The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: E255: Yung Pueblo: How To Let Go Of The Past, Connect With The Present, & Expand The Future

People don't understand their capacity.

You don't need to hit rock bottom

to be the best version of yourself.

What you just have to do is...

I love that.

Young Puebla, the expert in unlocking your true potential.

He's a meditator and best-selling author

whose work has impacted the lives of millions.

The world is incredibly challenging.

The demands are intense.

And whether you've experienced serious trauma or not,

hard moments get accumulated into the mind.

We're trapped in this tight little bubble by our past.

It keeps us in a loop.

You react very intensely with anger, with sadness,

with you to feel anxiety, stress,

but healing and letting go are possible.

How?

The best tool that we don't access is meditation.

If there's someone listening to this now

and they go, I don't meditate, I've tried it, didn't work,

what is the pitch you'd make to them?

Steve Jobs, the same ultimate.

High-performing people cultivate their minds and meditate.

As they cool under pressure and make more creative decisions,

I can do more with less stress.

It's essential for your mental health.

When I grew up, I didn't want to admit to myself

that I didn't feel good.

Constantly trying to coat myself in pleasure

by drinking as much as possible,

doing tons of drugs where I almost lost my life.

Everything was going terrible,

but when I started meditating, everything changed.

It requires this application of self-awareness

to really unlock your happiness.

You got to see what you're doing to yourself,

meditating in the biggest investment

that I've made in my life.

In a specific way, how does your meditation look?

There's two main things.

One is...

I wanted to start this episode in a slightly different way.

When I looked at the community stats last week

with myself and some of my team members,

we were blown away that millions of you

choose to follow us right here on this app.

And that, for me, is insane.

This is the most insane privilege I've ever had in my life,

a privilege I never dreamed of having

to be able to sit here with these great people

and have these conversations

in the way that I love having them.

In 2023, our plans are more scary,

they're bigger than ever before.

More of the same, but just finding ways

that we can make the conversations even better, even deeper,

even more wisdom-packed and actionable

for everybody that listens to the show.

And the way that you can continue to support us is simple.

Just hit that follow button that's on this app right now.

That is the number one way that you can help this show.

Thank you so much for your continued support.

Means a lot to me,

and we'll continue to repay that support

in every way that we can.

Let's get on with it.

MUSIC

Young Pueblo, Diego Perez.

When you look at the body of work you've produced

and you look specifically at the writing, the content

that you've put out into the world,

what mission are you on?

What is it you're trying to do?

What effect are you trying to have on society at large?

I think the mission is really hoping to raise self-awareness

around the fact that healing and letting go are possible.

So I got into this world really early on.

I think it was 2011 when I started realizing

that healing was even possible.

And this was before wellness was even a giant,

sort of this giant world that it is today.

And to me, it was a shock.

You know, when I grew up,

I thought that if you were sick physically

or mentally in some manner,

you just had to deal with that for the rest of your life.

You couldn't really fix that in any way.

And when I started changing my habits,

when I started changing what I was eating,

when I started reassessing my friend group,

and then eventually when I started meditating,

the changes were so massive that I was so shocked by them

that I wanted to really check in with myself

and see that, is this real?

And it was real.

So that just kind of pushed me into writing

where I felt this sort of creative pull

to share the little bit that I know, you know?

And it was interesting because I know that

I don't know everything.

I'm not fully healed.

I'm not fully wise.

I have a long way to go.

But hopefully some of the things that I'm reflecting on

could inspire other people to do this serious work as well.

And why?

Why does it matter that we heal?

Why does it matter?

I think it's because it's pretty necessary

to live a better life.

Like I think whether you've experienced serious trauma

or not, you've definitely had hard moments in your life.

And those hard moments get accumulated into the mind.

They literally, you know, the times when you react very

intensely with anger, with sadness,

with whatever emotion it is,

that reaction gets accumulated in your mind

and predisposes you to feeling that same thing again.

And oftentimes we don't quite realize

that we're sort of like trapped

in this tight little bubble by our past.

And we're thinking the same things,

saying the same things, making the same actions.

And it keeps us in a loop.

But if you start healing,

you can basically get access to your freedom.

So thinking about what you said there

about your own healing journey

where you couldn't believe the results were real and true.

What did you heal from?

I think a lot of it was anxiety and stress.

And this sort of scarcity mindset.

So I was born in Ecuador in the city called Wayakil.

I came to the United States

when I was about four years old with my parents.

When we got to the United States,

it was incredibly difficult.

Like we were stuck in the classic American poverty trap.

My mom, she worked cleaning houses.

My dad, he worked at a supermarket.

So there was no upward mobility for us.

They didn't know English.

We went through a really difficult time.

So as I was growing up,

I didn't notice how that was affecting me

until I got to college,

where I had so much anxiety and stress about,

I would see my parents fight constantly

about how they were going to pay the rent,

how they were gonna get more groceries.

I experienced multiple times

where I was eight-year-old child and I'm so hungry

because there wasn't enough food in the fridge.

And this all got accumulated over time

and never really properly processed.

Like I didn't have access to a therapist back then,

no meditating back then.

It was sort of just coping mechanisms.

And when I got to university,

I hit this breaking point where

I didn't want to admit to myself that I didn't feel good.

I was constantly trying to cope myself in pleasure

by drinking as much as possible,

smoking as much as possible,

always with friends, never alone.

And I ended up just like building all these bad habits

where I was partying constantly, doing tons of drugs,

and eventually hit that breaking point in the summer of 2011

where I almost lost my life.

I talked to a doctor afterwards

and described to them what happened.

And they were like,

oh yeah, that sounds like a mild heart attack

where I had just taken way too many drugs one night,

was on the floor crying basically,

praying, begging for my life,

because I didn't want to go out like that.

And going through that experience

and then basically taking a different route

into the life that I have now,

I think I'm really grateful that I had that strength

and I want other people to know

that they have that strength too.

Zooming on on that moment then,

when you go off to college,

you find yourself in addictive cycles

with drugs and alcohol and cocaine, I believe.

You have that miniature heart attack.

And then at that point, you make a decision

that you're not going to let this thing kill you.

What is the next step in your journey towards healing?

Walking.

Walking, I mean, I was incredibly unhealthy.

I was definitely overweight at the time,

but internally, I had an exercise probably

in like four years, four or five years.

And so I knew I took the drugs through them away

and I'm home and I'm like, okay,

how do I revamp my life?

And I remember seeing some YouTube video

or stumble upon or I saw something back then

where it was talking about how important it is

to have more nutrition.

So I ended up buying a huge tub of barley grass.

Barley grass used to be really hip back then

and I needed some type of super food

because I knew every day I'm just eating rice and meat,

just like a very like South American diet.

And I was like, okay, let me get some nutrition.

Let me get this barley grass stuff.

I can put it in my orange juice and just knock it back.

And I was like, I gotta do something.

Like I have to go outside and I just started walking.

And I remember I was so unhealthy,

started walking lightly jogging

that I got the worst shin splints.

Like I literally my legs hurt so bad

that I was having trouble going up the stairs,

but I kept going and I kept going.

And like, you know, even this morning,

this morning I ran four miles, no problem.

And thinking about that time,

it's, yeah, I've come a long way.

I was thinking as you were speaking about

the catalyst of change in people's lives.

Like that moment where they hit rock bottom

and they say enough is enough.

And what it takes for them to make a meaningful,

sustained change in any element of their life,

whether it's their relationships and leaving

and finding a better situation or a job

or just life in general, like you're describing

where you realize you're on the wrong track

and you make the decision to go in a new direction.

Two questions there.

What do you think it is that from your experience

that starts that journey of change for people?

And the second thing is when we often speak

to people who've changed,

the process seems to be really linear and quick.

Like I made the decision to change, then I changed.

I think people doubt their power.

Honestly, man, I've seen that happen time and time again

where people don't quite understand their capacity

and especially when the situation gets severe.

And of course, like, you know, not everybody makes it.

Like some people get destroyed

by the process of hitting rock bottom,

but other people stand up.

It's almost like a Phoenix.

I remember writing a poem called Phoenix

in my first book, Inward.

And I think that, you know, it's pretty personalized.

Like I really don't think everybody has to hit rock bottom.

And I think I like having that point of view

because I think people want to like go to extremes often

and kind of dramatize things,

but you don't need to hit rock bottom

to be the best version of yourself.

I think that's kind of the situation

that I was personally in.

But for me, man, I remember when I was on the floor

and I kept thinking about, I was like, man,

I feel my life like, you know, it's running out.

Like I felt it running out.

And I kept thinking about my parents

and I was like, they worked so hard.

Like, you know, I wasn't even mad at them

that they didn't have time for me

because I knew their struggle.

Like I understood, like I got it, you,

they rolled the dice by coming to the United States

because everybody doesn't win here.

The other major, major, major thing.

Like when I, you know, the few days after

where I almost lost my life,

I remember sitting in my room at my mom and dad's house.

And this was, you know, I had just graduated from college.

It was 2011.

The economy was pretty bad.

It was hard to get a job at the time.

And I remember sitting in the room and I was like,

okay, I was like, what's the problem here?

Like, how did this almost happen?

And it hit me.

It was like, oh, is it because you didn't want to admit

that you didn't feel good?

Now, if that's what got you here,

what can get you out of this?

And it's, oh, it's telling yourself the truth.

And this was, you know, before I had learned

how to meditate or anything, but I would just sit in my bed

and I would challenge myself to stay with the feelings

that I used to run away from.

So like I like to call it radical honesty with yourself.

Like it's not, it's not really about other people,

but it's between you and yourself.

And when those heavy emotions would come up,

normally I would just roll a joint smoke and just, you know,

it helped cover whatever was there.

But when the anxiety would arise,

when the stress would arise,

when those feelings of worthlessness would arise,

I would just sit with them.

And, you know, first it was a few minutes,

then 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

And I was like, okay, like, and I learned a lot, you know,

I learned that these little storms that come up,

like they don't need to blow you over.

They don't need to totally overwhelm you.

They don't even need to govern your actions.

If you just sit there and feel them,

you realize they're totally temporary

and it's gonna be okay, you know?

And I didn't know that before

until I started challenging myself to just be with that.

And I don't really know where that came from.

You know, like I hadn't really,

I hadn't really read self-improvement books

or seeing these things online or anything like that.

But I think instinctually I was like, okay,

if you were lying to yourself before,

now tell yourself the truth.

And what does that look like a lot of the time?

It looks like feeling your emotions

and not running from them.

We don't do that, do we?

We distract ourselves.

Constantly, constantly, yeah.

I was just thinking then,

how many of us really know how we're feeling?

Like, how many of us really know

how we ourselves are feeling?

Truly, like when was the last time,

I think for most people listening to this,

have you really sat there on the end of your bed or wherever

and asked yourself how you're actually feeling?

All things considered.

What's out of balance?

It's rare, but I think it's becoming more popular.

I'm pretty inspired by what's happening now.

I've been watching this whole wellness world brew

and grow and develop and obviously it has its downs,

it has a lot of consumerism around it,

but there are a lot of positives.

And there are just millions and millions of people

who are seeing therapists now.

There's millions and millions of people

who are meditating and there are millions and millions

more journaling, reflecting, building self awareness,

building language around these newer ideas.

I mean, actually old ideas,

but that have come back around.

Is that also slightly concerning?

What do you mean?

Because it's a sign that there is

a increasing demand potentially for,

you know what I mean?

If there's more fire extinguishers being solved.

Right, right, right, right.

Oh, it's totally concerning.

I think it's concerning, but I think to me

it gives me hope, honestly,

because of course the world is incredibly challenging.

You know, the advent of technology,

especially with social media,

the increases in loneliness, like we know, we know.

Like the cause and effect, they're very clear, right?

But these tools have been around for like,

the Western tools of therapy, what, 100, 150 years,

the Eastern tools of different forms of meditation,

indigenous healing practices,

these things have been around for millennia.

And now that the world is globalized,

people in major cities especially have access to them.

Like you can type in like, what can I do

to deal with my anxiety?

And you have like, things from psychiatrists,

like you can go to your local meditation center,

there are tons of things that you can do now.

And what you just have to do is find something

that meets you where you're at.

So you do see these two things rise together

where the demand for your attention is through the roof now,

from the media, from tech,

from everything that's happening around you,

family and friends, but at the same time,

here are a bunch of tools for you to get your mind right,

so that you can not be overwhelmed by these demands.

I am certainly guilty of using screens and other means

to distract myself from how I'm feeling.

In fact, when I'm feeling tired or bothered in some way

or a little bit agitated and whatever way it might be,

my way of dealing with that is to pick up a screen.

Yeah, that's good to be honest.

Pick up a screen and either watch something on YouTube,

distract myself from the feeling,

maybe watch some football or something else,

something else that's probably not so good for me.

And I think that scrolling on my phone, for example,

I think that represents the majority of people.

We use distraction as a way

to avoid confronting how we're feeling

because confronting how we're feeling is,

can be uncomfortable.

Absolutely, I mean, confronting how you're feeling

for a lot of us, that's the gateway to growth, right?

So if you're gonna be there and stand with your emotions,

you either see so much that you wanna keep running

or you're like, okay, I'm gonna accept this challenge

and let's see how I should grow next.

So it is quite difficult.

Is it called vipinsana?

Vipinsana? Vipassana.

Vipassana, Vipassana is a bunch of ways to say it.

What is that?

It's a meditation that's been around

that originated from the Buddhist teaching.

So 2,600 years where you basically do your best

to see reality as it really is.

And it's very different from how we normally see reality,

you and I are hanging out, we're talking,

we're having this conversation.

It feels like it's two individuals speaking,

but let's ask ourselves what's happening

at the ultimate level where, well, Diego and Steven,

we're basically just these bundles of atoms

that are changing so incredibly rapidly,

trillions of times, and at the same time,

it's just mental and physical phenomena interlocking

at incredibly high speeds

that makes the illusion that we're here.

But in reality, are we real?

No, not really.

Why is that an important or valuable exercise?

It's quite valuable.

I think the sense of self, when it becomes overgrown,

when it becomes highly traumatized,

it creates a barrier to happiness.

So what I found through vipassana meditation

was that as I was observing the truth of impermanence,

literally within the framework of the body,

when you start learning that everything that arises

ultimately passes away,

and you start understanding that change is,

it exists within the fabric of every single thing

in this universe, you start loosening up your identity.

It's not as rigid as it was before.

It's not like Diego always reads science fiction

and he always loves blueberries.

Actually, it's not true.

Sometimes I love watermelon.

Sometimes I love reading fiction.

So it allows this understanding of change

to help you loosen up and really evolve.

And I have found that quite beneficial

to my personal joy and happiness

and definitely in my relationships,

because if you embrace change,

you're not gonna be as attached.

It's not gonna be like, I want you to do this this way

all the time.

In fact, you're gonna understand,

oh no, different conditions create different situations.

So yes, I can have goals, but if they don't come about,

I'm not gonna be crying on the floor.

I'm just gonna try again.

How do you think our earliest experiences

impact the relationship we have with change?

Because change, it's funny,

because there's this almost duality of being a human

where we seem to like things staying the same.

There's a certain security and comfort.

Even the idea of self identity,

that's almost like a resistance to change.

It allows me to be understood.

If I give you my bio or my business card,

it will say CEO of marketing company, then you get me.

You know where I fit, I feel like I fit somewhere

and there's a tribe somewhere.

But at the same time, the human experience

yearns for progress.

Totally, and we're not trying to have people

get rid of their identities, right?

What we're trying to do is create a sense of flexibility

within that identity.

Where we don't often see that human beings,

we tend to side on the extreme of the apparent reality.

That's what I was mentioning before,

like I am here, you are there,

we're speaking to each other, that's apparently happening.

But we totally forget the ultimate reality.

We totally forget that everything is constantly changing.

Even this hard table, it's changing so fast.

So fast that you can't even witness it.

You can't even see it unless you profoundly calm down

the mind and start developing your awareness,

your equanimity and you do this within the framework

of the body because when you understand

what's happening within the body,

you actually understand universal law.

You understand what's happening throughout the universe

and missing that undercurrent of change.

Missing that understanding that your ego

is not this permanent thing,

it helps you tremendously so that you're not as attached

as you're moving through the world

because we're constantly trying to control everything,

control ourselves, control the people around us,

control whatever situation we can get our hands on.

And what happens when you're just trying

to constantly control things?

Misery, so much misery, so much struggle,

so much mental tension.

And I think that's why embracing change,

like your original question,

what is our relationship with change?

It's a combative one.

It's a situation where we grow up as children

and we, all we're focusing on is building our identity.

When you're becoming little, you're learning the culture,

you're sort of taking it all in

and you develop your sense of self,

but when you become older, when you're grounded

and you have a good sense of identity,

you also need to develop an understanding

of what's ultimately happening around here.

And I think when you get a real taste of ultimate truth,

it helps you tremendously

because I think if I didn't have,

if I didn't switch around my relationship with change,

like I would have no access to peace.

It's interesting because you're totally right.

When I was younger, I grew up hoovering information

that allowed me to survive.

And I built my identity around the character

that was required to survive in that context,

not the character that would make me happiest in my life

or most fulfilled or best in relationships.

So what was formed by the age of 18 was this like

insecure, shame ridden kid who would run from relationships

because he thought those were prison.

And that stood in the way of all of my,

so many of my goals,

it certainly stood in the way of me being really happy,

but it also stood in the way of me finding romantic love.

And it was unpacking that identity,

becoming aware of it, its existence,

and then unpacking it and trying to unlearn it

that allowed me to pursue the things

that now make me fulfilled and happy.

I'm still not there yet.

I haven't really met anybody that is,

but I find that really interesting

that like we build that identity around survival

and then as an adult at some point,

we need to like review it.

You hit it on the dot.

So I think when we, it makes sense evolutionarily.

Like you, evolution wants you to be able to survive.

It does not care about your happiness.

It does not care about your sense of thriving,

but as you come to fruition and you come into being

and you're like, you're here,

you have your sense of identity,

you realize that there's so much misery wrapped in

the sense of self or wrapped in your attachments

and to be able to really thrive and to be happy,

it requires letting go.

I mean, how much stress have you caused yourself, right?

There's like, we have to ask ourselves this.

Like, of course, you know,

sometimes people get offended by this question,

but you have to realize that there have definitely been

people in your life who've caused you harm.

People who've done terrible things,

but it's you and yourself in that mind of yours, right?

It's just you and we don't quite understand

how many times will you replay the past over and over

and then those same feelings of tension

come up again and again.

And we have no way to really process that

unless we try to actively find some sort of tool

that will help us let go.

And I think it's really important to just, you know,

you got to see what you're doing to yourself.

How?

Self-awareness, time alone, reflecting, have a good teacher,

you know, have someone who can point things out to you

that you couldn't see before.

I think that's ultimately what a lot of therapists are doing

is like, have you asked yourself this?

Have you been honest about this?

And similar with meditation,

and it's you developing a, you know,

a sense of inability to observe instead of just judgment.

Cause constantly when I'm looking out on the world,

I'm just evaluating things,

giving you this evaluation according to the memory

that I have, this record inside of my mind.

But instead of constantly just evaluating things,

why can't I just observe?

Why does it have to be plus or minus?

Let me just watch what's happening right now.

We're all in cycles, aren't we?

Every, most facets of my life,

I think pretty much every facet of my life

is in some kind of cycle.

Now some of those cycles are positive.

So me working out and going to the gym,

that seems to be a positive cycle that I've managed to build.

Some people might call that a habit.

And then I do have other cycles in my life where I go,

that happened, I reacted like that.

That was not the reaction that would bring me closer

to my goals and fulfillment.

I'll try not to do that again.

And then the thing happens

and that kind of cycle repeats itself.

And in so many, and I think about myself,

I think about my friends,

I think about, you know, even some of my close sort of mentors.

I observe those cycles in their life

that they're trying to break out of,

but they just seem so stubborn.

I've lived through so many of those stubborn cycles

where for years and years and years,

I've known it's a problem.

I've not known how to get out of it.

What advice would you give me or someone else

in a situation where we know we're in a cycle,

whether it's relationships or work,

or how we're responding to things?

And we feel stuck in that cycle.

Yeah, I think that's what a lot of us are going through

is that the past is constantly on a loop, right?

We are very largely formed by those first few years of life.

A lot of psychologists say about the age of seven,

I would say it's more.

It's like every time that you react, it gets accumulated.

So those moments of heartbreak,

like your first love, your first loss,

like all of these things that have really formed

your sense of self,

they are impacting the way that you're perceiving

and the way that you're reacting to the world.

And I think for a lot of us,

we probably one of the best tools that we don't access

is just the ability to slow down, is just slowing down,

literally just pumping the brakes.

And what you just talked about, what you just described,

being able to spend time observing,

okay, this is what I'm feeling.

This is how I want to react.

I have this, because initially our initial reaction

is pretty rough.

It's like the most defensive one,

the most survival oriented one,

but it's like, okay,

that's actually gonna make a bigger mess of things.

What can I do differently?

Like what can I do to change this play

that's happening around me so that I can put a different

input and hopefully get a different output?

And I think when we slow down, we see that.

And that's one of the gifts

that I personally got from meditating was,

I didn't have that ability before.

Like the reaction was lightning fast.

You know, someone said something about me,

I didn't like immediately like,

hey, like I would be so upset,

so like, you know,

wanting to control their view of me.

And now it's like, let me slow down,

let me see how I would have dealt with this before.

What's like the actually the most skillful thing

that I can do in this moment to like,

you know, to just stay in value with myself.

And at the same time, just like maneuver out of this.

Like, is this even worth my time?

You know?

Do you need to know where that reaction is coming from?

Do you need to know the root cause?

No, no.

I think a lot of people get stuck

in like examining the past and like peeling like, okay,

like my mom said this one thing to me one time.

And then my dad did this other thing,

like it's totally valuable to understand your past,

but healing happens in the present moment.

Like those feelings, like if you want to deal with your past,

you need to be able to create space

for the feelings that are coming up right now.

Because often those feelings

that are coming up right now are just echoes of the past.

You don't need to know a narrative.

Like you don't need to give a narrative

to every single feeling, you know,

you literally just have to be able to hold space for them.

And when you do hold space for them,

a lot of the unbinding happens

so that you're not as knotted up inside.

On a, you talked about what meditation

being critical for you there to kind of slow down

and have that space to reflect

on how you're responding and so on.

In a specific way, how does your meditation look?

Does it, is it once a day for five minutes?

You go through a retreat?

Yeah, so you learn Vipassana,

and this is an Esenguanga tradition,

same tradition that you've all known Harari also meditates in.

You learn the technique by going away

to one silent 10 day course.

So it's a big commitment, it's hard, it's not easy.

You know, the first one that I did,

it's incredibly difficult.

Like I just thought about running away

for the first seven days.

But you learn a technique that, you know,

the first three days you learn how to observe your respiration

and you're given this tool called Anapana

where, you know, you're literally observing

the natural breath.

And then that helps calm down the mind enough

where you can start feeling a lot more in your body

than what's usual.

You know, for some meditators,

they can feel like the crispness of the pain

that they might feel from sitting long hours a day

where they can like feel it to just like this hyper HD detail

and it's not as overwhelming, right?

Because they're there with it.

And or on the other end, you know,

some meditators will be able to feel this like flow of,

you know, rapid energy moving through the body.

And it's almost like, like an atomic river

that you're sort of fine-tune your mind to be able to feel.

And you can feel how like, yeah, this is my bicep,

but it's actually, it feels like tens of thousands

of like changing vibrations

that are moving incredibly rapidly.

And-

You sit there in silence for 10 days.

Total silence for 10 days.

You can talk to the teacher, you can ask questions,

but you're like, you're there totally by yourself.

You're there with a group of people,

but you're like in an environment

where it's basically by yourself.

You're not allowed to speak to those other people.

No, no eye contact, no speaking.

You're like basically living like a monk.

And what about on a day-to-day basis?

What is your daily?

On a day-to-day basis, I meditate two hours a day.

Two hours a day?

That's right.

Every day?

Every day.

I've been doing that for, I think about eight years now.

And I meditate one hour in the morning,

one hour in the evening,

or like late afternoon or something like that.

What does that look like?

Just sitting on your own or?

Yeah, I mean, this morning it looked like, you know,

came to New York City to come hang out with you,

woke up this morning and just like sat up on the bed

and put my timer for one hour and started meditating.

Yeah, but we also, you know, meditate at home.

We have our little meditation room

where my wife and I meditate and it's honestly,

it's amazing.

I know to a lot of people like two hours a day,

wow, so much time.

But I think about it to myself,

like how much time do I waste?

Like I waste tons of time.

Like I get a lot done,

but I'm also constantly wasting time every day.

And what I've understood is that

these two hours a day that I've been meditating for

the past eight years,

they've been the biggest investment

that I've made in my life.

Like by far, because it's one thing, you know,

you go away to these retreats

and it's incredibly valuable.

You know, you can come out totally transformed,

but to keep the process going at home,

it just adds a deeper element to it

that helps you continue evolving, continue evolving.

And I think because I've spent that time,

my relationship with my wife has flourished

because it was rough.

Like before we started meditating,

there was a six year period where we were together.

And before we started meditating

and our relationship was chaos.

It was like living in a hurricane,

constantly fighting each other,

constantly blaming each other.

You know, my relationship with my parents was very shallow.

My relationships with my brother and sister

were even more shallow.

You know, same thing with friends,

like work, life, everything was going terrible.

But when I started meditating, everything changed.

Everything opened up.

I didn't even know that I should write.

You know, like all of this came from cleaning up my mind

and then like my intuition started waking up

and it was like, oh, you know, try writing.

You know, you know that you don't know everything,

but share, share the process.

If you were to give me instructions

that on the meditation you did this morning,

what instructions would you give me

to replicate what you did?

I think, so this is the thing,

it's like this style of meditation,

you can't pay for it.

You can't like get it off of a YouTube video.

Like you, you have to go to a 10 day course

because it's not, I can tell you the instructions,

but do you have enough of the cultivated qualities

to be able to actually deeply feel the body?

Like that's why it's a step by step.

That 10 days is literally like one giant guided meditation.

Incredibly simple instructions,

but you won't be able to do them

unless your mind is like calm enough.

Unless it's, you know, it's like going to the gym.

It's like, if you were to ask me

to go run a marathon right now,

like I wouldn't be able to do it.

You know, I have to train for it.

Okay, so I'm not gonna be able to do it

just based on your instructions.

I get that, but I'm curious as to the specific like,

yeah, the specific instructions.

I mean, do you see?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the two basics are, you know,

like what I was describing to you,

the first three days you're observing the breath.

I mean, this morning.

And this morning, same thing.

Well, this morning, I was basically observing my body,

you know, bringing my attention to my body, you know,

started at the top of the head

and keep feeling my body as I'm moving down.

And, you know, it sounds really simple,

but when you put time into it,

when you like keep going to courses,

the amount that you feel it expands pretty incredibly.

Yeah.

Do you think the most important answers

that we're searching for are within us?

Totally, totally.

If you spend your whole life looking outside,

you can read every book in the world

and still be absolutely miserable.

I think it requires this application of self-awareness

to really unlock your happiness.

Like you have to develop what you're missing.

Like develop, like compassion is in your mind,

but it's undeveloped.

Like self-awareness, it's a capacity you have,

totally undeveloped.

Like that's what was shocking to me

when I went to go meditate was like,

my mind could do these things,

but my awareness was so meek when I first started

because it was like a muscle.

Like when I go to these meditation courses,

you know, I've gone to courses that are 20, 30, 45 days long,

you know, I come out of them and I'm like,

I just spent my whole time at the gym.

Like it was just a mental gym.

I was like literally developing my ability to be aware,

my ability to be equanimous,

and my ability to have love for myself and all beings.

That's my favorite ever quote that I've ever showed

on Instagram is what you've just said,

which is there's no self-development without self-awareness.

You can read as many books as you like,

but if you can't read yourself, you'll never learn a thing.

Well, this is why I saw like people listening around.

Like this is why I became so interested in you

was when I first came around your work

and the algorithm started, you know, I started popping it up.

This was like two, two and a half,

maybe even three years ago.

And I was like, I was like, dude, we're on the same wave.

Like, you know, we're not doing the same thing.

We live totally different lives,

but there's something there that's like, yeah,

it's the same wave.

It's a curiosity.

It's a curiosity that I see in your work and in you.

And it's funny because the subject matter

is not subject matter, that is for everybody.

And you'll know this from doing the work you do.

There's some people that when they read times

like self-love and healing, they go, oh, fuck you.

You know what I mean?

But it's funny, I just wish those people knew

that all of their goals start with that.

If they want to be a billionaire or a millionaire

for whatever reasons they want, I don't want to judge you.

You want to Lamborghini?

If you want to be happy, you want a beautiful relationship,

it all starts with these words that self-love and healing.

And it's interesting, man.

Like, I, you know, I just saw the movie Air.

Oh, I just watched that.

And it was, I loved it.

You know, it was incredible.

But what was really telling to me was that the guy

who owned Nike, he was meditating a lot, you know?

And like, it was really helping him.

It was helping him stay cool under pressure, you know?

It was helping him like make more creative decisions.

Like same thing with Steve Jobs.

Like he is like, he was a serious meditator.

And same thing with Sam Altman, you know,

created Open AI, like he's a serious meditator.

You know, just met him the other day.

And like he's meditating quite seriously.

But like these are people who are high performing people

who are, make it a point to cultivate their minds.

And these are people that are obsessed with productivity.

Totally.

And you know, that's something that has that blew my mind

experiencing it personally, where as I kept going,

as I kept going to courses, I realized like I can just,

I can do more.

I can do more with less stress.

And to me, that's been incredible.

Like at first I was a writer, and then I started opening up

and going into the venture capital world.

And even later, I'm thinking about opening a business,

but I wouldn't have been able to do anything

if it wasn't really for that basic development

of self-awareness and, you know, equanimity.

And I keep using the word and equanimity,

what I'm talking about is basically your ability

to observe something as it really is

without craving it or without having any aversion towards it.

You're not hating it.

You're not loving it and wanting it.

You're just observing it as it is.

It's a balanced mind.

Why?

So when I started the Diary of SEO,

the base sort of premise of it was

me to share my diary with complete honesty.

So I feel compelled to do that.

I've for a long time viewed meditation as a waste of time.

Like I think that was my, the thought of sitting there

and just, because you know, what it appears to be

on the surface is sitting there

and just not thinking about anything.

But then as you say, all of these incredible people

who are obsessed with productivity and efficiency

and time and are very, very, very busy,

Chamath as well, from the Allian podcast,

so many people that I follow and watch and listen to,

they all, and so many of the guests that have come here

and that are wildly successful,

they all talk about the benefits of meditation.

Right.

If there's someone listening to this now

and they go, I don't meditate and I, in any way,

whatever technique, you know, they might use,

I think I've always thought it's a waste of time.

I've tried it, didn't work.

What is the pitch you'd make to them

about why they should persevere and persist?

Well, there's two main things.

One is you tried it, it didn't work.

Of course, of course it didn't work.

Like you, no one starts out being good at meditation.

Like what the mind knows is distraction.

It's literally jumping from one thing to another,

flying from the past to the future,

from the past to the future, just swimming in imagination.

So that moment when you ask your mind to stay in one place

for a few seconds, it'll be gone, totally gone.

So of course you're bad at it, right?

But that's why you try again.

You keep trying.

You calmly, you know, without getting upset with yourself,

you put time into it the same way where you would,

you know, use to build your muscles

or educate yourself on, you know,

if you want to learn Spanish,

you're not just gonna know Spanish, you need to study.

You need to spend, you're not gonna know,

you know, zero Spanish when you begin.

And you put four, five, six years of serious work into it

and you get really good at Spanish.

It's the same thing with meditation.

So one thing is accept that it's gonna be extremely hard

in the beginning and it will humble you

because you're like, damn, I suck at this.

Good, then you keep going.

And the second part of it is it's an investment.

You're making a huge time investment

that produces incredible results inside of you

in the way that you see the world,

in the way that you talk to people,

in the way that you create whatever it is

that you want to give to the world.

I think you, but you have to give it time.

You have to give it time to really be able

to see the results.

Maybe at the very crux of this,

I was thinking as you were speaking then,

people do what they want to do.

And most of the things they want, they do

because they want to do them are

because they are clear on the reward of doing it.

Totally.

Think about human behavior.

Like I went to the toilet.

I was clear on the results of going to the toilet

and also not going to the toilet.

So I went to the toilet.

The results of not going for a wee before you came here

was I would urinate in my pants.

So I did.

I ate breakfast this morning

because I was clear on the upside of that.

And I also had the urge to do it.

When we think about meditation, I think,

when I think about the equation of why people do things,

the bit that I think a lot of people aren't clear on

is that first part, which is like, what is the upside?

I can take your word for it.

I can take a lot of very credible people's word for it.

But I think that's the issue.

It's the issue.

It's like you have to experience it for yourself.

And I think a lot of people go into meditation for,

like it's initial goals, you know, for liberation,

for you to be free from suffering,

which is the most important goal.

Like that's why I do it.

Like I don't meditate to be a better writer, right?

I don't meditate to like, for anything else other than

to take small steps forward on the path of liberation,

to truly try to cease the mechanism in my mind

that's causing me suffering.

And that outs sort of the externality of that, right?

Is that you become incredibly creative.

Like you don't need to be, you know, in film or writing

or whatever you can be in whatever field that it is,

you can be an engineer, you can be a doctor, a dentist,

but you become so much more creative

because your mind isn't as stressed as it used to be.

And it's able to make connections a lot more quickly

because your mind is sharper.

And understanding that creativity

and understanding how it impacts your relationships

that makes them so much more deeper than before,

I think it gives you an access to new beauty in life.

And why not?

You know, why not spend that time on yourself?

So you meditate to avoid suffering?

Not avoid, to be able to understand reality so well

that I don't cause myself suffering.

What are the main causes of suffering

as far as you're concerned?

It's craving.

Craving?

Craving, yeah, totally.

And it's not the same as wanting.

I think that there was a big issue when,

especially when the Buddhist teaching came over to the West

where it was translated as desire is the cause of suffering.

You could look at it that way to some extent,

but what seems much more approachable to me

and makes more sense is craving.

Craving is not the same thing as wanting something, right?

As having a goal.

Because there's a difference between having a goal

and having a craving.

You can have a goal and put your mind to it,

put a lot of work in,

but then the moment that you don't get what you want,

and you're like, okay, it's okay.

You know, let me go back to the drawing board,

let me re-strategize,

let me figure out how to do this better than before.

And you do all that without crying,

without being super set, without punching the wall.

You just, you keep diligently working and moving forward.

It's possible.

The other side of that is craving,

is doing everything with craving

when your energy is all knotted up,

when your mind is super tense,

because craving is basically the combination

of wanting and tension.

Like you're really craving something bad,

and you're sort of, the mind is rippled with stress

in the moment of craving something,

and in the moment of like,

even worse when you don't get it,

when you don't get what you were really striving for.

So, I don't wanna live like with a mind that's craving,

like I'm a householder, right?

I'm not a monk, like I have a wife, you know?

Someday we're gonna have kids,

like I have a mother and father

that I need to help take care of,

like I have to have goals, right?

When I write a new book, or when I start a new venture,

or do something like, yeah, I wanna do my best,

but I try to do that as calmly and as balanced as possible

without stressing myself out that much in the process.

I'm not perfect at it, but to me,

it seems like a much more effective way to live

than just like making myself stressed all the time.

How do I know if I'm craving a goal that I have in my life,

or if I just, you know, it's just a goal?

It's the moment when you don't get it.

It's the moment that, you know,

if you don't get what you were craving,

and you're super stressed out,

and it just makes you so upset,

then you're like crying, and you know, you were craving.

You can even feel that tension in your mind.

You're like, you're wanting that ice cream so bad.

Do you think people that crave achieve more professionally?

I don't, you know, that's a really good question.

I think definitely, there have been some like incredible,

high achieving people who were totally driven

by craving, dominated, but were they happy?

Like, were they okay inside?

Like what, you know, what is their karmic situation?

Like I have no, you know, like Genghis Khan,

like people who conquered the world,

like it's totally possible to conquer the world

with no morality, but I wouldn't want to live like that.

Like to me, it's like I'd rather be super intentional

and aware of how I'm moving about in the world

so that I don't cause myself harm or other people harm.

Like that's my thing now is like,

compassion is really powerful.

Like you can create businesses in a compassionate manner

and still be super successful.

Like you can do the work that you want to do

in a compassionate manner and be a high achiever.

That intentionality around your goals,

it's something I've, I think I've struggled with

for the last 10 years is being clear with myself

and why I have certain things as goals.

Yeah.

You know, cause I think in the first chapter of my life,

when I was very shame ridden,

my goals were driven by meeting,

really like to try to dissolve the shame

that I experienced as a kid and like get the things

that I thought would make me love myself

and feel like I was enough.

I didn't know that though.

So I was pursuing these material things

or these like superficial things,

thinking that they were my ambitions.

Upon getting there, the anti-climax,

the, yeah, the underwhelm,

signaled that I was aiming at the wrong things.

And there was a big piece of work actually,

that's why I resonate so much about what you write about

in chapter one of your book about self love.

There was a big piece of work for me to figure out

that none of this stuff was ever gonna make me worth more

inside and that the place for me

to actually build my ambitions from

was that place of feeling enoughness.

Can I ask you something?

Sure.

I'm quite curious.

Not like, I've seen your success, you know,

and I really commend you.

I think it's quite beautiful

and I think you're inspiring so many people.

But knowing your background, knowing this shame,

know like coming from a place of not having everything,

like now that you do have so much, so much success,

all the material things you can just, you know,

buy whatever you want, why do you keep going?

It's a great question.

So it's something I've mulled over

because there's still a part of me

that wants to accumulate wealth.

And I keep asking myself, why?

Yeah.

You know, because I also, I spoke to someone earlier

and I said, I'm at a conscious level aware

that there's nothing more that I could buy

that would have an impact on my happiness.

In fact, it's probably the opposite to some degree.

You know, if things were a bit more simple,

maybe I'd be more happier.

Why do I keep going?

So I'm gonna throw out my hypothesis

and please then interrogate it

because I'd love to chew it over with you.

Now please, I'm so curious.

I believe that for me to be happy,

I believe chaos is my stability.

And I think it's for most people.

I feel like there's a certain type of chaos

which is my stability and that my stability is chaos.

So what I mean by that is when everything in my life

is achieved and accomplished

and I have nothing else to strive for,

you see this a lot in Olympians

or anyone that achieves their goals,

they then fall into chaos.

So we all need to live in a certain state of worthwhile,

meaningful, voluntary chaos,

which means like having uncompleted goals.

I sometimes ponder whether that's hardwired

into the human condition,

whether the reason why we're in a skyscraper now

in the middle of Manhattan

is because our ancestors had that hardwired into them.

They had it hardwired that they would build

and progress and move forward.

I did some research in preparation for my book

and they asked people in work,

what's the most enjoyable day of your professional career?

And everyone points out a day

when there was some sense of progress.

I think that's hardwired into us.

So if I almost feel like if I stopped,

I would become disorientated.

Professionally, I'm looking for five things.

I'm looking to pursue goals

that are meaningful and worthwhile.

I'm looking to have a high degree of autonomy.

I'm looking to have a sufficient amount of challenge.

Again, if something's too easy, people lose motivation

for some reason, if something's too difficult,

they become intimidated and lose motivation.

I'm looking for a sense of forward motion.

And lastly, to work with people that I love.

I think that recipe is the recipe

for my professional happiness.

So that is what I'm doing.

Ever bigger goals with people I love

towards worthwhile challenges that I think are worthwhile.

And I'm trying to remain as conscious as I can

about the dishonest motivations that sit amongst that.

Like certain decisions I'll make

or consider are by Rolls Royce.

Like why did that come into my mind?

And where is that from?

Yeah.

Does that answer the question?

It absolutely answers it.

And you know, one, what I'm noticing from that trend

of what you just described is you realize that

these five things that you lined out

and the chaos versus stability

that all of that to me sounds like

this is essential for your mental health, right?

That it's almost like it's giving you reason.

That's, you know, to keep staking steps forward

and to do so in a way where life doesn't become a mess.

So I think that's pretty cool.

Let me challenge myself.

Yeah, yeah.

This is maybe the answer I'm scared of giving.

I'm still trying to prove to myself that I'm enough.

I haven't grown out of that.

I'm just doing it with different games now.

I'm doing it with podcasts and I'm doing it in business still.

They're just bigger games.

They're just different games, right?

They're like different status games.

They're not materialistic status games

because maybe I've evolved out of that,

but they are professional status games that I'm playing.

Now, what I want to point out to you then,

and so if you bring that up,

one of the most challenging truths to accept

is that life is inherently dissatisfactory.

This was one of the things that the Buddha pointed out.

He pointed out, you know, these three major truths

that everything's changing,

that there's suffering,

which can also be translated into dissatisfaction,

and there's no self, right?

Your ego, not real.

But that second one, I think,

is it's a difficult one to totally embrace,

but once embraced that, you know,

you can keep winning, winning, winning, winning, winning,

but there's still more.

There's still like, you know,

there's still something else to want

because we live in this situation.

You know, it's the way this universe works,

where we can continue ideating into infinity.

We can continue like developing more knowledge,

there's more books to read, there's more to understand.

So we're functioning almost on an infinite spectrum,

even though we ourselves are very finite.

And I think that creates a situation

where things can be so, so dissatisfying

because you never quite get there.

And like, I've been trying to accept that understanding

into my life and seeing like, you know,

people ask me like, how did you feel

after you became a number one New York Times bestseller?

And I'm like, oh, well, you know,

it was really nice for like a few minutes.

And it was like, yeah, that was cool.

Then it was done.

Like, it was like, well, you know, what happens after that?

It was like, well, you just keep living your life, you know?

And I could have got wrapped into the sort of the,

the deeper existential dissatisfaction of that,

of like, oh, like, you know, what happens next?

But it was like, okay, let me just be with it as it is.

But I think it's, yeah, it's tricky.

Yeah.

Why do you keep doing what you're doing?

Cause you're, you've been a successful writer.

You've done all of these amazing things.

Your books as well, smash hits.

You're a venture capitalist now.

You're an investor in great companies.

You're building businesses.

Why?

I keep going, like on a mundane level,

like I only write books if I actually have something to say,

if there's another topic that I want to cover.

So I don't do them for like the big check.

Like, you know, I do them to, to really be able to be of service.

And in terms of building companies,

like all of the companies that I, you know,

have invested in with wisdom ventures,

they're all companies that are trying,

basically trying to prove that compassion is good business.

So to me, that feels really critical on a deeper level,

right?

Like why even put myself out there?

I think it's just to have the ability to give, honestly,

like just to be able to give.

I think, like I don't gain myself worth from

being a number one New York Times bestseller from,

you know, like from selling over a million books or,

you know, all that stuff.

It's like that goes over a million.

How many?

Yeah, a million.

Yeah, it's wild.

It's wild, but those are just numbers.

Like I don't, I can't imagine a million.

Like I don't know what that really is.

You know, I can, I can wrap myself around stories.

Like, you know, I just, I just talked to someone

the other day, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco

and this woman was telling me like, you know,

how these three books that I wrote,

like they saved her life and I was just,

I was like talking to her and I'm like, what?

Like, what?

I'm like, are you okay now?

Like, are you, like, are you good now?

And she's like, I'm good.

And I was just like, I couldn't.

So to me, like a story like that, I can actually feel.

But when I see the numbers, like, you know,

I can't even pretend to imagine what a million is,

but I keep going cause, you know,

I want to be able to take care of my parents

and I want to be able to give to good things.

And to me, that feels right for right now.

Like I'll see what that looks like

five to 10 years down the line.

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What do you think makes a good partner broadly?

I sat here with Simon Sinek and I threw out the idea that,

because I think when I was younger

and maybe a bit more immature,

I had this kind of like superficial list, brunette,

this, this size, whatever.

And as I matured a little bit,

I tried to consolidate that list

until like the non-negotiables.

I landed on intellectually stimulating,

which I think is kind of what you've described there,

where you can have that kind of intellectual conversation

and build and grow intellectually together.

This one's a bit of an interesting one.

They make me better at what I do, my mission.

They support that in whatever way.

And I have to say that's something

that you have to be willing to reciprocate.

And then the third one is sexual attraction.

I didn't say physical attraction.

I was very specific about having to have sexual attraction.

Simon Sinek added one.

He said it's three plus one.

He said the one you need on top of that is timing.

So he concluded it was three plus one.

Anything else you would add to that in terms of?

I would actually simplify it.

I think it comes down to the intuitive click.

I think that there are some people,

like when my wife and I,

when we physically came across each other,

she was 18, I was 19,

she was a freshman, I was a sophomore,

like literally from the moment that we met,

we both come from very different backgrounds.

I grew up in the city, she grew up in the Burbs.

Our idea, our list of what we wanted in a partner

was not each other.

But there was just this incredible pull

to just discover who's this person.

And we spent two, two and a half months being friends.

And then the moment that I saw that other guys

were trying to pair up with her

and be their boy, get together with her,

I was like, oh no, I was like that.

And then I realized my deeper feelings

and I was like, no, no, no.

I was like, I actually have feelings for you.

I want to be with you.

And...

Do you come out to friend zone?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically came out of the friend zone.

I'm starting to have to make it out of friend zone.

Oh man.

But I think it's the intuitive click

plus the willingness to grow.

I think that's what really can make a relationship healthy

and productive because we're all in different starting points.

But if you have the willingness to grow,

I'm here, I want to learn from myself.

I want to learn from you.

How can we both do this better?

I think that you can make real magic from that.

When you encountered challenges in your relationship,

what was the root cause of that?

Or what was missing?

I mean, between the two of us,

if you were to add up how much emotional maturity there was,

it would be zero during that time.

Like zero self-awareness, zero emotional maturity.

Like if one of us got upset about whatever,

you know, whatever it could be,

it would immediately be finger pointing.

Like this is your fault, you know?

Like, and this is why you need to change.

And if you change, then I'll be happy.

But when we started meditating, we started realizing it was like,

oh wait, this isn't about you at all.

This is between me and myself.

And I'm actually just taking these dense emotions

and allowing narratives to be built around them

that somehow just take the blame away from me

and so that I take no accountability.

And it was rough, man.

Like when we first got together,

like the connection was there,

but there was no willingness to grow.

There was no emotional maturity to really hold it.

So we were like constantly fighting.

We'd break up, get back together,

break up, get back together.

And it was, it always felt like we were at square one.

Like we were never really like flowering and blossoming together.

And when we started meditating,

we started noticing like our fights got a little calmer, right?

The screams got a little lower.

And we started, and the switch was very slow,

where when the fight would happen,

it wasn't like, you did this, you did that.

It became, how do you feel?

Like, what's happening?

Like, what, you know, what are you seeing?

And then I explain what I'm seeing.

And it's like, we're trying to understand each other's

perspectives as opposed to making each other say sorry

and like winning the argument, you know?

It went from fighting as a thing for victory

to like fighting as a moment that we can develop understanding.

Like, what's happening with you?

Let me tell you what's happening with me.

You and her against the problem.

Yeah, yeah.

Versus you versus her.

Totally, totally.

That's really rare.

That's so rare.

Yeah, no, and we're, yeah, and same thing.

Like, we're not perfect.

You know, we still argue, have conflict,

but it's way less dramatic than it used to be.

The first chapter in your book is about self-love.

Your new book, your newest book,

lighter, is about self-love.

The subtitle here is,

let go of the past, connect with the present,

expand the future.

Self-love, what does that actually mean?

That just means loving myself, right?

No, there's a lot more to that, come on, Stephen.

I think that was off to you.

Yeah, no, I think when I started asking myself

the same question that the whole internet

was asking itself back in 2015, 2016,

when self-love just burst onto the scene.

Like, I don't know if you remember that time,

but on Instagram, like, everybody was trying to explore,

like, what does self-love really mean?

And I asked myself the same question back then.

And to me, the way I learned to define it

was that it's doing what you need to do

to heal and free yourself.

And I think of it as an energy.

Like, it's the energy that you use to evolve.

And I wanted to sort of put that definition out there

because I'm like, that's how I'm enacting self-love

in my life.

And it's very different from what I was learning

from, you know, the materialistic sort of consumer side

of self-love, which is just like, buy yourself

whatever you want, take a bubble bath,

like all these external things

that I personally think they don't, you know,

definitely treat yourself well,

but like, that's not gonna add up to that much.

Like, the problem is like, you know, in your own mind,

in your own heart.

A lot of that's still distraction, isn't it?

It's totally distraction.

It's just, you're just sugarcoating the situation,

but you're not really going to the depth,

going to the root problem.

So I think self-love is, you know, using that energy

to healing free yourself, to really go deep within yourself

and basically discover, like, you know,

you go, you walk through your own inner forest.

Like, there's so much.

Like, when you turn that lens inward

and you start examining, like, what have I gone through?

Like, what have I overcome?

Like, where do I struggle?

Where are my blocks?

And you learn to learn, you know, you learn from that

and you accept it simultaneously.

It's beautiful the way, you know,

the evolution can really flourish from there.

You describe it as going through that forest.

Yeah.

For a lot of people, it's not quite a forest.

It's like a big, dark canyon

that there might be lions and tigers inside.

Yeah.

So who wants to go into the canyon?

You know, I've got, I think so much about certain people

in my life where they are seeing their behavior

doesn't correlate or isn't aligned with who they want to be

and how they want to behave.

Yeah.

But the thought of going into the canyon or the forest

or however you want to describe it, it's also scary.

It's also really scary.

Absolutely.

But you're not going to have victory without challenge.

Like these two things go hand in hand.

Like you're not just going to be given peace.

Like no one's going to be like, oh, you're free now.

You know, like you have to put in the work.

And sometimes the work is like pretty scary, you know,

to really go in there to like sit there with yourself

while all this anxiety or like, you know,

panic attack energy or like whatever it is, you know,

like this, like this deep stuff starts coming up

and you're with yourself and you're calm and you're patient

and you're loving yourself through it.

Like I think there's really no other way,

especially if you're trying to like, you know,

just build a new structure in your mind and come out

with, you know, peace at the center of it.

What's your view broadly on the current state of,

talked about your wife a second ago,

about the current state of like relationships and dating

and what are people getting wrong?

I think a lot about this because again,

I'm at that age now, I'm 30 years old.

I'm lucky enough to be in a relationship,

I see a lot of people that are struggling

because I almost feel like there's a generation trapped

between the technological revolution

where there's this one generation that are kind of accustomed

to social media and dating apps.

And then there's this other generation that kind of got

trapped and they're now in their like early 30s.

And they don't quite resonate with the culture

of dating apps or social media.

But when you look at the data,

that more than 50% of people are now meeting

online, so they're struggling, what's your overview?

What's your sort of opinion on dating

and where we are in culture?

I think there's two main problems,

perfection and craving.

Oftentimes we want the person that we're gonna be with

to be so incredible, there's never a problem with them.

Always good times, you know, they know how to support

us perfectly when there's a moment of struggle

and it's just not gonna be like that.

To be able to develop a good rhythm with each other

means that your flaws are gonna come up,

that you're gonna be such clear mirrors for each other

that you're gonna see parts of yourself

that you have to face and do something about.

So being able to throw out this idea of perfection,

especially when like, you know, date one, day two, day three,

and then the first disagreement happens

is like blank, you cut it, you know?

The second part of that is that you're gonna be able

to see part of it is craving,

where I've seen, you know, with a number of friends

and just kind of like what's happening out there

is like, you'll have a relationship

for an X number of months, but then there's the craving

is like, oh, there might be something better out there

for me, you know?

But like, it's always gonna be like that.

So how many fantastic relationships have been ruined

by this idea that, oh, there might be something else

out there that's better for me

and then you just throw away a fantastic thing.

I've got a question to ask you.

I've got a friend who has been single for a while

and she's been on hundreds and hundreds of dates.

Hundreds and hundreds of dates.

And she asked me for advice the other day

and I didn't actually know what to say to her

because she's going on the dates.

I would assume that in hundreds and hundreds,

I literally mean three to four a week.

I would assume that she would have met someone, yeah.

And, you know, I wasn't necessarily sure what to say to her.

I almost look at think about it

like a marketing funnel where I think there's different,

in marketing, you have, at the top of the funnel,

you have awareness and then as the funnel gets thinner,

so you might meet, awareness might be just like impressions

on social media, so you might get a million impressions,

a million guys or women that you see interact

with come across.

Then we have the, maybe in the marketing context,

then we have the date, then the date might convert

into a relationship and the relationship

might convert into a marriage.

Her top of the funnel seems to be going great.

But there's lots of impressions, awareness.

But then that second stage in the funnel,

which is converting that date into something

that is a relationship seems to be,

I don't know, seems to be a problem.

What would you say to someone like that?

That's interesting.

You don't know her, I get it.

No, no, I don't.

You don't have all the context information,

but what would she do on the surface?

But if she gets hundreds of dates,

like she imagined she's beautiful, like.

She's beautiful.

And I think that there needs to be two things,

like there needs to be self-analysis on her part,

like what is going on, right?

Because I'm sure out of those hundreds,

like there's probably a few people who are like ready to,

you know, build something, let's build something together.

Just if you're playing the game of numbers, you know,

like there's definitely someone who's like,

yeah, let's go on a second date, a third day,

let's go on a trip, let's, you know,

build something together.

So I think there has to be a self-analysis

where like is there a part of her

that's afraid to actually like bring in

that next level of vulnerability

where we can like, you know,

develop something beautiful together.

The other aspect of it, I would say like the dating,

that's fine, but make sure that you are not stuck in a loop,

like that you're answering questions the same way,

that you're asking the same questions over and over,

that you're not sort of like stuck in the system

that your mind has created about what dating is,

like break that habit, like create something new.

It's an, it make it into a different play

between you and the other person.

How?

I think, yeah, if you're always meeting at a bar,

don't meet at a bar, like go out, meet in the park,

meet in the, you know, go for,

if you're living in New York city, walk 50 blocks together,

just like just do different things that you can do together.

Cause if you get stuck in that same mode

of doing it the way that you're familiar with,

then you're going to be saying the same things over and over,

and your mind's going to want like similar things,

so you won't be open to like fully embrace,

fully embracing a person as they really are.

And the added third thing is just throw away perfection.

Like you got, you got to like, you're looking for something

and like you might be missing what's the fantastic thing

that's right in front of you.

An idea of being stuck in a loop is so interesting to me

because you can be stuck in a self-sabotaging loop

and not even know it.

Totally man.

So I learned this between me and my dad.

So like my dad, he is like just hard,

hard working individual.

Like that's how he shows your love for you.

He's going to break his back so that he can support you

by giving you the monetary things that can help you.

So my dad has been busting his butt,

just working, working, working,

but I realized that like, I love this man.

Like, I don't know what it is.

Like me and him have a deep connection,

but our relationship was so stale and it was the same.

It was like the same light topics that we would talk about.

And I specifically remember this was like in that first year

when I started my personal growth journey,

I was like, my relationship with my dad, it sucks.

But like, what can I do to make it better?

And, you know, the first instinct is like, you need to change.

And it was like, no, no, no.

I was like, I need to change.

Like, I need to switch the game up

because we have this play going on between the two of us,

but I keep doing and saying the same thing.

So let me switch it up.

And I remember one day he comes home from work,

you know, super tired.

And I was like, you know what, like, fuck it,

let me just give him this huge hug.

And I remember, I remember hugging him

because we weren't that affectionate like that, you know?

I remember hugging him and being like, I love you, man.

And like, dude, let me tell you that totally changed

our relationship.

And it was, you know,

I don't want to give myself too much credit,

but there were a lot of things happening inside him,

but he's changed a lot since that.

Like he used to be hard like a rock,

and now he's so open with what he feels.

And he wasn't open with his feelings at all before.

And that might've been because we were very, very young.

And now that we're adults and we can like,

properly hold space with each other.

But I remember like that moment being like a clear,

like I changed the play, you know?

And now it's just like hug them.

And it was just like, I love you.

And now, you know, we text each other all the time

and it's deeper and we're solving problems together.

Like we solve family problems together

where like that, it wasn't quite like that before.

And like he cries, you know, I'll hold space for him.

And it's a real, real relationship.

And before it was just totally surface level.

Had you not done a lot of work,

would you have been in a situation

where you could have given him that hug

and said those words?

I think with courage, yeah.

And I think just with slowing down

and being able to observe,

because like at that time I hadn't done a lot of work.

This was like two, three months after I almost died.

And I just, you know, was examining,

like spending time with my emotions and examining like,

you know, what am I doing like with my wife?

Like what's, you know, what's going on?

Like why does my relationship with my little sister suck?

Like, you know, what more can I do?

And then when I came to my dad, I was like, yo, like,

you know, our relationship is stale.

And I need to, I need to, I want him to know

how much I love him.

Because this man worked so hard, like he should don't,

you know, he gave me life and I'm so grateful.

Why didn't you say that sooner?

I think because my mind was like,

my attention was totally consumed on running away

from myself.

And that's what made me hyper self-centered at that time.

Like I was only worried about what I craved,

only worried about what I wanted to watch on TV,

what I wanted to eat, you know,

what party I wanted to go to next.

And like I couldn't, like I didn't have the mental space

to actually like think about other people well.

It's a lot of distraction it sounds like.

Totally, totally.

A miserable period.

I can relate in a tremendous, tremendous way.

This conversation has really made me

realize how much I need to create spaces for myself.

I think that's one of the big, big takeaways.

Just I'm definitely addicted to distraction.

I think most of us are, especially in the modern world

where technology has been designed to

to take advantage of our brains.

In a way that will, you know,

I was chatting to some of my friends this week

and we had our stag do.

So my six plus friends came together

and halfway through the stag,

do I looked around and saw that we were,

a lot of us were on our phones.

So I said, let's compare screen time.

And we all whipped out our phones.

And my one friend who I won't name, you know who you are,

had 14 hours a day screen time.

He was the record holder, 14 hours a day.

And there was this really interesting moment

where we don't see each other much

because we all live in different parts of the world.

And we all just started roasting him

because he was on his phone the entire time.

We'd gone jet skiing, we'd gone this,

and it wasn't just him, it was most of us,

but the thought that you could be

with your best friends on planet Earth

and still be spending 10 hours a day on your mobile phone

is something.

And I remember we went to a restaurant

and I looked over at the table behind us

and one guy was watching the basketball.

We're in a restaurant.

It's nine PM at night.

One guy's watching the basketball on his phone.

There's a date across from us.

Both of the people on the date were on their phones.

I thought, fucking hell, there must be a cost to this.

Cultural addiction to distraction.

But do you see the paradox in that, right?

Where I'm not trying to shame your friend or anything.

So much love to him.

I'm sure he's a homie.

But if you spend that much time on your phone,

a tool that's supposed to make you connected,

you're actually incredibly disconnected.

Totally, because you spend that much time looking here

and the whole world, your life is happening around you,

but you're not plugged into it.

So there's no presence there.

That's hard.

These apps were sold to us on the basis of connection.

And that's the crazy thing.

We thought we'd become more connected.

We just became a lot more distracted and disconnected.

And the loneliness stats are horrifying.

The suicide rates,

how teenagers feel about themselves these days

and what's coming out about the impact of social media

on young minds, it's pretty dangerous.

And I mean, I've seen it.

It's quite rough.

Like I see it in myself

and I see it in young people around me too.

But the internet that we have now,

it has to be reformed with compassionate design.

We have to think about the way that we build our products

with the user's wellbeing in mind.

And I mean, that's why we decided to build wisdom ventures.

Like myself and five other friends from Silicon Valley

who all worked in different areas of the tech world.

We came together and we basically wanted

to create a venture capital firm

that focuses on funding pre-seed and seed companies.

So brand new startups,

but that are intentionally building their products

in a compassionate manner.

Like when whatever it is that they're trying to do,

whether it's in the wellbeing space or not,

they build in a way where they think about the user

and they think about the mental wellbeing of the user.

Like are they gonna be hurt using this program?

Like are they gonna be hurt using this platform?

And let's make it in a way

where it provides the service that they want,

but keeps them sane and balanced as much as possible.

In a society based on speed and productivity,

moving slowly is a radical act.

I love that quote, chapter eight of your book

in the chapter about challenges during healing.

In a society based on speed and productivity,

moving slowly is a radical act.

Yeah, I think it's something that is so challenging

because the demands are intense

and they just keep raising.

Everyone is trying to reach these incredible levels

of productivity and capitalism is just geared that way

where it's pushing for growth, growth, growth, growth

and not internal growth, like material growth.

So to be able to look at your life and say,

you know what, I just can't answer any more emails right now.

I don't feel good.

Like I need to go for a long walk.

I need to sit down and meditate.

Like I need to take some time for myself.

It's absolutely a radical act and it's necessary

because if you're trying to live a life of thriving,

like a good life, then you need to be able to live

that life at your own pace.

If I'm trying to match your pace,

then it's not gonna work for me.

You and I are very different people.

We can both be productive in different ways,

but we have to do it in a way that honors our internal system

and we're just not gonna be the same.

What's the most important thing

that we haven't talked about in your view?

I think how healing changes the world.

Because I think people like, oh man,

I read a review of lighter and it's funny

because the feedback that I got from the book

from the audience was so like,

they love the last two chapters.

And I remember writing that book and I was like,

okay, the purpose of this book is for me to put everything

together that I believe is important

for personal transformation.

So I cover the whole thing, you know,

self-love, letting go, the challenges that you face,

emotional maturity, how that change ripples outward.

But when I started going outward,

you know, that's the whole purpose of my pen name.

My pen name is Young Pueblo.

Like my real name is Diego Perez,

but I wanted to write within a particular frame.

And Young Pueblo means young people.

Like Pueblo is just a, you know, a Spanish word

and it has different definitions all over Latin America.

From where I come from,

it refers to the masses of impoverished people.

When I started meditating,

I realized I'm incredibly immature,

but the world is immature too,

because I've always loved studying history

and I've seen how the basic things

that we were taught as children, right?

To clean up after yourself, to share with each other,

to tell the truth, to not hit each other,

to generally be kind with one another.

These things are done on an individual basis by some people,

but if you're scale it up to the human collective,

we don't know how to do these things at all, right?

We're terrible at sharing with each other.

We're constantly hitting each other

through all these wars that we're fighting.

We're not kind to one another.

We're lying to each other like systemically.

As one humanity, we have not mastered the fundamentals

that we were taught as children.

And that's really, I wanted to basically put that frame

because I really believe that society emerges

from the individual and from our relationships, right?

Our society is a reflection of these relationships.

So I thought, let me spend a lot of time talking

and writing about personal development

because hopefully if people do develop self-love,

like real self-love,

then they're gonna be much less interested

in harming each other.

Diego Perez, Young Pueblo.

You have 30 seconds, 30 seconds left to live.

You're laid there on your final bed.

Your work is done.

You have a conclusive message to send out to the world.

Everybody is on the end of the phone or eight billion of us.

What'd you say?

If I could speak, I'd probably have everybody meditate with me.

I'd have them be aware of their breath and then die peacefully.

I was then, when you first asked, I was like,

I'd say nothing, I'd just be meditating.

But if there are people waiting for something,

then we have to meditate together.

Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?

We've kind of known each other from afar for a long time.

Is there anything else you're curious about

or before we close out this conversation?

I want to get into the technical aspects of how you manage your time.

Because I've been noticing one thing where,

now that I'm doing multiple things at once,

when I go into a new project,

I never specify how many hours I'm going to work on it.

What I do specify is what I can do for you.

Like what I can bring to the table

and what I'm going to be able to deliver on.

Which is very different from saying,

I can give you 20 hours of my time.

Because that doesn't mean anything.

Sometimes when you create a project,

you put things together and they happen quick.

And a bunch of the rest of the time,

you are not using that time that well.

And I've found that to be really useful to just say,

this is what I can do for you,

but not how long I'm going to work.

And also never be in a situation where someone's my boss.

Like it's always equal partnerships.

I think that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah, is that what you do too?

So, these days, I guess I do both.

So if I'm going into a new partnership or an investment,

I want to be very clear because I know expectations

are the root cause of all unhappiness in business

and in any form of relationship.

I want to be super clear on the expectations.

So A, what I'll deliver, but also clear deliverables

in terms of like time.

Like when?

Yeah, and I know that my time is literally

the most scarce asset that I have.

Like right now, before you arrived,

I'm being hounded by several members of my team

for urgent things.

They're telling me that if I don't deliver

X, Y, and Z on my book today,

then we'll have to move the publication day beyond August.

At the same time, I said something.

All of these things are in my head.

And then I have to say the most important thing

is just this idea of who not how.

I think a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs,

get caught up in trying to figure out how to do stuff.

But the big unlock for me after meeting certain entrepreneurs

and spending time with Richard Branson

and great people is those people default to who.

As in who can do this versus trying to figure it out

and do it myself.

And I'm very lucky now to have great teams of people

where it's meant that I can spend the time I do have

on the small thing that I'm good at

and that only I can do.

And that's like really my strategy to life.

It's like there's a small thing that only I can do

that I'm specifically good at.

It's try and spend all 16 waking hours

doing that thing if I can.

Yeah, but it's a mess.

And that is the most important thing I could probably say.

It is a total mess.

I hear about all these successful people or business people

and there's like 30 minute routine

and I have this time blocking technique and blah, blah, blah.

I can't, yeah.

I can't.

I mean, my life is a mess.

It's a balanced chaotic mess where each element of my life

kind of shrinks and expands in priority and attention

as I go through different seasons.

Right now I'm in a season of work

because I'm filming a TV show and then I'm doing this.

This is my week off and I'm back to filming the TV show.

So where's my partner and all of that?

After the TV show is done,

I'll be back with my partner and we'll go on holiday.

So that will expand.

I'm okay with it being a mess.

I think one of the things I'm most grateful for

is I never believed in what you said, which is perfection.

I never believed it.

I saw all of my idols and the way that they're portrayed

in interviews and stuff is like these superheroes or whatever.

I'm a total mess in so many facets of my life

and I always believed that that was both okay and enough

for me to achieve what I wanted to do.

That's really helped me because perfection

creates that sense of inadequacy, doesn't it?

It totally does.

That's beautiful to hear because I've been learning that

I can do it my way.

It's the same thing that you were just saying.

I can do it my way.

I don't have to be like the people around me.

I can learn from them, have role models,

but I don't need to be exactly like my role models.

I can just figure out how to achieve well

in the way that works best for me.

I think coming to peace with the fact that

there are just some things that I'm good at

and other things that I'm not.

When there are some things that you're not good at,

I don't need to get an MBA.

I need to hire out an MBA.

I'm good at marketing.

I'm good at vision.

I'm good at writing.

I can meditate.

That's all I can do.

That is more than enough.

Especially if you're good at those,

you just focus on those things,

you're going to be in that irreplaceable category

of people that can do that.

The world needs that.

Some of my best teammates are fundamentally,

including myself,

some of the best people that work in some of my companies

are fundamentally bad at critical things.

They're not good managers.

They're unorganized.

But they are the most incredible creatives.

Instead of trying to fight what might be seen

as their deficiency,

we've come to learn over time and with experience

to nurture their brilliance.

That gets the best out of them.

Same with Richard Branson.

He can't look at presentations, can't do English,

can't do math, he said, at a high level.

He's built one of the most incredible companies in the world.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast

where the last guest asks a question for the next guest,

not knowing who they're going to leave it for.

And the question left for you is,

what is your rich life?

My rich life would be being able to meditate

as much as I want to do more of these consecutive long courses

and still be able to amply support my parents.

Take super fantastic care of my wife and my children

or if my siblings or my wife's siblings

or parents need support that I can just give

without any sort of worry.

And being able to sit is what we call it,

being able to meditate

and still be able to give without worry.

I think that's the place where I'm trying to get to.

I've had a lot of success,

but I also know that I'm still on a building stage,

like I'm still growing.

That's very beautiful.

All your work is very beautiful.

The way I would describe it is it feels incredibly refreshing

to hear someone that has such a...

What I feel like is such a pure perspective

about the path to becoming our aligned happiest self.

Meeting you makes me feel refreshed.

It's almost like you've cleaned out a bunch of stuff in my head

that needed to be cleaned out for me to get close

to the happiest life that I could live.

That's the way that I would viscerally describe it.

And that's exactly what your book is.

I mean, that's what it's called, Lighter.

After meeting you and after having this conversation,

I feel inherently lighter.

This is what the book does to people.

It makes them feel lighter.

It's a perfect title.

What a perfect title,

because that's exactly how I feel right now.

It's a pleasure to meet you.

It's a pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you for doing such necessary work.

I'm so excited to follow your journey through entrepreneurship,

but also through publications like this one

over the next many, many decades.

Thank you so much, my friend.

It makes me feel so happy that this moment finally came together

and just watching you from afar.

I've been appreciating you all along the way.

And I've been supported by the wisdom

that you've been putting out there,

but to also see you act and create in the world,

to literally create things that people can benefit from.

And that's beautiful.

And I'm happy to see people doing both.

You can grow as an individual and be effective

and supportive in this world

and give people things they need.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Quick one.

As you guys know,

we're lucky enough to have BlueJeans by Verizon

as a sponsor of this podcast.

And for anyone that doesn't know,

BlueJeans is an online video conferencing tool

that allows you to have slick, fast,

high-quality online meetings

without all the glitches you might normally find

with online meeting tools.

And they have a new feature called BlueJeans Basic.

BlueJeans Basic is essentially a free version

of their top-quality video conferencing tool.

That means you get an immersive video experience

that is super high-quality,

super easy to use,

and super, basically, zero-fast.

Apart from all the incredible features,

like zero time limits on meeting calls,

it also comes with high-fidelity audio and video,

including Dolby Voice, which is incredibly useful.

They also have enterprise-grade security

so you can collaborate with confidence.

It's so smooth that it's quite literally

changing the game for myself and my team

without compromising on quality.

To find out more, all you have to do is search BlueJeans.com

and let me know how you get on.

I'll see you next time.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.