative structure.

We still would like to keep it just to keep some order into this traditional past, present future. So if you don’t mind a little bit of biographical story, particularly we’re interested in cathartic moment where something happened and you go, wow, something like that. Where [00:02:00] did you grow up? You grew up in Italy, right?

I grew up 

Jack: in Rimini. On the beach and northeast, very, very special place, a very disruptive place already in Italy, probably the weirdest part of Italy. 

Giancarlo: That’s where Fellini was from, right? 

Jack: Yeah, that’s where Fellini is from, and I think it makes all the sense that he was from there, because it’s it’s truly a bizarre place.

It’s where Italians go to break all the rules. As well as everyone else from the rest of Europe just going there to party, lose themselves, find themselves, get wasted and go on the beach and all the entertainment. It’s like yeah, a form of a cultural scene city of sorts. And, yeah. And so I, growing up there was an incredible primer for me attached to the traditions of Italy and some of the healthy aspects of the lifestyle, the cuisine, the nature, but also the highly disruptive side of of yeah, raves and parties and [00:03:00] people coming from all over the world to be aspects that they could not be at home.

And so a certain type of insight into human nature it’s very hard to be accustomed to growing up unless one grows up in Vegas or in I don’t know, I can’t even think of other places, like, or Ibiza, I guess, if one grows up in Ibiza, it would be like that. But in Italy, this is the Italian hub for everything weird.

So, that was already a pretty disruptive and cathartic few years. When, 

Giancarlo: when, when, when, how old were you when you realized I’m living in somewhere special? When did awareness came that not all the world is like Rimini? Do you remember? There was a moment where you thought, I’m living in the Vegas of Italy.

Jack: I think I knew it. I knew it all throughout. I mean, the people of Rimini know, they’re not, they’re not naive. They know that everything [00:04:00] they see on TV about Italian culture isn’t quite like that in Rimini, right? There is a big contrast like there’s the historical center. Yeah, it looks like a beautiful Italian town but everything else is like a fucking theme park and in winter and summer and yeah, and the people are just so eclectic and friendly and strange and Both when they are in Italy, but also when I meet them abroad, they’re just particularly kind of proud to be from that region where Italians are kind of mixed.

Some are not particularly proud of being Italian for some reason. Italians are a mix of inferiority and superiority complexes. 

Giancarlo (2): So true. 

Jack: People from Romania instead, they usually don’t give a fuck. They’re just like, yeah, we, we, we love, you know, everything about Romania, the region, like Rimini especially.

And so that [00:05:00] is a very distinct trait about Rimini. It’s special, like people trying to make the most of their time through hedonism, self-discovery, good food, 

Giancarlo (2): hedon, hedonism. Yes, yes, yes. Toni And the sexuality. 

Jack: Yeah. All those things. And the, the place is pretty wealthy. Like it’s a, it’s a part of Italy that has good disposable income, so people are not laden by the usual pessimism that is endemic country, and, and they’re exposed to so many people from around the world.

So there’s this. idea that everything can be fun and free and and yeah, self discovery and all these new experiences all the time and music and you know, the sea and the sun and all this stuff and And in winter, you can even drive for an hour and you can ski and snowboard. There’s like a mountain just behind Rimini.

And you can ski and snowboard while seeing [00:06:00] the sea in the background. I can’t think of any other place that has all this bizarre entertainment. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Was Tinto Brass from Bologna? Maybe. I remember 

Jack: Tinto Brass. You know, it’s an authority. I don’t remember if it’s from Bologna. Maybe. 

Giancarlo: I think so. Amazing. 

Jack: Yeah.

In the mountains, in the mountains near Rimini, in Carpegna, I had my first wild altered state of consciousness. I was, I think, 16 or 17 and at the time very much against drugs. Very raised by traditional parents of sorts, like not crazy traditional, but every drug is like heroin basically. And there’s not, if you do them, you’re not as cool.

You’re kind of weak or degenerate, that kind of psychology. But my friends decided to spend the new years there in in this [00:07:00] hut in the snow. And they were avid weed smokers. Occasionally doing cocaine and stuff like that. And I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. I just wanted to be. In the snow and chill with them, with my friends, talk about stuff and maybe witness what they were doing.

I, I used to party without even drinking alcohol at the time, just getting high on music and people and girls and all that stuff. But they bought something, one of the guys brought with them, not just weed, cocaine and alcohol, but this unknown. thing called the salvia divinorum. Nobody knew anything about it.

Giancarlo: And it was legal at the time. You can buy it in a, in a pharmacy or? No, in a pharmacy, no, in a smoke 

Jack: shop. Like it was still like a, it was like a, still a trippy thing, but a legal [00:08:00] high. And because of that, none of us made the connection that this was a very powerful substance. In fact, salvia in Italian means the sage, the one that you cook with for stews and meat.

And so, yeah, like I, I didn’t register that that was a drug. I thought that was some just of herbal thing, like, you know alo santo or incense. 

Jack (2): Incense. Yeah. Yeah. 

Jack: Yeah. And so I was like, all right, cool. Sage, right? Yeah. I can do this. It’s not drugs. It’ll be nice. It’ll be like a herbal tea kind of thing.

And funnily enough, I was so naive and reckless that I decided to go first. None of them ever tried salvia. It was just there, and they just bought it. It’s odd. They just thought it was like a type of weed. And I thought it was a type of sage. And and so they brought like a bong. [00:09:00] 

Giancarlo: Ah, you smoked it.

Jack: Smoked it, smoked it, and this was like an extract, so 5X, I think it was 5X, which is like, very strong, and especially for somebody that has never even been drunk at that point, never, no altered states, right, nothing, like no cigarettes, no, no weed, no, like, I think I had caffeine, yeah, Coca Cola, maybe coffee or two.

The only substance in my life had been just caffeine and sugar. And now, Salve Divinorum, which is like one of the most hardcore and destructive of things. And my friends thought it was like weed. So they just stuffed the cone of the bong, like, they literally like, like there was not tomorrow. 

Giancarlo (2): Oh my God.

And then they just, 

Jack: they instruct me to smoke it like it was weed. So they just torched this thing and they’re like, go, go, go. And then the interesting thing is that salvia is quite forgiving on the lungs. Like it’s not very harsh. So you can really go at it. 

Giancarlo (2): Oh my god. 

Jack: You can [00:10:00] really, like, deep, right? You go, you feel all your lungs and it doesn’t really burn and like, so I just fucking destroyed it.

The first thing I’d ever smoked in my life. I never inhaled. 

Giancarlo: Like 15 seconds inhale. 

Jack: Yeah, like, like I went for it, that was the time for me to prove myself that I wasn’t like a pussy or some kind of like you know, prude and And so I, I, I literally destroyed that bong and I held my breath, I did all the thing and I was like, okay, you know, what’s the worst that can happen and give it like 10 more seconds or 15 seconds and 

Giancarlo (3): yeah, I, 

Jack: I, I think today I’m still recovering from that.

It was an absolute existential sensorial meat grinder. I felt everything. Sick, confused, [00:11:00] scared, frightened. At some point I thought I lost consciousness and I found myself outside in the snow, completely naked, rolling in the snow, thinking that my skin was liquefying while screaming. 

Giancarlo (3): Woah. It 

Jack: was like, I, it was one of the most terrifying annihilation of reality.

That I had ever like, I mean, my only alternative to that was, yeah, I don’t know, a bad dream, right? Or a night terror. So it was like, there’s no comparison. It was just like reality and then complete ablation of anything I knew. And so that for me was yeah, I mean, life changing, 100%. 

Giancarlo: Did you lose a sense of your identity?

You didn’t know who you were? It was an out of body, like a death rebirth? Or you were in pain, it was horrendous, but you still were you? 

Jack: No, no, [00:12:00] it’s not that I didn’t know who I was. So I didn’t know what I was, it was like at the level of like physics, I just a place of pure fear and the confusion and no identity, no names, no family, no, a deeply dissociated state.

In fact, salvinorin A, the active principal of salvinorin, is considered a dissociative, and 

Giancarlo: Like 

Jack: ketamine? Like ketamine, like nitrous oxide, like PCP like ether, or chloroform, like, it’s a dissociative. But a specific type of dissociative. No, every dissociative has its own flavor. Just like iboga is not LSD.

And so how long, how long it lasted? You think 

Giancarlo: I would 

Jack: say 

Giancarlo: at least 45 minutes, but then, but then, you know, the disintegration was horrendous, but then the [00:13:00] reconfiguration was beautiful or not, there was like a silver lining on some sort or was just horror. 

Jack: I am not sure. Part of me is like one of those incredible car crashes where your mind has some pieces, Bob.

Not the majority of the pieces. 

Jack (2): I don’t think it 

Jack: was really the only silver lining that I was left with was curiosity. It was like, clearly there’s so much we don’t know. There’s clearly so much I didn’t know. And I was like, okay, I, I think I need to take a step back from my understanding of everything.

Giancarlo (2): Interesting. 

Jack: And maybe I need to change my direction in life. to get a little bit closer to what’s going on. Like before, I took a lot more for granted about how I thought things were. That instead was such a deeply humbling experience. 

Giancarlo: Amazing. [00:14:00] That’s a silver lining. 

Jack: Yeah, and I didn’t take any substance afterwards for years.

I did eventually try a little bit of weed there, but not much. And I didn’t really feel much, but until my, until I was like 23 or 24. So like a good seven, eight years later, I was too confused to, or too scared to try anything. So that’s one of the reasons why then I started a degree in pharmacology in London.

That was like, I’m going to understand this the most engineering based level possible, like deep science and and laboratory and data and, and then maybe, maybe I’ll be more equipped to go back there. 

Giancarlo: Did you share with your parents? Did you have the kind of relationship? 

Jack: No way. No, no. There was like, I didn’t share any of that until I finished my PhD.

I was 31. 

Giancarlo: Oh, [00:15:00] wow. They didn’t see you change the home or confused or they didn’t ask you what’s going on? 

Jack: No, because I was always, I was already very weird. Like it’s not a, it’s not a salvia fundamentally, no, if anything, it made me like even more convinced that things were even weirder than I 

Giancarlo (3): thought, 

Jack: made me more committed to the work and the explorations.

And, but no, I was already the weirdest person I knew. And the most of the people I knew, knew including my family. So no, I don’t think there was any Any distinct change in my behavior, but it definitely was a change in direction and goal. So after that, I started to consider leaving Italy altogether. 

Giancarlo: Yeah.

Can I ask you just, just as a boring question, just a little parenthesis. How do you think [00:16:00] Salvia Divinorum made it through the legal process and end up being legal when we was not, for example? Easy. Because. 

Jack: Salvia feels like shit. It is always horrible. And for men especially, it’s one of those rare substances that affects men and women differently.

So for men, it’s always a terrifying experience. It’s like a horror film. It’s like the horror film of psychedelics. But why people do it? Why? Because It’s ultimately safe. You don’t stop breathing. You can’t really run. Like, you can only crawl, and like, you You You’re too You’re too messed up to really cause any damage.

And and then it’s over and it’s [00:17:00] basically like a horror film. Why is there an industry, a film industry for horror? Because people get like, Whoa, that was, that’s strange. Like that’s a stimulating, but people don’t necessarily get off like. Yeah, I guess you can get off a horror film in the same way you can get off Salvia.

It’s just so bad, 

Giancarlo: it’s good. But so, but so, but so how the, so the authorities, what was the logic of the authorities saying it’s so bad that? 

Jack: It’s so bad that no sane person can become addicted to this. 

Jack (2): I see. In fact, 

Jack: in fact, the 95 percent of people that have ever tried Salvia, They only do it once. Once.

Once, 95 percent of people, but basically everyone, 

Giancarlo (3): you know, 

Jack: there’s only 5 percent including me, it’s small, right? And this is why when you make something illegal, it’s expensive. There’s laws around [00:18:00] it. The police has to care about it. They have to invest resources in tracking it down. They have to make resources in arresting people.

They have to invest with So it’s not, it’s not like just you make something illegal and it ends there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is very intense to make something illegal. So if the government can avoid doing that, It’s usually for the better, bureaucratically speaking. So, Salvia is non addictive. It’s, there’s only like less than five people have ever been reported in history becoming addicted to Salvia.

And interestingly, they were all women. Because for women, it’s actually a very mystical experience. It’s very like spiritual, and it makes you connect with your feminine and nature. But the vast majority of addicts in the world are men, and that is hard data. And it’s still not addictive for [00:19:00] women either.

It’s still an incredibly overwhelming experience, even for women. So there’s really no point making it illegal. Nobody would possibly think of driving on Salvia or operating any kind of equipment. So it’s more like a stunt. So yeah, like now it’s illegal because eventually became popular because of how weird it is.

And eventually they were like, no, we need to put a stop on this. Otherwise children are going to do it like me at the time. And like when it, when something becomes popular enough, then people start asking questions. 

Giancarlo: See. Okay, so you went to London after university. Yeah, you did. You went to King’s college, right?

Jack: After high school, I went to England. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Jack: I did my uni, my undergraduate in London, King’s college. 

Giancarlo: In pharmacology. 

Jack: Yeah. In pharmacology. Specializing especially in neuropharmacology and yeah, drugs of addiction and, yeah, [00:20:00] specializing in drugs that affect the mind, especially. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. And so what turns you on the most in that period?

What was your passion about? What were you the most passionate about? 

Jack: Well, at the time I was studying these things academically, but also research wise, I was employed for a year by Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals. The ones that invented Prozac and, 

Commercialized insulin for the first time and they invented Cialis, the erectile dysfunction drug.

So they’re very big and they were doing a lot of sleep science. They acquired another company that was just doing sleep science and they were grafting it in their operations. And they employed me to work across the full board from surgery on animals, drug formulations experimental design and data analytics and data mining and even the maintenance of machine learning classifiers.

And a lot of this [00:21:00] revolved around the psychedelics and dissociatives. So they asked me to give. A long list of psychedelics and dissertatives to animals to see how that disrupted their sleep architecture. So then I started to become even more intimately, yeah connected with altered states of consciousness, academically and experimentally.

And at that point I realized that everything I knew was mostly government propaganda. It wasn’t, it wasn’t really science. Everything I knew about drugs prior to starting a degree in pharmacology was mostly government propaganda. And that made me question everything. Also because I had the data points of Salvia before.

And many of my friends at university doing my degree were experimenting with drugs. And eventually I realized that that was the natural progression of [00:22:00] my Developing career in neuroscience and altered states of consciousness. So then I took the leap and started self experiment. Yeah, that started a spiral that I don’t think will ever end.

Giancarlo: Do you remember one exploration that was particularly meaningful? 

Jack: We’re talking over a hundred different psychotropes of sorts, like there’s so many. 

Giancarlo: But do you, do you remember how your philosophy of life was being influenced? 100%. But in which direction? More 

Jack: spiritual? Okay. So when I left Italy, I was very much Italian.

I somewhat traditional in belief systems, but eccentric, very eccentric. But still stock Italian, I even [00:23:00] sounded completely different. I couldn’t speak a word of English prior to my early twenties. So I, when I moved to England, I was like hardcore Italian. And I was I’m a materialist, quite hardcore, I was raised as a Catholic, but then in my late teens, I dropped it all and most of my family did even became disinterested, I guess, and, and then I joined the world of science.

So everything for me was about molecules and you know, atoms and electrical signals and matter and gravity and stuff like that. And there was no real, anything else. 

Giancarlo: So evidence based, replicable. 

Jack: Yeah. Yeah. Very much evidence based and materialistic. I would say agnostic or atheist. 80 percent atheist and 20 percent agnostic.

Maybe, maybe. But that [00:24:00] 20 percent got expanded. You know, to occupy pretty much the full spectrum and eventually turning me into a pine psychic, really. Where, you know, consciousness is the ultimate scaffold of everything. At the material and data level, existence level. You know, this doesn’t necessarily help because we do, we hardly know what consciousness is.

There’s no consensus in science. It brings mysticism and spiritual beliefs more down to a certain context that, that speaks a bit more to physics and the way a scientific mind would work. In fact, I believe that like Einstein was also a panpsychic, potentially Tesla, like many of the scientists of the past eventually either became a hardcore.

religious of [00:25:00] some sort. Or they became panpsychic. Okay, remember, someone said, I forgot who said it that when you start, when you first approach science, you find atheism. When, when you first drink from the cup of science, you find atheism. But by the, by the time you get to the bottom, you find God.

This because the more you learn about science, the The more you learn about how complex everything is, the more you learn about mathematics, the more you’re like, how can this all be random? It is overwhelming. Like, you start unraveling the fabric of how one cell becomes a full grown human with [00:26:00] thoughts and bones and ligaments and nerves and, and skin and everything speaks, and everything is Organized and as a scientist, eventually you’re like, this is too much.

Eventually you can think in terms of. randomness as much as you can. In fact, I believe, like, within my belief system, this is something I have never read before, but it’s one of my psychedelic realizations, is that atheism, in a way, is a religion. People still believe in something magical, something that I call the god of random, right?

Because when you ask an atheist anything, They would explain by some kind of axiom or behavior, like yeah, you move because you have legs, you [00:27:00] have legs because you have bones, you know, you, you have a bone because bones are made of calcium and Stuff. But then what’s eventually, the more you do that, the more you’re like, ah, then there’s stuff, right?

Stuff just moves. And why, why does the stuff become like that? Ah, it just does it and it moves. And then eventually the word, the, every, this funnel goes through, the singularity is random. Like, I just randomly does that, like DNA just assembles itself randomly, mutations just happen randomly. So atheists eventually believe in the God of random.

Giancarlo: Yeah, you know, you know, you know Rupert Sheldrake says that those atheist secular materialists, basically, they believe that consciousness is a part of the brain. And then they just ask for, just give me one free miracle. The first free miracle is that matter creates consciousness, but we don’t know where matter comes from.

Just give me that as a miracle, and then I can explain [00:28:00] everything else. 

Jack: 100 percent. And that miracle for physicists, that miracle for physicists is the singularity, right? 

Giancarlo (2): Yeah, let 

Jack: me explain everything until you get to that one point in time where nothing makes sense. Yeah. Right? So you give me one free miracle, but miracle is exclusively the language of religion.

Giancarlo: Exactly. 

Giancarlo (2): Exactly. 

Giancarlo: But so, sorry, Jack, sorry, can you just remind the audience, what’s the definition of panpsychism? 

Jack: Okay, panpsychism is a belief system that tries to explain the fundamental order of everything. Just like any religion would have a god or gods that would be the first movers, right? The first miracle.

Anpsychists have that to the vaguely defined concept [00:29:00] of consciousness, so a set of behaviors, of fundamental behaviors, that seem to permeate everything from subatomic particles to giraffes, to glass, rocks, metal, or mushrooms. Or the sun, or the vacuum of space. Everything is filled with consciousness that then pulls all of the strings from within one particle.

Like an atom, but then the atom is made up of, you know, quarks and other subatomic particles that have their own consciousness. So you can go down at the level of, you know, granularity and each module, each component would have its own identity [00:30:00] and consciousness, but then all of these things come together to form aggregate consciousness.

Where now all of a sudden there’s emergent consciousness. Consciousness that would be able to govern behavior on a more complex and integrated level. So then the god becomes consciousness, so that it doesn’t have to be like a man in the sky with a beard, or thinking of any kind of culture, or place on the planet, or race, or period in time.

Consciousness is just this continuum that Ever was, ever will, and somehow is in everything and anything and organizes life as well as things like we don’t call life, like rocks or anything else. So panpsychism [00:31:00] doesn’t draw a distinction between organic and inorganic life. Instead, in fact, in many ways, inorganic life is exclusively a panpsychic concept.

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. It’s like consciousness is a primordial part of reality, like time, space, matter, and consciousness. Right. But can I, can I ask you, did you, did you see the Nobel prize in physics given to these three Swedish scientists physics in 2022 about non localization? Did you see that? Non localization.

I’m not, I can’t recall. They, they, they proven that on a subatomic level, this particle, even if they are separated, they still influence each other from thousands of miles apart. Non localization. Like a form of entanglement? That’s a word, entanglement, yes. So can you comment on this concept of entanglement?

And then can you comment on the double slit [00:32:00] experiment? Can you explain that with your words, like you did so well for panpsychism? 

Jack: Yeah, now we start going deeper into, you know, like in epistemology. One says it’s turtles all the way down, like it’s as you try to regress on first principles things get weirder and weirder.

So entanglement is a concept in quantum mechanics where it is possible under certain experimental conditions to synchronize The behavior of one particle to another so that they spin in the same way. So every molecule has a certain spin, like planets, and they would go like different ways. Like Venus and Earth are almost identical in size.

But one turns faster than the other, and has a certain [00:33:00] axis that is different, there’s all of this. Wow. Under specific experimental conditions, these different things, like two neutrinos, or protons, or that kind of stuff, they can be put to lock, so that they move exactly in the same way. At that point, they become entangled.

And we don’t really understand how entanglement works. We just see it happen. We’ve learned how to establish it, but we don’t really know why it’s the way it is or what that means. Then these particles can be moved apart one centimeter, one meter, 10 miles, or literally 

Giancarlo: 10, 000 miles. 

Jack: Yeah. One could be in Spain and the other one could be in New Zealand, and they still behave [00:34:00] exactly the same way.

Like, literally, if one becomes perturbed, the other one just moves exactly the same way. And this is something that basically tells us that the speed of light isn’t the fastest thing there is. Because entangled particles change their behavior instantly. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Jack: There’s not a lag where they have to speak to one another with some kind of signals that then behaves like light.

No, they just move at the same time. So then there is something beyond traditional physics, Newtonian physics, that we just witness, but we don’t really know why things [00:35:00] behave in an entangled way. And then there is more exotic assumptions and theories that this kind of entanglement doesn’t just happen in those conditions.

Now, it is a fundamental tool. of reality. 

Jack (2): Yes. 

Jack: Where, for example, different parts of the brain may communicate at that level or even people like, for example, you think of that person and the phone rings, right? Exactly. Or people having a psychedelic experience reporting very similar things. 

Jack (2): Yes. 

Jack: Or even more exotic behaviors.

Jack (2): Yes. 

Jack: Some people, some are scientists, others are just weirdos, think that entanglement is at play. [00:36:00] And it’s a very, it’s a very seductive idea. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Jack: I don’t think, I don’t think there’s much science to it, but it’s an assumption that could become science at some point. 

Giancarlo: I mean, now with the Nobel Prize, they give them a stamp of approval.

Anyhow, I’ll let you, I’ll let you have a look at that. Then we’ll talk again, hopefully, but so this, we can, you know, this is a new interpretation of the connectedness of the universe, right? And so talking about the interconnectedness of the universe, can you comment on the observer effect on, on, on, on, on the, on the double slit experiment?

And then we’ll try to put all this thing together. 

Jack: Okay. If we have to talk about the double slit experiment, the observer effect this basically happened in the previous, in the 1950s or something, 60s, where they scientists basically were shining, [00:37:00] I think it was alpha rays, you know, some kind of particles.

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Jack: Blasted onto a field and they again behave by randomness. So if you just shine them onto the film, they will just spread evenly to occupy the space available. Then if you put like a grid in front of them, then weird stuff starts happening. One would expect the slits to filter these particles.

Like, as if there were little bowls, like a flow of little bowls, and then they would just create two, the two slits on the other side, like as if you’re spraying water, let’s say, colored water. But even better, with like a spray can, right? With paint, if you are to spray those slits, you’d get two slits on the other side with the color.

Jack (2): Yes. [00:38:00] 

Jack: And in that sense, these would act like particles. But, whenever this experiment was run, in specific conditions, they observed the slits on the other side behaving like they were waves and not particles. So, someone needs to be a little bit

It’s not really easy to explain how waves work, but waves like sound waves, gamma waves, and they have this sinusoidal behavior that 

Giancarlo (3): when 

Jack: this kind of behavior hits slits, it doesn’t just go on the other side like where it just splits into like several slits. according to this wavy behavior. And so then it [00:39:00] seems that if nobody’s watching, that flow of, of particles doesn’t behave like particles.

It behaves like waves. So then there’s this debate on whether everything is made of particles, or everything is made of waves, so just energy. And that’s not really easy to unravel. And it’s not necessarily the most important aspect. The most interesting aspect is that a human being made out of flesh, clothes, and teeth.

If that human being is pointing their eyeballs at the experimental setup, that flow of energy and particles all of a sudden behaves like particles. 

Giancarlo: Differently. Yeah. 

Jack: It behaves differently, so it seems that the experimental setup cares whether somebody’s watching or not. And 

Giancarlo: so [00:40:00] then, 

Jack: I don’t think this has been explained either, just like entanglement, it has been observed.

But then there are theories, and I myself have theories that are as wild as anyone else’s. It could be that maybe humans are able to alter reality by thought alone. Like, for example, if somebody studies physics, they would stumble upon a concept called the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle states that you cannot ever know the behavior of something perfectly, like the speed of a car.

If you have the machine from the police that shines a laser, you can know [00:41:00] the speed of the car. But it’s never very precise. If you want to be more precise, you increase the power of the laser, so that what shines back has more energy and more information. So you keep increasing the energy of the laser, and you keep knowing the speed of the car more and more accurately.

But at some point, if the laser is too strong, it will literally affect The speed of the car, the car is going to start to burn or is going to start deviated by the laser. 

Giancarlo (3): I see. 

Jack: So that means that whenever you’re trying to observe the behavior of something, you may have to throw something at it and then measure what comes back.

And that in itself has the potential of altering what’s going on. So if a human is watching the experimental setup, there is the potential the human is [00:42:00] projecting some kind of. 

Giancarlo (2): Energy. 

Jack: Stunning energy. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Jack: That may be strong enough to affect the delicate subtleties. 

Giancarlo: of something like that. Yeah, that’s why, that’s why sometimes you feel, if someone looks at you from behind, sometimes you feel it, right?

Jack: Yeah, maybe, right? There’s, it could be like that. 

Giancarlo: But so, so, so how can you reconcile pansakism with the entanglement effect and the observer effect? You know, basically, you know, the, the Newtonian Cartesian idea of the, of the universe was like a gigantic mechanical clock where, you know, we are separate, we are independent, all this planet move like a big clock.

And then, and then the East has been saying for thousands of years, no, it’s, it’s, it’s a gigantic organism was alive. You know, like the moon is alive. The sun is [00:43:00] alive. They have, there is a consciousness. And for us, Psychonaut who have been in those realms, We have been there, we felt a little bit this, this design.

So what I would like to explore with you, first of all, you know, do you agree? I mean, how, how are you reconciling modern contemporary quantum physics and transpersonal psychology into a new theory of, of what Bernardo Kastrup calls pragmatic idealism. This idea that, you know, we are all, we are all mind.

We are all consciousness. This. All universe is a big, gigantic organism. And, and, and what really, I think, what really interests me is that how can we learn to navigate these invisible cosmic matrix that might be there for harmonious living, connection, peace. Yes, 

Giancarlo (2): unfortunately. [00:44:00] It’s too New Age y, Bisa 

Jack: based.

It’s not New Age y. It’s actually not New Age y. It’s just terrifying. 

Giancarlo (2): Why? 

Jack: Because this is, in many ways the place where I always go on different classes of psychedelics. Because each one seems to provide a different insight. Into the machine. The issue is that one thing is understanding the mechanics of how something works.

And another thing is understanding what that means for human beings. Why should human beings care about these things in the first place? And how does this inform the nature of good and evil? Like, how does thinking of the moon as an organism [00:45:00] matter besides philosophical masturbations? Like, how can we bring this down to decision making, to policy, to society, to culture, ultimately to morality?

And this is actually very hard. And it is the kind of things that has kept me up at night. And because ultimately, how can you even, you know, when you start speaking, I say when you start speaking to the stars, right, when you are on a deep altered state, and you start talking a bit like them, like your fundamental stream of consciousness starts to get where it came from, at the level of, like, rocks, you start thinking that maybe Our ideas of right and wrong may be completely arbitrary and [00:46:00] meaningless things like generosity, altruism, togetherness, love, like, what is love to Saturn, right?

Or to you know, a dying supernovae or all of these things start to become meaningless. Bye bye. almost meaningless. This is why altered states of consciousness can provide such incredible power to really shine light and magnify insights into the nature of everything. However, the more you start getting into the mechanics of it, I believe the more you lose your humanity.

Jack (2): I see there is a risk of cynicism. 

Jack: Yeah, I mean, the risk of running into nihilism is Very strong. [00:47:00] Because there’s two, two extremes. 

Giancarlo (3): One is nothing has meaning. Nothing has human meaning, at least. 

Jack: And the other one, everything has meaning. So it’s a little bit like DMT and 5 mu DMT. Where you’re like, everything is part of a grand design of aliens talking to us from a different galaxy and, or everything is just cold noise from the vacuum of space and, and nothing is alive, everything is just a fluke.

So then, like how, finding a middle ground where we can still have jobs. Hug loved ones and find meaning in work or [00:48:00] connect with another human being or connect with humans, animals. It’s not as easy. Like certain substances can do that because they make you default down a level. Like we’re not humans.

We are animals. So all animals matter. Then you go down a level. So, ah, we’re all organisms. Plants, fungi, animals, we’re all the same. Another level down. Ah, we are carbon, calcium, oxygen. But the moment, every time you drop a level, 

Giancarlo: you lose some humanity. 

Jack: Exactly. You have to lose a, a, a sense of decision making and resource allocation.

Like when you are completely human, you’re like, [00:49:00] ah, everything is in service of human. You are a humanist. So we can destroy the trees. Kill all the animals and enslave the remaining animals and make them reproduce Extract all the minerals Extract and this is again a level down because a level up to that is we are all I don’t know Belgium, right?

Well, we’re all German or we’re all Swedish And everything else is a different species. Everything is in service of the nation. And that level up is like, Ah, everyone with my surname is everything. Everyone else is alien. Or then it defaults me. It’s all about me. Even my dad and my mom is an enemy that is competing for resources.

So you can see, you keep going down, [00:50:00] and then there’s nations, then there’s humans, and then the humans start, start losing separation with animals, and they’re like, we can’t eat the animals because animals have feelings, right? So then we eat only plants. Until you go a level down more and you’re like, maybe plants have feelings, you know, we’re murdering carrots.

We are planting corn next to one another like a concentration camp. Oh, my God. Like, we can’t even eat plants. So at that point, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna eat rocks. And that’s when people start exiting the gym pool, right? All the ones that thought that magically just didn’t make it. But it’s technically possible.

We have the faculties to get lower and lower at that level of empathy that is actually more empathy. So the more you empathize, the more you lose yourself. And that is [00:51:00] a very dark and poignant realization because you think, you know, empathy is togetherness. But in many ways, empathy is a dual, a non dual concept, meaning there’s less separation between me and them.

I can feel like them. But in the process, you lose the dual sense of you and the other. So on psychedelics and dissociatives and peak experiences and near death experiences, one starts playing with that continuum of empathy and non dualism. And in the process, You become more aware of the mechanics of the universe, but you also increasingly lose focus on the things that for everybody are just the operating system that they come shipped with.

All those assumptions, [00:52:00] all of those things of like, ah, I’m just not going to steal, I’m not going to kill, I’m not going to invade. These are assumptions. Why are those things right and wrong? You know, like. You’re going to talk to lions. They’re just going to do lions. They’re going to kill. They’re going to run there.

They’re going to grab anything. You know, there’s no morality that is obvious across species. So, the more you can think at that integrated level, the more you start to find it very hard to behave like a normal human, that has normal beings. Because when you start eventually speaking to the stars, how are you really going to care about anything that is so mundane as wearing this clothing, wearing that clothing, eating this, eating that, follow this religion, follow that religion.

Everything becomes [00:53:00] like a gimmick. Everything has become so, you know, like 

Giancarlo: dehumanized. 

Jack: Yeah, everything becomes like you start seeing everything is like a story. It’s not real. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. So I have I have two comments. I totally get it. I understand your theory of risk of cynicism and nihilism when you go deep, deep, deep on a subatomic matter on this.

psychedelic journey. I will just, I have to, I have to comment and the mouth sounds a bit corny, but you know, I remember in one of my psychedelic trip when there was the completely ego dissolution and, and, and, and he was, you know, I felt completely exploded that, you know, like you said before, I don’t know what I was, that was terrifying.

Right. But then what brought me together, you know, I, I, I completely lost my sense of identity and it was terrifying. But then the key for the, [00:54:00] you know, reintegration, recoagulation, the key to, to want the, the key to bring my identity back was this concept of love. You know, the first thing that came to my mind when I start being a little bit myself was the relationship with my mother, the relationship with my wife, the relationship with the friends, with the children.

So in that moment, I felt, you know, the sixties movement and it’s all about love. I really understood how love can be at the very, how can maybe, maybe pure consciousness is love. Because that was the key for me to, to go back into my body. And, and, and that’s why for me that we have that sense of caring for other, which is deep in our genes.

And that not only can be preserved and enhanced by the psychedelic experience. Not only can be, not only is there, but it can be maybe accentuated. The second [00:55:00] thing, you know, like Young used to say that when you feel on your body, when you viscerally feel that you’re part of something infinite, then all the trivialities.

Sort of like goes out of the window. So when, you know, when you start talking to the moon, yes, you can maybe lose your humanity, but you can also develop a sense of purpose. You can, you feel like I’m part of the moon. I’m part of this system. And so there is meaning in the universe. For me, the interesting part, you know, it’s, of course, what you said is like, okay, apart from a philosophical masturbation, what is the point about debating?

Is this a cosmic consciousness or not? I think that, you know, from the, from a healing point of view, feeling this connection and, and, and maybe even, you know, start working with a result of this, [00:56:00] of this matrix, which. Young was calling synchronicities, right? These, these things that happen that they seems coincidence, but they’re just very good for you.

I mean, I feel on my life, particularly that as you develop first, a cognitive understanding of this cosmic matrix, then sort of like attunement with your life on this, on this invisible cosmic matrix, then you get feedback through the synchronicities event. And that can not just, not only preserve love and encourage love, but also can encourage more harmonious and respectful living among human beings.

Do you see that part also? 

Jack: I see that. And I have gone through that many times. I have found some issues in that also, like very often [00:57:00] that is just a feeling like I have not, and whenever I have investigated deeper in asking questions to others describing this. It was always very vague, 

Giancarlo: the synchronicities or the connection, 

Jack: the love, the definition of love in a way that can actually become reproducible or informing of.

behavior. It’s more, it’s always like, ah, I feel like a caring for someone or something, warm feelings, togetherness, but this still doesn’t quite necessarily, like in some context, it can be very healing. If there is like an excess of pain or trauma or disconnection like prime example, MDMA for [00:58:00] PTSD just brings love back into a place of excessive defensiveness and whatnot.

That in itself, if taken to the extreme, makes someone deeply dysfunctional, like. It’s now deeply established that psychedelics are awful for warfare. Soldiers don’t do very well on psychedelics, and often they don’t want to fight either. They start losing, like, the motivation to kill and destroy.

However, if there is a war, there is a war. And unless everybody is tripping out Which is, seems unlikely. There’s always going to be a group that is going to not do that. And they’re going to have the upper hand at the level of violence. So, [00:59:00] love in itself is just a module. If it’s not, if love is not counterbalanced with violence and destruction.

Love dies. And that is very tricky. In fact, in many ways, love cannot even stand its own ground without violence. Because for example, oxytocin, right? A master component Of behavior for a bonding group. Dynamic makes people trust others and come together, right? So beautiful. However, this has also been measured scientifically in the wild on wild animals.

Like on baboons, for example, the biggest spike of oxytocin wasn’t when they were having sex or hugging or grooming each other, 

Jack (2): [01:00:00] fighting, bringing each other’s calls. 

Jack: It was, yeah. War. It was when they were fighting, oxytocin would go the highest up because ultimately oxytocin is singing a specific signal that is us together against everyone else.

And these two parts of the metal cannot be. Separated. So then, the baboons, or the people in war, attack the others because they love their group. So they are defending through attack. They either want people of their group to have food on their table, so the resources of the other group, or they are defending themselves.

This is still based on love. But the kind of love, instead, that I have observed, described in this psychedelic context, is love. Is a little bit too synthetic, a little bit like [01:01:00] taking sugar out of a fruit is much more than just sugar. But in those contexts, instead, the love gets taken out of context as this one feeling of just no violence.

We all together hug everything and everyone. I see it ultimately as an hallucination, an oversimplification of everything. 

Giancarlo: This is from the psychedelic experience, but what about from the cognitive realization that we are part of something infinite? Would that not increase prosocial behavior? Maybe. 

Jack: Then at that point, you’d have to be specific.

Okay. We are part of something bigger. And 

Giancarlo: so what? So, so, so, so, I mean, for me personally, I’ve been recently reconsidering this concept of time and time, you know, not being linear. And if we are part of something infinite, then this body is not even ours, right? We’re just like borrowing. It’s not my [01:02:00] body.

It’s like, but so, so you go in this state of mind of, you know, of, of soul journey that the East has been talking forever. I mean, there’s nothing new here. And if you go in this cognitive If you’re like cognitively aware, then you develop also maybe a body awareness that, you know, this is just a temporary.

temporary phase, and then maybe you don’t, you know you get out of this rush mentality and scarcity mentality. You know, I hear, I hear this podcast founders on all this, you know, overachiever of our generation, the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk of the world. And it’s all obsessed with. It’s all about fast, fast, fast next to the, you know, before the other guy and they’re all destroyed.

They all look like completely. And so this idea that you have to achieve everything in this. That’s one example of how being part of something infinite can help you to lead a better [01:03:00] life is that maybe the concept of time becomes a little bit less linear and maybe you can just relax and ultimately, you know, that’s also going to sound a bit corny and maybe I’ve been living in Ibiza too long, but I really feel that the measure of success is a calm nervous system.

Jack: I agree. I think it’s trying to have the right balance or functional homeostasis, because if you, that’s very important. Like, for example, that’s why psilocybin, magic mushrooms, are so effective at alleviating end of life anxiety. 

Giancarlo (3): Because 

Jack: when you are really tripping that hard, you start thinking that that’s not a big deal.

You’re going somewhere else, you were part of the stars before and you’ll continue being part of the stars and you’ll become some other life form. It’s not ending there, right? So of course that would bring more peace and, and yeah, freak people out less about [01:04:00] dying. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Jack: Yeah. I think in that sense, it’s extremely positive.

Then there is the extreme of that, right? Where you think that everything is so timeless. Now, you can just basically like air carton, right? You’re just going to be in the now, whatever, and unless somebody is going to scribe you, not even books are going to get published. You’re not going to get anything done.

At that point, you’re basically like functionally homeless and turn into a monk and that’s it. You check out. You know, it is tricky, right? You still need to care about deadlines. Otherwise it’s hard to really get anything done. So it is, it’s a tricky one, huh? And that’s why I like to try to keep it real, while also playing with reality as much as possible, because it has undeniable powers.

Giancarlo (3): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Giancarlo: So let’s go back, let’s go back to your life a little bit more concrete after this long exploration [01:05:00] of cosmic concepts. So we were now, you were working for the pharmaceutical company, you were studying sleep pattern, and then you decided to do your PhD in neuroscience. Right. What do you remember of those times in terms of like, excitement, strong emotion, passion?

What, what, what turned you on during your PhD times? Oh, 

Jack: my PhD time was the greatest psychedelic experience of my life, arguably. Of, I would say the majority of, of people I’ve ever interacted with, it was insane. It still is, but that was a, a deep space of risk taking and trying anything and everything.

Like my project in itself pivoted very rapidly. into inventing a new technology to unravel consciousness with the help of artificial intelligence. So 

Giancarlo (3): I 

Jack: [01:06:00] created a classifier that could categorize altered states of consciousness from a place of brain activity at the electrical level to study things like sleep and psychedelic states and more exotic states like epilepsy, for example.

And I succeeded in that while basically resuscitating my background in electronic engineering that I had in Italy and merging it with pharmacology, biology, and neuroscience that I’ve learned in the UK. My PhD was in Australia, and Australia was merging my ancient world with my Previous and current world and making machines speak with biology so that biological intelligence from humans and laboratory animals could communicate with carbon like silicon based intelligence, not all computers.

Giancarlo (3): Wow. 

Jack: And I had to retrain myself in a [01:07:00] lot of things, like I learned English, I had to relearn calculus and theory of machine learning, and computer programming, and, and more about neuroscience, and, and yeah, convolutional neural networks, and all this stuff was, And at that point, I realized that I couldn’t do it the conventional way.

I was a relatively gifted individual. I got very good scholarships in Australia. They invited me over from the UK because in King’s College, I won all these prizes and awards. So there was something there. But then I believe that that got weaponized by my lifestyle during the PhD, where I would literally throw myself in the most absurd of situations.

Like I, yeah, exposed myself to over a hundred different psychedelics and dissociatives and [01:08:00] solvents and stimulants and, and and sedatives and the most exotic research chemicals in different contexts, in nature, in parties, in sex, in In sports or while coding, while trying to understand how to build a technology.

And every year I would travel from three to five months, nonstop. Like I technically had four weeks off by contract, but that wasn’t enough to stoke my creativity. And so I would do the same thing that I did during my degree, where I would be gone for like four months or five months. Missed the first few months of university and then come back, think that I was going to lose everything and be a failure and then catch up.

I did the same on steroids during my PhD. And my supervisor at the time, at the beginning, was completely shocked. And I was like, what are you doing? This is never going to work. This is a crazy way to do a PhD. But then every time I’d come back from my exotic travels in [01:09:00] Southeast Asia, in Papua New Guinea, in South America, I would come back with ideas.

And with implementations and then I could basically implement a psychedelic way of thinking into engineering and basically build this thing that usually would require like a team of engineers and scientists working together. By just me alone. 

Giancarlo: Basically changing your environment was boosting your creativity.

Jack: 100 percent and in the most radical way I could. So I could, I would be in cities, I would be in the outback in Australia, I would be in jungles, I would be in foreign countries, in conflict zones, tribal contexts. I was in Papua New Guinea for a while, eating the craziest things from cats, dogs, monkeys, worms, and pirates, and you know, like, the most absurd things.

Like, for a period, [01:10:00] I ran one of the wildest experiments of my life. I joined the sex industry and I worked as an escort and in porn. Where, where? Like 

Giancarlo: about two 

Jack: and a half years. Tell us, 

Giancarlo: tell us a little bit how the, how the sex working started and, and where and, and, and a couple of anecdotes from that world.

It 

Jack: was in Australia and in Australia it’s all legal. You get like a license and pay taxes and And it’s very well funded. Like, you can charge things like 500 plus an hour. And the the industry is 99 percent female dominated. And in my second between the second and my third year in Australia, the friends around me kind of became a certain type.

At some point they were all women and most of them would be either strippers or sex workers. 

Giancarlo: Why do you think you were [01:11:00] attracted by this kind of characters? 

Jack: Because they were the wildest people you could imagine. 

Giancarlo: No cultural 

Jack: conditioning, free? Free. I mean, everybody has cultural conditioning, but they were, you know, playing all their own game and they had disposable time.

So they had freedom of time and financial freedom. You know, these are all wealthy in Australia. Sex workers are not like trafficked or enslaved. They make more money than lawyers. And so they have a lot of money and a lot of time to paint, read philosophy travel. And all of a sudden it was like, blew my mind.

Like I was just trying to work it out the linear way through education and everything else. And they just seem to have cracked something fundamental. Where they were having a good time, they were partying, they were fucking, and they had all this money. And they were navigating the [01:12:00] wildest corners of the human mind.

So I was like, this is literally the most insane of neuroscience experiment I can imagine. And these were the people that could understand my colorful living more than anyone else. 

Giancarlo: Of course. 

Jack: So these were all my friends. We would do all these expeditions. We would do all these experiments, or climb cranes.

In building sites, have sex with them, take all of the substances and try this, explore Tantra together, learn all of these practices, wild parties and travels together, they had all this money and time and they get mental and moral flexibility to try anything. It was like genius. It was like, these are superhuman.

So many, many people, but everybody else was so wrapped up in these mundane problems. Eventually, some of them started to make some connections and say things like, Jack, [01:13:00] you literally made for the industry. What are you doing being such a poor student? And I was like, I’m kind of busy. I’m doing a PhD, but they had a point.

They had time, money, and a lot of other things while I had little time. And little money, just a lot of knowledge. So then eventually they dragged me into the world themselves. And one popped my cherry and became, like, my first client. This tiny, gorgeous, blonde Australian girl who’s paid me for sex for the first time.

And trained me. She was a sex worker herself. And then she initiated me into that world, and then I worked with them together for a while, and they were still training me into that world, and then I started to work on my own, and then film from there was like a, an organic evolution. But in the process, I just learned about my body, about other people’s stories.

Since there’s so much money in the world, the [01:14:00] clients and the people, they were all wealthy and they want powerful insights about. economy and philosophy and stories or their own industry at least. And so in that way, I could create also a workshop for the mind and the body in that very rare context, right?

You never get a neuroscientist, a doctoral neuroscientist thrown into the sex industry with substance. It never happens, right? So it’s just like, 

Giancarlo (2): I don’t think so. I don’t think I can agree. 

Jack: It blew my mind, right? I was like, Yeah, so that’s why. And that’s how it came to be. And it was an integral part of my PhD, 100%.

Giancarlo: But let me ask you something on sexuality since we’re here. According to your experience and those time in that industry is it fair to say that they find a way to separate sex with intimacy? Or you think they were able to develop genuine [01:15:00] connection also in this, you know, like paper deals? 

Jack: It depends on the individual.

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Jack: So it’s, it’s hard to make generalizations. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. Yeah. 

Jack: It’s a little bit like, does every professional snowboarder enjoy their job? And are they all free of pain or they are destroying their joints in the process? Some do, some don’t. It is 

Giancarlo: Of course. It was a stupid question. Not stupid, but it’s true.

It was a bit myopic. No, 

Jack: no. It is an extremely valid question. And it brings it down to a level of personal responsibility. Because it is an extreme sport. That Industry is completely extreme. So then you need to understand more your place in the world, your understanding of health, safety mental health and and the trying not to destroy yourself in the process.

Giancarlo: But so percentage wise, which percentage would you think was [01:16:00] mostly hurting themselves or what people were navigating and snowboarding harmoniously? 

Jack: Oh, I, I mean, I would be pulling numbers out of my house, but 

Giancarlo: just, just watch for the majority people, but what I’m trying to figure it out is like, is it like 50 percent or more a little pathology or it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a case by case, right?

Jack: It’s really hard. I would say a big part of it, they didn’t make it through. They would become very damaged. 

Jack (2): Yeah. It should be a phase of people’s life, cannot be a lifestyle forever. 

Jack: No, I mean, professional snowboarding cannot be for life. 

Jack (2): Exactly. Exactly. 

Jack: So if you manage to milk as much insight out of it and resources and then evolve as you age.

And invest in a more complex way, then you won the game. [01:17:00] Otherwise, you can get burnt in the process. A little bit like, you know, boxes. 

Giancarlo (3): They make millions, 

Jack: and then at some point, they become concussed and messed up, and they waste all the money on tigers and casinos and supercars. They lose it all. The same thing applies to the sex industry, actually.

It’s just a lot of people cannot imagine becoming sex workers, just like a lot of people cannot imagine becoming professional MMA fighters. I think it’s actually very similar. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Okay. So tell me, tell me, can you remember a moment in your sex working career when you thought, okay, that’s it, I’ve done it.

It’s over for me. Do you remember that moment? 

Jack: I mean, for me it was over mostly because my scientific and business career took me traveling nonstop. You can’t really do it on the go. You need like a community, you need systems. It’s, [01:18:00] some people could do it like off a backpack, but it’s pretty dangerous and messy.

I could never think of doing it like that. There was never like a moment that broke me, right? No. In fact, in many ways, I retained a pretty romanticized view of my time in the industry And I could have I could have continued if I could but other priorities just became impossible to ignore otherwise Yeah, there were very rough moments here and there, in which I was not attracted at all to the people, or some people were kind of pushy or a little bit robotic or confrontational even.

But that was actually the minority. Most of the people I interacted with were wonderful. They were generous, they were educated. They were very [01:19:00] warm and so actually, personally, I had pretty either funny or enriching experiences with the occasional disaster here and there, you know, it would happen even when you’re snowboarding.

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is a, there is a TED talk by the sex worker that says, you know, really she talks like as a, as a social service, like, like as a tantrica, she says, you know, men, On average come in five minutes. They pay you for an hour. They don’t pay you for the five minutes They pay you for the company, for the sharing, for the connection.

Jack: 100%. For many of my clients, I was their psychology with benefits. 

Giancarlo: Exactly, exactly. Okay, so so, so, what, why were you traveling so much for your research, for your PhD? You mentioned animals on your I 

Jack: was traveling for a number of reasons. First, there would be a number of conferences to attend, and [01:20:00] Australia is a little bit at the periphery of everything, so I would have to travel to the U.

1. or Europe for them, either presenting or connecting with other academics. Then, for a while, I was building a network of labs that collaborated with me to build my technology. So, I had to visit them to either coordinate getting their data, and then I was going to work on, to tweak my algorithm, or build the relationship.

Being in the right place at the right time, to have dinner together, drink together. Like a lot of science is also about personal relationship. So you have to kind of be there and be a friend as well as a collaborator. Otherwise, you know, they don’t want to listen to you as a PhD student. They’re very busy people.

So there was a lot of that. And then [01:21:00] I would say 50 to 60 percent of that was me simply exploring, just going to a country and do the weirdest things I could either eat crazy animals, take jungle drugs, do bizarre rituals with the natives or explore the underground in in more civilized places with parties and underground chemists and, and the kink community and.

Or I would be yeah, just hitchhiking somewhere and talking to people and yeah, everything was for me a constant experiential workshop in as many directions as I could. And that complemented my PhD in ways that. Exceeded my wildest dream so that then I was productive while traveling doing my crazy things [01:22:00] and that was productive during my Ph.

1. Because I would come back and I have all this work to catch up on and all these ideas from the traveling. So then it would create this crazy work hard, play hard kind of thing. Where every time I’d come back, I’d forgotten half of what I was doing, and I’d had to convince my supervisor that I was working on something real, and so I had to kind of be on balance of extremes all the time.

And yeah, so that’s why I was traveling sober. It was a mix of pleasure, work And creativity. Yeah. 100%. 

Giancarlo: And so what was your thesis for the PhD? 

Jack: Was the design and the validation of Somnivore, which is the technology that then became my company. 

Giancarlo (3): I, 

Jack: I disrupted the department of pharmacology at my home university.

So they really loved it to the point that then they ran me through a commercial incubator at the business [01:23:00] school of the university and then managed to retrieve my intellectual property from the university because I created a lot of value for them and I managed to negotiate that so that then I could incorporate my data analytics company.

And then labs working on consciousness research became my clients from sleep science, psychedelics, and consciousness in animals. In Australia, the U. S. and Europe. So then, you know, that became a lot of my operations, even just coordinating the work and also the relationships and the business development.

And my thesis was literally building, designing, designing, building, and validating what then became yeah, my, my primary product and and business. So it was intimately associated with my, with what I do [01:24:00] now. In fact, everything I’ve done in my education, became integrated in what I do. Nothing was just for education.

So I managed to kind of scavenge bits and bobs from everywhere and create this Frankenstein persona, which then eventually became also another line of work for me at the level of consulting, where I have guided mostly company founders and CEOs to implement working with altered states of consciousness and the philosophies I’ve learned in my journey for the business development, self development, and the just lived more empowered and sovereign and creative life.

So then that became a line of work for me that been very rewarding. And one that created itself organically. I’d never really thought of it as a business, just speaking a lot in conferences [01:25:00] and people eventually would ask more and more questions and then eventually asked to somewhat create. Business container around the consultancy container.

So then that became also a source of data in a split testing different models, not just in the academic context in the peak performance context. Of a business entrepreneurship and yeah, big performance large. 

Giancarlo: And so we finally arrived to the present moment. So what are you doing these days? You’re still working for some Nivor or you’re doing mostly CEO empowerment with pick States or public speaking.

It’s actually 

Jack: a mix of all of the above and the focus I bring on to such and such varies according to. Relevancy and yeah, every component of what I do speaks to one another. So everything is integrated. And so [01:26:00] I, I am still the CEO of Somnivore while I have a team of engineers working for me and I need to do all of that.

Business development as well as speaking quite regularly. Now I’ve tuned it down a little bit because I want to be less jet lagged. And obviously I can do it both online and in person. So I try to strategize. The in person components so that I’m not destroying my brain on a thousand flights. Like at some point I would be flying from 30 to 40 times a year.

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. I became 

Jack: basically a flight attendant. And so like these days, I actually, since early October, I’ve been taking it very slow. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. 

Jack: I have reconnected myself with Australia and I did a Vipassana retreat that was One of the most powerful experiences in terms of altered states of my of my life and afterwards, I realized that I had to take a [01:27:00] break to heal certain aspects of what became eventually a burnout, seven years of jet lag and traveling nonstop and implementing a lot of the things I learned.

On myself, as opposed to inspiring them on others at the level of regulating my nervous system, my nutrition, 

Jack (2): parasympathetic, parasympathetic. Yeah, 

Jack: yeah. My sense of identity in being part of a community like Australia, as opposed to changing country every two weeks, every few days and, and yeah, be more alone instead of always being surrounded by people.

regain a level of introspection and meditate a bit more working out a lot more studying and Yeah, so i’m still doing all of the things but now a little bit more in one place [01:28:00] and I am building more and more systems that I’m trying to scale past the one on one clients I have tried to work out systems that can be bought into without multiple five figures or six figures like it is now for one person it can be more accessible to people that have more.

Time constraints or less financial availability up to a point, because what I do requires a lot of free time and resources, so I I haven’t gotten to a point that anyone could do it, but I’m okay with it. 

Giancarlo: This is, you mean, this is the, this is the human potential part, the, the personal development.

Jack: 100%. And so that’s an active thing that I always work on because my. My consultancy work is in many ways transcending my way of life to others and the things I have learned. So it’s something that [01:29:00] became a business eventually because it reached a critical mass. Otherwise, this is what I’ve been doing since I was a kid, having conversations, giving advice.

Getting lost in rabbit holes. It’s something that I don’t think I will ever stop doing. So I’m trying to formalize it and structure it more and more so that then it becomes a system that can be navigated in a more user friendly way without needing my physical presence there all the time. 

Giancarlo: Like a 10, 12 weeks workshop with some part of recording material, some online, something like that.

Jack: Something like that. For how much. I I’m definitely repeating some of the things I teach 100%. A lot is extremely personalized on the person’s contexts. Some aspects, I think, are generalized enough. So then I’m trying to make things a little bit more efficient. Even for me [01:30:00] and and then create systems that could speak from that place to the research component of my tech company so that then I can, with time, build a form of research entity that has an academic engineering and research component, as well as an applied component on individuals that can Do the work, basically, and they are interested in in tapping into context.

More exotic or more, less, less available. Things that over history were mostly available to either the clergy or certain types of elites like the Eleusian Mysteries, let’s say in Greece, or all these aspects that in many ways [01:31:00] need to be regulated because you can’t give Anyone, ten, ten types of acid and expect them to transcend.

Most of them are going to become psychotic. So a lot of these things require deep care and knowledge and wisdom. And so I, in that sense, that’s why I’m so passionate in covering as much of the field as possible, because there’s also a lot that can go wrong. There’s a lot that can go wrong with altered states and being at the fringes of the human experience.

And so one needs to be walking the path as much as possible. That’s, again, also one of the reasons why I, I slowed down in October and took almost a sabbatical. For half of the time, I was just walking and thinking, taking notes, because in many ways, it’s very hard to just teach these kinds of things. If you’re not doing them, you rapidly lose qualification.

Giancarlo (3): And [01:32:00] so, 

Jack: This is why I’ve always been very skeptical of, let’s say the coaching industry, which I’ve always distanced myself from because I don’t think anyone can do something like this full time. This is something that one should do no more than 20 or 30 percent of their time. The rest should be doing the thing in the wild, 

Jack (2): embodying the teaching, yeah, 

Jack: doing the things going on adventures, building businesses, create value for others.

Fuck up sometimes and get injured and learn new things and basically really being one with the world and extracting insight through lived experience. That is the only way, really, to, to feel that one is qualified to say anything or do anything. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah. Yeah. 

Jack: So that’s why I cannot really separate the teaching component from the [01:33:00] personal research and development that I have to do on my own life.

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. So, so let’s just look, you know, for the last few minutes. So when you said that, okay, now you have a little bit more, you’re creating a little bit more time for you and you’re doing more. reading and learning and researching. So in which direction is that? And, and how do you see your next 10, 20, 30 years?

Do you have an idea? How do you see your future? 

Jack: Okay. I’m glad you asked because these are some of the things that I get stuck into loops of, of altered state thinking. I, I think that my life is It was always dedicated to the exploration of the fringes or extremes or the bounds of the human experience.

So I think that my future will always be based on going where most don’t want to go or can’t go in the world of the [01:34:00] body and the mind. And for me, the future will be about making this as structured. And approachable and valuable as possible for at least parts of your money, trying to be as valuable as possible for as many people as possible, but without diluting it to everyone, because then you kind of lose it.

And in many ways, I have discovered through my life that I am very much dedicated to big performance and people that have. Really invested their life in building something of big output in the world, whether that is through business or the arts or science or sports, anything that [01:35:00] basically is fighting entropy to create models of anything at the extreme possible of output validation and stability.

So that takes many, many manifestations. And for me it’s about exploring as much as possible these different domains that can be within meditation, psychedelics, extreme diets or belief systems or cultures or belief systems. And basically trying to split test and be. a living laboratory, basically.

My, my challenge is to document this as well as I can, because this hasn’t always been the case for me, because I was always so excited and intoxicated with the doing. [01:36:00] And so for a lot of my past adventures, it all got stored here, but then I have to always talk about these things. Well, I need to learn a more integrated skill set of filming, writing, scripting, and systematizing so that these experiences can translate at the level of systems for better living or problem solving or creativity, goal setting.

That kind of thing. So this will translate in the future more and more in creating an inventory of my past explorations and create like a gradient of of difficulty, like a game, let’s say. From, for example, what is required and the benefits of intermittent [01:37:00] fasting for a few hours a day, all of the way to spending two weeks with no food and no water, which I have done, let’s say eight days so far successfully, no food, no water, while being active, working and doing all those things.

During that process, I learned incredible things that benefits that shocked me. That is something that I need to make more available for others, but also for myself, for the reference, being able to build better from there. And that’s an example, practical example, let’s say sensory deprivation. There can be meditation, dark retreats, all of the way to the sensory deprivation of life.

BDSM and all of these things are like a very intricate web of context, practices and tools to be able to control the mind and the body [01:38:00] to be able to thrive in in in extreme context, because what I have learned is that an experienced is that when an organism can thrive at the extremes. It means that they understood the fundamental laws of nature, which enables them to really withstand the power of, of, of entropy the most, because entropy likes to bring everything to average.

So whenever you go to the extreme, you need to be able to pull it off. And in that, I think there’s some of the most precious moments for a human being. That humans are so focused and obsessed about creating order in disorder, more than any other living organism, I think. And so I think it’s [01:39:00] a fundamental property of humans to become masters of that.

Giancarlo (3): And for me, I want to bring this to as many people as possible, as 

Jack (2): many people

Jack: as possible, but also personally. Okay. So this is. I don’t want to create something that is necessarily, I don’t want to be a martyr to the cause just for others, because I also believe that there’s fault in that. One needs to be able to cultivate the full spectrum of duality and non duality. I need to also live authentically within myself that I’m doing what I love, what inspires me, and what fires me up on a purely selfish level.

And then, from that place, trying to work out to also help others. Without necessarily losing myself, because if one [01:40:00] loses themselves while helping others, there is the potential that they’re not helping anyone because ultimately you lose qualification also being an individual. So that embodiment of philosophy is also very important, because in the personal development space, there’s also a lot of that, which I think is very dangerous, that of creating an over idealized sense of unity that ultimately can be very toxic.

And we have seen examples even throughout history. Like, for example, Buddhism is wonderful, and it’s one of the pillars of how I govern my life. However, that taken to the extreme without thinking of the individual can make a population very fragile. Like, Tibet had no way to defend itself against the Chinese.

And [01:41:00] without a fire being shot, like a bullet being shot, they just go invaded, enslaved, and subjugated. So it’s important to really have the right balance between Defending one’s interest and that of a collective, whether that is a family, a tribe, a nation, or a certain type of people on the planet. And that is the continuum I’m trying to navigate 

Giancarlo: all 

Jack: the time.

Giancarlo: So is it, because this is a little bit of a cynical way. to see, to see reality. So you don’t believe it at all on a possible collective awakening that you know, so many traditional we’re talking about this, this, this, you know, like collective raising frequency and consciousness where. You know, power as a need to control other would in a certain way you know, like losing his appeal or diminish in, in your most optimistic days.

Do you see peace in this planet at some stage or [01:42:00] not? 

Jack: I don’t because you never see that in any possible natural context. There is always something fighting against something else. So, yes, I, you know, give me a lot of MDMA, and I’ll probably think that, yeah, we can all be together, and Sure. But then the devil is always in the detail.

How? Okay, let’s work, let’s, let’s think about that in a very, with an open mind. What does it mean that the collective, like, you see what I mean? Like those feelings are very easy to get. But then these have to be implemented. Right? I’m an engineer. Ultimately, I’m also an engineer. So I’m like, okay, I’m, I’m open to it.

Let’s just work out how. And I think that cynicism [01:43:00] is a way to see, but I don’t think cynicism is the right word because ultimately an extreme cynic, how would that person even have friends at all? You still need to have a minimum capacity for, you know, being with people. Loving and affection and intimacy, all of these things can be done just cynically.

So the point is that you need to juggle cynicism and love contextually,

so that you can be functional in a ruthless, cynical world of stars, as well as working as a human, with other humans. And [01:44:00] these are skill sets that require different attitudes. 

Giancarlo: But don’t you think we’re getting better in this planet at, at, at getting along and respecting each other? And even, even, you know, even Martin Luther King was saying that, you know, the moral arc of the universe might be very large, but it exists.

I mean, like Barbara Max Hubbard used to say that, you know, consciousness is evolution of evolution. We are becoming a more conscious species in this planet. I mean, yes, there’s still war, there’s still a horrendous thing happening, but there’s a general increase in consciousness. We are more respectful of human and animal life today than 50, 100, 1, 000 years ago.

I mean, we are, there is a moral progression in this planet. You cannot deny that. No, 

Jack: no, I agree. However, this is mostly the context of specific cultures, [01:45:00] mostly in the West. and very affluent. The vast majority of the world isn’t going in that direction, and at the planetary level we don’t see that. Like, for example, warfare is actually on the rise.

Now that Pax Americana is breaking down and the hegemony of the U. S. is not what it used to be, the multipolar world Means that all of these territorial disputes will become conflict, and we see that all the time now even more than before, like Israel, Palestine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, now Venezuela and Guana.

Within Africa, it’s been a quagmire as since the beginning of time, there’s even [01:46:00] China now against Philippines and every other country around the South China Sea and Japan because of some random islands. There’s an influx of immigrants coming from China into outer Manchuria to try to reclaim Vladivostok and the entire area through immigration.

This is all a time bomb, like it’s not this collective awakening and I don’t see this actually happening in the world at large. The more time I spend in San Francisco, in Ibiza, in Zurich And in Amsterdam, yeah, I get evidence for the contrary all the time, when I am in the little bubble. But overall, that is still less than 5 percent of the world, really.

Jack (2): But it’s growing. 

Jack: But is [01:47:00] it as a percentage? I’m not sure, because the collective West also has no natality. So they’re actually, those people are shrinking. 

Giancarlo: But look at the, in philosophy, they call it metamodernism. Have you heard about this term? 

Jack: I’m not sure. 

Giancarlo: Anyhow, I don’t want to, maybe we do another episode.

We’re getting close to two hours. I’m, you know, very briefly, you know, modernism. We’re the big narrative, right? So the grand narrative of Marx, Hegel, Freud, Einstein, they all thought they had everything figured out. But then they were all wrong, right? Marx never really, the Marxism never really worked.

Einstein missed the old quantum part. Hegel thought, you know, after he missed the end of the world, my thesis and thesis synthesis will explain everything, but then it didn’t really happen. And you know, Freud missed the old transpersonal part, you know, Stan Grof said Freud was fishing sitting on the back of a whale.

He was missing the big, the bigger fish. [01:48:00] Anyhow, and then postmodernism says, forget the grand narrative, forget this naivete. And the postmodernists were more cynical. It was more about the marginalized. That’s where the Wokes, the Postmodernist Marxist came in university, and that’s what Fuco was about. And, and then meta modernist, which came there, two branch from Holland and from Sweden.

Sweden. The, the first paper was 15, 20 years ago, and they basic say, hold on a second. Meta modernism is gonna be a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism. And mostly the part that interests me the most is that it’s very interested on inner development. and spirituality and, and so you feel that in movies even, you know, like in the, in the 80s, it was Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas saying, if you want a friend, buy your dog.

And now it’s even, you know, the documentary on you know, what’s the name of that major director that can do all the different [01:49:00] genre? You know, even in documentary of people, now it’s all about their childhood trauma. Why they’re doing the thing they do, why is becoming, is becoming much more, you know, before it used to be.

What’s wrong with you? And now it’s what happened to you. Let’s talk about it. Let’s be open. I mean, it depends on where you look, but I feel that at least in the West with this metamodernism, there’s much more accentuation on inner development and co regulation and the books that can, the books, the course, the workshops.

It’s really, there’s a huge I feel interest and, and, and pathos towards getting to know each other, look at the blind spot, you know, and cover the subconscious. 

Jack: I agree that this movement exists, whether this movement is becoming bigger or more than normal, [01:50:00] besides. Certain parts of the middle class and hipsters and intellectuals.

I’m not sure. 

Giancarlo: You don’t see it around you. I mean, now you’re, you’re back in Melbourne. You don’t see more people doing therapy and, and, and understanding why they’re angry at their wife or why they’ve disconnected with their children and trying to break the side, the generational cycle of, of, of, of disconnection.

I mean, of course. 

Jack: Again, Melbourne is. This is the most livable or amongst the five most livable cities in the world. It was the most livable city for like seven years in a row. It’s not representative. Like this is a bubble built on Chinese subsidies, you know, in an economy that mostly relies just on extracting minerals out of the desert, creating almost no technology.

Like the Australian economies are. Is a castle of cards. This is here is the wildest manifestation of first world problems and [01:51:00] like it’s not representative. It’s not representative at all. Like so. So yes, here, if I come here, you’re completely right. Yeah. Everybody is. You know, trying to reverse engineer the generational trauma and meditating and doing Pilates.

But whether this is actually what’s happening overall in the world, I don’t think so. And it cannot become so. This will always be an elitarian model. Why? Because this kind of living is so expensive. It’s so expensive. Like, not everybody can eat organics. Why? Because if you eat organic, it means that you cannot use pesticides.

If you don’t use pesticides, the yield of crops is a fraction of what it can be. It means everything becomes super expensive. Now [01:52:00] people can afford buying cheap stuff because it’s all made in China. by slaves. So it’s all delegated immorality. And China has been booming because of that. The more they become developed, the more Vietnam is going to have to become the next China.

And, you know, Myanmar and all of these places, while the world keeps extracting more and more resources nonstop. So this is a bubble. This is not how the world is becoming. This is a bubble. And the moment we invent things like nuclear fusion, we are basically done as a species because then energy will become so cheap.

Extracting resources will become so easy and then good luck trying to preserve the rainforest in Brazil or not extract any mineral under the sun. So one needs to think [01:53:00] at the planetary integrated level, and it’s really not simple. This is why I love to live the way you’ve just said myself and the people around me.

But I also keep awareness that this is not how the world at large works. And there is a big chance that the world will never work like this. Also, because there is a technological constraints and the technological constraints are becoming worse, no better. Like AI will change the nature of humanity in ways we have no way of predicting even things like, you know, the apple vision pro is creating like this.

This virtual world, they have very little to do with being [01:54:00] present as humans with consciousness and other human beings and Neuralink will be even worse. So the world at large is not necessarily going into this utopia. It’s a lot more mixed than that. So this is why I think that at the personal level, the future can be awesome and increasingly better by the individual level and small groups that understand certain things.

And this is a lot of the purpose of my life is to be able to carry that torch of development as far as possible, because there are feedback loops that are constantly trying to sabotage them. Like, for example, The way we have created woke ideology is going directly against the technological [01:55:00] development.

Like, since we’ve become so empathetic with everyone, it means that we have not been able to protect our borders. In Europe, in the U. S., and most of the West, where technology is made, meaning that the very fabric of society is becoming disrupted there, while people become over reliant on mass migration.

And codependent on it so that the original citizens again don’t procreate and make no babies so that then the system degrades as opposed to evolves. And we’ve seen this. We see this on the streets of London or New York every day, every year. It looks like a more deranged version of before or L. A. or like.

It’s crazy. So That was 

Giancarlo: also a consequence of COVID, right? 

Jack: Yeah, and like COVID [01:56:00] again bastardized the science in such a dystopic way. So I want to believe in a positive future, but I am trying to do it in a pragmatic way, starting from myself and those around me as much as possible, but without pretending that collective consciousness is rising.

Everywhere in a way that’s going to resolve anything. Also, because whenever we talk about raising the frequency of consciousness, we always create a giant blind spot. Like, for example, whenever we talk about raising the frequency of consciousness, we always think of these feelings that are very much pro human.

Less war, more cooperation, more everything. But all of these things are always under [01:57:00] a humanistic framework. Nobody’s thinking about giraffes, raccoons, hippos. The wildlife in general, or even plants diversity, because all of that needs to be terraformed to create more food for humans, so there’s less world hunger, less world poverty, so raising the consciousness of humans.

Inherently destroys the planet. Like, for example, if we wanted to provide the most conscious way possible to, let’s say, places like Brazil or Africa, they would be able to turn the entire place into the Netherlands or Beijing. There will be no [01:58:00] space for jungles or hordes of bisons in the nature. All of that stuff doesn’t make any money.

All of that stuff doesn’t feed people. All of that stuff is just for backdrop, for natural beauty. So we have to be very careful what we wish for. In many ways, the nature is still working because we’ve not been efficient enough at doing industry things, which are inherently towards humans, more resources, more abundance, more love, but really only for humans.

Like the biosphere has collapsed. The size of the wildlife every year is collapsing. And there’s almost no way to make that pro human. Because zoos are good for entertainment, but they don’t really make anyone’s life any easier. You see what I mean? 

Giancarlo: Yeah. [01:59:00] So, so I have two comments about all that. What’s the term they use in science that says a paradigm change can only happen when all the scientists dies?

Jack: I think Maxwell said it for a truly disruptive paradigm to emerge, the previous scientists have to die or the 

Giancarlo: previous generation. Exactly. So in line with this concept, you know, my kids, I have, my son is 21 and my stepdaughter is 25. I feel that when I see the younger generation and the values they have, and it’s true, this is on the, on the privileged West.

Probably. But you know, I don’t know the, I don’t know the teenager in Africa and all the places where you said there is conflict, but you know, at least in the West, the new generation, they, they really have developed such a strong pro social belief. You know, when I was 17, I wanted to go and work at Goldman Sachs, right?

And, and, and now I see all these kids. I feel that when these [02:00:00] kids will be, you know, the new ruling generation, I’m more optimistic that, you know, this And that’s the second thing is that, you know, we can transition from a win lose paradigm to a win win paradigm. So, you know, there is this speaker, she’s a former poker player becoming public speaker called Liv Boeri, I don’t know how you pronounce her last name, Boeri.

She, remember this concept of Moloch, which was on the Alan Ginsberg Howl poem? Basically, she says that there is this, there’s a dark energy. in the in, in the game theory, right? You know, the game theory that, that says, you know, at this, at this game, there’s going to be an asshole. So it’s rather be me, right?

And so, you know, we have developed now in post, you know, late stage post capitalistic model, this idea of the, of the, you know, win lose, but really, for example, the overfishing of the [02:01:00] plant of the ocean, right? So, you know, the fishermen compete, even if they don’t want all the extra fish, but they say, if I don’t get it, the other, we’ll get it.

So that’s a typical case of malloc at work, the tragedy of the commons, the tragedy of the commons. So you’ll have, you’ll have ultimately, it’s a lose lose because there’s no more fish. So I, I’m, I just feel that, you know, maybe this can be this like win win mentality. Where there is actually a, a, a change in paradigm, a change in consciousness and and, you know, I guess, I guess it depends where you look.

Jack: I, I definitely think there are alternatives to the tragedy of the commons. I think that that requires a more grounded understanding of balance. I think that ultimately, potentially, AI [02:02:00] may find solutions for that. However, I think that ultimately, those technologies are going to be seen as evil by certain parts of the population.

Potentially, even the majority. Because When you are overfishing, an alternative to overfishing is 1. Create fisheries. Fisheries means that you create these pockets, fish farms. Fish that comes from fish farms is always less healthy than free roaming fish. At many, many levels. Always like it’s a disaster nutritionally.

And not just because They are not eating what they would eat in the wild, of course, but they’re also swimming in their shit. They don’t really move. [02:03:00] It’s crowded. There’s all of this, right? So, yes, technology could make that even better and healthier and healthier, but I think there’s always going to be like a difference and then there are all the competitive practices to get the bigger fish, the more yield, which usually is less healthy.

Just like for plants getting giant apples with instead of like the tiny sour ones that you find in nature, you need pesticides, crazy fertilizers. So one alternative is create these crazy fish farms, which then will will make sick humans. Or, we basically say, sorry, there can only be a cap on human population, because if we have more humans, it means that some [02:04:00] are not going to have food.

Because we either overfish or we create unhealthy fish. So then, the only way to balance this is to limit the world population. And that is never going to be seen as positive. It’s always going to be seen as evil. Why? The world is so abandoned and people don’t have concept. of nature balances. Unless people live on islands, those are the only cultures where they seem to have found a balance over thousands of years.

Otherwise people think that the horizon is forever, always, and they’re always going to destroy the planet. So then how do you create that balance? That win win is always gonna be human wins, human wins, but the planet may be losing because of this win win, you know, like if human one is winning [02:05:00] and human two is losing, it means that there is a conflict.

It means that there’s less cooperation. It means that there’s less development. There’s the potential that nature is winning. You see what I mean? 

Giancarlo (2): Yeah. If 

Jack: human and human are losing, let’s say through, you know, nuclear wars, there’s the potential that everybody’s losing. But if humans wipe each other out through nuclear warheads, then a thousand years afterwards, nature wins.

So this is very hard, right? Like, we can’t be so simplistic. We need to define who’s going to lose because someone is going to lose, whether it’s a whale, a mountain, 

Giancarlo: or something. That’s what I would like to challenge. You know, is it, is it really like that? Is this, there’s been no example in the human, in the story of this planet of when it’s a win win win for you, me, and the planet.

Like regenerative [02:06:00] agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is not a win win win technology. These are the biodiversity of Absolutely. 

Jack: However, the losers are the third world. The losers are the fact that in a regenerative agricultural farm, before there was an entire forest. with mycelium, animals, snakes, two hundred different types of plants.

And now there is a regenerative farm, which is still not the nature is still not winning. It’s just losing less like from the, from the angle of nature that isn’t winning. It’s basically like you’ve been, instead of you being kidnapped and killed, you’ve been enslaved. Ah, from a certain angle, you’re winning.

Are you [02:07:00] winning? So it’s all about specific examples, right? Like, I haven’t seen really an example that is truly, like someone is still losing. We’re just deciding not to pay attention to certain losers. And that is the blind spot. 

Giancarlo: Yes. I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask you for a round two and I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna come prepared with a lot of win, win, win example and tools.

But just the last thing I’d love to pick your brain on because you mentioned the word blind spot. How is, you know, you are such a radically chronically enthusiast of the inner landscape exploration, right? Of your brain. But so how is your traumatic constellation? How is I mean, how have you ever done your the typical young and shadow work?

You know, did you ever question, you know, contemplate the [02:08:00] idea that your, you know, chronic desire for 40 planes and, and, and always looking this extreme situation might have been rooted in some sort of. inability to, and I’m speculating, you know, I feel comfortable after two and a half, two hours, is it possible that it might be a little pathology?

Might it be, you know, have you ever considered that? What, where is, you know, and now you’re doing the Vipassana and you’re slowing down looking back and I resonate with that, you know, but for me, for example, this constant, you know, the adrenaline junkie. The, the, the taking risk in adventure, in sport, you know, in, in, in woman, in dangerous situation for me was a chronically need to escape the present moment from my inability to deal with the uneasiness that came from, from facing myself.

Jack: Do you resonate with that a little bit? I think that is one of the most important questions [02:09:00] 

Giancarlo (2): we got there. 

Jack: I, I have throughout my life gone through different seasons of playing with my own limits. In fact, in many ways, my entire life has been playing with my own limits. And there have been times in which I crossed boundaries that were beyond my limits.

And I, I hurt myself. And the last time would have been 2023 when I just pushed it too far at not having a home base. And so I had to learn certain homeostatic feedbacks that I needed one place, more stable friends and loves. But this doesn’t mean that before those things weren’t there. I’ve always been surrounded by loved ones, friends, and lovers, and the beauty of the world.

It’s just that [02:10:00] I, I neglected certain aspects of my self care. And now I am working on that more. But ultimately, I still consider myself wildly healthier than the vast majority. I have not had any caffeine in four years. No nicotine since last year and before it was sporadic. I don’t drink alcohol. At all.

Ever. I drink a year maybe. Half a glass of wine three times a year for curiosity. I don’t drink. I don’t take any pharmaceuticals. I just eat and drink water and somehow may manage to make quite an abundant income for myself and friends and adventures like at some point, [02:11:00] pathology has to be defined by some kind of metrics of health, because what is the difference between a passion?

and a pathological obsession, right? 

Giancarlo: That question is important. I think it’s similar of the definition of the addiction, which is something that brings short term relief, but medium long term negative consequences. 

Jack: Right, and I am constantly checking myself for that, because I also create the life with so much free time that that question is hard to ignore.

And before I would be smoking a cigarette and be like, Ah, I’ll think about this in an hour. Now it’s all there is. It’s actually hard. And I do take periods of sensory deprivation also to reconnect more with that. Like when you spend eight days with no food and no water, you have no way to soothe or to distract yourself.

[02:12:00] All you have is dread. All you have is working out the limits of your existence. And all of the things wrong you’ve done in your life to yourself and others. It’s actually a lot. Psychedelics, again, are not necessarily pleasant. When you take a lot of them, shadow work is all there is. Like, you can’t, you can’t grab your phone and go on Instagram.

It’s literally melting through your fingers. Like, you can’t, like You can’t watch television, like, you can barely keep your sphincters in one place, like, so, yes, I am constantly trying to mitigate my almost hysterical curiosity with a certain type of stillness. and also

human connection. Like I do care a [02:13:00] lot about my friends and my romantic partners for which the number varies with time. And yeah, I am constantly trying to be the kindest I can, provide value to others while keeping my addictions and health in check. And trying to inspire others also with the output of my own physical health.

There’s an issue with being so much at the vanguard of the mind is that a lot of philosophers really look like shit and people are the craziest psycho. They are pretty young besides Shogun and Hoffman. All of the others look terrible again. They don’t make any money and are constantly struggling. So I’m trying to create a balance where I go deep in the [02:14:00] mind while also working my body, my diet.

My belief systems, my morality, it’s hard, it’s fucking hard. 

Giancarlo (2): It’s hard, it’s hard. It’s 

Jack: insanely hard, but that’s part of the work. And whenever I, I failed to work on it, I got punished badly. And I still keep getting punished every so often. And I’m trying to learn. This is all I’m trying to do. 

Giancarlo: So listen, we’re getting close to 2.

30. You’ve been the longest guest I’ve ever had. I just wanted to close on these two things you mentioned, kindness and community. You said you care about your friends and lovers and, you know, Aldous Huxley says that I’m, you know, one of his quotes is like, I’m ashamed to say that after I don’t know, 50 years of exploration, the best recommendation I have to people is like, be kind.

And and the other thing I want to mention is, you know, the longest, the longest, the longest study on happiness was it’s the Harvard study. Have you heard about it? [02:15:00] So they’ve, you know, they’ve been following this at the beginning, at the beginning of the century, in the 1920s, I think it started, they’ve been finding, I don’t know, 20, 30 professors, and then in a hundred years, they became a thousand and, and, and they’ve been continue asking, you know, what makes, what, you know, where does happiness come from?

And the overwhelming answer is that from building community, the quality of your relationship. So after all this, after all this thing we discussed about the fate of the planet, cosmic consciousness, entanglement observer effect, ultimately call your friends and see how they are. So listen, that was amazing.

I want to officially on record invite you to Ibiza. You know, we, I’m, I’m building a little residence place at the intersection of hospitality and retreat. So we’re building these different apartments in the old town and I’d love to invite you to stay there for one week or [02:16:00] so whenever you’re ready.

And then I’m, you know, one of the neoculture metamodern curator of a members club. Would love to invite you there for a talk. I’d love to have you on the podcast again in person and maybe we can also do a workshop. Anyhow, and then we can enjoy nature and food and swimming. And when are you next in Europe?

Jack: I’m trying to work it out. I think May plus. 

Giancarlo: Also, I don’t want to, I know you’re trying to be more still, so, but anyhow, let’s be in touch. Is there anything do you need to publicize, advertise something on online? Do you have a 

Jack: website? Yeah, I have my, my Instagram, which is mostly full of some of the weirdest things I do.

Otherwise, a lot of what I have [02:17:00] done is behind closed doors and which I’m trying to now upgrade and open a bit more. My software company is for research labs and pharmaceutical companies, so if there’s any out there listening, I guess I can help with that. Otherwise yes, I’m working on a website. I’ve always had one for a long time, but it was password protected and full of weird stuff on the other side.

Like now I’m trying to change that as well. And otherwise, yeah, I, I will be writing more and starting to create a bit more content. So I guess my, my Instagram now is a good point to start at Jack. Alocka, two L’s and two C’s. 

Giancarlo (3): Yeah, 

Jack: we’ll, we’ll put it on the show 

Giancarlo: notes and 

Jack: the website is in, is it live?

No, the website is is now completely offline. It was, it was [02:18:00] online until like last year, but I’m now, I’m now rebuilding it to be a bit more front facing. Yeah. Otherwise there’s multiple talks online I’ve given. And yeah. People can also email me, I guess, Jack at som com au or Dr. Jack at Jack Lock do com.

Yeah, or talk to my friends, which then will talk to me. . 

Giancarlo: Thank you very much, Jack. You’re like really Sorry, John car. I No, you, you, you, you, you call yourself Jack because it’s more easier for the English people, but I remind people that you’re Italian from Rimini, like 

Giancarlo (2): Fellini, and the name is Jack. 

Jack: And the fact that you Giancarlo are resorting to have a podcast in English is the ultimate cosmic joke.

Giancarlo: Thank you very much. See you to be continued. See you soon. [02:19:00] Ciao.