Peter Kowalke is a 45-year-old relationship coach, “half monk,” and Bangkok-based nomad who has crafted a life of radical simplicity. (peterkowalke.com)
Peter explains his life through multiple levels of understanding—from the simple “I help people have good marriages and travel around the world doing it” to the complex spiritual journey that led him to nearly become an ordained monk in the Vedanta tradition. He shares how he lives on as little as $9,000 a year while occasionally earning up to $200,000 through his three income streams: relationship coaching, content marketing, and freelance writing.
We explore his nomadic lifestyle across Southeast Asia and Africa, his philosophy of distinguishing wants from needs, and his creative frugality, such as his airport food court “monk’s bowl” approach to eating. Peter reflects on the challenges of his borderless existence during the pandemic, when global “tribalism” left him without a community safety net despite his carefully designed life of freedom.
Peter discusses the apparent contradiction between his relationship coaching and monastic leanings, his unschooling background that taught him to question conventional wisdom, and how he builds community through his popular Bangkok dinner parties. Peter’s story illuminates the rewards and challenges of crafting a life that prioritizes spiritual growth and human connection over material possessions and geographic roots.
Full transcript: dirtbagrich.com/peter
Recorded in January 2025.
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Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript. Typos and mistakes exist!
Blake Boles 00:00
Peter Kowalke, welcome to Dirtbag Rich.
Peter Kowalke 00:03
Hi Blake, thanks for having me.
Blake Boles 00:07
There’s this YouTube series from the magazine Wired and they call it five levels and they bring on scientists or philosophers who describe what they do. They’re subject of expertise at five different levels. The first one is to a elementary school student, then to a high schooler, then a undergraduate, then a grad student, and then a fellow expert in the field. And your life is so interesting that I want to, to go on a similar journey, maybe not through five levels, but at least through multiple levels.And it will begin here. How would you explain your life to a 10 year old?
Peter Kowalke 00:41
I help people have good marriages and I travel around the world doing it.
Blake Boles 00:49
That’s great. Let’s just go to the next one. How would you explain it to like a curious, sharp teenager? Who is kind of like, who is this guy and what’s he all about?
Peter Kowalke 01:01
I go around the world meeting new people and I help them have good relationships. It’s probably pretty similar actually for the 10-year-old and the precocious team quite honestly.That’s probably what I tell the 50-year-old too, Blake.
Blake Boles 01:23
All right, let’s say there’s a somewhat combative, uh, 20 year old who’s asking you and, and it’s starting to ask questions like, okay, but you just travel around the world all the time. So you must be like wealthy and you just help people with their relationship. So you’re like a therapist. They want more details fill in the gaps here.
Peter Kowalke 01:45
Yeah, well, so basically, yeah, I’ve always been interested in love and relationships. And so after being a magazine editor, I decided I could be a baby Tony Robbins. And so I start I help people with that, you know, with all those basically getting them out of this, all these these poor advice from memes and social media, and everybody has trouble with relationships.And one of the things that makes me interesting is I’m very global. And so I travel all over the world and I do it very cheaply because, you know, if you don’t jet set, you know, new location every day, you can actually save costs by traveling. And I live really simply. So, yeah, actually, I’m anything but rich. I just, you know, mind my eyes and cross my T’s a little bit more.
Blake Boles 02:49
So how do you actually make money? This is again the college student asking this question. You know, someone who’s thinking about like, oh, I’m gonna have to start making my own money soon.This guy seems to do it in a pretty interesting way. Who pays you?
Peter Kowalke 03:04
I get paid two, well, three ways. I get paid first of all because I used to be a journalist and so I still do some freelance writing and if I pick my markets right, I still get paid for that. Usually that’s boring corporate stuff.I also am a relationship coach, so I’ve got usually well-to-do singles and couples that they’re struggling with their relationship or wanting to go from good to great. And so they’ll hire me on for three months a year, maybe longer to help them sort that out.And then the third thing, the way I make money is I run a content marketing firm because when I first started being a coach, I, of course, wasn’t making money and had no clue how to make money, but I was a journalist, so I said, well, writing for advertisers and writing for corporate clients, that’s actually pretty similar. So I just got in that content creator mode because every business is in the content creation business basically today.So that’s the third way I make money.
Blake Boles 04:20
When you say firm, I’m thinking New York City, Manhattan, fancy couches, but I’m imagining that you have a digital business. Is that right?
Peter Kowalke 04:32
Oh, completely. Yeah, you probably heard the language I just default to to make it sound like I’ve got a New York City address. Yeah, it’s me and a bunch of freelancers, basically, that I, you know, that I have on speed dial. And so it’s just a bunch of me’s basically.And so we I do that all over the world. I, you know, I’ll be writing from bank. Some of my clients know that I’m all over. So they’ll be like, Where in the world are you today? Help me know what time zone we’re interacting on here.
Blake Boles 05:03
And can you talk a little bit more about how much money these three different income streams earn? Maybe you could talk about historical averages or peaks or the current situation.
Peter Kowalke 05:17
I’ll give you the highs and the lows that might be because it does, as you know, from the sort of work you do, Blake, it goes up and down. Some years I make as low as maybe $9,000 a year, and before the pandemic, when things were actually quite good, it was closer to $200,000.Because I live very simply and I don’t use the money for myself anyway, with a little bit of smoothing, I can get away with running something closer to $9,000 and get through the day. When I was earning a lot more, it was mostly gravy.
Blake Boles 06:02
Where are you right now and where have you been living over the past number of years?
Peter Kowalke 06:08
At this moment, I’m in Bangkok, Thailand, on Sukhumvit, for those who’ve been to Bangkok. It is one of my home bases.The past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Kenya. Being a U.S. citizen, I do make it to the U.S. sometimes, usually to visit my mom and my parents in Ohio, and then other places. I’m one of those Southeast Asia guys, so you’ll see me in all the Southeast Asian countries and places like China. In a given year, I might be in four or five of those, Singapore, Vietnam, and of course, China’s been a big one lately, Philippines, places like that.
Blake Boles 07:01
There are a lot of people who like to spend time in Southeast Asia, a lot of so-called digital nomads. Oh, when you spent time in Africa, what was the draw there?
Peter Kowalke 07:12
The draw for Africa was that I didn’t know Africa at all. I sort of have this theory, this way I look at the world. There’s the home I know and the home I’m going to know. I really take the whole world as my home. I didn’t like the fact that Africa wasn’t home yet. It was a future home, but I didn’t really have a good sense for it.When I saw an African, I didn’t feel at home the way that I do with a Thai or a Chinese person or an American. Yeah, I first went, in the name of full disclosure, for a visa run. I was, of course, part of the calculus there, but it was also to make Africa home. I started in the safe countries and honestly, still and mostly in the safe countries. That meant Kenya and Uganda. I don’t know if Ethiopia is a safe country, but it’s relatively safe.
Blake Boles 08:17
So at this point, Peter, I think a number of people listening might think, all right, American dude in Southeast Asia, doing some online freelancing, online coaching, this is a pretty familiar story, but there’s this whole layer next level, we’re going to level up because there’s this, this next layer to your life, here comes the grad student question, um, cause you describe yourself as, as a monk, but you are not actually an ordained monk. Can you talk more about that?
Peter Kowalke 08:48
Yeah, I would love to be an ordained monk, but at the moment I’m not. So yeah, I don’t have a home, like I haven’t had a home for I think about 20 years now and I have very few possessions and I make it look like I’m a jet-setting consultant sort of person. Some people might even think that, but the reality is I’m much closer to a monk and I have almost nothing. And again, why I can get away with $9,000 a year and spend. And the reason I’m global, the reason I do that and don’t have the stuff is because I’m one of those people that takes spirituality pretty seriously. And so I practice Vedanta, which is a thoughtful strain of Hinduism. And I’ve been doing that for most of my life, even before I knew what it was called. And so, yeah, I thought about being a monk because that’s the sort of the highest expression of my faith. That’s what we would all do if we can do it. And I was pretty close to doing it.And I lived in monasteries a long time. It’s actually why I ended up in Bangkok. A monk sent me there originally. And for various reasons, I decided not to do it at the end. I did have an application, but instead I said it’s usually a yes, no question. It’s usually a binary choice of you’re a monk or you’re not a monk. But the reality is not quite like that. It’s really more of a journey. So I said, well, I can’t do the all option of being a monk, but it’s not really appropriate to be not a monk either. So I’ll just take a more gradual approach and be more monk like each year. And so that’s kind of why I travel the way I do. It’s kind of why I live simply. And a lot of the other things that people think are somewhat strange about me, because I sort of have one foot in this world and one foot in the monk world.
Blake Boles 10:57
Have you ever used a different word than monk like ascetic or, I don’t know, something else definitely conjures a certain image of a monk in a monastery of a certain order or faith and, and really it’s subject to a number of, of rules of the community and you, you are not subject to those. You are extremely.
Peter Kowalke 11:18
free? It’s a great question, Blake, and I’ve honestly pondered it for more than a decade now.Sometimes I call myself an R&D monastic. I don’t call myself an ascetic. I mean, you could call me a sadhu, but even that’s kind of wrong, Blake. The reality is, like a lot of things I do, I don’t quite fit into the boxes. And so I do explain myself variously. The reason I use monk is because people kind of have an idea in their head, and all the other ones communicate either nothingness, so it’s a meaningless term, or it communicates another idea that’s even farther from what I’m doing. The reality is I’m like a quarter monk or a half monk. It’s definitely not a full journey. I wouldn’t want to be held to all the things that are usually in the monk’s handbook, but there is the intentionality to get there at some point, because monks are kind of like tenured professors. Other than a few core rules, once you’re in the group, you do your own thing and you get a little eccentric and quirky.
Blake Boles 12:34
Yeah, I like the tenured professor analogy. And there’s really this aspect of renunciation, like all in. Yeah. And yeah, you are not all in and maybe you don’t want to be. Well, I want to be.
Peter Kowalke 12:48
I just can’t be. Why can’t you? I mean, people want to live like Jesus, but they can’t do it today. Why not? What’s your excuse? That’s a good question. I thought we went over that list. Things not to ask me, Blake.Why can’t I … No, actually, there’s not a long list, viewers. Okay. So, yeah. Why didn’t I actually go all in? Why am I not 100% monk? It had to do with culture and tribalism a little bit. It had a little bit to do with age, sad as that may sound. My order has an age limit because they don’t want monk to be your retirement option. They don’t want … They don’t want to win those St. Augustine moments of, God, give me the strength, but not quite yet. They want to avoid that kind of thinking, and they want you to be sort of robust and energetic. So, part of it was I was running against an age limit there.I think part of it for me was I kind of felt like I had a calling, and this gets back to my relationship work, Blake. I felt that a calling and being a monk is in an order, is like being in the military, but way more than being in the military. You’ve lost all control. Not just most control, you’ve lost all control. The people who I was thinking about giving that control over to were people I trusted, but anybody less than a saint, someone who’s perfect, is going to have that human fallibility, and that was the part that made me reluctant. Because what if they didn’t understand me enough? What if they didn’t know how I was, it could be the best tool I could be for this world, and I had just no ability to, I had no say in that, and so I didn’t worry about that. There’s other things like being celibate that was, and I was toying with it, but that was still a question. Am I ready? Can I do this not just today or five years, because I don’t want to fail out of anything. I want to make sure that with my order, if you do it, you do it. It’s lifelong. There were some questions like that that maybe even today I would have done it, but because there was this age limit, I had to make a call at a certain time, and on some of those things I wasn’t quite sure. I was quite ready for some of it.
Blake Boles 15:21
Yeah, that must be the far end of the professor, or the tenure analogy. If you’re a tenured professor, you can leave, you still have savings, you can start a different kind of life, and you become a monk, like you give everything away, you renounce, sure you can walk away, but starting over again is much more difficult.
Peter Kowalke 15:41
Yeah, I mean, and I’d still do that, but it’s not that I couldn’t start over. It was, you know, because I don’t have much now, I mean, to be honest, you know, starting over isn’t much different than where I’m at right now.But where it, you know, if you’re going to do something, you do it, you go all in and you want to know you’re going to succeed. You know, it is kind of not a good thing to be a monk and then leave, at least in my tradition. You know, I didn’t, if I, I wanted to represent all the non-Indians who are in my community because it’s mostly Indians. And I didn’t want to, you know, I didn’t want to be, oh, yeah, those foreigners, they, they try and then they fail out. They go from yoga to boga. I didn’t want to, they go from, from being a saint, you know, they go from the holy things to the, the, the soy cowboy, low level things. They, yeah, I wanted to represent that well and I, you know, I wanted to make sure I was going to do it. And I didn’t want to have doubts in my head.
Blake Boles 16:45
Let’s come back to your worldly life here, Peter, and your work and making money and spending money, uh, you have described yourself to me as almost independently wealthy. And you’ve said that if there’s like, if there’s like a state, a government that’s taken care of you when you’re old, then you already essentially have an infinite runway in the sense of you could stop earning money now and you could live off that money for the rest of your life, you know, catastrophe, not withstanding.Well, is this true? Is this, is this true?
Peter Kowalke 17:20
I’m starting to believe it a little bit, Blake, which is really weird. Basically the way that I structure my life, I make sure that if I earn $9,000, I have to spend less than $9,000. I do that by using that monastic distinction of want versus need. We have endless wants, even monks, if they’re allowed, probably have some wants there. But that’s endless, it grows as we get resources. It’s like you put in a highway to make traffic easier and then more cars get on the road because now traffic’s easier, so there you’re back to square one. Needs never go away. Wants are the basic things like roof over your head, sleep, eating. I try to stick to the needs and reduce those wants down to just the needs. Because I do that, not perfectly, but relatively well, it means that I don’t really need much at all.What I found lately, to answer your question, what I found lately is that I’m probably not working enough right now, and I thought that I was going to be in trouble. I was so busy, I didn’t balance my finances for a little bit. Then when I went to look, I thought, oh man, my savings is really going to be reduced. Darn it, if I didn’t have more savings than before, basically, I was still spending less than I was earning.I don’t think there isn’t in this runway, but there almost might be. I don’t have a lot in the bank, I have some, but it really goes more to that idea of I’ve got five dollars in my wallet, I spend less than five. I think I have the ability to do that more than a lot of people.
Blake Boles 19:34
I think a lot of people would like to be able to do that because it’s such a simple rule. Just earn less, sorry, spend less than you earn and you will never go broke.Um, it’s a lot harder, a lot harder than that though, isn’t it? Yeah. Let’s get into the expert level questions here. Like we show how are you actually pulling that off and what are you sacrificing? What are you saying? No to, uh, are there any, are you doing anything illegally? I maybe wouldn’t say that actually. Okay, good.
Peter Kowalke 20:04
Yeah, I’m not actually. I mean, I’m like, you know, there’s Thailand stuff, but anybody who’s been to Thailand knows well, you know, that’s not a, it’s not illegal. It’s just, well, okay, unspoken this and that. No, I’m not, I’m doing everything perfectly on the up and up.There’s no, you know, I’ve got an arms dealer friend and you know, he just seemed like a rich guy and then, you know, slowly it sort of came out what he did and you know, then the pieces came together, right? You know, you’re like, oh yeah, okay. And now this makes sense. Honestly, Blake, there’s nothing like that. I don’t have any special tricks. It just boils down to slowly reducing the things that I want and proving to myself, I don’t actually need them. It’s the little things like I drink three in one here in Thailand. And for anybody who’s been to Asia, three in one or has not been to Asia, three in one is basically it’s these little sachets that have the coffee creamer, the sugar and the really poor quality, robust to coffee all in one little packet. You just dump it in the cup and anybody who knows coffee will say, oh my God, that stuff’s horrible. It is pretty cheap coffee. But I drink that very intentionally because I don’t wanna be upsold to having to go get the good coffee. If I can get away with poor man’s coffee, I’m more free. I’m more able to pivot when my income’s less. And I try to do that with everything, not just coffee. I used to be a magazine editor and I ran a fine dining magazine and unfortunately I’m not that way with cocktails. Matter of fact, no cocktails meet my standard. And that was sort of like a cautionary tale, like don’t upsell yourself, just don’t do that.
Blake Boles 22:05
Don’t walk too far on the hedonic treadmill. You’ll never come back.
Peter Kowalke 22:08
And that goes back to being a little monastic, which makes it a little bit harder for some people to do it. We can all do it, but that might aid me a little bit.One of my great joys is actually when I’m in an airport, I have this little game I play, and I can’t believe I’m saying this in the public record, but I’m going to do it. There’s this game I play, so you’re in an airport, and you know that airport food is really overpriced. But you also probably have had this idea of what a monk is, and you know, like beggars’ ball, and they go around and they eat whatever is put in the ball. And so I sort of took that idea to the airport. And so what I do sometimes is I’ll go to the food court in the airport, and I’ll sit down for like two minutes, and invariably there’s some business travelers, and they’ve come by, they’ve got the expense account, they order that whole pizza or that big meal because they can, and because the airport just gives them this big portion, they eat like three bites, and then they’ve got to go, and they invariably throw that away in the trash then. I said to myself, well, you know, yeah, if they’re licking all the food, maybe there’s a health hazard. But like I’m literally sitting there watching this half a pizza, you know, I’ve got provenance. This has not been, you know, peed on or anything like that, you know, this is good food. And so the game I like to play, I’ll just sit there, watch somebody do that. And then when they leave, I’ll just walk over to their table and have my free meal. It’s so monastic, it’s so affordable, and honestly, that food tastes better to me. Also pretty environmental, too.
Blake Boles 23:58
Yeah. Yeah. No waste. And, uh, the, the sweet taste of, uh, not paying for a cheeseburger in an airport is hard to quantify.
Peter Kowalke 24:07
I haven’t had one person who saw me, I went up to them as they were throwing it away and said, you know, I can take that. And they were so appreciative, Blake, that they said, well, you know, I actually got this package of apples that I was, I don’t want. Do you want those also? And I’ve got this granola bar. She like outfitted me because she was just like, I’m so happy not to waste this food.So yeah, it worked out.
Blake Boles 24:32
It’d be nice if we could walk around with, uh, with auras that indicate whether we’re open to receiving, uh, food that would otherwise be thrown away. Maybe that’s an augmented reality thing that’s going to come.Uh, so I’m on board with you, Peter. I’ve done that too. Most other people would say you’re acting like a bum and they would say, uh, this is a grown man who is, uh, obsessed with thrift and, uh, just doesn’t want to grow up Peter Pan syndrome and doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to do the things that you have to do to be a responsible adult in this world and really pay your own way. Like when you’ve run into this attitude, whether it’s spoken or unspoken, um, how do you respond to it?
Peter Kowalke 25:17
Well, I do pay my own way. And honestly, I don’t hear that question so much because I do have enough, Blake, that I don’t… People don’t know that I don’t spend money. They just don’t know. When I spend money, it’s usually when I’m having lunch with that friend and I look normal to them. They just don’t know that I ordered light because I’m going home and eating the cheap stuff to supplement it. I don’t look poor, quite honestly.I don’t think poor. When people do ask, what people do say about me is, how much longer can you do this? You’ve been traveling around without a home and this sounds like something you’d do the first year after college or something, but when are you gonna settle down? I do get asked that a lot. And honestly, Blake, I think that’s a question that still haunts me a little bit. There is sort of this idea that at some point, my old body is going to need me to move a little less. Right now, I can do all sorts of crazy things, but probably there is a day. I admit I don’t sleep on couches anymore, Blake. I’d love to, but I have to protect my sleep a little bit. So yeah, I’ve already done a little bit of modification like that. So what do I say to people though who are skeptical? I don’t even know if I have a good answer for that, but I do think it’s a real issue to some degree because yeah, the world’s not really built for what I’m doing. It is true, Blake. It’s not really built for what I’m doing. It is kind of a young man’s game to some degree. And we could probably do it till I’m 60 or so, but I think at some point, I probably will settle down a little bit more.
Blake Boles 27:12
But that 60 is still pretty far away.
Peter Kowalke 27:15
Yeah, well, not that much.
Blake Boles 27:17
But yeah, well, 15 years is a long way. I want to talk about the, the moment when you, you really came up against a bunch of barriers to living the way that you do, which was the pandemic.Oh my God. You just talk about the, the poly crisis, which was your life in 2020.
Peter Kowalke 27:37
Yeah, I thought honestly, Blake, I thought I was really well positioned for the pandemic. I was actually in Wuhan when it started. I had been tipped off by one of my coaching clients that, you know, stuff was going down. So I’m the first person I know, basically, who I knew about the pandemic for almost anyone. And I picked where I was going to live. I had total location freedoms. So I thought, well, you know, I’ll let me where do I want to camp when things go down? I picked Thailand. It was the number third best place to be during the pandemic. So I got that one right.I had multiple streams, multiple income streams, corporate consumer. You know, I had I had that lined up. I don’t need to spend money. I just went down the list and I was I felt really in a good place. I was already remote working, all that stuff. But what happened was that I discovered. I discovered that my lifestyle relies on globalization a little bit. And it relies on, you know, things were pretty easy. Maybe 10 years ago, the world was pretty global relatively. Everything was sort of working together. There was a lot of, you know, services you could tap into. And then during the pandemic, everyone got very tribal. And every, you know, all that globalization sort of started to go into retreat. And and suddenly me not having a home started to matter me. Not having a tribe, the tribe was the biggest thing. And that’s something that I hope we cover in this this interview. The biggest challenge of being sort of this this wandering no man for so long is the social. That’s a it’s a huge issue. And I did it pretty well before the pandemic. But during the pandemic, everybody sort of reclused into their group. And I, by design, did not have a group. Everyone was my group, but nobody was my group. So I was sort of like between each group, which meant I was on the outside of every group. So when things got hard, I had like no help. And and everyone during that time was like pushing their problems to somebody else because they were struggling and they were all pushing it towards me. So the pandemic was hard for me because it really like everything just fell apart in just about all phases of my life. Like and I and I had no help, too. So it was yeah, it was it was a tough time. And and I will say that since the pandemic took me a while to recover. And since the pandemic, I’m still struggling a little bit with the world is a little more tribal than I think it used to be. And I can I’ve gotten back to a lot of the old things I used to do. But there still is this Peter on the outside feeling that I have that I don’t think I had before the pandemic.
Blake Boles 30:43
Well, let’s go ahead and dive more into this right now. When you say tribal, what are you talking about? And maybe offer an experience or two that really exemplified this struggle.
Peter Kowalke 30:59
Um, okay. You know, when I say tribal, I mean, it’s creating an us-them dynamic. This is my group, and there’s other people are not in my group. You know, it’s a form of racism, but you can apply it to anything. You know, it’s basically my people and not my people. And my people I might take care of. If they’re not my people, I can screw them. No problem.Um, and, and, you know, I, I, everyone has some of that in their life. Um, most people do, and it might just be your family. You know, you might put your family above other people. That’s a form of tribalism, actually, um, says the half monk. Um, and so, yeah, during the pandemic, there was, you know, everybody was taking care of themselves a little more and their immediate family or their company. And so, you know, I’m, I’m based on contractor relationships. So who was the first to get cut? It was me, you know, I was always the first to go. Um, and I, I was getting it from all sides, uh, from a corporate perspective, everybody was passing problems on to me. And, and, and I didn’t have anybody on my side. Nothing was getting better. Everything was getting worse because everyone, you know, like if you’re an Adobe employee, well, the, they’re passing, they’re making, raising the price. So the company stays afloat and the employees keep getting their benefits. So somebody’s benefiting from it. Their tribe, their, their, their little community there. Uh, I was not the one benefiting. I was the one on the, uh, the price hike side of things. And, and it really, you know, when, when things got tough, uh, social opportunities dried up, you know, uh, anybody who’s a digital nomad without kids, anybody who’s doing dirt, bag, rich without kids knows what happens when your friends have kids, you’ll lose them for about a decade. And it’s reasonable. They’re just so darn busy with those kids. And so, you know, there was that inward focus that everyone was doing, taking care of their family, taking care of themselves. And I was not included in any of those groups.
Blake Boles 33:19
Yeah, you’re describing the expert level problem of trying to be a real citizen of the world. Yes, I am. Yeah, to not feel like you are affiliated or attached to any specific groups. You can float in between them.You can travel to where the opportunities are. But as you described, once the travel shuts down, once people start looking inwards, once safety becomes more of a priority than exploration, then someone like you or me is the first person to kind of get cut out in the name of protecting our own. And let me ask a question. This might be an uncomfortable question, Peter, but did you have any close friends or relationships to huddle up with when you were in Thailand during the pandemic? Is this a symptom of you struggling to have these close relationships despite being a relationship coach, Peter?
Peter Kowalke 34:17
No, it wasn’t. I had friends in Thailand. I kept those friends in Thailand. But yeah, even among the Thai friends, there was, you know, a focus on my immediate tribe, my immediate community. And I again, was not in that tribe, you know, even the Australian expats, their Australian embassy was taking care of them. Nobody was taking care of me.And so, you know, no, I did have friends, it wasn’t anything to do with Thailand. It was it was just more times are tough. So we are a little less polite. We’re caring. You know, it’s easy to be care about other humans when things are easy. When things got hard, people got a little more selfish. And that didn’t mean it was everybody out for themselves. But often the line they would draw is, you know, taking care of my family, taking care of those in my company, taking care of those in my civic organization or whatever it may be. But there was definitely I could say with certainty, there was a definitely a move towards my group. And Peter’s not in my group. I was kind of in no group during that time. And that was it was hard because every day, I mean, literally, it was like every day, oh, here’s another piece of bad news. Here’s another piece of bad news. And so for about a year there, I think it was just like, hang on, just survive. And then afterwards, I took about a couple years to pick it all back up, quite honestly.
Blake Boles 35:51
If you were an ordained monk, you would have been hanging out with your people. You would have been there in the monastery. I would have. You’re very right.Right in the wave. Listen, this sounds tough. I’m sorry.
Peter Kowalke 36:06
It’s in the past now, Blake, but it was a tough time. And it surprised me because I thought I was going to be sailing through it.
Blake Boles 36:13
Yeah. Uh, let’s talk about your relationship coaching because there’s kind of a paradox here. You’ve, you’ve previously told me that you basically have no commitments and you’re beholden to no one. You have this kind of ultimate version of, of Wild West cowboy freedom and the radical individualism of, of the, in my mind, the Western United States. But, uh, you are also a relationship coach and people actually voluntarily pay you large amounts of money to talk about, um, helping their relationships. How does this add up and where did you get your, your coaching expertise, your background? Well,
Peter Kowalke 36:53
Well, that’s the maybe we’ll build up to it. Why am I a coach? You know, I’m the only person I know who at age two was trying to figure out what was the nature of love. My Indian friends say, well, it’s got to be from a past life or something. I think it was just for one reason or another, I sort of focused on human relationships at a very early age, and I’m somewhat philosophical by nature. So, you know, I was I was I was always focused on love and relationships and why are we here? And so, you know, I sort of was that friend that you had who was knew more about relationships and what was good to ask advice from. And I didn’t think I could make money off of it.So that’s why I was a magazine editor in my first life. And so, yeah, I was I was always focused on it. It was it’s it was those were the movies I’d watched, the ones on interesting social situations. And, you know, those were the things that I valued. I would have these long conversations with people and I would read the books about how to have a better relationship. And I was just focused on it. And so, yeah, at some point I said, you know, I have to do what what I’m most passionate about. And that was people and relationships. And I did think I had a lot of knowledge. And so I rounded it out a little bit with, you know, coaching courses, you know, and certifications. I, you know, started coaching people for free on relationships. And, you know, it’s sort of all built on itself. So that was what 15 years ago at this point. So it’s been a number of years I’ve been doing it. Now, it is kind of I wouldn’t say a contradiction, but there is a challenge point with me having this monastic orientation and being a relationship coach. There is a little tension there, I admit, because the stereotype people have of, you know, monk life is well, celibate monks. Maybe you’re on a mountain somewhere all alone. And that’s kind of the opposite of a romantic relationship there.And so, yeah, there is there’s a little tension in as much as I don’t always today eat the dog food. I used to eat the dog food, but today I don’t always eat the.
Blake Boles 39:31
You’ll have to explain that analogy. What do you mean?
Peter Kowalke 39:34
love that you called it out because I totally didn’t notice that one click. What I mean is, you know, I advise, if I’m a coaching somebody who’s in a, you know, LGBTQ, all, you know, if I’m in a, if I’m coaching somebody in that community, you know, that may not be me, but I can still help them. You know, so I’m not necessarily doing the same things that they’re, that my clients are going to be doing. So some of the things that I help people with in relationship, I’m used to do, and I don’t do those things anymore because I’m in a sort of a different place. So that’s a little bit of attention at points, but, you know, I definitely had relationships and have definitely done pretty much most of the things that I help people with. So it’s not too big of a thing.It just, it can get a little weird at points. Yeah. But where it helps actually is I bring to bear a lot of religious ideas, which are just timeless truths, not just from my tradition, but from other traditions. And so I think that in sometimes the, the little genocide quad, a little difference of my coaching is the fact that it’s, you know, it’s not, it’s not based on pop psychology. It’s not based on things that I’ve just things I’ve personally experienced. It’s based on these like truths that are thousands of years old. And so I also use that sort of monastic side of me to advantage a little bit.
Blake Boles 41:10
Hmm. Who are some modern day relationship coaches who you look up to or maybe refer other people to?
Peter Kowalke 41:20
Well, a non-relationship coach who is a coach, Marie Forleo, is a coach that I’ve always looked up to. Rather than speaking to any authors or people who…
Blake Boles 41:34
speak out about this subject.
Peter Kowalke 41:37
Well, uh, you know, there’s a lot of people with a lot of good ideas. I, I, I can’t say there’s like somebody I want to hang my hat on and it’s like, this is the guy. Uh, you know, John Gottman, the Gottman Institute, they do some good work at points. Uh, you know, Marie Forleo, uh, went to B school and all that. She does some good work. I look to a lot of the, uh, the saints, uh, even though I’m not Christian, I’m wearing a Christian cross right now, because I do look, you know, I do use, uh, uh, Jesus as a model a lot. Um, you know, there’s a lot of saints that I could name check that you probably, probably aren’t worth name checking because they’re a little obscure. Um, but in a popular sense, you know, I don’t know if there’s a lot, I don’t have a lot of direct role models, you know, on some parts I, you know, I grew up around Tony Robbins. So of course there’s a little bit of that. Uh, but it’s, I don’t have a big, uh, role model community.It’s more like I take little parts from each, each, each person, but it’s almost so small that role models overselling it a little bit. And, and I, I’ve often asked myself, why is that? Why don’t I have these role models? I think it’s just because, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t go to school until, uh, college, uh, Blake, which I think is how we first got to know each other. Cause you’ve done stuff in that space. And you know, the way that kind of worked for me was, you know, if you imagine popular culture being the highway and then, you know, if you do something different, you’d get off the highway and take a side road. And then on the side road, you might take another side road and another side road and you take so many side roads. Eventually you’re so far from the highway that you’re in a place that’s a little unusual. Now anybody can get there, but most don’t go there. And so I think that’s actually a root of why I don’t have as many good role models, uh, and just pieces here and there because there’s not a lot of people doing what I do.
Blake Boles 43:44
Um, we’re going to circle back to the unschooling connection, but just to stick with the relationship coaching for now, uh, is this where you derive your, your purpose from it in a work sense? Like, is this where you feel like you’re, you’re making some positive impact in the world? And, uh, and what, what are your other sources of that in your life?
Peter Kowalke 44:05
Yeah, it’s almost entirely through that, because when I’m not doing it for money, I’m doing it for free. Blake, you know, it’s, it’s everything that I care about is people and thus relationship work, basically. So, you know, that is the purpose. That’s the first thing and the only thing, quite honestly.So yeah, that’s the purpose. That’s where I draw my excitement from. And it doesn’t have to be paid work, of course. It’s nice when skin is in the game, when people have invested in it. So sometimes it being paid work is useful, because people work at it with more intensity. But yeah, anytime we talk about love and relationships, that’s to me the purpose. That’s the thing.
Blake Boles 44:56
what about the other work? Yeah, for money. I get the feeling that there’s not much purpose there. It’s really just fine.
Peter Kowalke 45:04
Totally. The most purpose I get from the other work, and honestly, it’s going away because of AI. It hasn’t all gone away, but it’s all going to go away because of AI. But yeah, that other work was there primarily to pay the bills for a while while I got the coaching work paying for my way. So yeah, there’s not a lot of great meaning there.I can sometimes sneak it in. But yeah, the corporate writing work wasn’t exactly the purpose work. I did leverage it for the purpose work indirectly, though, as much as I would learn something and use it with the nailed it, that that’s not the space I want to be in. And so I do try to do as little of that as possible. But sometimes you have to pay the bills. So there’s a little bit of that still.
Blake Boles 46:09
Well, I wonder if this is part of your quasi monk status and whether you felt like this was some sort of betrayal of your kind of broader spiritual path or journey to be doing kind of corporate copywriting work that you don’t really believe in, you know, even if it’s very part time.
Peter Kowalke 46:29
But I turned down the cannabis and the tobacco stuff. I’m still following my values here.No, it’s not, because the real spiritual work is internal, quite honestly. And if it’s directly dealing with love and relationships, that really easily hits what I think is valuable. But the real spiritual work, you can do the spiritual stuff while you’re doing the laundry. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing. So I’m OK with doing the corporate work, but yeah, the stuff that makes a bigger impact, of course, you want to do that more. And I do do it more, but I don’t do it 100% of the time.
Blake Boles 47:14
I didn’t want to push back a little bit here, Peter, and you said it almost doesn’t matter what you’re doing. So how far can we take that?Like if you’re doing corporate copywriting and work and you’re like, this is not great, but it’s not really hurting anything. You referred to your fictional arms dealer friend in Thailand earlier. He wasn’t a fictional, but yes. Oh my gosh, okay. But like, let’s say you get into something like that, but you’re like, but I still have a spiritual practice on the side. And so it’s all internal anyways, it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing in the external world. I mean, isn’t that kind of a big excuse and kind of, well, you tell me.
Peter Kowalke 47:53
I hear you. There’s a lot of people who believe that you have to, you know, the social justice thing and even monks who will, you know, rail against the system. And to some degree, you know, I mean, do I have opinions on things? Absolutely. But all of it is a little bit of missing the point.So yeah, I, of course, have to do good. And I want to help other people do good. But the reality is, I’m not going to make the world good. When I help, I try to make the world good. But the real thing I’m doing is making myself good. And of course, if you’re thinking of it that way, it becomes selfish, and you kind of sabotage the whole effort. But when we step back to look at what I’m actually doing, it’s sort of, there’s this famous religious book called the Bhagavad Gita. And it’s basically, you know, this warrior goes into battle with relatives, and he’s not so happy about that. And so he has a talk with God while he’s running into battle. And, you know, one of the big ideas of that book was, you know, do your job and don’t, you know, don’t care what the results are. And I, you know, this isn’t a spiritual podcast, I’m not going to go too deeply into it. But it, yeah, it’s, I play my part and I let it fall where it falls.So yeah, I don’t make my money killing people or doing bad things. But if the work isn’t, you know, the work is corporate communication sometimes. That doesn’t bother me. I’d like it to be the best work, but it doesn’t bother me. No, I can still do that with the right heart and the right intentionality.
Blake Boles 49:52
Thank you. Let’s go back to the unschooling topic because when I entered the world of unschooling from my outside perspective, you were definitely someone who was very active.You were documenting the lives of grown unschoolers, making YouTube documentaries. And yeah, just talk a little bit more about growing up unschooled and how you believe that connects to where you’ve ended up.
Peter Kowalke 50:23
Oh, it really does, too. Sometimes I forget it, but it really does. Yeah, I didn’t go to school until university. And I was an unschooler, which meant that I directed my own education. I’ve been doing what I want to do since I was a little kid. It never stopped.I was never institutionalized. And so, yeah, when I was an unschooler at that time, there weren’t as many of us. I that’s why the BBC interviewed me in The New York Times and CNN and a bunch of places. And I used to get used to get written into books. And then after, you know, university and all that, I I said, well, hey, you know, there’s something to say here. So my first career was actually being a homeschooling, quote unquote, expert, which might have been a prelude to living simply, because as you probably know, Blake, you don’t earn a lot of money in that community. So I made it work, but it wasn’t exactly high living. And so, you know, it really the. The biggest thing that I took from unschooling Blake, which is very directly applicable to the life I live today, is, you know, I remember being like a seven year old in the middle of the day watching cartoons and their commercial came on and it said, you know, don’t be a fool. Stay in school. It was, you know, I don’t skip school at. And I sort of looked at myself and I’m like, wait a minute, I’m not in school, but everybody says I’m doing well. And so like there was this dissonance between what society was telling me to do and what my eyes, what my community was saying I should do and what my eyes were saying was working. And that made me question things because I saw that the accepted truth isn’t necessarily always correct.There could be exceptions or there could just out and out be better ways of doing it. So that’s maybe the biggest thing I took from my unschooling years was that sense of questioning everything. And sometimes, you know, be we being willing to experiment with some other ways of doing things that look promising. And, you know, just sort of this knowledge that there might be another way to do things. And so that leads to the life I live today. I don’t know anybody who’s this sort of half monk thing that I am. I know very few people. I know some people who’ve thought about it, but I don’t know many people that have actually done it. I know people who travel a lot and I know people who do digital nomad life for a few years. I’ve been doing this a long time. Like I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years. And there’s not as many of us who’ve been doing that one so long. And just a lot of the little things I do, too, Blake, I’m always doing unusual things. And that comes from my unschooling. It comes from being willing to ask the questions and maybe try something different.
Blake Boles 53:29
And this is why parents are afraid of unschooling because they’re like, my kids going to get off the highway and then start taking all these side paths and they’re going to end up in Siberia or the middle of Utah.
Peter Kowalke 53:41
And one of the subjects in my documentary, which was about people who had unschooled or were now adults, was that he actually went to Siberia. So you’re getting a little close to home here, Blake.Who went to Siberia? One of the subjects in my grown homeschooler documentary spent some time in Siberia. But it’s a legit criticism, I think, Blake, it really is. I would argue that unschooling might make you happier, but I’m not going to say it makes you normal. It doesn’t. It could. If you want to be normal, you still can. But I’m not so sure it necessarily leads in that direction.
Blake Boles 54:24
Yeah, it doesn’t promise conventional success, but it does promise a greater chance of self-actualization. Maybe I’d put it that way.
Peter Kowalke 54:33
Yeah. I could say that too. It just allows you to do what you think is right.I know this podcast is going to come out months later than when we’re recording it, but politically, a lot of people are recognizing that by being said, there might be another makes you go, well, is there another way to look at this? Is this actually true?
Blake Boles 55:08
Hm.
Peter Kowalke 55:09
and it gave me the tools to test it and see. A lot of people think it, not everybody does it.
Blake Boles 55:17
Hmm. Uh, last thing I want to talk about, Peter, are your famous, uh, Bangkok dinner parties. Uh, word has come from, uh, multiple avenues. Uh, I see people yelling about them online. Can you just tell me a little bit about the parties that you organize with, with regularity?
Peter Kowalke 55:38
Well, because I’m all over the world, I’ve discovered people have a tendency to forget me. I’m the circus that comes to town. And so they like to see me, but I’m not built into the script. I’m just a side show that sometimes you like to go to. And so one of the things I have to work on actively is staying in front of people a little bit.I have to work a little harder on social. And so when I’m in Bangkok, one of the ways I do that is I host a dinner party twice a month. And this is also one of those Gandhian be the change you wanna see in the world sort of things. It’s not just so people don’t forget me. Basically, people do these sort of dinners. It’s often buy food and bring it home, or we’ll meet at a restaurant, or it’s a paid thing. So these are old school dinner parties. I cook all day. I invite people into my home. It’s big enough that it’s a dinner party, but it’s small enough that everybody really gets to know each other. How many people? And I usually 13. It can usually between 11 and 14. And I try to have 13 every time. And so I basically create a space where there’s a little bit of community. And I gotta tell you that people love it. It’s a lot of work for me, but I can’t tell you how many people have reached out afterwards and told me how important this is to them. And some have even started doing it on their own as well, because it’s just this lost community that in our world, they’re not seeing it as much of. There’s this family feeling, and there’s no monetization going on. There’s no money changing hands. And there’s just this community and friendliness that people kind of have heard about and sometimes get. But this is the thing that people enjoy and they wanna see more of. So when they start going, they pretty much continue going. The wait list is a problem for me right now, quite honestly Blake. But yeah, I’ve been doing this for about a year and a half now and it’s going very well. And it’s a community building thing and a way to make the world a little more family centered.
Blake Boles 58:13
and to hedge against the next pandemic. These are the people who will come over and just cook food with you all day long during lockdown.
Peter Kowalke 58:21
I might have said that during the last pandemic beforehand, but having seen the last pandemic, Blake, I don’t know quite honestly. I don’t know.Well, I’m a big way. I wouldn’t want to do it for that anyway.If I have motive, I’ve wrecked it a little bit.
Blake Boles 58:35
tongue-in-cheek. I’m a big fan of this and I think these are one of these little things that you can do if you are a, you know, as you describe someone with basically no commitments and beholden to no one, you can throw your time and energy into something like this. You can pull in these solo travelers of the world or these lonely expats or people who just had a breakup and you’d be like come on over. I got another dinner party happening next week and and that can mean a lot to people.I like to organize little dinner parties through the dance community. I’m part of Europe. People usually show up for these dance weekends but they’re all sort of staying separately and kind of isolated or just staying with their friends and I’ll be the one who says hey come over on Saturday. I’ll cook you all a huge pasta dinner. They’ll be whatever vegan gluten-free options and it costs me roughly the amount of money in groceries that it would cost for like two people to go out to a nice dinner and I’m like but that is complete and I don’t ask for money from anyone and I say this is so worth it just and people will come to me afterwards and say that was really almost my favorite part of the weekend. That’s extremely gratifying.
Peter Kowalke 59:47
Yeah, yeah. It’s a community thing that’s not always as common everywhere.And so, yeah, people sometimes look at it strangely at first, and then they come and they go, oh, I see why you’re doing this.
Blake Boles 01:00:03
Hmm, I get it now Peter, I think you’ve done a great job of explaining your life on five levels, from 10-year-old all the way up to fellow expert. If people want to follow along or learn about stuff you offer, where should they go?
Peter Kowalke 01:00:21
Well, I’m a little remiss that I don’t have some product to peddle you, but I don’t right now. If people want to connect with me and maybe learn a little more about me, they can go to peterkowalke.com and there’s of course ways to reach me through that.
Blake Boles 01:00:39
Fantastic. Peter, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Peter Kowalke 01:00:43
Thank you so much for having me, Blake.