#915 - Yung Pueblo - The Art Of Unlocking Your Inner Peace
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I was saying to you before we got started, I really have noticed in myself as I've spent more time creating content and talking about challenges in life.

I've started to gravitate toward the people that I listen to or the sorts of topics that I used to consume when I very, very first started. And these are people like yourself, Oliver Berkman, Alain de Botton from the School of Life. You know, people that really see the human condition with all of its challenges, all of its shortcomings, all of its foibles and the sort of very unashamed, unabashed self-reflection of, look,

We're irrational. We're shaven chimps on a rock. We didn't ask to be here. We don't know how to be here. We're living in an environment that's hopelessly mismatched with the genetics and the biological predisposition that we were given. We've got technology that's moving way quicker than even our brains can keep up, let alone our evolution. It's tough.

and it's okay, and maybe this comforting sentence will help. Like that's kind of the center of where I'm at at the moment. And I think you slot very nicely into that. Yeah, thank you. I mean, you broke it down really beautifully. And it's like, hopefully this sentence builds a little bit of self-awareness, right? Because we're highly imperfect.

we're bound to make mistakes but the reality is that in the process of accepting how imperfect you are it's almost like you take your power back and you're like okay well i know what i'm good at and i know what i'm not good at so let me try to build some new you know some new skills along the way yeah i think there's a few different ways that you can do it um maybe people that are more

disposed towards positive affect or extraversion or like high energy perhaps they would default to kind of laughing it off you know they make a joke out of it it's not so big of a deal isn't it silly like look at the way that my brain works look at the um and then there's different horses for courses i think if you've got the level of self-reflection of someone like oliver berkman laughing at the absurdity of your own thoughts is probably a little bit harder to do so you know he he

works through it kind of more methodically. He takes it sort of step by step. He understands, okay, well, this is because of this and this is because of this and this because of this. And then with this very large view, we actually get to, we get some perspective and we step back from being caught up in the torrent of our own thoughts.

Oh, that's really interesting. You know, it's, it's, um, I think what's really worked for me is sort of just honestly realizing how flimsy thoughts are like flimsy and like insubstantial. So to me, when I find myself getting caught up in a thought stream or some narrative, that's just building tension. I have to like pull myself back and I'm like, wait, like, why am I hanging on to this thing? That's so incredibly impermanent. Like, why am I just stuck?

allowing anxiety and tension and heaviness to just continue bubbling up in my mind when you, you know, I'm the one causing this tension, so let me let it go. It's wild to think how much stress and suffering we have caused ourselves.

Yeah. And I think that's like the key medicine, right? It's really hard to accept the fact that like the person who hurt you can't heal you. And ultimately your perception and your reaction, all of this of which is happening inside your own mind, that's where the real trouble lies. You know, when you understand that your perception is coded heavily by the past and that it's

influencing the way you're seeing things in the present moment. And you're not actually seeing them clearly. You're just seeing them through this like heavy coated lens of old pain, old sort of inclinations, sort of defensive, like survivalist mode of living makes it really hard to engage with something genuinely. So I honestly, when people, you know, ask me, how do you become happy? Well, you have to embrace mental training. You have to train the mind.

Yeah, it's an unruly steed to have between your ears in the same way as a bad horse might be between your legs. But, dude, I mean, you know, when you realize...

I feel like I have to put this caveat on the internet for the edge cases of people. There are certainly some people for whom the world has mistreated them consistently from when they were a baby until when they were an adult. And for those people, I feel bad for you. That being said, the vast majority of the bell curve, with that caveat out of the way, we are the ultimate source of most of our own suffering.

We know exactly where our fears lie. We know where our shame is hidden and we're able to pick at that scab over and over again. We almost get this strange sense of satisfaction when we do that, when we go back over a familiar but painful loop that we moved through. Oh, you did this thing and you did that thing and it's going to make this happen and you didn't do that thing before. You know...

the path it's like going on a walk it's like a little mental walk that you take yourself on and you turn right when you get to this tree and you turn left when you get to that stream and um yeah when you realize holy fuck

Sure, stuff happens outside, but largely that's just these sort of little sparks. The palisades fire that comes from that is me perpetuating it, pouring kerosene on it. Exactly. Not giving myself a break, not allowing myself to have perspective. And it's two things. It is liberating and guilt-inducing because you realize that the...

If you're a prisoner inside of these bad thoughts, you're also the prison guard. And that means that the fact that you haven't sort of turned the key and opened the door is on you. And there's a type of pressure that's associated with that, which can make you feel uncomfortable. Right. And I think, I mean, you're hitting on a key thing too here where letting go is not a one-time event. So once you kind of see yourself going into the loop, jumping back in sort of like,

giving power again to like the old traumatic moment of someone hurting you. Like, yeah, someone did hurt you, but who's the one picking it back up? Like, who's the one, like, you know, it's encoded in your perception and then you keep reacting to that emotional response to it over and over again. And that's, what's making your mind heavy. And I think instead of just sort of

existing passively in that, you have to kind of take your power back and tell yourself, okay, what is my mind clinging to? And if my mind is clinging in this moment, what does that mean? I'm no longer in the present. I'm like swimming around in my mind. And it's the same way where either dealing with trauma from the past or with dealing with attachments of the future. Like I want

X and Y, you know, like all these things to happen in a very particular way and you're craving all of that, then the mind is just riddled with tension. But I think it's a difficult thing because sometimes people go to an extreme where they're like, oh, so what does that mean? I do nothing, want nothing. It's like, no, it's having desires and goals in a balanced manner.

Like, can you move forward towards your goal in a strategic way without causing yourself tons of suffering in the process? And I think that's something that, you know, honestly, I've had to learn the hard way because I have goals. But I realize, you know, with each book launch, I'm realizing, like, how am I handling this? Am I handling it a little better than before? And I can really measure that by the mixture of productivity and success.

what the stress level is and i find productivity and pain it's yeah how much how much am i getting done and how much am i suffering while i'm trying to do it yeah and i honestly another higher level of that too is like i'm actually noticing that i can be more productive with less stress if i just allow myself to do my best in each situation and then let it go it is what it is yeah i uh

you know, you're well read when it comes to Buddhism significantly better than I am, but the tiny little like cliff notes stuff that I've got, you know, letting go of desire, uh, letting go, non-attachment. Um, I think, um,

If everybody just had to meditate, that might actually be a really great strategy. That would probably be kind of the single turnkey solution. If you can let go of all attachments, if you can let go of all desires, then you're probably going to end up, assuming that you're not totally terrible at meditation and mindfulness, you're probably going to end up somewhere close to pretty good. The problem is, and the reason that I've never been able to kind of fully get on board with that is,

Given that you probably have constraints around your ability to dedicate yourself to that philosophy,

you have to exist within the existing framework, which is I am a social animal that needs status and validation and recognition and external praise. And that's me. It's part of me. And one route would be completely detox myself from that, rid myself of all of these attachments, basically transcend the programming that a couple of million years have given me. You go, all right,

So assuming that that is perhaps too lofty of a goal for almost everybody to get, except for super elite meditators, how can I play within the system? How can I play the game whilst knowing that it's not about the game? And that balance, I think, is where the sort of devil in the details lies. Yeah.

It's quite a challenge too, because I think a lot of times when we get caught up in the social aspect of life where, you know, the things that you're trying to achieve, the circles that you want to be a part of, just, you know, the value that you want to bring to the world, I think it's really, and this happens to so many people, that...

their success, they can't even enjoy it because the mind is so untrained. The mind is so geared towards, okay, I accomplished this, what's next? What else can I do after that? And there's very little joy in that. So I think like one thing that I found pretty often was when I go away to meditation retreats, like I'm going and it's basically, I'm taking myself to a mental gym. Like I'm specifically focusing on cultivating three qualities, cultivating

cultivating awareness, cultivating non-reaction, and cultivating compassion for myself and others. And those three qualities, like over time, yes, you can become an extraordinarily elite meditator, can really walk this path that leads to the end of suffering. But in the process,

what it really does is it just makes life brighter, shinier. It improves your decision-making. It makes you way more productive with way less tension. And I think to me, it's like, it's the best investment I've ever made. You know, it's like better than investing in the S&P 500 for 20, 30 years. So to me, when people ask me, they're like, why do you meditate daily? It's, you know, you're so busy. It takes up so much time. And I'm like,

because it improves every facet of my life. And it makes the moments of victory so much sweeter, like the moments that I get to spend with my parents, with my wife, with friends. When I am able to accomplish something, it's like I can be with it and engage with so much more presence. And then when it's done, it's done and I'm okay. And I can move forward, but in a way where I

I didn't miss the previous moment, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, that's the attachment thing again, right? In advance of it, you're anticipating it. You can't wait for it to happen. While it's happening, you can have a bunch of things going on. You can feel, Oliver Berkman describes this beautifully. He talks about a gorgeous morning in the Yorkshire Dales near where he lives. And he says, he gets up on time. He has a

the perfect coffee that he made himself in his hand. And he walks out, it's the middle of December. There's this beautiful vista in front of him. You know, it's just untouched, unfettered snow, perfectly, you know, it looks like a postcard. And during the experience of this, you know, very normal, but very peak moment, he thinks to himself, this is a beautiful morning.

This is the sort of morning that you should be having all of the time. And the fact that you're not having this sort of morning all of the time is actually a failing of yours. So in the moment of experiencing, he's already looking over the shoulder of the present moment to consider what's coming next, to regret the fact that he hasn't done this in the past. And yeah, I mean, there's so many ways that you can ruin peak experiences. And then what you end up with is basically a string of miserable successes. You know, you have...

You have the wall of all of the things. You've got the photos or you've got the accolades. You can say that you did the thing. But when, this is definitely true for me, man. This isn't me fucking castigating the audience. This is me saying like, this is me. This is my experience when I'm not, when I'm untrained, when I haven't spent enough time meditating, when I'm not putting my mind where my feet are. You can have a repertoire of different things that you've achieved and you weren't there for any of them.

That's one of the saddest moments in life too, because I've gone through the same thing where I've had beautiful moments. People or friends are coming together to celebrate my birthday. And before I started meditating, I'd look around all these people wanting to share and joy. And my mind is only thinking about the one person who's missing or why is X, Y, and Z not here? And it's like, dude, you missed it. You missed it. You missed literally the miracle of even having people who want to come up and show up for you. And-

To me, honestly, that was exhausting. And it was simultaneously sad, but also empowering when I did start meditating. I did my first silent tender retreat in July of 2012, and it hit me right off the bat.

how superficial all of my relationships were, like how superficial my relationship was with my wife, with my parents, with my friends. And I was like, but I noticed off the bat, I'm like, oh, it's because I'm highly disconnected from myself. I've spent years running away from my emotions. And as soon as I saw my emotions, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm terribly disconnected. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of us are, what do you say, decapitated below the neck.

Right? What is it? The last time that somebody, that the guillotine was used, actually wasn't that long ago. I don't think if you look worldwide, obviously there's probably guillotines being used in war crimes across all sorts of different horrible places, but one that was officially used actually wasn't all that long ago. So you think, wow, you know, decapitation, how barbaric. And it's like, dude, you've done that emotionally to yourself since you were born. Yeah. This problem of struggling to connect with other people

after you've spent time working on yourself is an interesting challenge, I think. The sorts of people that consume your stuff and hopefully this show too, they're considered. They're reflective. Maybe they are a bit predisposed to low mood. And the reason that they're on this path is that they're trying to work out what's going on. And they think, fuck, if only I didn't have

if only I didn't have this thing holding me back, you know, and if you're behaviorally genetics pilled, it's part of your predisposition. If your attachment theory pilled, it's part of your upbringing. If you're, you know, trauma pilled, it's part of your first relationship, you know, wherever it is that you laid the feet. And it's a conglomeration of all of these things.

A lot of people can kind of wish, and I catch myself doing this too, if only, you know, if only, if only, if only, if only the raw materials, the ingredients that this dish that I am was made from. Look at all of the work that I need to do. Look at how hard I need to climb uphill to be able to overcome these particular pathologies that I didn't choose, that I didn't ask for, that was somehow like whatever the, not gifted to me, like,

thrown at me and I did all of this slime and I've got to wipe off all of this slime. And as you said, it's not a one-time event. I've got to, you tell me I've got to do it again. Yeah. I did it perfectly today. And you're telling me I've got to fucking do it again. But, but I think that everybody can look at

Everybody that that resonates with this sense of unfairness, this sense of sort of additionally heavy burden, there is an unbelievable light side to this, which is your level of self-insight is so much greater than the people who don't have to deal with that. And this isn't a that's better or worse. It just isn't.

is. And when you think about how much pleasure do you take from knowing yourself truly, from being able to do this kind of self-investigation, from the quality of your thoughts being driven by this need to understand, not only this need to understand you, but this need to be able to sympathize and empathize and connect with other people on a much deeper level. When you ask someone, when I ask myself this question, I'm like, look, would you sacrifice that if it meant that you didn't have to, like, is ignorance bliss, basically? And, um,

Maybe this is stock like psychological Stockholm syndrome or something that I'm like, I have to love my captor. I wouldn't I don't think I'd take that deal. I think that I value too much the opportunity to really to broaden out and fully fully investigate everything that life's got to offer. And I also think that when you arrive at successes and conquests in that kind of a way, you

Uh, you know, deep ones, insights about yourself, connections with other people. When you arrive there and you did it through spit and sawdust and sweat and blood and tears, it feels really earned as opposed to somebody that just sort of stumbled on it, didn't know where it came from and then kind of blew past it because they hadn't, they hadn't really worked out why it was there.

Yeah. I mean, you literally end up building your piece brick by brick. And I love that you, you know, came to your own conclusion there. But it's like ignorance is not bliss, dude. Ignorance is suffering. It's just what I'm just going to be exhausted, stressed, full of tension, full of anxiety, always like missing the beautiful moment that's right in front of me. I don't want to live like that. I think that's one thing that's special about the time that we live in today is that, you

you know, being miserable is like going, it's going out of style. It feels like so many people are exhausted by, you know, like I grew up in a way where if you had a mental ailment or a physical ailment, you were just going to have to deal with it for the rest of your life. But I think so many people are,

looking at whatever it is that's ailing them, making life harder, and they're actively looking for solutions. And if there isn't one out there, they're building companies to find it. They're creating new science to do it. They're just like, no, let's find a way to live at a higher or optimal level. I find that really inspiring. But even what you were saying before, it's making me remember that we live in a society that

is trying to make everything easier for us. Every single aspect of, you think about all the apps on your phone, they're all sort of designed to make life easier. So we live in this like uber door dash society and you can't bring that mentality into your personal growth. You also can't bring that mentality into your relationship. So there's definitely skills that you can develop, but

Honestly, you have to build your piece brick by brick. And I think it's, I've noticed that over time, you know, like I've done so many meditation retreats. I've probably meditated for over 12, 13,000 hours. And it's like, you know, maybe after five, 6,000 hours when I was like, okay, my mind is very different from how it was before. And it was literally like, you know, I'm training myself.

to live happier, to have more peace, to have more freedom. And it's the same way that you don't just run a marathon, you have to train for it. And you don't just learn a language, you have to learn it over time. And I think that's one of the harder aspects of self-development that people have to accept is that it's nice and slow and you got to be there for the long journey. And you know that something is good. I remember after that first 10-day retreat,

when I left, my mind felt undeniably lighter. And, but only by like maybe 3%, but it was so noticeable to me because my mind felt so damn heavy before that. And that's why I was like, you know, I got to go back. Cause I don't even, I don't even really understand what I went through. I need to go learn more. And as I've gone, you know, I still feel the same set of, you know, same set of

emotions like everybody else, but anxiety, sadness, these sort of heavier things, I feel them, but I don't grab them. I don't throw more fuel onto that fire. I don't make them bigger than they need to be. And, and, you know, I'm, I'm grateful that I put in the work because like it was hard, man, but, uh, you know, I still have a long way to go.

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Instagram reel that gets shared pretty regularly that's maybe a woman that's talking. She says, no one is coming to save you. And it's kind of played as part of an alpha motivational idea of pick up the weight and carry it yourself. This is something that you need to do. This is an issue that you're going to have to face, so on and so forth. And I think in many ways, it's cool and it's aggressive and it's lean in and it's high testosterone stuff. But the really, really difficult

that everybody needs to look at and that everybody needs to face is that when it comes to issues inside of your own mind, when it comes to boring, repetitive thought patterns, the way that you see yourself, the fact that you continue to show up in relationships in this way all the time and that you almost create this self-fulfilling prophecy. You almost say, I think that this is the way that things are going to happen

And I'm going to continue to push the buttons that seem to have caused it to happen before because I'm more concerned with proving myself right than breaking a negative pattern. I would sooner be miserable and correct than happy and incorrect. And I'm doing CBT for the first time. I don't know whether you've ever tried doing cognitive behavioral therapy, but it is...

It's frankly a lot of fucking work. Like it's just really hard. And it's not, you know, meditation. Yes, you do mindfulness throughout the day. Come back to the breath. You can notice, you can, you know, label release and allow, you can do those things. But for the most part, a lot of the work happens on the cushion, right? And you go, okay, here's my 10, 30, 60 for you, 120 minutes a day that I'm going to lock in and do this thing. CBT is like,

is like Japanese water torture for the mind. Because it's like, dude, if you could see the number of fucking reminders I've got on my phone, it's insane. If anybody was able to look at my phone throughout the day for the different triggers that I need to do, they'd be like, what the fuck is this? Like, why does kick the bully appear every 30 minutes throughout your day? And that's just one of a bunch of different triggers. And I'm like, right, okay, well, I'm going to commit. I'm going to try and work on this real hard. But my point being that no one is coming to save you

is literally the most true place it's ever going to be true is when it comes to the inner landscape of your mind. Absolutely. And it's funny too, because like, as soon as you said that, it made me think like, no one's going to come save you, but there are going to be people that randomly appear that will inspire you. And they may even help you with whatever method

um it is that you're trying to learn you know like i wasn't gonna i didn't just like teach myself meditating like i went to a teacher they taught me they corrected me over time it took me years to be able to like really you know make the actual practice of meditation much more efficient as opposed to like making it clunky and you know does the mind doesn't want to observe the present moment the mind is constantly trying to fight that and it's really hard to just observe reality as it is the mind is

constantly trying to interject the past or the future onto that. And so it took a lot of teachers to, you know, for me asking questions and corrections, but ultimately it's,

who put in the effort, it was my own mind. No one's going to come and meditate for you, dude. No, no one. No one's going to give you their enlightenment. No one's going to transmit peace to you. Like, you know, you may have be around people who have great energy and are nonjudgmental, but those are very sort of temporary things. And I think it was, it was interesting. Like I remember what, before I started meditating, I, um,

I did, you know, mushrooms a few times, tried acid a few times. And I found that these were almost like really pretty powerful, like intellectual experiences where like I felt better. It felt better in my, you know, my body and my mind was just like connecting to all these different ideas. But it felt like I was almost taking a peek

at a new world and opening a window. But when I started meditating, it was like, dude, I cracked that window open and just put my legs right through and I was walking in a whole new world. And even days later, I was like, everything is shinier and brighter. I literally remember after, I think on day seven, day eight of the first course, and it still continues on now,

I remember looking at a tree and being like, holy shit, I can see more branches and more leaves than I could before. Like my mind wasn't even able to cognize at that level because it was so busy. And I think it was a shock over time how our senses and literally all of our abilities are dulled by the tension that we unconsciously carry. You're rate limited by how much you're distracted. 100%. And yeah, you're right. The brain...

Can't do parallel processing. I'm sorry, even for the people that think they're amazing. Multitasking isn't a thing. You can just task switch really quickly. And yeah, you're right. You know, you think about, you'll remember this when you're reading and you're unmindfully reading. And this is such a funny one. You go through a page and you go...

I know that I looked at each individual word and I probably kind of somehow vocalized them in my mind. And if you held a gun to my head and asked me to tell you anything that just happened on the page, I'm like, I have no, like, how the fuck did I do this? I understand how I can watch a TV show and be distracted, but how did I say the words inside of my own mind? I know. And not taking any, I had to say it myself. And yeah, the interesting thing you said about being around friends, this is another thing I've realized.

the challenges of training the mind, whether it's through meditation or through CBT or through psychotherapy or through whatever, um,

Being around friends that eat healthily and regularly go for walks will probably result in you eating healthily and going for walks. Or at least you're not going to be smoking as much. There's sort of social influence in that way. They get up on time. They don't go out and party. They don't cheat on their partners. All of these things, many habits that people want to develop can be things that you imbibe, you absorb from being around people that also do those things.

and being around people that are sort of thoughtful and mindful and peaceful and gentle and inquisitive and curious and loving caring fuck like yes give me more of that but ultimately you being able to access that level of presence is only a you thing so yeah i do get the sense that kind of the final frontier for anyone that wants to do the

you know, Sigma male personal growth, Lone Ranger bullshit thing. Anybody that really wants to do that, it's got nothing to do with what you can flex on your social media. It's got everything to do with what the texture of your own mind feels like. It definitely does. And, you know, and I'm not going to discount the power of like,

who we allow to influence us, like, because I've seen that work in multiple ways. Like my wife and I, we both stopped drinking and just taking any intoxicants. It's been a number of years. It's been like since 2016, since I last like drank and smoked marijuana or did anything, right? Like taking zero intoxicants. And I've noticed over time, you know, not only did I have to like rebuild my

friendships because so much of friendship is pretty ritualistic. Like, you know, we come together, we smoke a joint, we come together, we have a drink. But I realized that, you know, my key friends, the ones that I've been friends with for years, after a few months, they really didn't care. They got over it pretty quickly. But there was an interesting dynamic where when my wife and I were, you know, we would go out to dinner with friends and whatnot or be at a party, like, you

One time we were talking, we're like, hey, are they drinking less than they normally do because they're around us? Like, are we like having some sort of, you know, unsaid thing? Like, we're not asking them not to drink, but just because we're around, they like totally slow down and we find some sort of balance. And like the other end of that is that,

in 2020, my wife and I, we moved up to Western Massachusetts and this little town out here that's near the meditation center that we often go to. And out here, there are so many people who have been meditating for decades. People have been meditating way more than I have, like 20,000, 30, 40, 50,000 hours of meditation, been meditating for decades and decades. And these

these people are weapons. Like their minds are just literally, you would not believe how cultivated they are. And these are people who, they don't write books, they don't have Instagrams. They're just so, like all they do is serve others and they just, you know, they generate peace and they have simple lives and work, but they're such hardcore meditators. And being around these people

has helped sort of fire up and like give even more energy to that effort that I'm applying in my own mind because I'm around them and I'm like, shit, like I want to be like this dude when I'm 70, you know, like this, this guy's like, when I think about like, you know, my teacher, Barry, like this guy is just like, he's 76. So unafraid of death. Like,

so kind doesn't want to hurt anyone in anything and is so simultaneously living in his power like he is a leader and he's just like you feel his peace move with him and he doesn't get caught up in other people's sort of like energetic troubles and it's it's awesome so to me i'm like damn i'm trying to be like this dude uh what have you learned about the

problem of struggling to connect with people when you start to do personal growth. You know, some people come along for the ride, but if you've sat with your emotions, if you've started to do even kind of a modicum of self-work, you can have a challenge to connect with people in the same way that you used to.

Yeah, I think it's because you end up changing the play. You know, like I think normally when we have long-term relationships or friendships, we sort of fall into this like rhythm of how we do things, the things we joke about. And when you start really applying that,

the fact that identity is flexible, that your preferences can evolve, that you can change your emotional skillset and improve it, then that's going to, you know, it's going to directly impact the way that you behave and show up in interpersonal situations. Some people are taken aback and have noticed that, you know, like I remember when I stopped, when I first stopped doing cocaine, like back in like 2011, like I used to party all the time. And I remember this one guy,

He was stressed that I stopped. He was like, just so like something, it was calling to him. And I remember he like screamed at me and was like, dude, stop being a bitch. Like do, you know, just like do the line. And I'm like, okay. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, haven't seen this guy since like, he's, he's just like on the other side of the world. I don't even know where I wish him the best. And, and I can tell that it just, it wasn't really about me. It just, it's scared me.

him about himself. But I think when you start changing, yeah, some people are going to be absolutely repelled, but also new people are going to appear. I think it was at that same time that I ended up meeting one of my best friends, Anwar, who is just so dedicated to his personal growth and his fitness. And it was like, this is like the exact friend that I needed at that moment when I was trying to develop a healthier mind and a healthier body. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so funny. I did maybe 27, 28 probably. I stopped drinking for the first time. I didn't drink that much, but every fortnight or so, I'd send it. And that's like classic club promoter drinker, right? Professional party boy shit. And I was like, I just don't think that I'm going to drink for six months. I'm going to see what happens if I don't drink for six months. And something not too dissimilar happened, which was...

Some people got spiky around it. Yeah. Because I think it, if somebody starts to make a positive change or even just any change, especially a positive change, it throws into sharp contrast the areas of your life where you're not behaving the way that you should do. You know, if you keep cheating on your missus every time that you go on a night out, then someone gets into a new relationship and they're like, do you know what it is, man? Like, I just really fucking love her. And I, I,

Not only do I have no desire to cheat on her, I kind of don't really have that much desire to do anything else other than hang out with her. It's like, oh, fucking gay. Dude, come on. What are you doing? Because these people know, I think, some people know deep down. And then you've got the other friends that are like, ah, sweet, man. I'm going to go fuck this girl that isn't my girlfriend. That's a different category of friend. But yeah, the other side that's super interesting, I think about this a lot,

We like people who are easy to predict. I think we like people who feel reliable. Like I know, don't worry about Diego. You know, he was with us on that one belief thing. He's going to be sweet when it comes to immigration, gun laws, taxation, you know, whatever, voting for the next, whatever it is. Don't need to worry about him. But if somebody shows the capacity for

surprising change. This includes a partner as well. If a partner is able to change themselves, you don't have that much control over them. They're kind of their own agent here. They're a little bit wild and free. And if they're able to change something that feels kind of fundamental about, you know, the relationship

The way that emotionally disturbing events impact them. They're able to change like, oh my God, like that, you know, it's really fundamental to them. Dot, dot, dot. What if that means that they change the way that they feel about me? Right. There's this fear of abandonment. There's this lack of predictability. And then when it comes to, you know, friendships and stuff too, yeah.

we want someone that we is just there for the ride you know we we know that they're going to be good it's kind of like a loyalty test right not not changing yourself too much is kind of like a show of fealty you know it's flying this banner above your head that says i'm with you even if i don't want to be with you or even if i shouldn't be with you but if somebody shows that if

the shouldn't is stronger than the should, they're actually going to fuck off. They're going to change themselves. Yeah. I would even take it a little step further where the ego...

it craves for those nearest us to have the same values and the same opinions. It feels challenging because sometimes it sort of will trigger this response where it feels like we might be left out of the herd or someone in the tribe is separating too far out of the tribe and you want to bring them in. And you notice that often with your sort of very close friend groups,

generally there's very similar views that people will have. And it takes a pretty strong individual to like,

develop a connection with someone who has very, just like totally different views on things. And I think that makes it really hard because you have to work with the universe instead of against it. And this universe that we live in at the atomic level, the biological level, the cosmological level, everything is just flowing change. We live in this giant river of change that only flows forward. What does that mean for our personal identities? That means that we are beings of change.

That means that what my preferences, my likes, my dislikes, my beliefs, what they were five years ago, they're not going to be the same right now. They're going to evolve. And hopefully they evolve because if I try to remain static, what that means is I'm trying to flow against the universe. And that's just going to hurt, right?

So you have to adapt. You have to have flexibility. You have to allow yourself to learn new things so that your perspectives can keep evolving. And that is challenging for friendships and for connections because I have no control over what my wife believes in. She's the most important person in the world to me, but her beliefs are her own to create because her mind is hers. A quick note, you are probably not eating enough fruit and vegetables and you know it.

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What about the challenge of moving slowly and in a considered way in the modern world? It's fast-paced, there's lots of distraction, and yet kind of what you're saying here is, hey, be intentional with the way that you do things. Absolutely, absolutely. These two things are in conflict. They totally are, but I don't care. I think about this all the time. I'm like,

I have all these different people that I work with. I've been really fortunate. I'm releasing my fifth book. And so I have agents that I work with, different people that I sign contracts with, publishers and whatnot. And I never...

allow myself to be rushed into decisions. I never sort of, you know, I do my best to only say yes to what feels right and what I can actually do as opposed to just doing what other people want me to do. And to be able to do that, it requires me moving slowly, moving intentionally. So, you know, if you don't get a text from me immediately, it's because like, I'm living my life, you know, give me some time to think. And I

I think it's hard, but that's the challenge that you need to take if you really want to embrace your own power in this world that's moving absurdly fast. We move so fast, and you see this a lot when things happen politically where...

One person puts up a story and they're like this is what's happening This is my view and then you don't read anything about it And then immediately you put up the same view same idea when you haven't even looked at what the situation is So I'm the perfect example as I went to this meditation retreat. I was gone for 45 days Totally silent had didn't have my computer didn't have my cell phone during that time the Ukraine war started and I

When I finished the retreat, I came back out. I went on Twitter and I was like, hey, just came back from a 45-day retreat. What did I miss? And people were like, don't look at the news. It's going to ruin your peace, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh shit, I have no idea what happened. So I'm looking around and then I go on Instagram and I see

all these intense stories, people pro-war, people against war, people this, that, that. And I'm like, I have no idea. And then people are asking me, what do you think? I'm like, I have no idea what I think. I just literally just got here. I need to go take some time to read some articles, make sure that they're from places that are not biased, so I can try to develop my own view on the situation. But I think that moment, honestly, was really helpful to be like, I don't need to just

say what the herd is saying because I'm afraid of being left out. You also don't need to keep up to date. There's this beautiful idea which you'll be familiar with called signal versus noise. And

is the information that you're taking in something that's actually worthwhile and going to stick about for a long amount of time or is it kind of just fluff within the system? And a perfect example of this would be, you mentioned the S&P earlier on. You could be long the S&P and you could check the price of it every single day for an entire year. Within that, there is a fucking ton of noise. Intraday trading, all of the movement of the price. Oh my God, this week it's up this much, this week it's down this much. And you're...

assuming that you're not totally detached emotionally, you're going to get ragged around at the mercy of the market. It's going to say, today you should feel good. Yes, tomorrow you should feel bad. A lot of noise, not that much signal. If you checked it once a year, you're like, huh, I can assume pretty reliably that most of the...

information I'm getting is a lot of signal right across the space of a year. Cause you can look at the entire, all of the little wobbles ups and downs and you can see it. Oh my God, that was the week that COVID happened. Look at the 20 point drop, 20% drop in the, I came back up and it did the rest of the thing. It's like, yeah. So that is signal as opposed to noise. And I feel like daily news is just that it's like, it's ripping your emotional state around and

In the same way, actually, going back to what we spoke about at the very beginning, this sort of very effective prison guard, mean prison guard slash torturer that you've got inside of your own mind. Let's say that you had a really miserable day three weeks ago on Wednesday and there was something you were real worried about and you know that you had a sad day. If you knew that you had a sad day and you hadn't journaled about it, could you tell me why you were sad?

Probably not. It was just all noise. It was ruminating about a thing that you were worried would happen, but didn't ever happen. And after you imagined the thing that wasn't going to happen would happen, you can't even recall the fact that you were fucking worried about it. That is actually kind of like a definition of insanity. It's this weird version of suffering schizophrenia.

Where you inside of your own mind create this entire landscape of problem and challenge that in retrospect, you couldn't even recall. But you know, the time's gone. That Wednesday, three Wednesdays ago, that Wednesday was lost. That Wednesday was lost to this thought that you can't even recall in the future.

And it's so funny because like you remember how you felt, right? You remember how you felt in your body and you remember that it wasn't a good day, but the contents of it, they're totally superfluous. They're not important. And I think it doesn't surprise me because this is such a common human experience. But one of the most popular posts that I've written was something along the lines like maturity is...

not trusting your mind when your mood is low, and not doing any sort of self-assessment when your mood is low. And it's understanding that like when the mind is feeling a lot of sadness, a lot of heaviness, and it's just full of self-doubt,

then of course it's going to point the attention back to you and you're going to start doing all this nonsense self-analysis that has no value because you're like, I'm so bad at this. I'm so bad at that. I'm terrible. I'm not a good person. And it's like, you have to totally learn to just not pay attention in these moments because yes, there are of course times when you should do self-analysis. And usually those times are in moments when your mind is a little more balanced, when

when you can tell yourself what you're good at and what you're not good at. But if you're just beating yourself down, then there's no point. You can't listen to that nonsense. And another thing, we talk about repetition a lot, but that takes a lot of repetition for you to recognize, ooh, my mind is throwing around a bunch of nonsense right now. Let me not grab it. I'm going to treat myself gently, and I'm going to try to move around the day pretty calmly.

It's the same reason that you should never go shopping when you're hungry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's tricky. It's hard because like the mind is always like...

And I've noticed this tendency a lot where emotions will try to expand themselves. Whether it's joy, we will share that joy with others and we wanna treat other people kindly, but it's the same thing when we're angry. We invite others to join us in our anger, either by saying something that gets them upset or...

or by just telling them like, oh, this happened to me and that happened to me. And you'll notice that your friend will slowly over time get angry with you and the emotion will keep building and growing. We also do the same thing in our own minds. And I have this, there was this beautiful moment in our relationship where my wife was working in this room here and I was working in the kitchen and we were apart for like two, three hours, both working on our laptops. And she comes into the room laughing

And I was like, "Hey, what's up?" She's like, "I just spent the last three hours trying to figure out how this tension in my mind is your fault." And she was like, "I just kept going backwards and further and further back in time to figure out how this is your fault." And she's like, "And it's not, it has nothing to do with you. I just don't feel good today." And I'm like, "Wow, that's, I mean, for one, thank you, 'cause you saved me from an argument, but also, you know, that's real wisdom right there." - What a beautiful level of self-awareness, dude.

You know, to have someone that's going to sit with the thing and investigate it and investigate it and investigate it and then go, yeah, this is a me thing. This is a me thing. Yeah. The, one of my friends, George keeps texting me, uh, different times when you should never trust your thoughts. So, uh, I, I, maybe it's Rousseau that said, uh, never trust the thought that you have indoors.

that basically you should always be on a walk when you have a thought. Never trust the thought you have when you're on less than six hours sleep. Never trust a thought that you have when you're hungry. Never trust a thought that you have after 10 p.m. at night. You know, there's kind of actually, when you think about it, it's a very small window of time and scenarios in which you should trust your thoughts. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I've been noticing more and more lately that

I try to lean in on the three internal guides, which are your values, your intuition, and your nervous system. When I'm trying to make big decisions, I have a set of values. Probably the most important one is, I don't want to hurt myself and I don't want to hurt other people. That's a key framework that I try to exist inside of. Then the other end is, is my intuition pushing me towards this direction? Does this feel correct?

And the other side of that is with your nervous system is like, am I already so overworked that I feel fried? Like, do I feel fried already? And if I add this, is it going to make things worse or better? And using those three guides, I think has been super helpful because

Like I said before, thoughts are flimsy. I don't give them a lot of credence. They're not very stable. But I think with intuition hasn't really led me astray. It's really been, and it's not like, it's not an often thing. It's not like something that, it's not telling you left or right. It's just, it will come slowly, especially with big chapters. Like it'll help open up new chapters in my life. And I'm glad I've been able to listen.

Where does self-love come from, in your opinion? I think it comes from embracing the fact that there's a lot inside of you. I think self-love is literally just turning that lens inward and you having deep, deep acceptance over your emotional history. You know, the good things that have happened, the tough things that have happened, you're sort of cognizant of it, you're aware of it, you're able to hold that history inside of yourself and you're simultaneously saying,

okay, I've felt a lot of pain in the past. I'm very imperfect, but I'm going to choose to start developing qualities that are going to help me make better decisions in life. So it's a mixture of self-acceptance and embracing personal transformation. And I think it comes from what we were talking about earlier. People are just exhausted by being miserable. It felt like

Like when I was growing up in the 90s, it didn't feel very emotionally hopeful, if I were to say. It was just like, you're kind of stuck. Whatever your situation is, it's what you have. And I think part of the reason that this wellness movement has exploded is that people are like, I need to figure out how to be happier. And part of that has been interesting is figuring out, okay,

I need to spend more attention on myself and try to cultivate myself. But that immediately, that personal inner work shines a light on what you can do better in your relationships. Is there a relationship between that and enoughness? This sort of desire to not feel like there's something missing, to feel whole?

I think so, yeah. I mean, it's tricky too because you want to be able to accept yourself and part of self-love is that deep self-acceptance

But human beings also, we like a project. I think we, you know, whether it's work or outside of work or personal or hobby, whatever it is, like we like having things to do. And I think a lot of us, when we notice how much of life is relational and interpersonal, it shines a light on the fact that it's worth your time to put effort into like, you know,

improving whatever it is that's making your life harder because you're the maker of your own suffering by large. So understanding where am I creating points of difficulty for myself and what can I do to remove them? But you have to balance that out because you're simultaneously enough

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If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount to see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. You could be more. Balancing those two things is so challenging because we want to have this sense of progress. You know, if we were to look back on the days of our lives that we're most happy with, it's probably not when we actually achieved the thing

It was when we were balls deep in the process of getting toward the thing. And both me and you are big fans of the challenging translation of the word dukkha. I just love that every time that someone tells this story of sort of what it could be and what it might be as well. Can you just explain the sort of suffering dissatisfaction? Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. That's so cool. Yeah.

My goodness. So one of the initial translations of dukkha—this is a Pali word that's really important in the Buddhist teaching—

it was initially translated as misery or suffering. And that sounds so intense. It sounds like- Super not dialed. Right. And I think that's the reality for some people, for sure. Their lives have been horribly difficult and if they were to give it a word, they would give it suffering. I think for a lot of us, it's on the other end of the spectrum where dukkha can also be translated into stress or dissatisfaction.

where, you know, instead of saying life is suffering, it's like life is dissatisfactory or life is stressful. And that I can definitely relate to, you know, there's definitely been parts of life that have been full of suffering. But I think the vast majority of the time, there is that sense of dissatisfaction and like being aware of that.

has been so helpful because you can live in a life where, you know, you can have the type of life where a lot of things just don't work out for you and it's a constant struggle and you could recognize that as dissatisfactory. But then there's also the times when things do go well for you and you do accrue victory after victory, but you're still incredibly dissatisfied. You're still looking to build another business. You're looking to do

you know, your next big thing and you're just appreciating nothing. So that's another type of suffering. And

I think being aware of that helps create the beginning of peace, really, because when you understand how the mind is geared towards dissatisfaction, when you're able to relieve those attachments and you make the mind lighter, what you end up getting are what's called the Brahma-Viharas, where it's just the divine abodes, where you get so much more equanimity, so much more loving kindness, so much more compassion, and

joy for the happiness of others, which is like, you know, one of the key elements of friendship, like to be able to, you know, have victories. Like one of our mutual friends, like Sahil Bloom, right? He was telling me how, you know, he had a great time talking with you. And then I was just talking to, talking him to, with him today. And we were celebrating that he was on the New York Times bestseller again. And, you know, we were like myself and our other friend, Sarah Kubrick, we were like,

both in the chat room and it was like we felt so much joy for this guy no jealousy just pure joy like he works so hard for this victory and we're celebrating him and i think those those things are hard to have without recognizing first that life has this dissatisfying quality but if you put right effort into it then you can relieve that tension so that you can have these different types of joy different types of peace yeah the uh

The first time I ever learned about that was in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True. Oh, yeah. He crushed that book. That was so good. Fuck. I mean, evolutionary psychology meets mindfulness for me is like... Yeah. So...

And just realizing that most things are kind of designed to be a little bit shitter than you thought that they were going to be. The orgasm is going to last less long. The holiday is going to be more complicated. The cocktail is not going to be quite as cold. You know, the gym routines just get you're going to be two, two, two reps short. And, um,

I guess there's two areas, right? So there's one which is, what's the story that you tell yourself about what happened and what is the thing that you're making happen? So you have your stimulus, you have whatever the thing is that you're relating to, that's environment design, that's ensuring that you want what you want to want and you go after the things that you actually want. So the sort of intentionalism approach.

And then the other side is, okay, even in the midst of something which is a little bit dissatisfying, how can I try and reframe this? And that's where, you know, the CBT side of stuff that I'm currently really interested in is super fucking powerful because you're training yourself, at least currently what I'm trying to do, I'm training myself on a daily basis to find all of the things that are good, to try and find like arbitrary, stupid, small things that...

And then you realize, hey, these things are there for me to enjoy. Like the front and center of consciousness. So I kind of had this idea. I wonder if you agree with this. Sam Harris has a thought that

All that we're ever trying to do is give our minds a good enough reason to be here in the present moment. And a lot of the time we do that through base jumping and skydiving and rock concerts and achievements and new cars and sex and drugs and all of the things that we do. And we're trying to raise the level of stimulus

to the point where we can't do anything but be in the moment. Paul Bloom talks about this. He spoke to a dominatrix for one of his books and she used this line, nothing catches attention like a whip. And if you've just been slapped across the face by a chick wearing tricep high leather gloves, there's not much going on in your mind for five seconds. The same thing goes for

elite sporting events, fighting in a ring, you know, all of these things just give us a good enough reason to be there in the present moment. And I've kind of had it in my mind for a while that the goal, as far as I can see it, of the mindful person should be to try and lower the bar

of external stimulus that you need in order to excuse yourself to be here in the present moment that you want to try and be able to do it navals if you won't be present with a coffee you can't be present on a yacht quote yeah um just okay i want to try and get myself to the stage where the smallest thing a really lovely gust of wind that was yeah refreshing like i really enjoyed that gust of wind how how fortunate i am that i'm here walking

in this good weather or this bad weather, but I'm still here walking. And that gust of wind was like really nice. And how great that, you know, I got up early today and I, you know, like, yeah, sure. I got stuck in a little bit of traffic, but how great that I, you know, I got to listen to that song that I love on the radio. I got to, you know, like you're chipping away at this negativity by you're chipping away at Duker. Right.

Right. You're just eroding it away over and over and over. And this is where, again, everyone's new shiny toy is the fucking coolest thing that they play with. So I'm kind of cautious of being fully CBT pilled about everything. But I do get the sense that there is a place for more...

more lean in, more kind of crafting. This is Rick Hansen's hardwiring happiness approach. This is sort of, I get the sense that there's a real place for that, that at least for me, my meditation was a great foundation for, but it's been a good springboard on top of that, that utilizing the

the ability to have the mind be nice and clear and then come in over the top and actually actively notice things that go out of your way to almost like lean in. It feels aggressive. It feels like action oriented. Whereas a lot of the time, I think that meditation feels a little bit more kind of sit back. It's not necessarily passive, but it's, you know, things that you'd like, let be, let go, let in, like this stuff is sort of flowing through you a little bit. And yeah, just that's

that sense that there is always something pretty much that you can find in the present moment that's pretty good and trying to get yourself to the stage where you don't need to be on stage in front of three and a half thousand people you don't need to have just won an award you don't need to have just watched your first child be born there's um there's this element that's like you know clear and all the examples that you gave where human beings are sensation oriented

where we crave pleasant sensations. That's why we're trying to heighten what you were mentioning, to bring ourselves to the present moment. And because we're really craving and seeking after these moments of deep, deep pleasure, literally the feeling of pleasure in the body that can manifest as a lot of different ways. And that's the thing that we get attached to, is we crave pleasure.

the things that feel good, literally at the level of sensations, and we hate the things that don't feel good at the level of sensations. When the Buddha was meditating, what he realized is that his way to freedom was not only in the body, but was through the level of experiencing sensations and being able to

be fully observant and to see them as they are. And part of that was bringing in the element of equanimity, the element of mental balance where you're not reacting to something, you're just observing it as it is. And I think from the deepest inside out,

it's almost, you become a lot more successful when you can develop that sense of equanimity with all of your sensations. When you're able to just feel, you feel something painful and you're like, okay, that's painful, but you're not necessarily reacting to it. And the same thing with the things that are super pleasurable. And it's quite powerful, man. When I go away to the longer retreats, we're essentially cultivating that level of equanimity with anything that we feel.

And the mind gets so heightened. It gets so powerful over time, especially if you spend, you know, these longer 45-day retreats, you spend 15 days being aware of the breath and taking that ability to concentrate to a whole nother level. And then you take the last 30 days

where you take that concentration and turn it away from the breath, but into the body. And it turns the mind into like a cannon where you can feel the body at a level that's just so more oriented to ultimate truth because your hands and the rest of your body, it doesn't feel like it's

It feels like it's just changing vibrations that are moving at incredibly rapid speeds. And I think having those experiences has been really helpful in the moments where you're

you're a little more sensitive in a positive way where you can just feel the breeze that you were talking about. You can feel a friend having their hand on your back and everything just becomes shinier and more vibrant, but you're also a lot less attached to it because you understand that all these things are highly impermanent. Because a lot of the things I'm curious about your meditation background because

There are different forms of Vipassana from the Theravada Buddhist background. And there's so many different styles of meditating, but some of the Vipassanas are a little more mind and thought oriented and others are more feeling oriented where it's like you're just directly going into the body. Yeah, I would say probably more thought oriented. It's Shinzen Yung's Five Ways to Know Yourself, which you'll probably be familiar with. I really liked that because it's the most...

rational procedural would be a good way to put it sort of approach to meditation right you see hear feel uh uh clarity equanimity uh whatever the fucking third one is consistency whatever it is anyway um just having a

framework that you can follow quite easily and that you can step through. I had a really great, uh, Brian Maniscalco. I used to work with this guy one-on-one during COVID and before that time. And, you know, I do these check-ins and I'd have little notes and you could even export your insight time and notes after a session. Um, so that was cool. And, you know, it'd be like a little training course, but, um, yeah, it's the opportunity to actually be able to

just experience life without this mental chatter in the back of your mind is um it's really great and i'm aware that for everybody that doesn't meditate or thinks that meditation is hokey uh this is just like two two people that believe in ghosts like talking about how there's fucking ghosts everywhere you know what's funny is like i think people do do feel like that i think meditation has a way to you know grow in the culture but a lot of these traditions you know with

with Shenzhen Yang, with Goenka, with Joseph Gose, you know, like all these different traditions that are out there with Jack Kornfield. Um,

a lot of it is really result-oriented and it's really based in like regular mundane life. You know, it's not like some like spiritual esoteric thing that's way out there. It's more so based on like what qualities you need to cultivate. Because honestly, really like when I go to retreats, it's just the mental gym. It's literally like you're going to the gym, you're building awareness, you're building equanimity, you're building compassion, and then your life changes after that. But I'm always like, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I was so

I felt at home when I got there into the meditation hall because, you know, there were people there who were like doctors and consultants and people who like, I don't know, people who had big jobs, small jobs, teachers, professors, students. It was all of these, you know, regular people. And you're being given a teaching that isn't trying to like convert you into Buddhism or anything like that. So like, I don't think of myself as a Buddhist, but I do believe

have a high respect for the Buddhist teaching. Like I personally believe the Buddha understood the human mind better than anyone else in human history. And, but, you know, I don't need to like convert into a religion to like make use of that teaching. Yeah.

Dude, I appreciate the heck out of you. I love what you talk about online. I think everybody needs to follow your Instagram. We came on here to talk about your new book and we got so distracted talking about meditation. We haven't had time. So why don't we, why don't we run this back? Why don't we do another episode within the next couple of weeks and we can talk about love, what it is, what it isn't, problem of struggling to connect, all of that attachment stuff. But it was so great to get to talk about this with you and

Like I say at the very beginning, I really, really love and increasingly I'm finding myself being drawn to people that just see the human condition the way it is. And I think you're definitely one of them. So people need to check out new book, you, everything that you do online. Where should they go?

They can come on Instagram, youngpueblo, Y-U-N-G underscore P-U-E-B-L-O. Also on Substack and my new book, How to Love Better, which is basically a bridge between personal growth and new harmony and relationships. You can find that in bookstores, on Amazon, wherever books are. But thank you, man. This has been a real, real joy. I feel like we can just keep wrapping on. Well, we will do. I'll see you very soon. I appreciate you, man.

Awesome. Thank you.

of 100 of the best books that I've ever found, and you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.