Eric Bandholz is the founder of Beardbrand. His newsletter and YouTube channel have been great sources of healthy masculinity. Here is a newsletter he sent out today.
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FRIENDSHIPS
There is this Venn diagram for many men over thirty – one circle is for "friendships where you can be vulnerable." The other circle is for "friends who live close to you." Sadly, the circles do not overlap.
Over the years, I have developed many great friendships with incredible men. But as life happens, distance comes between those friendships. Suddenly, you’re back at square one and trying to build another strong relationship. Commonly, those new connections aren’t just right, and you can only keep it to surface-level pleasantries.
I’ve felt alone in this world many times. I needed a friend who could understand my work challenges, my relationship challenges, or my parenting challenges and could discuss them over a beer in person.
I had no release, and it only led to darkness.
Fortunately, right now, I feel I have it as good as it gets in today’s world. No, I can’t walk down a few houses to a good friend, but I have several in Austin. No, I can’t usually be spontaneous, but many are down to grab lunch at a moment’s notice.
I talked to my dad about how hard it is to have friendships as an adult man, and he shared a similar sentiment. I know this happens to men of all generations.
WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?
This past week, I went to Olympic National Park to sleep in a cold-ass tent for three nights and test our new deodorant prototype.
This trip is an annual event put on by my good friend, Will Roman of Chisos. It’s approximately 15 like-minded guys from Austin and around the States. I know about half of them, and I get to know the others. We disconnect from technology from families and spend much time sharing our current challenges (and a little bit of roasting each other). Basically, we can let loose, know that we’re in good company who won’t judge, and build stronger relationships.
WHAT ARE THE LOGISTICS?
Step 1: Many months in advance, find three consecutive nights in a beautiful park. We’ve found majestic environments create more intense experiences. It’s also nice to have a bathroom.Step 2: Set the values for the group and start recruiting people. It’s more enticing if you can handle food & water. Include a fee to cover those costs. Plan on a couple of last-minute cancellations.Step 3: Create an online document with trip details, gear needed, contact information, and attendee arrival/departure information.Step 4: Start an email thread for those committed to help start conversations and allow other newbies to get to know others digitally.Step 5: Meet up in nature and enjoy the time together. Have one or two hikes planned, and leave the schedule mostly open and flexible.Step 6: Repeat next year.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO LEAD
People don’t know if you’re looking for this type of experience. Sometimes, you need to take a risk and be the person to create the world you want to be part of. Most people will say "no," but if you can get a few core people on board, you can leverage their friendships and network.
Be sure to set expectations. You can make the event whatever you want—friend roasting, spirituality, yoga, fitness, beer drinking, fishing, etc. (or maybe all of the above).
What’s important is that you do something like this regularly.
There’s no reason that you tackle the world’s challenges alone. These events will help you close that Venn diagram and can help you make friends who are physically and emotionally close.
Keep on growing!
Eric BandholzFounder, Beardbrand
Overall seems like a pretty balanced board. Al Shafei and Bezuidenhout have backgrounds aligned with the type of Mastodon I want to see. The lawyer guy dabbles in crypto law, but also did tons of pro bono work for Mastodon. Seems to me like he’s just passionate about emerging tech. Biz Stone is also an interesting inclusion. He’s obviously well connected to the VC space but has been pretty critical of Elon Twitter.
Hang in there! I’m a teacher and we just had our last day yesterday. Summer break is right around the corner!
I have a sneaking suspicion that there are more than a few Chinese EV companies with flimsy finances or finances that are propped up by the state. The growth of the Chinese auto industry just stinks of artificial growth through government patronage to me.
I had this thought as well. Read the books up until 6 or 7 a few years ago, enough to vaguely remember overarching plot but not specifics. I can tell they’re changing things but I’m not invested enough in the plot specifics to really care. It’s a nice spot to be in as a casual WoT fan.
If the shoe were on the other foot you know exactly what the GOP would do.
Awesome! Gondolin is an underappreciated piece of Tolkien lore.
Relatively small shifts on the margins can have huge consequences in the electoral college.
Just started Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. Excited to work my way through his kickstarter books.
Our governor is generally sane, I’d be surprised if he supports this. Our state legislature on the other hand is exactly this stupid.
It’s one of the fascinating paradoxes of education that the more you teach to standardized tests, the worse test results tend to be. Improved test scores are a byproduct of strong teaching - they shouldn’t be the only focus.
Teaching is every bit as much an art as it is a science and straight-jacketing teachers with canned curricula only results in worse test scores and a deteriorated school experience for students. I don’t understand how there are admins out there that still operate like this. The failures of No Child Left Behind mean we’ve known this for at least a decade.
I use ChatGPT to create banks of questions that are aligned to the essential topics that I need students to learn. Then I randomly assign the same number of questions to each student from each essential topic. I give the students the list of topics to focus their studying on.
I also have other “categories” that form their final grade, things like participation and homework assignments. So any marginal unfairness that might result from randomized test questions is more that made up for over the course of everything I grade them on.
I would never accept a student’s use of Wikipedia as a source. However, it’s a great place to go initially to get to grips with a topic quickly. Then you can start to dig into different primary and secondary sources.
Chat GPT is the same. I would never use the content it makes without verifying that content first.
This is why I read through everything I use to make sure it’s accurate.
Babel didn’t grip me as a book, but the magic system using word pairs was so novel and cool.
This should be the standard response to the “free speech” screechers. Free speech to say what, motherfuckers?
And don’t let them dodge the question. If they don’t answer with specifics then you know exactly what they want “free speech” for.
I should also add that I fully inform students and administrators that I’m using AI. Whenever I use an assessment that is created with AI I indicate with a little “Created with ChatGPT” tag. As a history teacher I’m a big believer in citing sources :)
High school history teacher here. It’s changed how I do assessments. I’ve used it to rewrite all of the multiple choice/short answer assessments that I do. Being able to quickly create different versions of an assessment has helped me limit instances of cheating, but also to quickly create modified versions for students who require that (due to IEPs or whatever).
The cool thing that I’ve been using it for is to create different types of assessments that I simply didn’t have the time or resources to create myself. For instance, I’ll have it generate a writing passage making a historical argument, but I’ll have AI make the argument inaccurate or incorrectly use evidence, etc. The students have to refute, support, or modify the passage.
Due to the risk of inaccuracies and hallucination I always 100% verify any AI generated piece that I use in class. But it’s been a game changer for me in education.
The battles over AP curriculum were already partially this.