What is the role of bliss in life? - Andres Gomez Emilsson (Qualia Research: Stanford)

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. Today I interviewed Andres Gomez Emilson and Andres is doing a lot of interesting work at Stanford looking into the mathematics behind pleasure and pain with the Qualia Research Group. I love talking to iconoclasts within academia because it essentially what academia seems to do is break down all societal conventions about what should be and tries to get to the truth. Of course, a lot of academia is wrapped up in non truth and groupthink and a lot of other things. But what I love about this episode with Andres is that all of the Puritan dogma about bliss is questioned and from that point of questioning, we can get to the truth. Because as long as we're questioning what everybody says is the right answer and actually back up and be like, well, what is the. What is the truth of this? What is the truth of bliss? And there are a lot of people suffering. And you know, my understanding of what Buddha said is that life is suffering and until you come to that realization that life is suffering, you will not get out of suffering. And Andres offers a lot of valuable wisdom on what is suffering and what the role of bliss is in all these different types of bliss into how to end suffering. As I learned in this episode, there are about 10% of the population that just don't have the capacity to feel good, to feel well. And why would it be a problem for that 10% in order to change their brain in order to feel good? Because honestly, like, if you're not feeling good, you're probably not going to be able to participate in society, to have a family, to do all these things that might contribute to your short time here on Earth, being of benefit to yourself and those around you. And so it's a really interesting episode and I learned a lot. And he's got a lot of science to back up what they're talking about. Also doing a lot of research onto the psychedelics and stuff like that. And from a quantitative and qualitative understanding of what's actually going on. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you find it to be value, I'd highly appreciate it if you could find us on itunes and go ahead and leave us a review or subscribe if you're not already a subscriber. And yeah, if you're on Twitter, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. I'm Ewart Allsop III. Please. My DMs are open, I respond regularly to people. So yeah, let me know what you think and have a great day. So welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest here is Andres Gomez Emilson, and he is the director of research at Qualia Research Institute. He's investigating the mathematics behind pleasure and pain and. And what. Was a co founder of the Stanford Transhumanist Association. We are going to have an excellent talk. I'm really interested in this. Pleasure and pain. The mathematics behind pleasure and pain is super interesting to me. What got you into this?