How to Love Better (Yung Pueblo)

Listen now (47 mins) | "Big, big, big part of that is understanding that each individual arrives into a relationship with their own conditioning, with their own emotional history..."

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Diego Perez is widely known by his pen name, Yung Pueblo. His books have sold a staggering one and half million copies worldwide, and they’ve been translated into 25 languages. I just finished reading his latest, How to Love Better: The Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness, and Compassion. Which is more or less what we talk about today.

Diego and I both shared a bit about our own relationships, and what we’ve learned from our partners and the different ways we complement one another. We talk about the myths and archetypal relationships that are served to us, and how many of us have been conditioned to go into a relationship looking for someone to solve all our problems. We talk about more realistic ways to create harmony in a relationship, and how to avoid the trap of assuming your partner can read your mind—which is something I’ve certainly done with my husband Rob over the years.

MORE FROM YUNG PUEBLO:

How to Love Better: The Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness, and Compassion

Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future

Yung Pueblo’s Website

Follow Yung Pueblo on Instagram

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

DIEGO:

How long were you in the city?

ELISE:

10 years.

DIEGO:

Yeah,

ELISE:

That's

DIEGO:

A long time

ELISE:

I think to get immune to it in some way, but I can't do it now.

DIEGO:

Yeah, that's the weird dynamic too, of living in the city and you don't look at people and everyone's just living in their own lives and going to where they need to go. And I remember when we left New York City and moved to western Massachusetts, we had to get accustomed to every time we came across somebody, everybody says hello and everybody looks you in the eye. And even cars, when they drive past you, they wave.

ELISE:

Yeah, it's definitely different. And your wife's a scientist?

DIEGO:

Yeah, she was a scientist for a long time, for 10 years, but now she works as my manager and we've been working together for, it feels like our own little small business. We've been working together for the past four years and it's great. She helps me with all strategy, who we should sign contracts with, who we should work with and whatnot. And yeah, it's fantastic having her guidance and her ability to feel people out is just so critical. I trust myself, but whenever we go into, if we're going to work with a new editor or whatnot, we really try to feel people out together and see if, does this person feel good?

ELISE:

Oh my God, I love it. I love too this idea. Have you ever read, oh, this is such an intense book, Ian McGhilchrist, he wrote The Matter with Things and the Master and the Emissary, and it's all about left brain, right brain hemispheres and how the left hemisphere, he's a neuroscientist and it's 1500 pages. It's one of those books where it's every interesting thought he's ever had and it's all somehow in a book. But it's fascinating and it's full of incredible anecdotes and bits of information, but it sounds too like you have a left hemisphere, right hemisphere relationship between the two of you where she gets to examine the parts and play a left hemisphere role of that high attention to detail and acuity while you get to hold the right hemisphere, wholeness and larger context. And I mean, I think we strive for that sort of balance in ourselves anyway, but what an amazing to outsource that to your partner would be amazing.

DIEGO:

I know. I mean you couldn't have explained it more clearly because she really is good at everything that I'm bad at, I think, which is an interesting thing. We've noticed overall she's better at short-term things and I'm better at long-term things, so she will handle all of the taxes from year to year, but then I'll handle all the investments so we make over a 10, 20 year period, but the smaller, more micro things, she's able to just manage them so much more quickly than I would if I'm sitting down to write an email. By the time I'm done with one email, she would've written three. She just does so many things faster and then I can just think about essays and write things out and stuff.

ELISE:

Well, this is the perfect entree to how to look better. Isn't it interesting to just talk about our partners a little bit more? But I went through the fires, my husband, my kids, the Palisades fire in January, and we were evacuated for 11 days and it was so, such an interesting experience and we still have our house and there's so much to be grateful for. And one of the things that I was also grateful for was a new lens on our relationship and we were with friends, we were all evacuated at the same hotel and it was one of my best friends who hadn't known my husband that well because super introverted and shy,

And so we were all together and so they got to observe our dynamic and it was really interesting to have it reflected back how I'm excel at the practical and the detail oriented, oh, I can't make my kids lunch, so I need to figure out how I'm getting lunch to them and so on and so forth. My husband excels at figuring out how to break back into our neighborhood and how to do any, he's an architect and so the structural, he was out there taking the most beautiful photographs, these planes to the point where people were finding him on Instagram to be like, can I get that print? That's my husband flying that plane. But it was really interesting to experience him through the eyes of the other, he is who I want to be with in a disaster because his ability to access information, find the right experts, it was stunning and it was a treat amidst chaos to see how he is so different than I am and how we're so complimentary in that way.

DIEGO:

I love that so much too because it reminds me often of how in our relationship between Sarah and I, we have learned to follow each other's leadership at different times where no one person is in charge of the relationship. We're always making major decisions together, but there are things that she's clearly better at than I am, and I follow her leadership when it comes to those key moments. And she also follows my leadership at other times too. And I think having that flow and also having a sense of what matters more to us in one instance where if we have diverging points of view, we just try to figure out who cares more about us moving in one direction as opposed to the other. And it could be something as simple as who wants to watch this TV show more? And then we like, oh, I'm like, oh sure, I'll wait and we can watch your thing.

Or where should we go to vacation or whose family should we see next? And I think having that constant communication and playing the game of step up, step back all the time because we've noticed this interesting trend where a lot of the major decisions where I was the one that felt the intuition to move to New York City when we were living in Boston after we graduated, and I also felt the intuition, it's time for us to move to the woods, and she leans on me for those bigger moments, but then when we arrive to a place, she's the one being like, okay, this is what we need. This is how we need to organize things and puts us all together. So she leads us through the week and then I feel like I kind of lead us through the year.

ELISE:

That's beautiful. I love that. And it's interesting that you are not only co-creating a relationship together or that the relationship is its own entity, but that you're co-creating a career. Does it work in part because you write under a pen name, she probably feels a sense of some ownership over well how to love better. That's forged from your relationship and everything that she has taught you by being in relationship with you too, but do you think that the fact that you have a pen name too lets it be its own jointly owned entity-like venture?

DIEGO:

Yeah. Yeah, I think that it's a good point. We both do. Think about it as a project. Yung Pueblo feels like a long project that we're doing and I don't know when I'm going to put it down, but right now it feels good to write under that pen name. And it's interesting because I'll write the essays, the chapters and whatnot, but she's the primary editor. Even before my editor at Penguin sees things, she's the one reading everything first. I'll make adjustments according to her advice because I really trust her wisdom. She's meditated as much as I have. I did a rough calculation once and I meditated maybe around between 12 and 13,000 hours. She's done the same. But I think the one thing that we did that was special because she doesn't like being in the front of things. She loves living a quiet life. But what we did do for this book, because it is based on a lot of the lessons we learned in our relationship is that we, for the audio book, I read the audio book, but at the end we had a conversation between the two of us where we talked more about the stories that we mentioned in the book. I asked her about what she's learned from meditating and we really got to hear from her,

ELISE:

At the beginning and maybe you had a pre-cognition about what you were building or driving toward or an intuitive sense of what people need. I want to hear about that, the becoming of Yung Pueblo. Why is a pen name? What's the container and how did that come to you?

DIEGO:

When I signed onto Instagram, the name just came up. It came to my mind being Pueblo. I have always resonated with that word in Ecuador. It refers to the masses of impoverished people and the young, I'm just dropping the O off of the word young and it felt like an ode to my Americanness. So I bring these two things together and then as I started writing and as things started picking up, I had moments where I was like, oh, I could change it to just my name, but I thought I really like being able to go to this supermarket and instead of just putting my face everywhere, it felt, why not just hold up the writing under this pen name and I'm not going to hide my name and I'm not going to hide myself. I'll still do events and do interviews and whatnot, but I'm not necessarily trying to make my face famous.

That felt really important, and as I kept meditating, the clarity around the name really was shining through because it became clear to me that I'm really immature. I have so much growing up to do so many qualities that I need to develop. But when I was looking at history, to me it was so clear that humanity is just growing up. We're so young, we don't know how to do basic, fundamental things that we try to teach four year olds to clean up after yourself, to take care of each other, to share, to tell the truth, just general kindness. We haven't mastered those things as a human collective. So I've kept the name Yung Pueblo basically just as a reminder to me about where humanity stands, and that's always just felt important. So it's less about other people and more about me.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it's interesting too because I feel like your poems and what you share feels, I mean, there's some story in the book, but it mostly feels like disembodied wisdom and it's really accessible and it's almost like a mobile mind. I think people read it and they're like, oh, I recognize that. I feel that in a way that it's almost co-authored or that's my sense of view, which I think also makes it ironically feel deeply personal to people because that might not have been part of the conceit, but in a way it's quite brilliant to make this container that maybe can speak for many of us or all of us or Yeah,

DIEGO:

Yeah. Thank you for noticing that. It felt important. A long time ago when I was reading a lot of Krishnamurti, there's a quote where Jiddu Krishnamurti basically talks about how we think we're different, but we're actually all the same. And as I kept meditating, I'm like, it's so true. We're all moving through the same spectrum of emotions. Some of us feel certain emotions more than others, and we all have very unique conditioning that affects the way our behaviors manifest in daily life, but we're still moving through the same spectrum of emotions. So the way that I feel, sadness, you feel sadness the way that I feel. Anger, you felt anger too. And I think it felt important to honor the very human aspect of what we're all going through because we all know grief, we all know heartbreak, we've all been hurt, and all of those things require some degree of overcoming.

ELISE:

And I'd say one of the main theses of this book, How To Love Better, is we go into relationship often looking for not the opposite, but someone to sort of solve all of that pain just to take responsibility for our emotions. And there's this idea of great relief of I found the person, so this is sorted somehow. And meanwhile, not that there's not mutual caretaking and relationships, but as you seem to have learned, and I've certainly learned, you got to take care of your own side of the street actually. And the most highly functioning relationship is one in which you use your partner as a mirror and recognize that it's being in relationship requires extreme self-responsibility. You can seep a little bit, but really your partner might be like, yes, there's a hurricane. I'll clean your side of the street too, but mostly take care of your own stuff.

DIEGO:

Yeah, that's the tragedy of the messaging that we got around relationships as we were growing up. And a lot of what we saw with all of these romantic comedies and whatnot is two people get together, they have a connection. There's one major problem that they solve and then they're happily ever after, but nobody talks about how after there's still tons of arguments, they're still getting to know each other. You don't automatically know how to care for someone. And relationships are just a constant streams of ups and downs, and I think not being afraid of that and understanding that a healthy relationship can still have ups and downs and that we have to be proactive about learning how to care for each other. Those things feel really important. And like you said, a big, big, big part of that is understanding that each individual arrives into a relationship with their own conditioning, with their own emotional history, with past pain that they're either aware of or not aware of, and all of that is affecting the way you show up. So having a combination of understanding that you need to either grow or heal as an individual, and you need to simultaneously take time to understand how your partner likes their happiness to be supported. That's what starts creating the possibility for more harmony in a relationship.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and that you have to push past the archetypal relationships that are served to us for women, mostly the fairytale, mostly the romcom. There's the different varieties, but mostly it's the passive damsel and distress, and this is terrible onus for boys and men as well too. This rescuing hero, totally the warrior. And then there's the version for girls of, and this is primarily in books, but it's sort of the Emma of it all. There's the beautiful glamorous girl, and then when you look past her, you see the girl with the real beauty and you want to be that girl who isn't so obviously compelling, but is the gold, the alchemist gold? There's so much this archetypal ways that relationships are served to us, and then certainly the fantasy, which is more modern, that is you find the guy, you get the ring, you plan the wedding, and you're good. And most of us fail to have an imagination for a relationship beyond the honeymoon, right?

DIEGO:

I wish that there were more movies that started with the first scene being the wedding, and then it's how they even learn how to be in relationship afterwards because it's tough where when the story just ends at this high point, but then you expect relationship whether you're married or not, to just be a constant stream of excitement, which is just so untrue, especially if you've been with someone for years. You understand there's a mixture of highs and lows, and there's also a mixture of a lot of really mundane, tiny little moments where you don't even necessarily have a memory of them because they're so small. Washing the dishes every day, cooking meals together every day, going to take out the trash together, all these tiny little things. But as you add them all together, there's a feeling there where there is contentment and almost a small axis to joy in these moments because you are okay with them being boring.

You're okay with not being a constant level of excitement, and a lot of relationship is composed of those tiny little dull moments. I think it's lovely to embrace them as opposed to fight them because we end up just chasing excitement and chasing these small increments of improvement, which is really common in our society today because we have all of these apps on our phone that are just, whether they're dating apps or not, there are these apps that are just focused on making your life easier, Uber, DoorDash, everything is just easy, easy, easy. And we want to bring that mentality into our personal growth, bring it into our relationship, but to be able to have inner peace, to be able to have harmony in your relationship, all that is slow work. It's very slow work, and we have to remember that because we don't want to think that everything's supposed to be easy all the time.

ELISE:

Have you ever read M. Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled?

DIEGO:

No, I haven't.

ELISE:

Okay, so I don't know when he wrote this. 1979, maybe in the early eighties, but there's such a helpful metaphor I think for relationships, and this is in some ways prescient. I mean, it's somewhat of the time, and he's an incredible therapist. That's a beautiful book. I had sort of dismissed it because it was so popular. It's one of those books that's in incredibly bestselling, and then I don't know, I didn't pay attention to it, and then I read it and I was like, oh, I love this guy. And then he wrote this book called The People of the Lie, which is incredible. It's about evil,

So it's a little bit of a turn from the road, less traveled. Here's the core metaphor though, which I think is really important, or maybe I relate to it more intensely than most people, but he talks about an effective or healthy marriage or relationship as the maintenance of a base camp where each partner not necessarily simultaneously goes out and ventures and does the ascension of the peak knowing that they will return to the base camp for nurturance and care. So it's like this hero's journey in some ways, I don't think he uses that language, but where each partner is individuating pursuing their own separate spiritual goal or life goal, returning to share what they've learned and be sustained by this relationship and that when he diagnoses, I think his wife is a therapist as well, but when they are seeing couples, there's usually, and at this point it was typically the man who thought he was ascending all the time and that the wife would be happy to be taking care of that base camp, but that for a healthy relationship to flex, it needs both. And I loved that. It's so helpful and you don't necessarily have to have the same pursuit, although you and your wife, you and Sarah are engaged in some ways in the same entity right now, but that both need to be expressed.

DIEGO:

Yeah, I think that's a really beautiful picture. I think it's really true, even though we work together, we have individual pursuits and a lot of things are very relational, right? Situations with our family and the challenges that we need to resolve and the different ways that we need to show up as individuals or as a couple. And even though we've chosen to live our lives side by side, they're distinct even though they're so similar, the things that she's learning, even when she's meditating or moving through daily life, we're building different types of wisdom, and I think it's part of the joy of relationship is being able to learn. I want to hear things from your perspective. I want to hear how things are moving in your mind, and that's not just entertainment, but it's to enhance my own perspective.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and it keeps things lively and interesting and all of those things. Speaking of movies, did you ever see the breakup with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston?

DIEGO:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

ELISE:

Okay. And it's such a great movie because it's essentially about the disillusion of relationship over time. And there's this moment, the scene that I will always remember, I write about it actually I think in my book, but it's that moment when, so to paint the scene for people who haven't seen it, they're in a relationship that's sort of devolving in part because Vince Vaughn is just not paying attention. And she comes home, I think they have a dinner party together, and he sits down immediately after to play a video game and she asks for help in the kitchen and he's like, oh, I'll do it later, babe. I just need to rest or whatever. And she's put this whole thing on and then it ends up in a blowup and he's like, I don't understand the problem. I told you I would help you. I just needed to do this. I wanted to do this other thing first. And she says, I want you to want do the dishes, but it's such a beautiful one. I think for a lot of women, the wanting is covert and all you want is the other person to see your need and address your need without it needing to be spoken.

And that so often what we want becomes expressed through the relationship in those types of ways rather than an assertion not wanting to control anyone else's behavior, just point blank. You're like, I want a supportive partner who recognizes that there's work that needs to be done and steps to the work and doesn't wait for an invitation anyway. I just loved it. To me, it was such a expression of disjointed, wanting and inability to serve the core relationship or attend to the base camp. You got to attend to the base camp.

DIEGO:

Yeah, it's hard because we want people to be able to read our minds, but it feels really important to lean on communication and to just not let things be mystical and mysterious. Just being open about how you would your happiness to be supported. I always go back to this really simple example where my wife loves when I take care of the compost, and I would not have known unless she told me, and she tells me once to take care of it. And I'm like, okay, great. Thank you for letting me know, and now I make it my duty. And that feels really valuable that I just would've never been able to read her mind.

ELISE:

Does she continually appreciate that for you too? Thank you.

DIEGO:

Thank you. And especially if I ever go above and beyond and clean more than what are my tasks, she's so grateful. It's like magic to her. So I'm over here trying to clean my butt off,

ELISE:

But that's really important too. A friend of mine who's a coach, an incredible coach, but she did this practice with me where she was essentially gave me this sheet and was like, you need to practice appreciation. And I chased. I was like, I don't want to, and I refuse to do it at the level at which you want. It was too fabricated for me. I couldn't do it, but I noticed I just need to do it better even though I refuse to do it because I feel like my husband doesn't appreciate me enough.

And so there was this paucity of generosity, I'm not going to appreciate him when I don't think I'm getting it in turn. However, I found that if I just do it, it makes our relationship so much better. It's so simple. I don't know why I have so much stubborn resistance. And yet just saying the other day, I am not the best driver. And I popped something, the wheel case cover off of my car, and I thought it was going to require a lengthy reparation, and my husband's very handy and he just went up there and he reassembled my car. You can't tell I did anything. It's amazing. Anyway, something like that where I can, I can fawn all over him and appreciation.

DIEGO:

I think being able to appreciate and just vocalizing, it feels nice because we know that the effort that the both of us are putting in, it's very much accounted for. And I think it helps both of us realize that we're doing our part. I think whether it's the emotional heavily lifting of trying to resolve an argument or all the productivity that requires to move from one day to another, we're both doing our part. And it's helpful for us to know that whenever we have an argument, it's usually one of us feels more tense than the other. And then what we've both been learning is basically how to live in our own energy. So if one person has a lot of tension, we don't necessarily take that as an invitation to join them in their tension. Instead, I'm going to sit in my peace and I'm happy to talk to you, tell me what's going on. And I think when both of us can do that for each other at different times, that's a big gift.

ELISE:

Yeah, that sounds like magic. I also just want to go back to what you said about this mystical, and again, this might be something that we learn in childhood, but this mystical presumption of telepathy between you and your partner or that they should necessarily be able to anticipate and meet your needs and how heavily romanticized that is. It reminded me of this story early on in my relationship with my husband. He was living in Jersey City. I was living in Manhattan, and he had a car and he could park on the street outside of his apartment, and his apartment was probably a 15 minute block from the train and it through a slightly dicey neighborhood. And I was coming out relatively late at night, and I want him to telepathically, anticipatorily know that he should come and get me from the train. And he didn't get the hint, Diego, if you can believe it. And I was just stewing. I was so mad. And I remember getting there and he was like, what's wrong? And I was like, why did you not come and pick me up? And he was like, I missed your call. When did you call me? When did you essentially ask?

DIEGO:

Yeah,

ELISE:

I was like, he was like, if you tell me I can do it. But yeah, I think many of us go through just seething and resentment and just particularly for women, I don't know if it's men hold this as tensely, but this again saying, I want, this is very difficult for a lot of women, so we want the need to be met and we try and manipulate or control to get that need or want met instead of just feeling like we can say, Hey, it would be very smooth sailing if you unclogged the sink attended to the compost

DIEGO:

And

ELISE:

Took out the trash.

DIEGO:

And honestly, that's a very human thing, even when you said it recalls childhood. Because to me, when we have these silent expectations, it also reminds me that how much we love gifts. And it reminds me of being kids at Christmas morning and you have all these mysterious little presents and your parents read your mind because it's so obvious. We can tell what you want, we can tell what you watch all the time, and we know what types of gifts you'll desire, but there's a continuation of that, of us wanting these little silent presence to appear out of nowhere as opposed to just relying on simple communication and letting each other know, this is what I'd like for my happiness to be supported. And also realizing that that's going to change over time. And we had this really funny moment where my wife and I were traveling together really often for work about two years ago, and she was feeling a physical toll.

It was affecting her health, and she wanted to not travel with me as much. And I was like, oh, great. I totally support you. You don't need to come with me all the time. It's nice moving together, but it's not absolutely necessary. And to support her, I started changing my language where when a speaking engagement or whatever it was that was coming up, I would change my language to, oh, I need to go to Boston and do X, Y, and Z. But then fast forward two years, the other day we had this conversation about how she was feeling left out because I was saying, oh, I'm going to go to Boston or I'm going to go to New York. And she was like, well, I want to make sure that we're still making decisions together. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry I changed my language in support of what you wanted two years ago so that you didn't feel obligated to come with me to events or anything like that. And she was like, well, I want to make sure that I have the choice. And I was like, oh, totally. You're always welcome. But it's funny how what worked and would helped two years ago required another conversation, and it wasn't until the tension appeared, it was like, oh, okay, there's something that needs our attention here. Let's try to figure out how to resolve it

ELISE:

And to preemptively make the decision out of protection, but to preemptively with language make the decision on her behalf is something I think is probably, we can all relate to that where you think, I don't want to make you say no or assert your own needs or be clear about what your body wants in this moment. So I'm just going to cut off. I have that feeling generally where I'm like, please don't ask things of me because I don't want to have to say no. Do you have a sense, so you don't know at some point whether you will cease feeling young?

DIEGO:

Yeah, that happened probably like four or four years ago.

ELISE:

Do you have I'm, I have two questions that are kind of unrelated. One besides Krishnamurti, I'm curious about what you like to read and then second, do you have a vision for Yung Pueblo or is it just you do the next best thing, the next right thing?

DIEGO:

I think in the moment it feels like I'm definitely going to write a few more books under the Yung Pueblo name. I want to make sure I say the things I want to say. And it also takes, I mean, as a writer, it takes time to cultivate your voice. As a writer, I literally intentionally waited to write how to love better, even though I knew I wanted to write that four or five years ago. I very clearly saw that as soon as I started meditating that it was affecting my relationship in a positive way. And I went into meditating not for my relationship. I went into it to save myself. I knew I needed qualities that could help me have a more peaceful and less tense mind. So I was surprised and honestly shocked at all the skills that I was developing in terms of awareness, non-reaction, compassion, patience, all of these things were immediately supporting a new chapter in my relationship.

So I do want to write a few more books under Yung Pueblo. I don't know how long that'll go. I don't want to write books just for the sake of a paycheck. I want to write books because I have something that I need to say, but we'll see how long that lasts. And I used to have these sort of more hardened plans, but honestly, things keep changing. That's one thing that I'm learning, don't work against the universe, work with it, and part of working with it means constantly embracing change. And what was the other question?

ELISE:

The other question was about what you like to read.

DIEGO:

Oh my gosh. I like to read. It's so funny. So I intentionally don't read self-help books because I'm trying to be really careful with not unconsciously taking something that someone else has written and affecting the way that I see things or putting it into words. I like having all the books that I write. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a psychologist or anything like that. I'm just a person who meditates a lot. So a lot of that is being influenced by the hours and hours that I've been put into meditating and really the Buddhist teaching. So it's how the Buddhist teaching affects life. I don't write about the Buddhist teaching, but it is influencing how I see daily life and it's influencing how I see relationships. But I read a lot of history books. I really love understanding revolutionary periods. One of the best books I've read lately was The Hero of Two Worlds that was about the Marquita Lafayette, and it was just an incredible biography.

He was a hero in the American Revolutionary War and then a hero in the French Revolution, and it's just wild that someone had a life like that. So I really love history. I really like understanding the Russian Revolution, world War ii, and I also enjoy science fiction, so I read a lot of Arthur C. Clark and then otherwise I read a lot of things by Buddhist monks. So I've read a lot of Bku Bodi, I've read a lot of different sort of Buddhist and a little bit of fiction. I've read everything by jitter, certi and Herman Hess.

ELISE:

So interesting. The aversion to self-help is, I mean, I get it. It's not what you do, which again, it feels sort of like disembodied wisdom rather than a recitation of prevailing theory about attachment or whatever. So it's interesting.

DIEGO:

Yeah, yeah, that's not me. Yeah, totally. I try to stay away. I think it's good. I also, it's not to say that that stuff is bad, it's just not for me, and I'm trying to be careful to make sure that I'm playing in my lane. I'm not trying to pretend to be a psychologist. I'm not trying to pretend to be a scientist.

ELISE:

I feel like there's a fair amount, whether it's intentional or not, that is protective in a healthy way. I think about how you're even just the triangulation, as someone who spent the first 40 years of my life working for other people and behind brands, I sort of recognize the safety of a triangulation or the distance that it gives you to not get swept up. It's not necessarily you or your thing, but it gives you a clarity of vision. I think that's very helpful and how much more complex it is when it's you and yeah, I think about this all the time in part because I do a little bit of memoir, but that's not my main thing, but it's enough to sort of tether people to what I'm trying to say. And yet I don't want my life to become the thing that needs to be blown up compulsively or repetitively for me to have content. And when you make yourself the thing, it's very dangerous. I think for a lot of writers.

DIEGO:

There was a trend, and I think around 20 19, 20 20 when it really started taking hold where a lot of people started, and it happened when stories appeared on Instagram, but a lot of people started showing every part of their life they would show what they were making for breakfast and just going to this place, going to that place. And I made an intentional decision in that moment. I was like, I'm not going to do that. There are a lot of things that I'm interested in that don't necessarily make sense for the Yung Pueblo account. And I realized that I need to focus in on the 15 20% that I feel is my zone of what I'm really learning in. And simultaneously, that 20% connects with what people want to hear about, and that's really just what I'm learning through what meditating is teaching me about how to do life a little bit better.

And I think that's been really healthy. I also, I love history and I like listening to business podcasts and stuff like that, but I don't think people really want investment advice from me, so it doesn't seem like that's necessary. I had a friend the other day, he was asking me for podcast recommendations and he's a pretty mystical, magical guy, and I was like, dude, honestly, I'm just listening to business podcasts. And he was just like, oh, yeah. He's like, I should have known I meditate two hours a day. That's enough spirituality for me. I don't need more than that.

ELISE:

Yeah, I mean, I think about in the context of what you're talking about too, and the fracturing of our culture, the explosion, whether it's on stories or in books of the Me story, and Richard Rohr, who I'm obsessed with, unhealthily obsessed with is Franciscan Friar and he’s at The Center for Action and Contemplation, and he's a true mystic and he talks about the cosmic egg and how within the cosmic egg, the me story is nestled within the We story, which is nestled inside of the story. I feel like our culture, the egg is broken, so you have so much meanness me story, me story, me story, and it's not tethered to the we or the the, and I think it can be dangerous for people to get so caught up in their own

DIEGO:

Story. Yeah, that's a beautiful place to end on. It hit me very clearly when I first started meditating that it was important to put out, I started my writing career at a time where there was a lot of conversations around the world and what self-love really meant, and I wanted to make sure that I was adamant that self-love, in my view, self-love is really real when it starts opening the door to unconditional love to all beings. So it's not just you taking care of yourself, you doing what you need to do to heal and to grow as an individual, but because of that work, because you see the sorrow in your mind because you start seeing the way you move through so many emotions that should cultivate compassion for you, and it should show you that other people struggle just like you. To me, it feels really important that self-love is not some egoic thing that just makes your ego bigger and bigger and self focus, but it should start helping you have compassion for yourself and for other people

ELISE:

In How to Love Better, Yung Pueblo. Khalil Gibran’s famous piece On Marriage, and I wanted to read this to you because it's really beautiful, “but let there be spaces in your togetherness, love one another, but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup, but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of loot are alone, though they quiver the same music and stand together yet not too near together for the pillars of the temple. Stand apart and the oak tree and the Cyprus grow knot in each other's shadow.” Woo, that is good.

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