Curious Humans Podcast: Kyle Kowalski with Jonny Miller

I went on the Curious Humans podcast with Jonny Miller on April 4, 2023.

“Kyle may be one of the most well-read humans, and certainly the most relentlessly curious human, that I’ve ever come across.” — Jonny Miller

Listen: Spotify, Apple, on Curious Humans, or here:

Curious Humans Podcast: Childhood Curiosity, Human Development, Synthesizing Mind, & More

Show Notes

0:00 — Intro, how I’m feeling in 3 words

2:30 — Childhood curiosity and imagination, growing up shy and quiet, pursuing graphic design, not growing up a reader

6:45 — Existential crisis, busyness plus purposelessness, pre-crisis vs post-crisis, stumbling into a marketing major and career, disorienting dilemmas, the irony of reinventing a brand while having a personal crisis, starting to ask all the questions, zombified state, nervous system

14:30 — The state of my mind in my crisis, psychological development, 30 years of not questioning, my mind prioritizing passion/purpose vs money/materialism, how did my mind become my mind, asking questions and not pre-judging the answers, meeting life face-to-face, 5 Whys

19:00 — Discovering intentional living, 2.5 years of increasing cognitive dissonance, starting Sloww, using Sloww as an acronym, shifting from an external focus in life to an internal focus, interdisciplinary approach to learning

25:30 — Redesigning the ikigai model, money as a byproduct, my own purpose

29:30 — My evolving relationship with money, attempting to “fund the fun,” building an “entrepreneurial runway,” discovering the FIRE movement, Vicki Robin (Your Money or Your Life), Jacob Lund Fisker (Early Retirement Extreme), the beauty of “entrepreneurial math,” job crafting vs entrepreneurship

35:00 — Human development theories, Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, Robert Kegan’s theory of adult development and subject-object theory, how Susanne Cook-Greuter’s Ego Development Theory works, how the Sloww stages map to EDT

46:30 — Lottery of birth, ovarian lottery, original position (or veil of ignorance) thought experiment, the strangest thing, everyone is other-created before they are ever self-created

1:00:00 — The Extended Mind (Annie Murphy Paul), polarity thinking (Beena Sharma), how Ken Wilber learned to write by copying Alan Watts’ books, AI as a catalyst for human development

1:06:00 — Interdisciplinary learning, being a “bad” reader growing up, How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler), dialectical objectivity, coming to terms with authors

1:12:30 — Novel synthesis, reaching the end of the internet on a subject

1:14:45 — Rapid fire questions, slow living myth busting, busy life vs full life, The Quest of the Simple Life (W.J. Dawson), meta-crisis, our relationship with our minds

1:26:30 — What question is most alive for me right now

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