Audience of One Podcast #010: Kyle Kowalski with Spencer Kier

I went on the Audience of One podcast with Spencer Kier on March 7, 2023.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, or here:

Show notes and more below.

Audience of One Podcast #010: Personal Journey, Finding Purpose, Human Development, Birth Lottery, Free Will, & More

Show Notes

0:00 — My background in graphic design through high school, stumbling into a marketing career after college, not questioning anything in my life until 2015

4:00 — Leading up to existential crisis, the 6-week crisis itself

7:30 — The following 2.5 years of increasing cognitive dissonance, asking all the questions but not having any of the answers, dying inside by early 2018

11:30 — Entrepreneurial dreams, my other side project that I put on the backburner to pursue Sloww

15:30 — Intentional living, finances/money, why Sloww is named “Sloww,” work as self-worth, funding the fun, building an entrepreneurial runway, discovering the FIRE movement, entrepreneurial math, evolving relationship with money, imposter syndrome

24:30 — Conversations with my wife about intentional living, money, quitting career, and pursuing entrepreneurship

30:00 — The difference between a crisis in 2015 vs 2023, not having a lot of examples/guides in 2015, are crises more common today, are more people looking for purpose/meaning

35:00 — Why I’m more optimistic about the future than most, The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant, This is Water by David Foster Wallace, the rising tide of psychological development collectively, adult learning as a means to adult development, Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and how technology runs ahead of culture

38:00 — How the Sloww Stages came about, lifelong learning as support for all stages, Stage 1 intentional living, Stage 2 life purpose, Stage 3 mental mastery (the mind), Stage 4 spiritual growth/timeless wisdom (beyond mind), holons/holarchy, Maslow’s holarchy of needs, transcending and including (or development is envelopment), end-of-history illusion, unfolding and connecting dots looking back

45:00 — Life purpose, ikigai, Ikigai 2.0 breakdown, checks and balances when finding purpose, money as an optional byproduct of meaning, job crafting

55:00 — Lottery of birth overview, childhood amnesia, testing everything against my lived experience, the strangest thing, validating all this for yourself, Livewired by David Eagleman, socialization/conditioning, implications of all this, Creating Freedom by Raoul Martinez, universal/unconditional compassion, myth of ultimate responsibility, realization/understanding vs belief

1:08:00 — Agency and free will, does it even matter, why it changes everything, why lack of free will is liberating vs limiting, how awareness of something changes your relationship with it, Kegan’s theory of adult development and subject-object theory, false dichotomy of determinism vs free will, the holy shit moment, Behave by Robert Sapolsky

1:22:30 — What I’m seeking, life is just happening/unfolding, do you live life or does life live you, Alan Watts on sailing vs rowing, Michael Singer on surrender

Pre-Show Q&A

Spencer shared some questions prior to our podcast recording. Here’s how I answered them.

Q: What have been the biggest steps you’ve taken re: your lifestyle and financially to enable your pursuit of wisdom?

1) Relationship with Money (lifelong): Money has never been a primary motivator in my life. Even though I’ve been working since I was 13 or 14 years old (started lifeguarding because I was in competitive swimming), money has always been a secondary extrinsic byproduct of my primary intrinsic motivation which is doing good work (that’s a separate topic about how I realized that my worth as a person was always tied to my work even throughout my career). Anyway, my views on money make more sense now because Daniel Kahneman says, “The importance that people attached to income at age 18 also anticipated their satisfaction with their income as adults.” Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money) confirms it saying your views on money come from the economic situation of the time period you were born into, where you were born, and how you were raised about money—and they are largely set pretty early in life.
2) Discovering Intentional Living (late 2015-16): I discovered intentional living (slow living, simple living, voluntary simplicity, minimalism, etc) in 2015-16 (during my existential crisis and the year after) which blew my mind at the time. I had no idea people were intentionally downshifting, and I saw it as a possible way to escape my career and do what I really wanted to do (pursue something more purposeful through entrepreneurship).
3) Discovering FIRE Movement (mid-2017): I discovered the FIRE movement in mid-2017. Like intentional living, FIRE blew my mind. People retiring in their 30s and 40s (some even in late 20s!). I’ve never really cared about luxury stuff (even though we’ve owned a McMansion in the suburbs and sports car), so that made it easier to be willing to give those things up if necessary. It wasn’t too hard to stop the bleeding on lifestyle inflation. We audited our spending in 2017 and reduced year-over-year expenses by 30% the following year. Vicki Robin says it’s not uncommon to see a 20-25% reduction because that’s how much unconsciousness there is in most people’s spending.
4) “Funding the Fun” & “Entrepreneurial Runway” (late 2015 – mid-2018): I worked full-time for 2.5 years between existential crisis and quitting my career (brutal years of increasing cognitive dissonance) which allowed me to build an “entrepreneurial runway” of funding myself. Initially, I thought I’d “fund the fun” which meant staying employed and keeping my salary while using the money to fund what I really wanted to do on the side. That didn’t last long because I was dying inside working a purposeless job/career and it eventually hit a boiling point in 2018.
5) Ongoing “Entrepreneurial Math” (mid-2018 – today): If you don’t spend much money, you don’t need to make much money. If you don’t need to make much money, you have a much higher likelihood at succeeding doing whatever you want (making it entrepreneurially). Here’s a bit more about 🔒my evolving relationship with money.

Sloww has a lot going on. You crank out content and have a lot of different offerings. How much are you optimizing for quantity and breadth of ideas, vs. filtration and quality?

I’ve realized this is a false dichotomy. Quality only comes as a byproduct of quantity. You can’t skip quantity and just jump ahead to quality. Same applies for filtering, evaluation of information, etc. Your filter and evaluation abilities get better as a byproduct of doing them more.

How are you applying all of these models, frameworks, theories to your own life? What kind of experimentation are you doing?

I don’t run “experiments” per se. Everything I learn is for life. I’m not learning hard skills, sports, languages, etc. I’m learning why and how to live. To me, the learning and the living are one and the same—life is the learning/testing ground and the actual living simultaneously. Daily life itself is both the practice and the game. This makes more sense in context in terms of a new concept I recently discovered called “transformative learning.” Adult learning is the means for adult development. And, guess what? Transformative learning starts with a “disorienting dilemma” (aka my existential crisis) and ends with a perspective transformation (aka psychological development).

How do you chose what aspects of others to pull into your own philosophy?

This is a good question, and I’m not sure I have a good answer at the moment. I look for themes/patterns that generate insights between everything I’m learning across people and disciplines. Sometimes the insight puts words to something that I already knew but couldn’t articulate which results in an aha moment/epiphany. Sometimes the insight goes against my lived experience, in which case it’s surprising/unexpected and worth exploring deeper.

Self-improvement can quickly become a game and a means of entertainment, rather than truly improving. How do you avoid this trap?

Everything I do is still driven by my existential crisis 7+ years later. For some reason, it was the spark that seems to give me self-regenerating fuel. Because I’m driven by my own realization that “You can get all A’s and still flunk life” (Walker Percy), the absolutely last thing I want to do is delude myself. I’m open to what is, whatever it is. The entertainment side of self-improvement has never really been an issue because of my personality type (INTJ, Enneagram 3 or 5) is pretty ruthless about efficiency and effectiveness. How I’m wired will not allow me to be inefficient or ineffective for long.

You talk about a four step progression — 1) intentional living, 2) life purpose, 3) mental mastery, 4) spiritual growth — why these four and in this order?

This is just the progression of my own personal lived experience and journey to date. I discovered intentional living first during my existential crisis (late 2015), I spent 2016-17 finding life purpose, then I started getting even deeper into the mind and my own mind (what is purpose anyway?), and interest in the mind eventually seems to lead to the limitations of the mind or “beyond mind.”

Is this a linear, unavoidable journey, or is it unique to each person?

It isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing by any means. However, when you sign up for Sloww emails, I ask people which stage they are most interested in, and the results mirror the stages (most people interested in Stage 1, followed by 2, then 3, and the least interested in 4). Also, the 🔒Sloww Stages map to the Ego Development Stages pretty well. So, this general progression seems to make sense: shifting from an external focus to an internal focus (Stage 1), figuring out what you really want to do in life (Stage 2), getting to “know thyself” gets you into the mind (Stage 3), and then mind leads to beyond mind (Stage 4).

Where are you at in your journey?

The stages “transcend and include” or “development is envelopment” (in Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory terms). So, being at one stage doesn’t mean excluding or leaving prior stages. I feel good about Stages 1 & 2 at this point, so most of my time, energy, curiosity, and focus is on Stages 3 & 4.

What do you see this journey culminating in?

No idea. I can only see what I can currently see. Life is happening and unfolding.

Is there something beyond the fourth stage?

I’ll have to wait and see. There were only 3 Sloww Stages when I first created the framework. I didn’t “see” the 4th stage until a year or two later. I’ll never say it’s finished because that would suffer from the “end of history” illusion.

You’re working on courses for each of these. What’s the timeline? How you are you creating them for action vs. consumption?

First course is the Synthesizer course for lifelong learners that will teach others how I do everything I do. It will be grounded in my own process (screen sharing exactly how I do everything), so it should be actionable instead of lecture-based edutainment. That should launch in the next month or two (although I humbly admit I’ve been extremely bad at predicting when it will be live to date). After that, there will be a course for each stage that launch in chronological order. The Stage 1 intentional living course will also be live this year. If things go really well, the Stage 2 life purpose course will also be this year (or early next year). I plan to make each of them grounded in my own experience with many practical calls to action for the student.

You created an ebook on Ikigai 2.0. For those who are unfamiliar, what is Ikigai, and why did it need revising?

It’s probably easier to say what ikigai is not—it’s not the viral 4-circle diagram you’ve probably seen online. When I was searching for my own purpose in life, I stumbled upon that diagram which took me deeper down the rabbit hole of ikigai. I discovered that the creator of the diagram actually just combined an existing Spanish diagram about purpose with Dan Buettner’s TED Talk about the Blue Zones which mentions ikigai. He had no bad intentions by combining these existing sources (and he’s actually probably done the world a big favor by getting the ikigai meme out there), but I quickly realized it doesn’t represent the actual Japanese concept of ikigai. So, my 5+ years of studying the subject resulted in redesigning the diagram to better match the truth of ikigai (I call it Ikigai 2.0 to leverage the meme that already exists instead of naming it something new). Ikigai 2.0 is the model I personally used to find purpose, and it’s what I still recommend to everyone today.

One of the concepts you’re more interested in is the “Lottery of Birth Ticket”. What is and what are the implications?

The lottery of birth is the idea that your birth sets many things in your life in motion at absolutely no choice/control of your own. Your nature: genetics, sex, race, IQ, etc. Your nurture: your parents, your geographic location, the time period in which you are born, your parents’ wealth, what your parents choose for your education, etc. The 🔒strangest thing to me is that we have 0% choice/control in any of these things that shape our brain/mind, yet at some point we are expected to take 100% sole responsibility for the brain/mind we are dealt. But, the cards you were dealt shape the brain/mind that you now use to play the hand. So, the lottery of birth impacts and has implications on everything. Warren Buffett says it’s the most important event in which you’ll ever participate. And, this isn’t just direct observation of your own lived experience or philosophical; neuroscience also shows how things change the brain based on what came before (I just read Livewired by David Eagleman so it’s top of mind).

To what degree do we have agency?

I don’t know. I no longer have the lived experience (and also haven’t seen scientific evidence to support) that anything is completely free. I would say I have the sense of more agency now than I did pre-existential crisis. And, I seem to have more agency now that I clearly see my socialization and conditioning. Having awareness of something changes your relationship with what you are aware of. So, more holistic perspective-taking means 🔒you as subject can take more things as object and change your relationship with them.

Do we have a responsibility to humanity and the rest of the universe? What is it and why?

It seems to be that ultimate responsibility is a myth (meaning someone doesn’t deserve credit or blame for the brain/mind they got). It’s easy for me to take credit for my strong sense of personal responsibility, but I didn’t choose that. I don’t blame someone who “lost” the lottery of birth if they have a weak sense of personal responsibility. So, I think the concept of “responsibility” needs to be redefined. One of the best definitions I’ve come across is: “To acknowledge that we aren’t ultimately responsible is the closest we get to taking responsibility. The more we understand the affect the world has had on us, the more we can affect the world.” (Raoul Martinez).

Are there examples to the contrary (i.e. people who have transcended their genes and environment)? What does this say about the validity of the idea, or should we just look at those cases as anomalies?

Not completely that I’ve ever seen, but if anyone knows of any please share them with me. For instance, no one is transcending their primary language (even the enlightened, or even people who disappear in the woods/caves for decades). I don’t think transcendence means leaving them (unless you are Jill Bolte Taylor and have a left brain hemisphere stroke where biological changes wipe out identity, language, etc). I think transcending means being aware of them and understanding them. This awareness and understanding allows you to change your relationship with your socialization/conditioning. There’s also no bypassing socialization/conditioning because you would be a feral child like Danielle Crockett (see David Eagleman’s book Livewired).

How do you reconcile your passion for self-improvement with the idea that we control so little of what/who were, and may not even have free will?

I view this more as 🔒life is living me vs me living life—life is living through me.

Do we have free will, and does it really matter?

This is such a touchy subject for so many people that I hesitate to give an answer. Instead, I have 20+ posts on the Sloww website that I’d encourage people to investigate for themselves (and that I’ll eventually turn into an eBook). I would say it’s absolutely worth your time and energy, and it matters so much more than most people think. After countless conversations about free will on Twitter, I will mention a couple common things I’ve seen where we people get hung up: 1) most people are stuck with a false dichotomy (determinism vs free will), and 2) most people think “no free will” is a belief when it’s not.

What’s your fascination with Ego Development Theory? Why is it a good framework for understanding human development?

I’m fascinated by Ego Development Theory because I didn’t discover it until years into my journey (so there wasn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy playing out). When I came across it, I felt it articulated pretty much exactly what I had gone through in shockingly similar detail. It also seems to be one of the few theories where the theory emerges from the research (vs most coming up with a theory first and then looking to validate it with research). All this being said, I’m currently playing devil’s advocate/steelmanning psychological development stage theories and looking at all the arguments against them.

What stage are you at?

I did a 🔒self-assessment in mid-2021 where I assessed myself at a “center of gravity” of Stage 5 (Susanne Cook-Greuter says most people span 3 stages at any given time but have a center of gravity in one stage—so I felt I was spanning 4/5, 5, and 5/6). Now, two years later, 5/6 is resonating more than before. Self-assessments can always suffer from bias, so I’ve actually reached out to a few people in Ego Development Theory (there’s also the Vertical Development Academy) including Susanne herself, and they’ve confirmed they think I’m in the 5-5/6 range. But, who knows.
- EDT Stage 3/4: Skill-Centric / Self-Conscious / Expert: During the first ~7 years of my marketing/advertising career (2007-2014), I was unconsciously immersed in the rat race: get a job, get promoted, change jobs for more money, upgrade lifestyle, repeat. There wasn’t much (if any) questioning of anything. I was executing the socialization/conditioning of my environment, culture, education, profession, etc. I was a high-achiever whose worth was my work. My identity was my LinkedIn profile, and my energy was focused externally. In 2014, I started my fourth job, but the first one to pay me six figures. I had “made it.”
- EDT Stage 4: Self-Determining / Conscientious / Achiever During 2015, I was killing myself with work more than any prior year and consistently working 60-80+ hour workweeks for months straight. On one hand, it “paid off” in the conventional sense: I was promoted to Marketing Director and making even more money. But, work finally broke me—not just because of the burnout hours, but because the work itself was purposeless to me. Imagine getting paid so much to kill yourself with work just to sell people more stuff they don’t need. Was this really why I was alive? This was one of countless questions I started asking myself in the midst of an existential crisis in late 2015. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my beginning breakthrough toward the postconventional stages of development. During this time, I also discovered intentional living, slow living, simple living, etc (Sloww Stage 1).
- EDT Stage 4/5: Self-Questioning / Individualist / Pluralist: During 2016-17 (while still working full-time), I immersed myself in the inner journey—trying to get to know myself with the intent of discovering my life purpose (Sloww Stage 2). In the 2.5 years post-crisis, the cognitive dissonance between what I had been learning about myself, others, and the world vs how I was still living hit a boiling point. In mid-2018, I quit my career to finally follow my purpose and go full-time into solopreneurship. Most of my lifelong learning (“horizontal development”) and human development (“vertical development”) really started to take off after mid-2018.
- EDT Stage 5: Self-Actualizing / Autonomous / Strategist: It was probably another 2-3 years into Sloww before I started to resonate with this stage. I attempted to give myself an “EDT self-assessment” in mid-2021 and felt like this stage was my “center of gravity” at the time (spanning stages 4/5, 5, and 5/6). Systems views and polarity thinking are parts of what I’d consider Sloww Stage 3 (polarity thinking in particular was quite an epiphany).
- EDT Stage 5/6: Construct-Aware / Ego-Aware / Magician / Alchemist: I’m now writing these words almost two years later in 2023, and Stage 5/6 resonates more (and seems more embodied) than ever before. I’m now very aware of my lottery of birth, socialization/conditioning, nurturing, language, etc—why I’m “me” psychologically. I’m able to observe/witness the workings of my mind and understand “beyond mind” (Sloww Stage 4).
- EDT Stage 6: Unitive: This transcendent stage is mostly beyond my current development (subject and object have not merged), so nothing much to share (for now)!

Why is it so important to tie your own experience to theories and frameworks?

I’ve just found they help explain things. Yes, they are maps and not reality. But, I have nothing against better maps.

What are you seeking?

I don’t know. I was initially seeking an escape from my career and finding life purpose. Then all the learning made me realize that one thing is interconnected to everything else. Now I’m just pulling on the connected threads and seeing where they lead. I continue to learn new things which seems to lead to new perspectives (psychological development), so I guess I’m just seeing how life continues to unfold vs seeking anything in particular.

What’s your hope/goal for Sloww?

I’m not sure. This whole thing started as an attempt to make sense of life (my life and life in general) in the midst of an existential crisis. Learning one thing has led to another thing to another to another. I view it more in the context of an “infinite game” (in James Carse’s terms) vs finite goals. I’ve distilled my purpose (and since I’m synonymous with Sloww, Sloww’s purpose) as “synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes human development.” I’ve seen this in my own life, and others have told me Sloww has done the same for them. So, Sloww seems to facilitate transformative learning.

You are a master synthesizer and have consumed a lot. What’s your best attempt at a “theory of everything”?

I honestly don’t have one and haven’t attempted to create one. I’m not sure humans will ever have a single theory of everything. So far, I’ve been more interested in synthesizing everyone else’s theories of everything.

How hopeful are you that we’ll be able to raise the baseline level of awareness/consciousness for humanity? Through what means?

I seem to be more optimistic than most about this. Some like Ken Wilber claim that when 10% of the population reaches a certain level of development, they become a critical mass/tipping point and their values infuse the culture at large. Ego Development theory says 15-20% of the population (US and UK I believe) are in postconventional stages of development, so maybe the percentage needs to be higher than Wilber thinks. The means by which I’ve personally experienced it is transformative learning (or adult learning that leads to adult development). So, I plan to continue synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes human development in myself and others. I also think tech, psychedelics, and other inventions/innovations can be means that facilitate development.

What’s one question you’d leave me and listeners with, either to think about or act on?

I’d say my question comes from the lottery of birth (or “ovarian lottery” in Warren Buffett’s terms). Imagine you are going to be born 24 hours from now and that you’ve been granted an extraordinary power: the ability to determine the rules of the society that you are going to enter. But, you probably aren’t going to be born as “you.” You are going to select one lottery ball out of a barrel with 8 billion balls, and that’s you. You don’t know your genetics, race, sex, health, IQ, location, parents, or anything else. Not knowing which lottery ball you are going to get, what kind of a society are you going to design?

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