Basecamp for Men E38: Mentoring Our Boys

E38: Mentoring Our Boys with author Earl Hipp

 

E38 Introduction

The topic of guiding adolescent boys into manhood seems to me an extremely relevant one right now. As a society, we have not created the initiatory structures that enable our young people to come into manhood as a celebration. We almost dread it when a boy is creeping towards manhood, as if that is a terrible thing. What sort of message does that send our boys? Is being a man really that awful? Do men not have anything to offer? Or is it the cultural conditioning that is in dire need of being upgraded? How come boys aren’t properly celebrated as they enter the tribe of men?

There has been a movement to create rites-of-passage trainings for boys but we need more. We need more imperfect men stepping up to mentor adolescent boys.

My guest today exemplifies being committed to helping our boys arrive at manhood as a celebration and with the support of caring, appropriate elders.

Earl Hipp Bio-

Earl Hipp is an author, speaker, adviser to mentoring groups, and community consultant. Since 1982, Earl has been involved with organizations that focus on men’s issues and development. He speaks at national conferences and delivers workshops across the country, teaching organizations how to call men to mentoring.

Since 2005, Earl has published the Man-Making Blog, discussing manhood, male culture, mentoring, and men’s rites of passage. His mission is to help men discover and use their innate man-making gifts, so fewer boys (and men) are left to wander alone in the dangerous never-never land between boyhood and manhood.

Lastly, here is a quote from Meladona Some, an African spiritual teacher, “When a civilization lacks rites of passage, its soul is sick. The evidence for this sickness is threefold: first, there are no elders; second, the young are violent; and third, the adults are bewildered.”

Basecamp for Men E37: Season One Finale

E37: Season One Finale-Best of 2019

 

E37 Introduction

Well my dear listeners, we’ve come to the end of season one. I hope you enjoyed the show and picked up some new resources and perspectives for the next chapters of your life‘s journey.

Season two will pick up in March or April. We will be continuing with some great guests and seeking to balance the tried and true resources for men that we know and love with all the new tools that we try out and find valuable. My commitment is to continue to find our edge together and to share as authentically as possible, where you and I get stuck and how to proceed powerfully and to live as courageously as possible.

Until then, please go to basecampformen.com and sign up for our quarterly newsletter.

I only send this out 4 times a year and it will have valuable and sometimes free stuff in it. I will be posting updates on the show from this email list so be sure I have your email address.

I would like to thank my team! Sound editors extraordinaire Chris Rodd and Tahu Parkinson. Thank you, men, for making the show sound so professional. And I would like to thank my producer Tabitha Smiles for all of her hard work and for putting up with my periodic freak-outs as we worked to make the show all it could be. Thanks, Tabitha.

Now for the best of Season One. I’ll first give you the most listened to episodes and then share the listener’s favorites. The three most listened to episodes were:

  • At number three was Ep #14 The Porn Trap with Wendy Maltz.
  • Coming in at number two was EP #13 The Hero Within with Carol Pearson
  • and the #1 most listened to the episode, drum roll please, was E10 Inside the Men’s Circle which was the first one we did with the Warrior Dogs.  All right Warrior Dogs!

Now for the listener’s choice of Best of Season One. We got votes for E7 How to Raise a Boy with Michael Reichert and E11 Building Boys with Nicky Wilks, both excellent episodes if you haven’t heard them. The two episodes I did with Ben Seaman, #4 The Secret Lives of Men and E23 Men and Depression also received plenty of love. Go listen to those if you haven’t. But the two top shows according to you were E29 Into the Mystic with Paul Dunion and E14 The Porn Trap with Wendy Maltz. You have excellent taste as those are two really great episodes, in my opinion. But I can only run one and I choose E14 The Porn Trap. Only because we just aired E29 a few short weeks ago and E14 feels like a looooong time ago!

So, here is your favorite episode of Season One. Enjoy and we’ll see you back here in the spring for season two of Basecamp for Men! Thank you, listeners, and have a great start to 2020!

Best,

Tony

Basecamp for Men E36: The Genius of Children

E36: The Genius of Children with  Special Guest

Rick Ackerly

 

 

E36 Introduction

One of the sub-topics on Basecamp is the raising of boys, who will one day be our men. Our public school system is problematic in the development of our boys. This is not a knock on all the good people who teach and administer in the public schools. It’s just that having boys sit at a desk and do assigned, menial work without much collaboration or creative problem solving is essentially preparing them to sit and obey an authority figure. It’s social engineering. It‘s good preparation for the military or a life of following orders but is it maximizing their potential?

I have often thought that if you run the schools like a business with our young people like the customer, you would have VERY different schools.  I remember asking my young son Lucas, who was probably 8 or 9 at the time: “So if you are the customer, what does a school need to change to work well for you?” You know what he said? “Better food! The food is awful. Why don‘t they feed us healthier, better-tasting food.” What else, I asked him? More free time, more time to collaborate on projects with your friends. And more time outside and on field trips to learn. It sounds like a pretty great school to me. What kid would not want to go to THAT school? Sure, you still need some math and learn how to read but the boys would be so much more engaged in school, wouldn’t they?

I’m not saying that I have all the answers to how to best educate our kids. It’s just so obvious to the customers, the young people, that their time is precious too and why do they have to have such a boring, regimented curriculum? Even the teachers look burned-out and frayed by the system.

My guest today states that the education system today is primarily used as a social sorting device instead of vibrantly educating our children. That is an interesting notion.

And lastly, I think we consistently underestimate our young people. It‘s an old habit that we adults have that says that kids don’t really understand the world and so they need to sit on the sideline while we VIP adults handle the important projects of the world. I think this is a mistake.

Kids come with innate creativity and a sense of possibility that is often missing in adults. It’s been educated out of us.  Sure, some of their ideas are wild and far-fetched but in their free-flowing creativity, they will sometimes hit on ideas that adults just can’t conceive. What if we had kids of all ages working on the important problems of the world? I’m being serious. What solutions would they come up with? I for one, am curious.

 

Basecamp for Men E35: Pitfalls of the Path

E35: Pitfalls of the Path with Special Guest

Michael Anderson

 

E35 Introduction

First off, I want to remind listeners to go to www.basecampformen.com and sign up for my newsletter and please vote for your favorite season 1 episode or episodes. You can choose more than one. It looks like we will air the final season one episode on either Jan. 7thor Jan. 14thdepending on a few things.

One of the sub-topics we will continue to explore in Season Two is men’s health and aging well.

We all want to feel good and sometimes just a little more awareness of a situation goes a long way. Has it started to dawn on you that our system is not made for optimal health? If it was, we would have radically different outcomes than the ones we have now.

It seems the chemical industry has partnered with the food industry and the municipal water companies to give us chemical compounds that may be making us sick. There’s plenty of science to back this up if you care to look.

Everyone I know is buying organic and questioning the system. Gone are the days of just putting our heads in the sand, assuming big corporations have our health in mind (I can’t even say that with a straight face), eating a bunch of over-processed food and then taking prescription drugs (again more chemicals) to hopefully correct course and have us feel good again. More and more people that I meet and talk to are looking at creating the healthy road NOW for themselves, their families, and the communities they live in.

So here’s to 2020 being a healthier one for all of us. Here on Basecamp for Men, will continue to share resources here on with that end in mind.

Have a great Holiday season!

Tony

Basecamp for Men E34: The Gifts of Solitude

Man looking at sunset with words

Hello listeners, I hope you are all having a great festive Holiday season. Before we get to our interview, I wanted to give you some updates on Basecamp. We are finishing up Season 1 in the coming weeks. I anticipate doing the final season One episode in January. After that, we will take a short hiatus (likely two months) to recharge and re-set things before season two.