Intelligent Masculinity

Sick of this Shit Pub
Sick of this Shit Pub

A series dedicated to reclaiming what true masculinity is - not an old, fragile masculinity of domination; rather, a new, intelligent masculinity built on accountability. sickofthis.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Sean Talbeaux

    “Men need examples. We need to see other men doing the thing so that we can have permission to do the thing.” ~ Sean Talbeaux ~ Masculinity In Review Sean Talbeaux reached out to Nick Paro cold, and said on air that doing so terrified him. That admission sets the terms for the whole hour. Sean writes What Doesn’t Change on Substack, runs wilderness and psychedelic men’s retreats out of Portland, and coaches men one-on-one in five-month containers he deliberately refuses to extend. His argument is that Intelligent Masculinity has been doing the intellectual half of the work well and the embodied half barely at all — that men are, as he puts it, “really, really good at staying in our heads about” masculinity. This episode is the correction: a conversation about what changes when men stop analyzing their conditioning and start noticing their own breathing. The clearest through-line is Sean’s account of what patriarchy actually charges men. Not privilege lost, but capacity destroyed: “What it costs men is our humanity. Because we’re specifically taught to not empathize.” He describes the training as nervous-system deep — men learn, he says, “that we might die if we feel.” That framing reroutes a familiar argument. The manosphere, in Sean’s reading, isn’t primarily an ideology problem; it’s a supply problem. Men have real needs for connection and no direct route to meeting them, so they take the sideways one that Reddit and the grift economy have made cheap and available. Naming it that way makes the fix concrete rather than moral — build better containers, and the bad ones lose their monopoly. Sean’s critique of the men’s-work industry itself is the sharpest material in the episode, and it lands harder because he’s an insider. The retreats are expensive, and the rooms are middle- to upper-class, white, and middle-aged — he had to scholarship his way into spaces he now leads. The rites-of-passage franchises fare no better: he names the ManKind Project and Sacred Sons as models that arrive with a borrowed framework and impose it, which he experienced as “you’re not contacting me at all.” His alternative is almost aggressively minimal. He removes the agenda entirely and tells men in his circles they don’t have to be vulnerable, don’t have to share, don’t have to feel anything. For men whose entire conditioning is a list of things they have to do, the absence of one more obligation is the intervention. That minimalism pays off in the part of the episode Nick pushes hardest on — whether any of it survives contact with ordinary life. Sean’s answer is that it doesn’t transfer as technique, it transfers as example. He describes a windshield-replacement call that turned into a conversation about a man’s reactivity toward his daughter and ended with “do you want to be friends?” He describes young men interrupting his coffee-shop conversations to say they aspire to talk like that. Both stories argue the same point: the bottleneck isn’t willingness, it’s visibility. And his four-part framework — awareness, relational depth, expansion, integration — is built to be practiced in public rather than performed at a retreat, which is why it starts with something as unglamorous as noticing tightness in your chest. Nick and Sean converge on the episode’s most uncomfortable claim, and neither softens it. Feminism is not the problem; the danger is what happens when men conditioned across generations to hold power lose it inside a single one. Sean is explicit that this contraction is producing the Trumps, the Hegseths, the Putins, and the ICE agents he cites at Delaney Hall — and equally explicit that managing it is not women’s work to do. Nick lands it plainly: men have an inherent space for existing, “but it’s a lot smaller than we have been taught that it really is. And that’s okay.” The capacity Sean wants men to build is precisely the capacity to hear that without contracting. Sean Talbeaux is a somatic coach, commercial fisherman, woodworker, and father of a four-year-old who has spent more than a decade in men’s circles, and he has just released Bowing In, a guide covering eight domains of a man’s life for men who want to start this work without a therapist. He and Nick ran past the hour and stopped mid-thought, with a return conversation already promised. What he adds to this series is the missing lower half of it — the argument that intelligent masculinity, if it stays a good idea men agree with, was never going to be enough. ~ Nick Paro Sources & References * Sean Talbeaux, What Doesn’t Change — Substack * Bowing In — Sean’s guide across eight domains of a man’s life * Joanna Macy’s “Great Turning,” referenced as the frame for the larger shift away from capitalist patriarchy * Ann Kramer’s wholeness framework, from her earlier Intelligent Masculinity appearance Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you LeftieProf, ArleneMach, Donna Everett, DarBid 🇨🇦, Laura Stevenson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Sean Talbeaux! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Sean Talbeaux

  2. 3d ago

    Intelligent Masculinity | Lawrence Winnerman is Back!

    “What if I’m just a f*****g grasshopper? What if that’s what I am? Am I not good enough? I mean, grasshoppers exist. Grasshoppers are valid. Grasshoppers bring value to the world.” ~ Lawrence Winnerman ~ Masculinity In Review This discussion never says the word “masculinity” until the last ten minutes, and that turns out to be the point. Nick Paro brought Lawrence Winnerman back to talk about better humaning, and what they got instead was a ninety-minute demonstration of it — we follow each other’s tangents through Dungeon Crawler Carl, bioweapons research, Apple’s AI strategy, and a children’s fable about an ant. Watch what we do with the hour and you get a working model of the thing Intelligent Masculinity keeps circling: men talking about ideas without performing certainty, and about themselves without apology. Lawrence’s account of how he writes ends up being our theme throughout. He describes himself as a “pantser” — a writer who works without an outline, letting the story reveal itself — and then admits that his characters feel like real people in another dimension telling him how their lives go. That sounds like a craft anecdote until he explains what he found there: writing a novel set in the fractured United States of 2042, he realized every one of his main characters was queer, and decided to make that his signature rather than a discovery to be edited around. He is 56, and says it has taken him this long to conclude “this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” The self-knowledge arrived through the work, not before it — which is the opposite of how men are usually told to find themselves. The AI material is where Lawrence is most useful and most alarming, because he is not speaking as a critic outside the industry. Twenty-five years at Microsoft and Amazon ended with him pushed out of a tech program-management career by the same technology he now uses daily; he has a Claude subscription, taught himself MCP integrations and skill creation, and built a working app — Moondark.app — without knowing how to build apps. That dual position gives his warning weight. He walks through a Stanford result in which an LLM trained on bacteriophage genomes generated thousands of novel designs, 300 were synthesized, and 16 of them lived and replicated. His conclusion is not that AI is bad but that the frenzy is driven by the same scarcity logic as bioweapons and nuclear research: get it before they do, whoever they are. The counter-argument he offers is genuinely structural, and it’s the most practical thing in this discussion. He splits the field into builders and layerers — labs racing to own all human information versus companies betting intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous and the interface is what matters. He puts Apple in the second camp and reads its apparent AI lag as a deliberate bet rather than a failure. Nick extends the frame outward: the United States does not have to win the model race to matter, it can be the layer that learns from nations already regulating AI and digital privacy better. Lawrence pairs it with concrete policy — a digital bill of rights covering your likeness, your voice print, your DNA, and a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Alaska’s Permanent Fund, taking public stake in the frontier labs that trained on all of our writing. That is what a reimagined economy looks like when someone stops describing the disaster and starts drafting the alternative. And then there is the grasshopper. Lawrence’s closing thought — that he hates the ant-and-grasshopper parable because it teaches children to aspire out of their own nature — lands as the episode’s real argument about men. The parable is the whole script: be industrious, be useful, produce, and if you make art or play the fiddle you are the cautionary tale. His rejection of it is not a rejection of work. It is a refusal of the premise that there is one correct shape for a life. Nick’s addition sharpens it further — do not let the ant tell you that you cannot become a butterfly either — and the two of them arrive, through a fable, at a version of masculinity that has room for transformation in it. Lawrence Winnerman writes The Hinge and the Near Field, co-hosts The Daily Whatever with Dana DuBois, and serves as COO of Blue Amp Media. This conversation covered his serialized queer science fiction, the Rewiring the Republic series analyzing 43-odd fixes for American democracy, the case for an integrative economy built with Ann Kramer, and a hard-eyed read on where AI takes us. He is exactly the kind of guest this series needs — a man who found out what he was in his fifties, said it out loud, and then spent the rest of the hour arguing that everyone else should get to do the same. ~ Nick Paro Sources & References * The Hinge and the Near Field — Lawrence Winnerman’s Substack, home to his serialized novel and the Rewiring the Republic series * Moondark.app — the void-of-course moon tracker Winnerman built with Claude * Nuclear War: A Scenario and its follow-up on biological war, by Annie Jacobsen — the books driving Winnerman’s threat assessment * Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman — the LitRPG series anchoring the episode’s opening discussion of tragedy and craft Actions You Can Take Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Amelia Hall, MSW, CPACC, Ashleigh Alauren, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈, Ayana Madrone 🌻, Ms.Yuse, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lawrence Winnerman! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | Lawrence Winnerman is Back!

  3. Aug 8

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Jason Odell

    Masculinity In Review A photographer with a doctorate in biology is not the obvious guest for a show about masculinity, which is exactly why this episode works. Nick Paro brings on Jason P. Odell — self-employed in Colorado Springs, a PhD out of UC Riverside “back in a previous lifetime” — and the conversation turns quickly into something other than a politics segment. It becomes an argument about how anyone decides what is true, and what happens to men, and to a country, when evidence is no longer permitted to change a mind. Jason names the mechanism early: the refusal to “allow any evidence to alter our worldview,” and the decision instead to “alter the world to support our worldview.” Nick pulls that back toward the series’ own working thesis — that intelligent masculinity is “the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of your actions and values.” What comes out of the hour is a practice rather than a position: check yourself, then go find a room where you are not the smartest person in it. The sharpest stretch is not about the administration at all. It is about a Democrat. Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the election official convicted of tampering with voting machines, and Jason — who voted for him twice — refuses to soften it. He walks through what was actually available to anyone who thought the sentence ran long: an appeals court, a parole hearing, the ordinary machinery of a judicial system. Polis instead reached for executive authority right after the legislature had recessed for the summer, which Nick names on the spot as “the coward’s way.” What Jason wants from the moment is smaller and harder than partisanship — “forget masculinity for a minute, just straight up leadership” — the willingness to say out loud that in the state of Colorado the rule of law applies to you too, and that “you don’t get off easy because your political positions differ from mine.” The failure isn’t ideological. It’s a man holding real authority and spending it, as the two of them land on it, “performing for an audience of one.” Underneath the politics runs a quieter argument about knowledge, and it may be the most durable thing Jason brings. “Science by design, it is a process,” he says. “It is not a dogma.” The point is not that scientists are always right; it is that the entire apparatus is built to say this is the best explanation we have given what we know today and then survive being wrong tomorrow. He illustrates it twice — with a biology textbook from the mid-1950s that had essentially nothing to say about DNA because the structure hadn’t been published yet, and with a paper from the mid-90s, funded by nobody famous and certainly not Moderna, that got a piece of mRNA into a living mouse cell and watched it make the intended protein. Thirty years later that unglamorous result underwrites the mRNA vaccines, which an FDA is now reluctant to approve. Government pays for basic research, Jason argues, precisely because “a company will not invest a trillion dollars into an idea that may never pan out.” Certainty is the cheap thing. Revisable belief is expensive, and we have stopped paying for it. The best question of the episode is Nick’s, and it isn’t about Washington. He notices what Jason didn’t say — “what I did not hear you say is that you feel guilty” — and asks how a man keeps an honest accounting of his advantages without collapsing into self-flagellation. Jason’s answer is unusually clean. He names specifics: grandparents who promised to cover college before he was born, a mother home for most of his childhood, public schools that actually worked, a health insurance premium that “went up 600% this year” that he is still, by his own admission, lucky enough to pay. Then he declines the guilt outright — “you can’t diminish yourself for accomplishing something, even if you had assistance” — because he still had to attend class, still wasn’t a straight-A student, still barely got into graduate school, still learned “real quick that I was not the smartest one in the room.” What privilege changes is the road, not the destination: “the barriers that you had were quite lower than the barriers that a lot of other people have.” Nick draws the line where it belongs — “when privilege becomes entitlement, we’ve crossed a line” — and Jason answers that what we are watching now is “entitlement writ large.” Jason P. Odell writes The Photographer’s Perspective, came to Substack in January of 2025 to make himself write again, and carries a biology doctorate he now mostly uses as a lens on what public life has lost. Across the hour he and Nick worked through RFK Jr. and the dismantling of federal health agencies, Colorado’s purple political geography, the shift from a parent asking a child what went wrong to “lawnmower parenting” that mows down every obstacle before the kid reaches it, and Nick’s ledger argument that USAID returned about “$1.20” for every dollar spent — that “it is more profitable to save lives than it is to kill them.” The closing Mulan round found Jason quoting John Wooden on being swift as a coursing river — “be quick, but don’t hurry” — describing the typhoon as acting from “informed intelligence and trying to lift up others at the same time,” measuring the raging fire by finishing what he starts even “if it takes till two in the morning,” and locating his own mystery in the plain fact that “we don’t always present everything on the outside that we have on the inside.” What he adds to Intelligent Masculinity is the scientist’s particular humility: not a man who has the answer, but a man who has a method, and the nerve to let it prove him wrong. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Amy Gabrielle, The Rebel Crone (Shālah), Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, Nieta Greene, Sandra, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jason P. Odell 📷! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Jason Odell

  4. Aug 6

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Jasper Craven

    Masculinity In Review Nick Paro opens this one on a Tuesday, off the usual schedule, with a guest whose book title is itself an argument. Jasper Craven — an investigative journalist who has covered veterans and the military since 2014 for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Times — wrote God Forgives, Brothers Don’t about military education and what it manufactures in American men. The premise is deceptively simple: the military is not, and never has been, an institution designed to make men whole. Craven’s phrasing is blunt — “It is a very cold mission. It is not a warm one.” What makes the hour land is that Nick, a disabled veteran who enlisted, keeps testing that claim against his own service, insisting that “none of this is an attack on the service itself” while refusing to let the institution off the hook. Listeners come away with a usable separation: what service actually gave them, and what it only promised. Craven’s central diagnosis is that the military is a machine for withholding. Boys arrive with what he heard over and over in interviews — “a yearning to secure masculine validation” — layered on top of genuinely civic motives: public service, democracy, structure, family. What they meet instead is an institution that “forever withholds true validation, true love, true support,” because anxiety and striving are what move a force. The rank structure makes the trick visible; there is always another grade, another medal, and so the masculine archetype stays “just out of reach.” His most unsettling example is Pete Hegseth — a man who has arguably won the game and still behaves like someone graded insufficient. Nick’s gloss is sharper and funnier, “our secretary of wannabes,” but the point underneath is identical: the men most fused to the identity are the ones it punishes hardest. The book’s title is the second argument. God Forgives, Brothers Don’t served as the West Point football motto for years, until 2019, when it was discovered to have originated as “the omerta code of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas” — the same year a bronze plaque in the academy’s science building was found to feature a hooded man and the words Ku Klux Klan. Craven doesn’t file this under scandal-of-the-week. He treats it as evidence that “military ideologies often rhyme with white nationalist ones,” which is why the exit from service is so easy to hijack: men leave highly trained in violence, still hungry for a mission, and convinced the last one was bungled — and militias recruit on exactly that frequency. His remedy is unglamorous and concrete: fund the VA, where he notes roughly a third of the workforce is veterans, and build more places where the mission can continue without a rifle. Nick extends the list to teaching, city council, school boards — service after service, redefined so that it no longer requires an enemy. The third thread runs backward, into childhood. Long before recruitment, Craven argues, American schools export their hardest cases — kids with disabilities, kids with tumultuous homes, “these lost boys” — into military-style reform schools, on the belief that you can “break someone down and then build them up” and get a good man out the other end. He traces the residue further than you would expect: physical education teachers, he says, won their foothold in public schools through a deal with military leaders, then pushed compulsory military training and textbooks built around great military men and battles. The method fails even on its own terms — research on hazing and stress-induced training, he notes, shows it does not prepare anyone for battle. “They just instill trauma, anxiety, stress.” It is here that the two men most usefully complicate each other: when Craven hedges the academies’ rituals as “semi-indoctrinational,” Nick calls it, because you have to indoctrinate someone to get them to walk into harm’s way, and Craven admits he was “trying to be diplomatic.” “You don’t have to be diplomatic here,” Nick tells him — and the rest of the hour is better for it. Craven has been on the veterans beat since 2014, and he is the son of an anti-war organizer who was “mentored by Howard Zinn and collaborated with John Lennon and members of the Chicago 7” — a lineage that handed him an “alternative form of masculinity” to measure the military’s against, even as he still felt a certain romantic pull toward it. The interview covered military education from West Point to reform schools, Vietnam as the hinge where aspiration curdled, the pipeline from service into extremist movements, sexual violence as the byproduct of a bonding culture built on violence, and the way a family lineage of service produces reformers as often as it produces recruits. It closes on a line Craven carried out of his reporting: West Point graduate John Wheeler contrasting “things worth dying for” with the more feminine-coded “things worth living for.” Destruction against creation — that is close to this series’ own thesis, arrived at by someone who came to it from outside the uniform. Intelligent Masculinity has spent months asking what men are for; Craven’s contribution is the reminder that the country’s biggest answer to that question was never built to answer it. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Farmers AGAINST trump., ArleneMach, Dana Britt, Patricia Wren, Debbi Gonzalez, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jasper Craven! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Jasper Craven

  5. Aug 5

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Ron Placone

    Masculinity In Review Comedy is never neutral. That is the quiet argument running under this episode, and Ron Placone — stand-up, filmmaker, and the man behind the anti-capitalist comedy Left at Wall — makes it without ever announcing it. Nick Paro brings him in on a recommendation from mutual friend Tara Devlin, and the two spend an hour tracing a line from Mussolini’s war on pasta to a men’s national soccer team that could not bring itself to say anything at all. The through-line is that culture moves before politics does — “culture is upwind of politics,” as Nick puts it — and that whoever is willing to be funny about power gets some say in what people accept as normal. What makes it an Intelligent Masculinity conversation rather than a comedy-podcast interview is that neither man treats a platform as a perk — it’s an obligation with a price tag. Listeners come away with a usable test: not what you believe, but what you are willing to say out loud while saying it still costs you something. The first thing Ron does is reclaim a lineage. His Edinburgh Fringe show, Anti-Fascist Pasta Night, takes its name from a real Italian tradition dating to the fall of Mussolini — who, as Ron tells it, took pasta away and then took coffee away, after which his countrymen said, “we’re going to kill you now.” The joke has a thesis inside it. Italian-American identity gets read as reactionary — Ron names “the Rudy Giuliani’s of the world and the Pam Bondi’s of the world” — but he points to a rich labor history, an anarchist strain, and anti-Columbus Day protests led by Italian Americans since the 1930s, and argues the right-wing version was manufactured — the powers that be told Italian immigrants they were “kind of in between,” “this sort of other,” and handed them Columbus as a figurehead. His sharpest turn is on reparations: Italian Americans already received them after the lynching in Louisiana, so “if Italian people got reparations, why shouldn’t other people get them as well?” Reclaiming a radical history, in his framing, isn’t nostalgia. It’s ammunition. The middle of the conversation is where the two men press hardest, and it starts with soccer. Ron wrote that in times like these “the United States needs to lose,” and he means it — he says he has “never taken more joy in watching a sports team lose” than when Belgium beat them, Trump’s thumb on the scale and all. Nick, a lifelong fan who grew up playing, complicates it rather than agreeing: he wanted the men to do well, and observes that the women’s team “have always stood up to the politics very openly where our men’s team doesn’t.” His read on the men’s silence is blunt — “it feels like cowardice in my eyes” — and he isn’t gentler about the athletes who wait until afterward to admit a few of them disagreed. “You could have told Kash Patel to go away,” he says. Ron won’t quite co-sign the indictment; women “have it a lot harder,” he answers, and “it’s a lot harder to ignore things when it affects you personally every day,” to the point that breaking a ceiling makes it tempting to say “hey, F all that, I broke the ceiling.” Two men landing on the same disappointment from opposite directions — one calling it cowardice, one calling it context — is the most honest exchange in the hour. The episode’s most uncomfortable admission is a financial one. Ron says he could “probably double my salary in a couple of weeks” by making a “why I left the left” video and moving into right-wing podcasting, and he points out that contemporaries “helped normalize RFK” and helped get Trump back into office — part of a longer history, he notes, in which one of stand-up’s pioneers was a literal fascist. He then locates the incentive inside masculinity itself: on the toxic side there is an encouraging “element of apathy,” the posture that says “everything’s fine in my gated community,” so “stop bellyaching.” Nick wants to know whether comedians are organizing an alternative — a manosphere “that doesn’t suck” — and Ron refuses to flatter him: “I wish I could say yes to that.” What he sees instead are inclusive comedy scenes built by queer, non-binary, and women comics, spaces where he has “always felt welcome” as an ally, but without the unification the other side has. Naming that gap honestly is more useful than pretending the counter-pipeline already exists. Ron Placone is a Pittsburgh-raised, Carnegie Mellon-trained comedian, filmmaker, and podcaster — Left at Wall streams free on Tubi and YouTube, Anti-Fascist Pasta Night runs at the Fringe — whose politics predate his comedy: the Iraq War, he says, “jolted me awake” before he ever reached his first open mic. Across the hour he and Nick covered Italian-American radical history, the politics of the World Cup, the DOJ’s assault on the Olmstead decision and disability rights, and capitalism as the engine under all of it: “if capitalism was a car, it would break down every 2000 miles.” The show’s four Mulan questions find a man who has evidently thought about them — swift as a coursing river means “to be definitive, to make choices, to think decisively,” with the caveat that always being in motion “does involve the appropriate times of rest”; strong as a raging fire is being “the best Ron Placone I can possibly be, because I’m the only one”; and mysterious as the dark side of the moon is embracing his “10% meathead.” What Ron adds to the series is a live demonstration of Nick’s own definition of intelligent masculinity — “the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of your actions and values” — applied to a career where the sellout door stays unlocked and clearly marked. He keeps not walking through it. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take Say NO to Crip Crow * Sign-up for our in-person lobby day efforts * Stay informed at BroadBanner’s Say No to Crip Crow action campaign to contact your federal legislators: https://broadbanner.com/crip-crow Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Dr. Eric Lullove, Jason Gael, Christina Reamy, Bre Phillips, Cathy Stein, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ron Placone! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Ron Placone

  6. Aug 4

    Intelligent Masculinity | Let’s Talk About Evan Fields

    Masculinity In Review The episode opens on a fumbled stream key and Nick Paro scolding himself — “be ashamed of yourself” — which turns out to be the right overture for an hour built on the premise that men get further by naming the mess than by hiding it. The title puts Evan Fields in the subject position rather than the guest chair, and that placement is deliberate: Evan is the guest, and he is also the topic. Nick brought him back because Evan has been writing “really strong articles around masculinity these last few months,” and Nick wanted the man behind the byline on the record. What follows is less an interview than an audit of a friendship — two men retracing how a crisis in one of their lives became a show, and how the show became a practice. The takeaway they land on is portable and almost embarrassingly small: three words, no program, no fee. Evan starts with an essay he wrote about John Cena’s appearance on Pete Davidson’s Netflix show. Cena has granted more Make-A-Wish requests than anyone in the foundation’s history; Davidson, by Evan’s account, said he had done it once and “it f****d me up.” The interesting part isn’t the gap in stamina — it’s what Cena did with it. He didn’t correct Davidson, Evan is careful to say: “he wasn’t lecturing him or anything.” He reframed it — “it’s not about you in that moment” — and then offered the phrase the whole episode hangs on: talk about it. Evan’s reading is that the permission lands because of who extends it, “this huge jack dude that was in WWE,” and that “it’s just one guy being there for another” is the entire mechanism. Nothing about that is soft. It is a man with nothing left to prove spending some of his surplus on a man who has plenty. Nick then turns the camera around, and he does it on purpose. He points back at the Diogenes Club, which he started with Eric and Walter while Evan was going through a divorce, because “we gave you a space where you could actually talk about it.” Evan doesn’t dress up the debt: “It’s what you guys did for me.” What lifts the segment above gratitude is his insistence that crisis is “kind of a sliding scale” — a divorce, a midlife crisis, an ordinary bad week — and that the reaching out was itself the masculine act, “intelligently masculine of me to like reach out.” Nick reaches for the cleanest formulation the series has produced, from Sherrod Swaney of Centered America, interviewed early in the run: “I just found a group of men I could cry around.” Swaney was nineteen, and the arithmetic Nick draws from that is unkind by design — decades of runway, and still nobody to call. The proof Evan offers isn’t a feeling, it’s an outcome. Months on, he describes a new relationship as “the healthiest relationship that I’ve ever had,” with a partner who will listen and also “challenge me about things,” and he traces that directly back to what he learned from Nick and Eric. Men’s friendships, in this telling, aren’t a consolation prize for intimacy — they’re the prerequisite for it. That framing is what makes the two men’s shared impatience with the “male loneliness epidemic” more than a talking point. Nick’s objection is that the phrase launders responsibility, “a piss-poor way of saying we’re too lazy to self-reflect,” and that it keeps “placing the blame on women” instead. His counter-definition is sharper than the diagnosis: “the male loneliness epidemic is you’re just unwilling to make friends who will f*****g challenge your experience in life.” Evan lands in nearly the same place from the opposite direction, by way of an article of his own: “all you had to do was be nice.” No grand gestures, no flowers on every date — show up, pay attention. Where the two complicate each other is on what’s structural and what’s personal. Nick spends a long stretch arguing that marriage in America is first a governmental contract and that its real content is “love, friendship, and partnership,” sexual attraction optional; Evan doesn’t take that as provocation but answers with the practical stakes — mortgages, health care, military housing allowances, all hanging on a signature. Both keep circling the same trap from different ends: a culture “all about removing accountability from yourself,” where one bad experience becomes an indictment of an entire group. Nick borrows the corrective from a recent guest, Amelia Hall of Trailblazing with CP — “you meet one person with CP and you’ve met one person with CP.” One interaction is one interaction. That’s the whole rebuttal to the manosphere, and it fits on a napkin. Evan Fields writes News from Underground, which he calls “a small but growing community” and his main source of income; he’s a veteran, and in his own words “a disabled veteran,” the subject of an article of his about not looking the part. The conversation ran from Cena and Davidson through Threads discourse, the Kennedy family’s treatment of their institutionalized daughter, and a blunt exchange about what the current administration wants for disabled Americans, before closing on the shirt Nick was wearing: “Humanity is not for debate.” The plugs that follow — Say No to Crip Crow, Disability Community for Democracy — are less a sponsor break than a demonstration of the thesis, since the argument all along was that talking is where the work starts, not where it ends. What this episode adds to Intelligent Masculinity is a look at the machinery from the inside: the series has spent months telling men to find people they can talk to, and here is a man who did it on camera, in real time, and came out the other side of it better. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Beth Cruz, Jill B., Dana Britt, NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Ann Sczerbowicz, and many others for tuning into my live video with Evan Fields! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | Let’s Talk About Evan Fields

  7. Jul 2

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Cliff Schecter

    Masculinity In Review This episode takes one of the most combustible subjects in American politics — antisemitism and the war in Gaza — and treats it as a test case for whether men can hold hard truths without flattening them. Nick Paro brings Cliff Schecter — longtime Democratic consultant, 2020 Biden ad-writer, and founder of the independent outlet Blue Amp Media — into a conversation that refuses every easy exit. The through-line is restraint as strength: the discipline to criticize a war criminal by name while refusing to collectively blame a whole people, to demand nuance even when nuance is unpopular. What makes it an Intelligent Masculinity conversation rather than a cable segment is that Schecter keeps turning the analysis back on himself — on his own temper, his own mistakes, his own choice of words. Listeners walk away with something more usable than a hot take: a working model for how to stay in a difficult conversation without either surrendering your convictions or dehumanizing the person across from you. Schecter’s central argument is that proportion is a moral obligation, and that abandoning it is how good people get recruited into bad stereotypes. He is unsparing on Netanyahu — “a mass murderer,” “a war criminal,” a fascist “like Trump or Putin” — and equally unsparing on AIPAC, which he calls a Republican front group that doesn’t represent most Jews. But he draws a hard line at collective blame, pointing out that roughly two-thirds of Israelis want out of Gaza and that treating every American Jew as responsible for Netanyahu’s government revives the oldest blood libel there is. His tell for bad faith is selective outrage: the same voices screaming about Gaza have “nothing to say” about the Uyghurs in Chinese camps, Assad gassing 600,000 Syrians, or the Saudi regime the U.S. funds far more heavily than Israel. The point isn’t whataboutism — it’s that a conscience which only activates for one group of people, and that group happens to be the historical scapegoat of all scapegoats, deserves a hard look in the mirror. The episode’s most quietly radical move is Schecter’s refusal to use the word “genocide,” and his reasoning is where the masculinity theme actually lives. He won’t use it not because he’s soft on Israel’s government — he’d put Netanyahu in the Hague and make him watch a Palestinian state be born just to twist the knife — but because he understands what the accusation of baby-killing has meant for Jews across two millennia of passion plays and pogroms. It’s the same instinct, he explains, that stops him from calling a lazy person by a racial slur or a woman “emotional”: he refuses to reach for the weapon that a whole history has already loaded. That discipline reappears later, when Nick notices that Schecter insults a Trump official as “a dick” rather than reaching for female anatomy — a small choice that both men agree is the whole game. Intelligent masculinity, in this frame, is the decision not to say the cruelest available thing simply because it’s within reach. Then Schecter does the thing the rest of the internet almost never does: he tells on himself. He admits he lost his temper on air over this issue, that a commenter gently told him it wasn’t his best look, and that he stopped his own show to apologize on camera “without condition.” He roots that instinct in a longer story of changing his mind — how eight years on the board of the Ohio Innocence Project turned a young death-penalty supporter into an abolitionist, and how a man named Ricky Jackson, freed after 39 years for a crime he didn’t commit, taught him what letting go actually costs. The accountability isn’t performance; it’s a method. Against the “false masculinity” of a Pete Hegseth or a preening official in a Nazi cosplay uniform, Schecter offers three plain tools any listener can steal: chase real evidence and know who you’re reading, cultivate the humility to be told you’re wrong, and find whatever genuinely returns you to equilibrium — for him, phone-free workouts, the Calm app, therapeutic massage, and, unashamedly, dumb Karl Urban action movies. Cliff Schecter is a political operative by trade, but the version of him that shows up here is a father first — the man who becomes “a fierce dad” when his ten-year-old gets called a “stupid Jew” on a soccer field, and who insists that protecting his kids and extending equal dignity to everyone else’s are the same impulse, not competing ones. The interview closes, as the series always does, with the four Mulan “Make a Man Out of You” questions, and Schecter’s answers — reckless-abandon swiftness, a “righteous fight” typhoon, passion as a contained fire, and a self-deprecating riff on his own sarcasm as the dark side of the moon — sketch a man comfortable being both silly and serious in the same breath. Fittingly, Nick breaks his own no-self-promotion rule at the end to point everyone toward the Crip Crow campaign against the gutting of disability rights, and Schecter promptly redirects the spotlight back: make your calls first, subscribe to Nick second. It’s the whole thesis in miniature — lift each other up, and everyone does better. Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Cliff Schecter

  8. Jun 25

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Dean Blundell

    Masculinity In Review This episode takes a single loaded word and uses it to pry open a much larger question: what does it actually mean to be deliberate about how you move through the world? Nick Paro brings Dean Blundell — the Toronto broadcaster, Save America movement contributor, and self-described emotional support Canadian — into a conversation that starts with the word “p***y” and ends with disability rights, and never once feels like it drifted. The throughline is restraint as strength. Blundell’s case is that men who insist on their right to say anything have mistaken volume for power, and that the harder, more masculine move is to weigh the consequence and choose. Listeners walk away with a usable framework: not a list of banned words, but a way of asking why a word is in your mouth in the first place. The opening exchange reframes language as a question of audience rather than entitlement. Blundell, who is 53 and spent fifteen years in morning radio, is candid that words he once used freely — the slur he won’t repeat, the casual “that’s gay” — are gone from his vocabulary, not because someone forced him out of them but because he read David Letterman in Rolling Stone years ago and decided he didn’t want to “throw another log” on anyone’s already-hard journey. His refusal to grandstand is the point: he doesn’t believe in free speech as a thing without cost, because “there’s a consequence for everything you say and you do.” If a word is costing him reach, dropping it isn’t censorship — it’s just the smart play. That, he insists, is what intelligent masculinity looks like in practice. Nick sharpens it from the male side, noting that it isn’t his place to police how women use their own anatomy in language, but it is absolutely his place to talk to men about the words that aren’t theirs to weaponize. The middle of the conversation is where the two genuinely diverge, and to their credit they let the disagreement breathe rather than resolving it for comfort. Nick, who describes himself as culturally Jewish, presses Blundell on Gaza — citing Lawrence Winnerman’s argument that what’s happening rises to the level of a Holocaust, and stating plainly that he reads it as genocide, a purposeful campaign toward a Jewish-only ethnostate. Blundell won’t go there, and his reason is methodological rather than evasive: he distinguishes between what he knows and what he’s qualified to adjudicate. He’ll call Netanyahu “human garbage,” Ben-Gvir a genocidal extremist, and the whole far-right faction a hostage-taking of every Jew worldwide — but the legal term “genocide” he leaves to the Hague and to people like Nick who have skin in the game. It’s a live demonstration of the episode’s thesis: two men holding incompatible conclusions without either trying to bludgeon the other into agreement. Underneath the topical sparring runs a quieter, more durable argument about character. Blundell keeps returning to Marcus Aurelius and the four stoic virtues — courage, wisdom, temperance, justice — not as decoration but as a working filter for everything he publishes. “If I’m wrong, tell me I’m wrong,” he says, framing changeability as strength rather than weakness; he is “unmovable unless the data is proper.” His self-described superpower is the discipline of not caring about what he can’t control, a posture he traces through Mark Manson and back to Viktor Frankl finding joy on the far side of the Holocaust. The danger he names is its inverse: the willful ignorance and “false masculinity cosplaying as alphas” that he calls the real pandemic in North America — people with the whole of human knowledge in their pocket who choose discomfort-avoidance over learning. Intelligence, for Blundell, is simply refusing to be one of them. Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Lev Parnas, Beth Cruz, Ashleigh Alauren, Jason Gael, LeftieProf, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Dean Blundell
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A series dedicated to reclaiming what true masculinity is - not an old, fragile masculinity of domination; rather, a new, intelligent masculinity built on accountability. sickofthis.substack.com

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