Young Pueblo on How to Find Inner Peace Today

During the French Revolution, a group of people fought for a genuinely beautiful idea: real republics, real rights. They won. Then the guillotine came out, and tens of thousands of people were killed in the years that followed. Diego Perez, the meditation teacher and bestselling author known by his pen name Young Pueblo, uses this as his go-to example of what happens when power meets an unexamined mind. "Power will expose the roughest parts of the ego," he says (08:32). "If you don't deal with that inner darkness... if you win, you're going to recreate the thing that you used to hate." It is a strange, slightly chilling story, but it sets up the whole episode's argument: the work that happens inside a person is not separate from the work that happens in the world. It is the thing that decides whether the second kind of work helps or harms.

Perez has spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation and sold over two million copies of his books, including Lighter and How to Love Better (00:00). On Liz Moody's podcast, he is asked a blunt version of a question a lot of people are quietly asking themselves: is it even possible to feel okay right now, given the news, the climate reports, the algorithms, the general sense that everything is on fire? His answer starts with something unglamorous. Before any of the inner work is possible, he says, a person needs clean water, food, a roof, and relative safety (00:42). Peace of mind is not purely a mental trick; it sits on top of a physical floor. For anyone who has that floor, though, he thinks the rest is trainable, not a matter of temperament or luck.

The first tool he offers is small and specific. When he reads about something terrible happening somewhere he has no direct power over, he practices metta bhavana, the Buddhist loving kindness meditation: directing a wish for safety and peace toward people he will never meet (05:28). He is careful not to oversell it. It might not change anything measurable. But Liz Moody pairs it with a line that does the real work of the segment: "Action is the antidote to anxiety" (06:13). The idea is that anxiety often comes from feeling powerless over something huge, and the fix is not forcing yourself to feel calm about the huge thing, it is finding the small thing inside your actual reach and doing it, whether that is a donation, a vote, a phone call to a representative, or, failing all of that, a few minutes of directed goodwill.

Getting out of automatic

A recurring theme is the gap between a person's immediate impulse and who they actually want to be. "The real you is not your immediate impulse," Perez says. "The real you is how you intentionally decide to arrive into the moment" (10:11). He connects this directly to family conflict: a lot of people do deep self-work, then go home for a holiday and are twelve years old again within minutes. His practical answer is almost anticlimactic: slow down. Notice the old pattern rising before it runs the show. He says this is the one thing worth taking from the whole conversation if nothing else sticks (09:47).

That same patience shows up in how he talks about long relationships. He describes himself and his wife as "two rivers that have intentionally decided to flow side by side" (17:10), each changing over the decades, choosing to keep changing together rather than freezing each other in place. On arguments specifically, he rejects the instinct to win. "Arguments are going to happen, so you have to create space for them, because that's an opportunity to create deeper connection," he says, describing a practice where each partner narrates their version of events while the other listens, back and forth, until a shared middle version emerges (17:56, 18:24). He is openly suspicious of couples who claim they never fight, calling it more likely a sign of bottled-up needs than of real harmony (18:47).

"Build boundaries, not walls, 'cause I think sometimes people are just, like, so intense about their boundaries and they think that their peace is gonna come from an external situation." — Diego Perez (Young Pueblo) [40:39]

That line matters because the boundary conversation can tip into avoidance. Perez's worry, shared from a friend's experience, is that some people shut a relationship down at the first sign of friction, which prevents the relationship from ever maturing into something deeper (39:21). A wall protects nothing but stagnation; a boundary, done well, is just a clearer version of showing up.

Phones get their own reckoning. He points out that a fifteen-second TikTok video is engineered for the easiest possible dopamine hit (24:23), and that forty minutes of scrolling tends to leave people more tired, not less, even after a few real laughs (24:38). His counter-practice is almost embarrassingly simple: walking. He calls it "a core element of what it means to be a human being," something that prevents both boredom and the physical toll of sitting all day (27:36). He also offers a method for a feeling most people never admit to: jealousy. Rather than scolding himself for feeling it, he notices it and deliberately tries to redirect it into what he calls sympathetic joy, actively rooting for the person he envies (28:55). It will not always land, but the attempt itself, he argues, is the practice.

Sixty days of silence and one law of the universe

The most concrete evidence for all of this comes from Perez's own meditation history. He began serious practice in 2012, started meditating two hours a day in 2015, and this year completed a sixty-day silent retreat, from January 1 to March 3, with no phone, no laptop, and no talking (46:40, 47:02). The first twenty days were spent entirely on breath awareness, nothing else (48:07). What he took from it is less mystical than it sounds: "Happiness takes mental training," he says. "If you really want to be a compassionate human being who's helping others, but simultaneously feeling good inside, you have to cultivate the mind" (47:23). Peace, in his telling, is closer to a trained muscle than a personality trait.

The lesson he keeps returning to is change itself. "The primary law of the universe at every single level of existence is change," he says, and fighting it is what produces most of the tension people feel (51:59, 15:18). He extends this to money, having grown up poor after his family emigrated from Ecuador, and having since spent time around people with a great deal of it. His verdict is unambiguous: "They can't fundamentally buy the mindset of being able to see the joy and appreciate the joy in life" (56:55). He names a friend in Costa Rica, a serious meditation teacher who gets by on close to nothing, as proof that the inner state and the bank balance are not the same instrument (56:12).

Near the end, he lists what he calls the seven things inner peace needs: exercise, healthy food, slowing down, uplifting friendships, gratitude, letting go of the past, and staying in the present moment (76:36). None of it is exotic. What makes the list worth hearing is the honesty wrapped around it, the admission that he still gets jealous, still feels anger and loneliness, still argues with his wife. The difference, he says, is that the emotions arrive lighter than they used to, and there's more room left over for noticing a good meal, a long walk, or a boring book read slowly, on purpose, for no other reason than the pleasure of taking one's time.