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

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.

 

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

Addiction is a life experience that touches us all. More than 21 million Americans have at least one addiction. Of those 21 million, only 10% receive any sort of treatment. Addiction is something that nearly every family knows. In a typical family, you don’t have to look very far to find someone who has an addiction or an addictive/compulsive personality. Enjoy the episode with my very special guest Dr. Bob Beare as we “look under the hood” of addiction.

Spiritual wisdom is something that I have been fascinated with since I was a young man. Tales of spiritual enlightenment and the quest for deeper truths have long held my heartstrings. My guest today is a mystically inclined, wonderful woman named Janell Hartman.