This weeks New Man features Wolfgang Bloch, artist and surfer who has continually taken the road less traveled, and found passion and success along the way.
Wolfgang Bloch - photo credit Giovanni Reda
Learn more about Wolfgang’s life and art in his new book.
The New Man podcast has a new hot sponsor, Adam & Eve.com.
We have been slaving away, whipping out The New Man podcast for almost a year now. People are starting to notice, and it’s great to have the support of sponsorship, especially ones to tied to our mission. I am just buzzing with enthusiasm about the show lately….ok..ok I’ll stop. Check these guys out, they have fun stuff. I can vouch 
Adam and Eve offers the finest in “Adult Products” to spice up any relationship.
Following the decisive Obama victory on election day yesterday, I immediately went into visioning mode about what is possible for America and the world from this place.
Energy tops my list as the most interesting and world-changing opportunity we face. Energy is one of those “root-cause” issues—solutions here lead to all manner of positive changes across all systems.
Being an intensely practical person, I am drawn to energy solutions where the “rubber-meets-the-road” so to speak—with transportation. Fix the way we humans get from point A to point B to point…San Francisco and we have produced a monumental shift towards a sustainable existence on this planet.
I grew up in the west. I understand the value of horsepower and the value of freedom. After several years in LA, I understand the value of mass transit(or lack therof.) No one solution is going to immediately address all the transportation challenges we face, but a complex and interaged approach certainly can, and with the resources and technology we have available today.
Rocky Mountain Institute has been publishing transportation solutions for over two decades, most of which are seldom adopted or capitalized on in the mainstream. It has simply been too cheap and easy to rely on existing petroleum and steel. These days are obviously coming to an end, and RMI is more relevant than ever. They have been in talks with such organizations as Wal-Mart and the US Army around hyper-efficiency and alternative energy.
These organizations are feeling the cost of energy dependence and looking to the future to stay competitive. Whatever their motives, it is good for the planet, and if major entities like these get on board, real solutions are not far to follow.
So what can I do?
I live with my girlfriend a few miles outside of Boulder in an amazing little house in the canyon. We’re near the river, and both get so much from our mountain retreat. The progressive suggestion is that we get rid of our cars, move to town and bike everywhere to reduce our carbon footprint and get more sustainable. I don’t want to do that and I refuse to think that is the only way I can lend a hand.
My girl recently traded in her inefficient Jeep Liberty for an all-wheel drive Subaru Impreza (we need the 4 wheels for the winter snow.) After an initial resistance to the smaller size, she now loves this car and especially the extra mpg’s.
She works in Denver, which is a major energy drain. She negotiated to work 2 days a week from home, saving 60 miles of commute time and energy. She also rides the bus from the park-n-ride every day she does go to the city, a little more time consuming but a lot more efficient. She has come to enjoy the downtime of the ride to listen to great podcasts or read.
I heard of a start-up recently(name and link forthcoming) that is going to be offering gas-to-electric conversions of existing vehicles at a reasonable price. These conversions will get all the performance of a combustion engine at about a 60 mile range. At first thought, 60 miles does not seem like much, but when I did an analysis of my transportation, i rarely drive more than 60 miles in a single day…usually its less than 10.
The company will set up financing for the conversion, effectively replacing your monthly gas bill with your monthly conversion loan payment. This is at current fuel prices, when fuel hits $5 a gallon, the loan payment will be much cheaper.
I started shopping for old mini-trucks with millions of miles or busted engines to get my conversion. I love the idea of tooling around in a little truck, making no sound and using no gasoline. My grandpa used to drive Datsun pickups, always with over 100k miles. it was a point of pride in the value of the thing for him, and a statement against frivolous luxury. He could have afforded whatever he wanted to drive, and brand new.
I think I inherited his flair for rebellion, underpinned with a genuine compassion and practical sense of value.
That’s where I am going to focus my energy for change. I contacted the conversion company about helping them grow their business. I look forward to reshaping the way Americans use transportation.
Ken Wilber
Ken puts masculine and feminine in a Kosmic context and revels the practical reasons for the difference between roles of men and women in the public and private spheres.
Click Here to check out this thought provoking dialogue with one of the great minds of our time.
What’s this? Mtv, the cultural feeding tube for teens of an entire generation. A tube that was confusingly reformulated with a regurgitated reality mixture, quickly informing generation X that their time to leave the nest had come.
Yes, Mtv has revived its original soul, this time on “the” tubes…an the service seems really cool.
Embed, add to Facebook, vote up or down. The new Mtv has all the hallmarks of social media.
how long before the reality denizens of The Hills(etc) infiltrate and ruin it?
The AMP guys are back on The New Man podcast to talk about their newest product The Power of Integrity DVD.
Bryan and Garrison are great, humble, fun and humorous in their discussion with Tripp about the importance of integrity for men.
The guys go into what it means to be in real integrity and the power it can have in all areas of our lives.
Good Stuff.
Listen to The New Man here or in my sidebar widget.
Inspired by a post from C4Chaos, I thought this worth addressing from my own perspective.
C4 examines how worldview affects our perspective of presidential candidates. A wholehearted YES. Obama had me at hello with his demonstration of worldcentric values, a worldview I see as essential to global leadership in an interconnected world.
C4 quotes Tim Wu:
Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren
The New Man Podcast has a new sponsor atEcoWine.com.
From their website:
The Organic Wine Company is a family business that promotes:
Personal Life Media, the parent network for The New Man Podcast, has just launched a new embeddable media player that can be totally customized and feature the latest episodes from up to 5 PLM shows.
This podcast widget makes it easy for guests and fans of the show to share it on myspace, facebook, and any other social media site, blog and standard website.
Simply click the ‘Get’ button on my widget, or the ‘create’ button to customize it the way you like it.
This is a great extension of the power of podcasting into new and more user accessible places online. “Podcasting” is quickly evolving into a ubiquitous communication method, giving users more of what they want how they want it.
very cool.
Intel recently revealed plans for a new series of chips due out in 2009 that run between 16 and 48 “cores” or processors in parallel. The thinking is that each core can be processing different tasks or different parts of tasks simultaneously.
The technology race through the 80′s and 90′s that revealed Moore’s law of exponential speed increases, was based on linear processing evolution. This new method of linking cores in parallel could very well mark a quantum leap in speed evolution.
Parallel and interlinked internet technologies like the popular “cloud computing,” made famous by Apple and Google lately, distribute computing power across networks of machines on the desktop and the server rack. This parallel network structure is more powerful, reliable and convenient, allowing application innovation to skyrocket.
Combine a “clouded internet” with a multi-core parallel processor structure and you are effectively working with a network of networks, an information processing architecture with speeds that rapidly begin to approach infinity. This will allow for radical evolutions in the very essence of human social-systems and knowledge.
There is another entity that already behaves in a very similar fashion the the networked networks model,,,the human brain.
The brain is made up of 100 billion neurons, the “cores” of the human mind network. Each neuron is responsible for carrying out highly specialized processing and transmission of cellular signals. Neurons connect to thousands of other neurons to form neural networks to carry out specific functions. These neural networks are interlinked with other neural networks to make up the entirety of the brain, and carry out all human functions.
As we create our external reality in our own image, we are unlocking untold power in the higher fractal.
I wonder what things will look like in ten years.
