Episode 005: ☰ ( SKY ) Dan Mann - The Hero's Journey
I first became aware of Dan after I got to ride a custom Mannkine surfboard shaped for my old boss. From the first wave I rode, the board absolutely blew my mind and it continued to do so for every ride that followed. The board had a funky looking and almost counter-intuitive look to the design template, at least for my, at the time, conditioned mainstream and critical surfing lens. Once I experienced the elation that came from riding this eccentric shape, I knew I had to find and meet the mad scientist behind it. I looked online for some way to contact him and wound up on bit of a goose chase, the guy was clearly not trying to be found. Eventually, I was able to track down a landline number listed on an old website. So I called and left a voicemail asking if I could come meet him. A week or two later I got a call back. He graciously invited me to come on down to his shaping bay in south San Diego, which I happily did. From our first visit, we hit it off, rapping out about a whole variety of interesting and fun topics, discovering that we had a fair amount of common ground in our interests. From there a budding friendship began to develop and thankfully, that came along with a few custom board orders.
Dan Mann is an elite competitive endurance athlete, a world-renowned surfboard shaper, deep thinker, father, husband and a genuine renaissance man. In this episode, Dan and I find a sunny spot in a park near his shaping bay, where we enjoy a trumpet student's flat lines and discuss the culture surrounding self-improvement techniques and how tackling adversities & challenges can be a more pragmatic and self-empowering path to improving our quality of life and expanding our consciousness, in the age of comforts and conveniences.
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005: ☰ (SKY) Dan Mann - The Hero's Journey