How To Build An Audience From Scratch | Yung Pueblo

0:00I spent like two and a half years not making any money and just like working on myself as an individual and trying to craft my writing develop my voice as a writer work on my manuscript like Instagram X threads like these places will be beautiful Avenues they make it really easy to connect with other people the young Pueblo audience it's about 3.4 3.5 million people now across all the networks having sold a million bucks after having become a number one New York Times bestseller it's just allowed me to speak to investors in a way they really take you seriously Diego I've been looking forward to this for months

0:34I have been following you for years I think probably since like 2016. oh wow yeah 2017 early days when I remember you were the first person I'd heard talk about self-love wow wow yeah yeah I didn't know wow that's that's really um shocking because I didn't know you were following for that long I've been following you I think for about two years it was funny because it was at a time when I was first starting my Venture Capital company everything you were saying about uh 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 um I

1:16write under the name Young Pueblo I think I started taking it really seriously around 2015. that was my primary focus for 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 you know used to be just quite a big mess like I was you know partying all the time just pushing my body to the edge as much as much as possible 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

1:49myself 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 you know like changing my habits like changing how I ate changing the way I interact with people I eventually started meditating 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 you know difficult situations would arise so to me all those changes were really surprising another byproduct of that was that my creativity started blossoming in

2:24a way where it never had before and I started writing and that's really where young Pueblo came about and I've since released three books I have a fourth one 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

3:00field or not they're intentionally designing their products in a way that keeps the well-being of the user in mind and um and that's been just fantastic work we actually just finished raising our fund one for 10 million dollars and we're focusing on pre-seed and Seed Investments and um it's been a phenomenal work can you expand on what it means to be compassionate like what is a compassionate Adventure 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 medias that products that just can you know capture attention make you you know really sort of of like

3:40addicted 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 um you know we want to be able to treat your mind as beautiful place that we care for not one that we're trying to damage there is a wide variety of products like that I think there's one in particular we just invested in bereavement company that's like when you have a loved one that passes away you don't quite think about how many things

4:13go 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 how is debt handled and but this company better leave um 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 stiff difficult on you and how is compassion good business I think that's that's the what we're trying to prove like I got really inspired by um I think the clothing world is like

4:49one of the first places where you saw people care more about how their 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 product well always told me oh that's not that's not going to be a big turn for investors it's not going to be a big big opportunity and he sort of had to deal with a lot of crap from people for

5:22a 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 fashion Adventures so you are you're 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 on the Forefront just being on like writing your books and on being on Instagram of people wanting uh wanting almost like the anti products they want the anti-tick-tock yeah when we first created wisdom Ventures that was a lot of the conversation was like we were hoping to invest in that next

6:00generation of social media that can help connect people without all these addictive like byproducts I think there definitely has to be a different way we um simultaneously surprise and not by how much like investors just came up you know like investors came through and were like yeah like this sounds great this is like a a wonderful experiment 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 that's grown over the years um it's about 3.4 3.5 million people now across all the networks the books are

6:40all other opportunities for me arise from you know the quality of the writing that I'm putting out having sold the million bucks after having come in number one New York Times bestseller it's just allowed me to like Leverage that work to then you know be able to speak to investors in a way where you know they really take you seriously um in terms of like 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 like you know I'm direct directly investing in these companies being able to give such a wide

7:12audience 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 when I first started was that like you want to win people over first and institutions later so that's why I like that Instagram was so important to like get it out there and get pieces of the book out there floating so to see if um you know people were understanding that what I was writing and at the same time I decided to self-publish a book to see how it would do and it you know it went pretty

7:44well I think I self-published my first book Inward and it was out there for six months um I think I sold like 12 000 copies what is a you know good amount and it also kind of proved to Publishers that you know this is worthwhile so then I then you know 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 some 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

8:19to test it out for themselves and if it's good they then 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 five thousand ten thousand fifteen fifty thousand 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 our company you know they they you have a small group of people who test out a

8:50product 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 yourself 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

9:25carry it around with you or to me it's like one of the biggest compliments that I get about um 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 my 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

9:54know a newsletter where you own the relationship man it's tough man that's been the the great conversation in the past it's a double-edged like sword wear Outlet on one end it's really positive because like Instagram you know X um threads like these places will be you know beautiful Avenues they 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 it you have no control over it you have no control over how these companies change then those changes may not always benefit you in the past like three years I've been really focusing on

10:31just building a newsletter and I've found a home on substack because I've become friends with the people who 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 sub stack 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 in

11:10like starting in 2016 as opposed to starting in 2020. yeah when you talk to like James clear or Tim Ferriss they always say like everything is about the newsletter I think they're completely correct and I and now I find myself like um 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

11:47my wife so my wife was initially um she worked as a scientist for many years and um she actually took care of the two of us when I was first developing young Pueblo so I I spent like two and a half years not making any money and just like working on um 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 um she wanted more flexibility in her life so she decided to start working with me so I do all the posting all of social media

12:23but she will handle the relationship with you know the different Publishers that we have with the Italian agencies because I'm also you know represented by United United talent agency and we're considering hiring like one or two more people but at the same time like spoken to James clear about this too it's like he just has one person that he works with as well I've heard that um to think John Cabot Zen also has a similar sort of setup where like he just does what he can do and you know if people have to wait a lot for him to respond to emails like he just just you

12:59know has decided that it would make his life easier if he just is you know the one who's actually there typing everything and I have a lot of respect for that 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 that requires just just me on that side I think Ryan holiday has a bigger team with you know the daily stoic and what he's working on what have you followed Ryan's work at all and curious like what you think of

13:31totally totally yeah yeah I've spoken from what do you think of his model I've spoken to him his model is working well I think it just depends on where you want your biggest Revenue coming from I saw one time brene 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 um 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 by having to manage all these people and then I think there are some

14:02points where I would feel like I'd have to write books just to pay all these people that's is stressful because then you 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 I just spoke to a friend yesterday and he was telling me how you know he also um 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 a hundred thousand dollars in terms of like paying people and he was like what am I doing

14:37you 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 or Mosey has and Layla hermosi 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 an 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 what do you think of when you hear stories about like Alex hermosi who basically you know became popular

15:11via his content team yeah I think it's you know it just depends on what type of um content you're putting out there if it's like business content that's specific and you're trying to get a quick audience then 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 is not like um there's 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 and you

15:43get 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 like 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 uh you know if you times a year usually usually one of

16:14them will be longer like 30 or 45 days long and and that to me is like that clears my mind enough that when I sit down and I write um 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 um is James Clear he made his bet and he bet on the newsletter and his bed totally paid off I think him and Mark Manson uh like I listened to them really

16:49closely I think 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 being more newsletter focused and having just fantastic content because I think when I think about James's 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 it's just it's the bow 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 in my

17:27mind that like I'm really inspired by that um you know when you bring that beautiful combination together of like a high quality product with fantastic marketing then you're gonna have a tremendous hit 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 uh he almost crafted the perfect book with the perfect amount of rituals with the perfect medium of newsletter uses Instagram in a really smart way where he always draws it back to the newsletter I wonder if James Clear like was he really passionate about Atomic

18:10habits or did he see the opportunity to build this ecosystem oh that's really interesting I have a friend who worked with him before um before he released Atomic habits ooh she she worked at Business Insider and it was back when he would release articles but I bet he learned a lot um 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 um I released the book called lighter that was my first non-fiction book

18:50longer 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 um that I knew performed really well and so I would take that you know 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 or what you write banding on it in a book it's like 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

19:30basically eight really good blog posts because I told him I was like dude he was actually he he hit me up and he was like you should write a book and I was like I can't write a book you kidding me oh you definitely could write a book man come on dude your your posts go viral all the time you can just take them and that's dude I mean that's what he said and then he was just like you've been writing weekly for years you have to go back and just kind of put it together and expand upon it and write examples yeah I mean question for you I mean selfishly like

20:01someone like me who um has a niche you know an area expertise in a particular space um who writes writes on the internet who hasn't really been drawn so much to books because I love the instant gratification of you know this morning I published a newsletter press publish and I got feedback instantaneously or you post a tweet and you get a thousand like why should someone like me write a book books still sell like if it's a good book maybe five percent of books that are released to actually sell a lot of copies but out of those five percent like some of them sell extremely well if

20:38the topic is really good people will give you their attention and they'll like read your book over a week or two week period if they've trusted you for this long then they're gonna trust you to give you multiple hours of their time 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

21:08you know when you listen to a book it's just like you're just basically listening to a podcast 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 like I think books are selling really well the other thing too is that you know you can leverage your work like I think you you'd be surprised that if you've written a lot over the past year or two years you can just do the 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

21:43that I've written put them out in front of you and then you can start writing from there 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 it'll benefit everybody because the people who loved it the first time they'll enjoy reading it the deeper version a publisher won't get mad that you like you know release that in some other fashion before because publishing companies they're basically just Venture Capital companies like they literally will just you know they'll make a

22:18hundred bets and they 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 the 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 I would imagine that if you have a publisher you know they want you to publish as much as possible it's like having as you said a venture capitalist right like they it's they want you to grow and they're incentivized for you to

22:50to create a lot of content so how has been working with a publisher been for you and why haven't you self-published all the way 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 like you know local bookstores everywhere that it's like that that helps so much more than just being on Amazon and because I think Amazon definitely does the majority of book sales but it doesn't do all the book sales yet so having it in stores feels

23:27like uh not only like a big like personal Victory just because I've Loved bookstores my whole life but I think it increases the reach of the book itself and I think it's worthwhile because you you 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 the 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 a hundred thousand people and they can only access it on Amazon

24:01um 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 I like 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 I just Googled um Hudson the largest airport bookstore in in North America and they're only in North America yet they're bringing in 1.8 billion dollars a yard Revenue so yeah it's such a tight

24:36selection too like the selection is so tight in places also like um like Target like if you can get your book in Target you're going to sell a ton of books for people listening it's really about like what trade-offs 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 Prof like I'm a curious person so the idea of like oh maybe I'll make a book because it'll be fun to do um and I'll just you know start with myself publishing and then maybe see where it goes yeah I think it's I think

25:09it'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're writing from scratch then it would take like two two and a half years right but if you've already been writing a ton then all you have to do is basically start with the elimination process right you can literally just go to your analytics and see like what performed well and what didn't and then that that makes it really easy for you how important has the the pen name of young Pueblo been for you if you went

25:44out as you know Diego perez.young play 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 you know have pen names not have pen names but to me it just felt like um like it made sense like 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 have been studying history my whole life and when

26:20I you know was examining like 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 of you know that we get taught in kindergarten like the 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 them we're like really bad at that and I thought of this work when I was um you

26:57know writing like my first second third book I was like it feels really important to to be you know 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 I thought let me put the emphasis on personal transformation because as I've been studying more and more it you know it doesn'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 gonna be really hard to have a

27:36peaceful world um so I think you know 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 on in turn 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 um like intimate partners with each other then there's going to be a lot less harm that's going to be reproduced in the world so I try to write always

28:16with that mindset in in the hopes that you know hopefully I can Inspire individuals maybe that inspiration will trickle that word and help help Humanity become a little more peaceful and you think the name Young Pueblo just when people are scanning Instagram do you think they they taste a little they're like what is that yeah what do you what do you think go you know crosses their mind I've heard a lot of different things like some people think it's like you know like I'm a big fan of of young the psychoanalyst um but I've never read any of Young's books like I actually prefer Freud I

28:49think 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 um you get a sense of like oh this this is where it's coming from there's like a 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 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 and your new game is to convert

29:20them 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 I don't think we would be having this conversation you know New York number one you know times best-selling author if if your name was something else right there yeah you know I I I love I love that feedback too because I think um 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 um you know decided to just stick with the pen name Young Pueblo reminds me like oh yeah this is

29:55just 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 I think 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

30:27supermarket with my wife and nobody noticing us I'm really curious so um Greg how far does your um like how big is your audience now across all networks um probably like six hundred thousand so not not huge um but it it's a very high quality audience so it's a lot of people a lot of business builders a lot of investors uh just people interested in creation and community so I'm really interested now in equipping these people with like more tools and tactics if I know something that other people don't and I could equip them with knowledge to build these types of businesses like don't I have to be in service to do those things

31:10like don't I have to give away all this knowledge um and the reason I had that uh sort of idea is just over the last few years I've had you know the crazy stories of people been like I was working at a McDonald's and I read one of your blog post and I was able to you know create a business that's not worth eight figures you know I started this Discord Community as like a 17 year old and now it's a paid Discord community and it's bringing in eight hundred thousand dollars a year and I was able to you know buy a house for my mom and all

31:41these 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 communityempire.com where it's basically you know 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 knives as possible man I gotta sign up that sounds awesome I think yeah it's it's cool hearing about it uh about the

32:26way you constructed things too because it just sounds so smart I imagine is a lot of that like a lot of those numbers is a newsletter Focus newsletter and Twitter yeah the Twitter algorithm treats you well I mean it's because you 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 it's funny to me because it's just listening to you talk you probably have like two books inside of you I have two two books actually I have the concepts for them one is Community Empire and it's an expanded version of of what

32:59of basically the playbooks inside communityempire.com which is how do you build an audience how do you convert that audience into a community then 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 my second book I don't know if I want to say what the second book is it's related to the first book I'll tell you another time I love how 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

33:31should write a book I think you should definitely do it man because I've noticed that when whenever I release a new book my communities just grow especially the 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 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 it's like then

34:02then they sign up to the community that's a really good takeaway for folks listening which is 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 um 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

34:35sort 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 you know 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 ah like how come my stuff's not going viral and I'll be like maybe maybe I should put this concept in that format and then all of a sudden like you're doing things for the wrong reasons content first and algorithm second not algorithm first and

35:08content second you should be pleasing the algorithm Gods at first especially as all this whole AI wave hits Us in more and more content feels very cookie cutter the stuff that's gonna stand out is this unique remarkable exceptional weird stuff uh that it 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 you know it almost feels like um you're like losing 50 of potential creativity people know what they what to expect from you and since I've been

35:53breaking 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 let me just post and see what happens and it almost feels like in a way that I'm like playing around in a way where it was like 2016 but I'm wondering for you like what 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

36:27months I'm gonna have really high engagement and really high virality and some months I'm gonna have really low it's just me in real time exploring my interests I'm not a robot I'm able to 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 and I think it's like it's the hell it's a healthy approach too and and with that like Risk like you you have to be okay with you

37:06know 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 uh 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 kind of like get burned out by the social media aspect of it and and they just disappear they just like stop you know they stop posting and they kind of close that part of themselves yeah you gotta trust the process so I spoke to an entrepreneur the other day one of the most talented designers I

37:40know Creator slash entrepreneur he's actually selling you know 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 all you gotta 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 you're gonna be A-Okay and and he was like yeah just like I wish I got like a few more million dollars from

38:10this deal no no and I was like you will not have to worry about money just create and and stay healthy and you can learn from your mistakes I want to end up on meditation because I know that's that's core to to who you are and 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 um so there's a lot in different meditation Styles will have different goals especially if a person and meditation that I do it's it's definitely a high spiritual path that's supposed to lead out of suffering to get there it's really just a mental gym

38:46there are qualities that your mind has specifically qualities of awareness non-reactiveness and um compassion that are ingrained in your mind but they're not strong they're they're quite weak and when you go to these silent 10-day meditation courses um and I'm talking about the ones in the snoenka tradition uh you spend three days just building your awareness and that's you do that by being aware of the natural breath just to just stay with the natural breath and be with it and um 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

39:28aware 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 uh build this quality of equanimity which I'm using the synonym non-reactiveness uh 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 um and lastly you build that quality of compassion of Selfless Love of you know um of loving kindness where you you know you want what's best for yourself and for other people and um and that becomes

40:08a lot easier with a with a pure mind and but I really think of meditation as a mental gym it's like you're you know you gotta strengthen your mind because the 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 um if you want like a higher Discerning capacity then you have to cultivate that and if you 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 on your capacity it depends on like there's like

40:46a lot of factors there are a bunch of different apps that will teach you know basic forms of meditation um 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 um and there are you know a lot of different styles of opposite as well so you kind of have to just find what works for you but I found like I meditate in the same tradition as you all know Harare and those those like you know 10-day courses will eventually build into like 20 30 45 60 day long

41:18meditation 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 um but he said he would not have been able to write sapiens without meditation and 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 um that literally wasn't possible before meditating how do I find one of these Retreats um you go to dhamma.org d-h-a-m-m-a dot org and uh there are meditation centers in this same style

41:58all over the world and um 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 Diego this has been an absolute privilege and pleasure uh if people want to follow you and follow your sub stack where could they go young pueblo.substack.com and uh young is spelled without the O in it y-u-n-g-p-u-e-b-l-o you can definitely find me on Instagram or on X on threads you know um and my books are in bookstores everywhere the newest one is called the way forward and that one's

42:39available for pre-order now it'll be in your favorite airport too all right thanks again