The Startup Ideas Podcast - Yung Pueblo’s Self-Love Empire

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Today Greg is joined by New York Times Best-Selling Author, and Instagram Celebrity Yung Pueblo, whose real name is Diego Perez. In this episode, Greg and Diego talk about building an audience through meaningful writing, turning it into books, and using that influence to build companies that expand the vision expressed in writing that got it all started. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce. You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where It Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergaLINKS FOR THIS EPISODEProduction Team:https://podflow.comDiego Perez / Yung Pueblo:https://yungpueblo.comhttp://instagram.com/yung_puebloSHOW NOTES02:45 - What compassionate venture means.06:01 - How he thinks of each of his businesses - books, social media and venture capital09:19 - How he thinks about building on other social platforms versus email?12:45 - Comparing his business's structure to other writers' structures.16:00 - Social media entrepreneurs he looks up to.18:47 - Should I write a book?21:54 - A comparison of getting published and self-publishing.25:04 - The importance of the pen name Young Pueblo.40:00 - How to learn meditation.

Diego, I've been looking forward to this for months. I have been following you for years, probably since like 2016, 2017, early days when I remember you were the first person I'd heard talked about self-love. Wow. Yeah, I didn't know. Well, that's really shocking because I didn't know you were following for that long. I've been following you, I think, for about two years. And it was funny because it was at a time when I was first starting my venture capital company. everything you were saying about startups, I was like just eating it all up.

I wanted to kick it off by just trying to understand your business empire. My main thing is I write under the name Young Pueblo. I started taking it really seriously around 2015. That was my primary focus until about 2020 when I started opening up and getting into the venture capital world. But the Young Pueblo work, it's basically, it stems from like the development of my personal life where I used to be just quite a big mess. I was partying all the time, just pushing my body to the edge as much as possible. And I really hit a wall and a rock bottom point where I almost lost my life.

And when I realized that I couldn't push myself any further, I was like, I need to start accepting, you know, what's happening inside of me, like these emotions that I'm trying to ignore. I ended up changing my habits, changing how I eat, changing the way I interact with people. I eventually started meditating. And when I started meditating, I realized that the big changes were happening inside of me where my mind felt a lot less intense than it used to. And I didn't have as intense reactions when difficult situations would arise. So to me, all those changes were really surprising. And another byproduct of that was that my creativity started blossoming in a way where

it never had before. And I started writing. And that's really where Young Pueblo came about. I've since released three books. I have a four phone coming out. It was sometime during 2020 when I felt like something was missing. I was like, you know, I love this work that I'm doing. I love writing books, but I also want to be able to help people in other ways. And then this idea came forward to build wisdom ventures, which is basically a venture capital company that's trying to invest in companies and founders that are trying to build their products in a compassionate manner. So whether they're building in the wellness field or not, they're intentionally designing their products in a way that keeps the well-being of the user in mind. And that's been just fantastic work. We actually just finished raising Fund One for $10 million and we're focusing on pre-seed and seed investments. Can you expand on what it means to be compassionate?

Like, what does a compassionate venture really mean? It means that you're being really cognizant of the other person's perspective and, like, what's, best for their well-being. If you look at the basic social media, products that just can, you know, capture your attention, make you, you know, really sort of like addicted, isolated, lonely. Like, we know how to build things like that. But can we build things that can provide a great service, but simultaneously don't hurt your mind in the process, right?

Aren't making you a worse version of yourself or aren't making it. You know, we want to be able to treat your mind at a beautiful place that we care for, not one that we're trying to damage. There's a wide variety of products like that. There's one in particularly we just invested in a bereavement company. Like when you have a loved one that passes away, you don't quite think about how many things go into taking care of them as an individual, like and simultaneously taking care of your own mental health while that's happening. And on top of that, taking care of all of like the legal aspects of who gets what and, you know, how is debt handled? but this company better leave, it basically aggregates all those things that you would need

in one place to help you through that bereavement process so that it's not as difficult on you or that purpose. And how is compassion good business? I think that's what we're trying to prove. Like I got really inspired by, I think the clothing world is like one of the first places where you saw people care more about how their purpose. products were produced because the consumers were like, hey, I would love if my clothes are made by people who are getting paid well in a way that is less damaging to the environment.

And I think that same type of energy we want to bring. I think it's going to work. When I started talking about community-based products, people always told me, oh, that's not, that's not going to be a big return for investors. It's not going to be a big opportunity. And he sort of had to deal with a lot of crap from people for a long period of time. So you're very much in that stage where it's like year one of like I haven't even heard the term compassionate, you know, startups before compassionate ventures. So you are, you know, you're creating this category and you're proving out that thesis.

And I think it makes sense because there's definitely this movement. And you're seeing it on the forefront just being on like writing your books and on being on Instagram of people wanting almost like the anti-product. They want the anti-Tik-Ticot. Yeah. When we first created WISInventures, we were hoping to invest in that next generation of social media that can help connect people without all these addictive, like, buy products. I think there definitely has to be a different way. We're simultaneously surprised and not by how much, like, investors just came up.

Like, investors came through and were like, yeah, like, this sounds great. This is like a wonderful experiment. So you have the book business. You have the, you know, the Instagram, social audience. You have the venture business. Walk me through how you think about each of the businesses. The young Pueblo audience, it's grown over the years. It's about 3.4, 3.5 million people now across all the networks.

The books are my, like, central component. All other opportunities for me arise from, you know, the quality of the writing that I'm putting out. Having sold a million books after having become a number one New York Times bestseller, it's just allowed me to like leverage that work to then be able to speak to investors in a way where, you know, they really take you seriously in terms of building the venture capital company and being able to connect my audience to all of these companies that we're investing in and show them like, hey, I'm directly investing in these companies, being able to give such a wide audience knowledge about that these companies even exist, especially at the startup level. That's like a huge bonus to them because I'm, you know, 30, 35. And I learned pretty clearly when I first started that you want to win people over first and institutions later. So that's why Instagram was so important to like get it out there and get pieces of the book out there floating. So to see if, you know, people were understanding what I was writing. And at the same time, I decided to self-publish a book to see how it would do.

And, you know, it went pretty well. I think I self-published my first book inward. And it was out there for six months. I think I sold like 12,000 copies, which is a good amount. And it also kind of proved to publishers that this is worthwhile. So then I got signed. The book was re-released into bookstores. But to me, like whether it's a new book that I'm releasing or a company that I'm trying to build myself or a company that I'm supporting through venture capital, like communities, everything. You know, people are going to decide whether this product is valuable. They're going to test it out for themselves. And if it's good, they didn't tell their friends. And to me, that's been like everything. And it's the same thing. Like when you're an author, you do, you know, whatever book you have,

you have a pre-order stage. And during that pre-order stage, you make it 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, pre-orders. Then once people actually get the book and they start reading it, if they like it, then that 50,000 becomes 150,000 or 200,000 because they like it. And it's the same thing for a company. You know, they, they, they, you have a small group. of people who test out a product. And if it's enjoyable and if it provides a service that they don't already have, then it'll spread like fire. Someone asked me just before this call, how do you know when you have product market fit? And I was like, if you're asking self if you have product market fit, you don't have product market fit. You know people are going to be screaming it.

They're going to want to tell people whenever I make something, when I make a new book or when I'm working on a new venture, I'm always trying to tell myself, like, make something that's useful, right? That if it's useful and you want to like carry it around with you or to me, like one of the biggest compliments that I get about the books that I've written is if someone's like, oh, I always keep your book in my purse or I always keep your book on your nightstand. To me, it's like, wow, that means that you find a lot of value in this book. And, and that's great because I'm hoping that these books serve as a point of inspiration for you to help, you know, either improve your relationships or keep transforming your life for the better. How do you think about

building on other people's platforms, like on Instagram versus, you know, a newsletter where you own the relationship. Man, it's tough, man. That's been the great conversation in the past. It's a double-edged sword where on one end it's really positive because like Instagram, X, threads. These places will be beautiful avenues that make it really easy to connect with other people. But then at the end of the day, you have no idea how the algorithm works.

And because you have no control over it, you have no control over it. these companies change, then those changes may not always benefit you. In the past three years, I've been really focusing on just building a newsletter. And I've found a home on Substack because I've become friends with the people who have built Substack and have seen the depth of their commitment to how they're always going to keep that, like, that nexus of Substack where you have direct connection with your audience. where you know you send something to them and they all receive it via email and there's no algorithm between you and another person. And to me, that's like so critical. And I think looking back,

I feel like if I would have done things differently, I would have definitely put a lot more emphasis on building a newsletter and like starting in 2016 as opposed to starting in 2020. Yeah. When you talk to like James Clear, Tim Ferriss, they always say everything is about the newsletter. They're completely correct. And now I find myself, like, in a way following in their footsteps and, like, tracing everything, pointing it all back to the newsletter so that people know, like, if you really want to hang out, like, that's the place where we should hang out. 100%. When you say, like, you know, these businesses, you know, is it just you? Like, are you managing the Instagram? Like, who's behind young Pueblo? Oh, behind young Pueblo, it's just me and my wife. So my wife was worked as a scientist for many years. And she actually took. care of the two of us when I was first developing Young Pueblo. So I spent like two and a half years

not making any money and just like working on, working on myself as an individual and trying to craft my writing, develop my voice as a writer, work on my manuscript. And eventually, you know, it sort of started picking up steam and becoming bigger and bigger. And she wanted more flexibility in her life. So she decided to start working with me. So I do all of the posting for social media but she will handle the relationship with the different publishers that we have, with the talent agencies, because I'm also represented by United Talent Agency. We're considering hiring like one or two more people, but at the same time, I've spoken to James Clear about this too.

It's like he just has one person that he works with as well. And I've heard that I think John Kabat-Zinn also has a similar sort of setup where like he just does what he can do. And if people have to wait a lot for him to respond. respond to emails, he just has decided that it would make his life easier if he just is the one who's actually there typing everything. And I have a lot of respect for that because the publishers help a ton because they come with their own teams. But having it just be me and my wife, I think, keeps it manageable so that my attention can then focus on the venture capital world. Because that

requires just me on that side. I think Ryan Holiday has a bigger team with the Daily Stoic and what he's working on. Have you followed Ryan's work at all and curious like what you think of what you think of his model? I've spoken to him. His model's working well. I think it just depends on where you want your biggest revenue coming from. I saw one time Bray Brown took a picture of her team and it was like 20 something people. It was like tons of people. And when I saw that picture, one, I was very happy for her. But then I thought about myself in that context and I was like, you know, I think I would just be like, too stressed out by having to manage all these people.

And then I think there are some points where I would feel like I'd have to write books just to pay all these people. That is stressful because then you're right. In a lot of sense, you're creating products to support them.

And then it's like, am I working for them? Are they working for me? I just spoke to a friend yesterday and he was telling me how, you know, He also is out there on Instagram, has more than a million followers, but he got to a point where he had so many employees that just his monthly overhead was over $100,000 in terms of like paying

people. And he was like, what am I doing? You know, this is like, this is totally getting out of hand. And he had to totally scale back and, you know, for the right reason. I also heard that Alex Hermose has, and Layla Hermosie have been spending like hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on their content team. One of the things I'm thinking about is like, is it a chicken and a egg type thing? Like, do you need to spend money to create content to get the audience to create the services? Like, what do you think of when you hear stories about like Alex Hermosey who basically, you know, became popular via his content team? Yeah, I think it's, you know, it just depends on what type of content you're putting out there. If it's like

business content that's specific and you're trying to get a quick audience and it's totally possible you know you just have to spend money and hire the right people who who know how to like go viral because i think going viral just like a recipe to it it's not it's not like something like uh that's that's too difficult to do i mean people musicians do it all the time there's like after a while when you become a musician you get good at it you know how to write a hit and like you know you can just look at drake over and over again there's like similarities between the hits that he puts out there. What's worked for me and what's helped me with my longevity to keep chugging along has been to just stay as genuine as possible and to just like, like the,

the center of everything I do is meditating. So like, I just have to keep meditating. Like I meditate two hours a day, one hour in the morning, one hour in the evening. I go to meditation retreats like, you know, a few times a year. Usually, usually one of them will be longer like 30 or 45 days long. and that to me is like that clears my mind enough that when I sit down and I write you know I write with the intention of like putting something that's actually useful for people and then it all sort of works itself out. I want to come back to meditation but who are some social media entrepreneurs you look up to? The dude who's like really the boss man is James Clear.

He bet on the newsletter and his bed totally. paid off. I think him and Mark Manson, like I listened to them really closely. I probably have more, more social media followers than both of them, but they sell more books than I do. And, and I think it's because of the way, the way that they have set up their newsletter focus and having just fantastic content. Because I think, when I think about James is, you know, his book, Atomic Habits, that book not only has great promotion with his weekly newsletter, but it's a fantastic book. It's just, it's the book. The book is just phenomenal.

Like, you know, I've given it to people as a gift many times over and they find it incredibly useful. So I think in my mind, I'm really inspired by that. You know, when you bring that beautiful combination together of like a high quality product with fantastic marketing, then you're going to have a tremendous hit. The beauty about atomic habits is there's so many rituals involved. And he can use this content to bring back. Like everything points back to these atomic habits, right? So he almost crafted the perfect book with the perfect amount of rituals,

with the perfect medium of newsletter. He uses Instagram in a really smart way where he always draws it back to the newsletter. I wonder if James Clear was he really passionate it about atomic habits or did he see the opportunity to build this ecosystem? Oh, that's really interesting. I have a friend who worked with him before he released Atomic Habits. She worked at Business Insider and it was back when he would release articles. But I bet he learned a lot from releasing articles and just finding out like which ones were of good quality, which ones like, you know, made sense and which ones people enjoyed and shared it with others. And I, you know, I've learned from that and do like a similar

thing with my newsletter where I released the book called Lighter. That was my first nonfiction book, longer form, where I really go deeply into personal development. A number of chapters of that book are built off of newsletters that I released that I knew performed really well. And so I would take something that was maybe like 700 words and then built a whole chapter out of it. And I think using that framework of testing out the way that you set something up with what you write and expanding on it in a book that is such a good way to produce a book these days. Yeah, I had someone on the pod recently, Nicholas Cole, and he's published 10 books. He told me a book is basically eight really good blog posts put together.

Because I told him, I was like, dude, he was actually, he hit me up and he was like, you should write a book. And I was like, I can't write a book. You're, I can't write a book, man. Come on. Dude, your post go viral all the time. You can just take them. That's what he said.

And then he was just like, you've been writing weekly for years. You have to go back and put it together and expand upon it and write examples. Yeah, I mean, question for you selfishly, someone like me who has a niche, you know, an area of expertise in a particular space, who writes on the internet, who hasn't really been drawn so much to books because I love the instantification of, you know, this morning I published a newsletter, press publish, and I got feedback instantaneously. Or you. you post a tweet and you get a thousand likes. Why should someone like me write a book? I mean, the reason that I still do it is that books still sell. Like if it's a good book, maybe 5% of books that are released actually sell a lot of copies. But out of those 5%, some of them sell extremely well. And if the topic is really good, people will give you their attention. And they'll like read your book over a week or two week period. They've trusted you for this long, then they're going to trust you to give you multiple hours of their time to be able to go deep into a book. And I think it's phenomenal these days. The fact that you can read a book like

as a physical book or you can read it on your phone on the Kindle app or you can read it or you can listen to it as an audiobook. That gives people so many different ways to interact with it. And when you listen to a book, it's just like, you're just basically listening to a podcast. And it's been interesting the way that like even though our attention is getting totally overwhelmed by our phones and by our TVs at the same time books are selling really well. And the other thing too is that you can leverage your work. You'd be surprised that if you've written a lot over the past year or two years, you can just do the sort of editing process rather quickly and just pull out like what are the most highly rated, highly valued, highly commented, highly liked things that I've written.

in, put them out in front of you, and then you can start writing from there. And that won't stop you from creating basically a whole new product out of that original material. So you just leverage that old material and deepen it, enhance it, and then put it back out there. And nobody will be upset. It'll benefit everybody because the people who loved it the first time, they'll enjoy reading it the deeper version. And a publisher won't get mad, released that in some other fashion before, because publishing companies, they're basically just venture capital companies. They'll make 100 bets and they're all like tiny investments to them and a few of them work out. So they're really focused on the investment that's going to pan out.

And how has working with a publisher been for you like you mentioned your books now in all these bookstores? And that's amazing. On the other hand, I know how much being light is important to you. And I would imagine that if you have a publisher, they want you to publish as much as possible. It's like having, as you said, a venture capitalist, right? Like, they want you to grow and they're incentivized for you to create a lot of content. So how has been working with a publisher been for you? And why haven't you self-publish?

Yeah, that's a great question. Self-publishing has great limitations. Like, even though you make more per book with self-publishing, the amount of reach that you get when you're actually in every single bookstore around the world, your book is in airports, that it's in local bookstores everywhere. That helps so much more than just being on Amazon. Because I think Amazon definitely does the majority of book sales, but it doesn't do all the book sales yet.

Having it in stores feels like not only like a big personal victory, just because I've loved bookstores my whole life. But I think it increases the reach of the book itself. It's worthwhile because you had a particular audience, but then there's like a magic that can happen in the bookstore. where people can see it and then slowly your book, if it's being bought a lot in a particular bookstore, it'll work its way up to the front of the bookstore. And that doesn't quite happen if you only have an audience of like, you know, 100,000 people and they can only access it on

Amazon. So I think, yeah, bookstores are still quite powerful. Yeah, it's surprising how powerful the airport bookstore is. Oh, the airport is the big win, man. When you, you. It took me years to get into the airport, years. And even now when I walk in and just see, like, only in the past, like, year and a half have I been in the airport. My wife and I are like, wow, like we did it in the airport. Yeah, I just Googled Hudson, the largest airport bookstore in North America. And they're only in North America, yet they're bringing in $1.8 billion a year in revenue. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a tight selection, too. This selection is so tight. In places also like Target, like if you can get your book in Target, you got to sell a ton of books.

For people listening, it's really about what tradeoffs do you want to make? If you are looking to reach the masses, it sounds like having a publisher's still necessary. For me, I'm just curious about the process. Like, I'm a curious person. So the idea of like, oh, maybe I'll make a book because it'll be fun and I'll just, you know, start by self-publishing and then maybe see where it goes. Yeah. I think it's totally worth a shot, and you'd be surprised. I think you can put out a fantastic book in like six months.

It really doesn't have to be like the most like grueling, intense process. Especially if you were writing from scratch, then it would take like two, two and a half years. But if you've already been writing a ton, then all you have to do is basically start with the elimination process. You can literally just go to your analytics and see like what performed well and what did it. And then that makes it really easy for you. How important has the pen name of young Pueblo been for you? Like, if you went out as Diego Perez, not Young Pueblo, would you be less popular, more popular the same? Man, that's the great question.

I think there was something about the pen name that was just, like, so different that caught a little bit more of people's attention. I see a lot of authors, half pen names, not have pen names, but to me, it just felt like it made sense, because young Pueblo means young people, and it hit me so hard when I was meditating that, like, I was really immature. Like, I have a lot of growing up to do. But I've been studying history my whole life. And when I was examining humanity, I was like, wait, humanity has a lot of growing up to do. Like, we really do not excel. We have not mastered the basic things that will get taught in kindergarten, like the basic things of cleaning up after ourselves, telling the truth, sharing with each other, not hitting each other, being kind to one another, like these

fundamental things that were taught as five-year-olds and four-year-olds, we may be able to do these things as individuals, but as a human collective, we suck at that. We're like really bad at that. And I thought of this work when I was writing like my first, second, third book, I was like, it feels really important to be even a small part of this like maturation of humanity that's happening right now. And I was like, okay, where can I help? And I thought, let me put the emphasis on personal transformation because as I've been studying more and more, it, you know, it isn't like the type of system that we have, whether it's, you know, a communist system, socialist, whether it's capitalist, you know, libertarian, if you have people that are like highly traumatized,

you know, or people that are too self-centered, then it's going to be really hard to have a peaceful world. If we're able to develop our self-love and treat ourselves better, heal ourselves better, then we're going to be less inclined to hurt other people intentionally or unintentionally. So, and part of that, you know, is not just with the personal transformation. It's also in terms of our relationships. Like if we can love each other better and we can be not only better friends to each other, but also better, like intimate partners with each other, then And there's going to be a lot less harm that's going to be reproduced in the world. So I try to write always with that mindset in the hopes that, you know,

hopefully I can inspire individuals. Maybe that inspiration will trickle that word and help humanity become a little more peaceful. And you think the name young Pueblo, just when people are scanning Instagram, do you think they taste a little? They're like, what is that? Yeah, what do you think crosses their mind? I've heard a lot of different things. Like some people think it's like, you know, I'm a big,

fan of Young, the, like, psychoanalyst. But I've never read any of Young's books. Like, I actually prefer Freud. I think I've, like, read a lot of Freud's books. And then, you know, you hear one of the podcasts or something that I've been on and, and a sense of like, oh, this is where it's coming from. There's like a bigger mission here. I think when you're choosing your name, a little bit of mystery is important. Because if you think about it, it's a game for capturing attention. So you're on these social platforms. You have something you want to say. And your goal is to get someone to click your profile.

Then once you're on someone's profile, your new game is to convert them to follow you. So it's this commitment curve that I think you have. And that's why I think pen names are so powerful yet so underused. I don't think we would be having this conversation, number one, New York Times bestselling author, if your name was something else. That's my take.

Yeah, you know, I love that feedback too, because I think there have been times when I'm like wondering to myself, like, why did I do that? But I'm actually grateful to my former self when I, you know, decided to just stick with the pen name Young Pueblo. It reminds me like, oh, yeah, this is just a project.

So make sure that you say what's actually worth saying and that it doesn't become this like giant money game. Do you feel more free that you can talk as Young Pueblo. For sure. And also like, I've been on a lot of podcasts. I've probably been interviewed on like 80 plus podcasts, but, but I don't really get recognized. I also don't put my face up on social media very often. Only when I'm like, you know, if I go on TV to promote a book or something like that, it's helped me like maintain a lot of anonymity, which I'm pretty grateful for because I love just, you know, being in a supermarket with my wife and nobody noticing us. I'm really curious.

So, Greg, how far does your, like, how big is your audience now across all networks? Probably like 600,000. So not, it's not huge. But it's a very high quality audience. So it's a lot of people, a lot of business builders, a lot of investors, just people interested in creation and community. So I'm really interested now in equipping these people with more tools and tactic. If I know something that other people don't and I could equip them with knowledge to build these

types of businesses, don't I have to be in service to do those things? Like don't I have to give away all this knowledge? And the reason I had that sort of idea is just over the last few years, I've had crazy stories of people been like I was working out of McDonald's and I read one of your blog post and I was able to create a business that's now worth eight figures. I started this Discord community as like a 17 year and now it's a paid Discord community and it's bringing in $800,000 a year and I was able to buy a house for my mom and all these like crazy stories of like, hey, I picked up on some information. I applied the information. So like just today we launched this membership called community empire

dot co where it's basically a bunch of my playbooks and tools and tactics and accountability calls for my team and stuff like that and I want to see these people who join this thing are they actually going to be able to create their own community empires and I think I'm on this path around like equipping these people with as much Swiss Army nights as possible. Man, I got to sign up. That sounds awesome. I think yeah, it's cool hearing about it about the way you've constructed things too because it just sounds so smart. I imagine is a lot of that,

like a lot of those numbers is it newsletter focus? Newsletter and Twitter. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, the Twitter algorithm treats do well. I mean, it's because you give a lot in each post and I think it's more than other people. I think that's why your stuff stood out to me so much. But it's funny to me because just listening to you talk, you probably have like two books inside of you? I have two, two books. Actually, I have the content for them. One is community empire, and it's an expanded version of basically the plate books inside community empire.com, which is how do you build an audience, how do you convert that audience into a community, and how do you get ideas from that community to build them products that they're obsessed with

and all the different business models associated with it? And my second book, I don't know if I want to say what the second book is, it's related. it to the first book. I'll tell you another time. But I love that. I hit it on the dot. I was like just listening to you talk, I'm like, man, you got like two books in you just right now. I think to like support your friend who told you you should write a book, I think you should definitely do it, man. I've noticed that when whenever I release a new book, um, my communities just grow, especially first three, four months after the book is released. And a lot of that is from friends gifting the book because you'll find that some of your best people that love your work,

they're just not online people. Right. They're just not people that, like, spend tons of time online. They're not that savvy with, you know, Twitter and whatnot. And they don't sign up to any newsletters, but somehow they end up getting your book through their friend. And then they sign up to the community. That's a really good takeaway for folks listening.

When you're thinking about creating content and that could be a book, it could be a podcast, it could be a newsletter, it could be a community. There's different strokes for different folks, basically. I just wrote a post the other day on Substack about advice to new writers. And I told them, you know, don't forget that you're a writer first and foremost and not a social media manager. I find with like myself and with other people who are out there, it's like they'll stretch themselves so far on every single platform that it's just sort of like devaluing and like they're spending too much time figuring out how to go viral as opposed to just just write something that's amazing. It's easier said than done because you know what? What happens is there's a lot of creators, and I'm guilty of this sometimes too, where I'll see a type of post that goes viral and I'll be like, oh, like, how come my stuff's not going viral?

And I'll be like, maybe I should put this concept in that format. And then all of a sudden, like, you're doing things for the wrong reasons. It's content first and algorithm second, not algorithm first and content second. You should be pleasing the algorithm gods at first, especially as this whole AI. wave hits us and more and more content feels very cookie cutter. The stuff that's going to stand out is this unique, remarkable, exceptional, weird stuff that comes from being yourself. Yeah, I'm curious too. Sometimes we create these funnels where we know what our audience likes, but we are also able to integrate what we like into that and then we post it. But it gets so

strict over time that it almost feels like you're like losing 50% of potential creativity. People know what to expect from you. And since I've been breaking away from that, like being on Instagram and being on like threads and Twitter has been so much more fun because I'm just like, you know what? I don't even care. Let me just post it and see what happens. And it almost feels like in a way that I'm like playing around in a way where it's, it was like 2016. But I'm wondering for you like when you know being at like 600,000 like how do you feel in regards to like playing with format do you feel like you can for me so yes I feel like I can and I just have to be okay with some months I'm going to have really high engagement and really high virality and some months I'm

going to have really low and yeah yeah it's just me in real time exploring my interests I'm not a robot I'm coming up with new ideas I'm trying to add to the conversation versus curate I think what's really underrated as for entrepreneurs in general is just to have fun with what you're doing. Because if you follow the fun, good things will happen. And you can't take yourself too seriously. I love that, man. I think it's like it's a healthy approach to.

And with that like risk, like you have to be okay with, you know, the numbers going slightly down. And then people kind of getting used to you doing things in a slightly different way. and then they go back up. But it's like, you know, when you play the long game, all you have to do to be successful is just not stop. I've seen so many writers just get burned out by the social media aspect of it. And they just disappear.

They just like stop, you know, they stop posting and they kind of close that part of themselves. You've got to trust the process. So I spoke to an entrepreneur the other day. One of the most talented designers I know, creator slash entrepreneur. He's actually set up. He ended up raising a ton of money, selling his company, but he's not going to end up with much from it.

So he was a bit down, down on himself. And I was like, dude, don't be down on yourself. You're like 23. You're so talented. Like, all you got to do is just show up. Like, and you don't even need to show up seven days a week. Like, you can show up four days a week, literally. And, and you're going to be a okay.

And he was like, yeah, it's just like, I wish I got. like a few more million dollars from this deal. And I was like, you will not have to worry about money. Like, just create and stay healthy. And you can learn from your mistakes. I want to end up on meditation because I know that's core to who you are. Sure. I honestly don't know what meditation really is.

Can you define what meditation is? I can define it in the terms that I know. So there's a lot of different meditation styles will have different goals. especially the Vapasana meditation that I do, it's definitely a high spiritual path that's supposed to lead out of suffering. But to get there, it's really just a mental gym. There are qualities that your mind has, specifically qualities of awareness, non-reactiveness, and compassion that are ingrained in your mind, but they're not strong. They're quite weak. And when you go to these silent 10-day meditation courses, and I'm talking about the ones in the S. Ngoenka,

tradition. You spend three days just building your awareness. And you do that by being aware of the natural breath and just stay with the natural breath and be with it. And that will help calm and concentrate the mind. And that really will strengthen your awareness. The next part is where for the next seven days, you start being aware of the truth that exists in the body by literally paying attention to all the sensations that are happening in you. And that will help build this quality of equanimity, which I'm using the synonym non-reactiveness, really balance of mind. And ultimately, that helps not only purify the mind, but it helps just clear the mind incredibly well so that, you know, whatever situation comes up, you'll know what the right action is to take.

And lastly, you build that quality of compassion, of selfless love, of loving kindness, where you want what's best for yourself and for other people. And that becomes a lot easier with a pure mind. But I really think of meditation as a mental gym. It's like you're, you know, you've got to strengthen your mind because the mind can do a ton of amazing things. But most of those things are based around simply intellectualizing. But if you want peace, if you want clarity, if you want compassion,

if you want like a higher discerning capacity, then you have to cultivate that. And if you want to learn this skill is the best way to do it to go to one of these retreats? It depends on your capacity. It depends on like there's like a lot of factors. There are a bunch of different apps that will teach, you know, basic forms of meditation. But if you want to really dig deep, if you want to go serious, if you want to sort of take yourself to that next level, then I definitely recommend doing a retreat. And there are a lot of different styles of Phapasana as well.

So you kind of have to just find what works for you. But I've found, like, I meditate in the same tradition as you've all know, Harari. And those 10-day courses will eventually build into like 20, 30, 45, 60-day long meditation courses. And they're incredibly powerful. Even you've all said it, which I thought was really interesting because him and I, we actually have never, we've never spoken. But he said he would not have been able to write sapiens without meditation.

And it's funny because I didn't even discover that I was a writer until I started meditating. Like meditating did something to my mind just like kind of realigned it really well so that I could produce creativity. And that literally wasn't possible before meditating. How do I find one of these retreats? You go to dama.org, dh-a-m-a-org. And there are meditation centers in the same style all over the world. Yeah, you can just sign up to one. I'm checking it out.

I'm actually going to Japan for a month. So maybe they have one in Japan, I wonder. They do. Yeah, they have a center there. Cool. Gago, this has been an absolute privilege and pleasure. If people want to follow you and follow your substack, where could they go? Youngpevlo.com and Young is spelled without the Owen. Y-U-N-G-P-U-E-B-L-O.

You can definitely find me on Instagram or on X on threads. And my books are in bookstores everywhere. The newest one is called The Way Forward and that one's available for pre-order now. It'll be in your favorite airport, too. All right, thanks again. Been a great convo.