Intelligent Masculinity

Sick of this Shit Pub
Sick of this Shit Pub
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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

  1. 4d ago

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Jacob Summers

    “So that is the difference between an intelligent man and a knuckle dragging man is go aim it at the people who are trying to keep other people from having the freedom to find that balance for themselves.” ~ Jacob Summers ~ Masculinity In Review The internet ate this episode twice before it finally held. What survived is audio only, and it is worth the trouble. Jacob Summers — Captain Valhalla to most of the internet, Coach Cap to the rest — spent an hour with Nick working through a question the fitness world keeps refusing to answer honestly: who does strength belong to? Jake ran an LGBTQ-inclusive gym in Tuscaloosa, in the heart of Alabama, and he has watched the answer get contested in real time. He describes himself as a typical himbo with muscles and a heart, which undersells a man who thinks about this more carefully than most people who write books about it. The conversation opens on the fight over gym culture, and Jake refuses both of the easy positions. There are people burying their heads in the sand insisting that white supremacists and Christian nationalists are not moving into fitness and combat sports, and there are people who see it clearly and want to concede the ground. He rejects the second group as firmly as the first, pointing to the men-only gym founded by a man who cheated on his wife and concluded the problem was women — a solution Jake compares, not gently, to the Republican National Convention. The move did not make anyone safer; it just changed who was available to harm. What it did do was advertise a claim, that iron and sweat belong to one political crowd, and Jake’s answer is that the claim was always nonsense: “you will never be able to get a liberal or a leftist out of health and fitness.” His actual argument is structural rather than tribal. The people who only chase the physical, he says, do not last — maybe five or ten good years, rarely more, and rarely with the gains they expected. The ones still lifting into their fifties, sixties and seventies figured out that the body is a door into the rest of the person. “When you develop one part of the body, it by nature improves another part of the person,” he says, and then makes the harder claim: ignore the mind, heart and soul and you will cap the physical, too, because muscles do not fire themselves. Strictness has a place in that picture, but as consistency, not rigidity — you can change the plan, you just do not change it for no reason. Ask him who taught him this and the list is the most quietly radical part of the episode. His father, who used push-ups as discipline but taught resilience underneath them. A friend in the Army, almost forty when he enlisted, who went six days a week and made it a life rather than a phase. A powerlifting community and a set of online role models that did the work local culture would not. Charlie Ritchie, who outlifted the men around her and taught him that masculine and feminine are things you set on your own terms. And his wife Lindsay — who lost most of her weight in an apartment with workout videos before walking into CrossFit, Spartan races and roller derby, and who then made enough room for him to ask questions about himself that he had not been able to ask before. This is the series’ recurring finding, arriving again from a new direction: nobody assembles a self alone, and the men who insist they did are usually the ones doing the most damage. Nick brings his working definition to the table — intelligent masculinity as the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and Jake accepts it, then sharpens it with one word: aim. Everybody is watching where a man points himself. Sex and violence are the two engines, in his reading, and both repression and misdirection fail for the same reason: the energy does not disappear, it comes out sideways and lands on whoever is nearby. So aim the intimacy at your partner, aim the aggression at the barbell, and aim whatever is left at the people working to take other people’s freedom. Call it the anti-bully bully. It is a definition with a target rather than a vibe, which is what makes it usable. Jacob Summers is a veteran, a former gym owner, a competitor, and the voice behind The Better Human Project, and he has been building this framework in public for years. This hour covers the capture of fitness culture, holistic training, the people who shaped him, and a lightning round built out of Mulan that ends somewhere unexpected — on his insistence that you can live almost entirely in the open and still owe yourself a private corner nobody gets to see. What he adds to Intelligent Masculinity is the aiming point. Nick has spent the year assembling a definition from men between nineteen and their sixties; Jake handed it a direction. ~ Nick Paro Sources & References * The Better Human Project — Jacob Summers’ YouTube project, referenced throughout * Captain Valhalla on Threads, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook (as Jacob Summers) — where the gym-culture thread that started this conversation lives \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 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 Jacob Summers

  2. Aug 27

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Kyle Pacheco

    “So using the words to just tell somebody you can be vulnerable won’t necessarily gain the action that you intended to give. I would say that just like children, modeling that you’re vulnerable is much more of an effective way.” ~ Kyle Pacheco ~ Masculinity In Review Kyle Pacheco ( ClearRoot Intelligence) spent an hour this week describing a pattern most men will recognize and few will name out loud: you don’t learn manhood, you copy it. He talked about mirroring men he now knows were harmful, about a stepfather’s affair that reshaped his sense of what a father is, and about the moment he realized the friends around him didn’t actually care about him or each other. What makes this conversation matter isn’t the wreckage — it’s what he did with it. Kyle treated his own past as source material to be studied rather than a story to be defended, and that distinction is the entire practice. Better humaning is not the absence of bad models; it’s the deliberate work of becoming a better one. The sharpest idea Kyle offered is that vulnerability can’t be granted by announcement. Telling a man “it’s okay to cry” leaves him exactly where he was, because the invitation costs you nothing and proves nothing. “You’re not showing me your vulnerability,” Kyle said, “so why would I be vulnerable?” His alternative is to go first and keep going first — say out loud at work that you go to therapy, name the ADHD, admit the thing you’re still bad at. He described people at his job responding to that openness who “probably wouldn’t have done it on their own,” and later described colleagues pulling him aside for conversations he never solicited: “I didn’t walk up to them and say, you can talk to me anytime you want. They perceive it by the way I act.” The safety was never offered — it was demonstrated until it was believed. The modeling runs closest to home with his kids, and Kyle was clear that the most honest thing he does as a father is apologize. He admitted he sometimes raises his voice with his four-and-a-half-year-old instead of slowing down, and that his repair now sounds like: that was a mistake, I’m sorry I raised my voice, and what you were doing still isn’t okay. That’s accountability moving in both directions in the same breath — the father holding himself to the standard he’s asking his son to meet. He extended the same logic to his marriage, noting that the relationship his son sees every day for eighteen years is the template, right down to whether affection is something men show in front of other people. Kids pick up far more than we credit them for, which means the lesson is being taught whether or not we intended to teach one. Kyle also complicated the search for a male figure worth copying, and this is where the episode earns its title. His model turned out to be his grandfather — born in 1932, GOP for most of his life, and someone Kyle disagreed with ideologically — who nonetheless treated his wife with a consistency Kyle hadn’t seen anywhere else, taught him woodworking, held him accountable, and refused to go to bed angry. More striking, the grandfather changed: in his seventies and eighties he came around on people he’d spent decades opposed to. Kyle called that the most impressive thing about him, and he’s right — the willingness to be wrong in public, late, is itself a masculine skill worth mirroring. Intelligent masculinity is not about finding a flawless man to imitate. It’s about being able to identify the specific, transferable behaviors worth carrying forward and leaving the rest. None of this stays private, which is why the void matters. We didn’t lose young men because someone else was louder; we lost ground because good men vacated the rooms where culture gets made and assumed the next generation would sort it out on its own. Kyle’s answer is to occupy those rooms deliberately — at work, at home, in the neighborhood, and in the in-person communities he’s trying to rebuild alongside the digital ones. That’s the same discipline behind ClearRoot, the civic-literacy tool he’s building to link money, votes, and action so that being upset can become being useful. Modeling and building are the same reflex pointed at different scales. Kyle Pacheco is the founder of ClearRoot, a senior sales manager, a new MBA, and a father of two who came into this conversation having already done the reflection it asked of him — he said outright he didn’t want to hold back. That preparation is its own answer to the question of how you model better humaning: you show up having already done the work in private, and then you do it again where people can see. He expands this series by demonstrating that the practice scales — from a bedtime apology, to a coworker who finally asks for a minute, to a tool built so strangers can act on what they learn. Refuse to outsource your accountability, live with the consequences of your values, and let people watch you do it. ~ Nick Paro Sources & References * ClearRoot — Kyle’s civic-literacy and research platform (currently in beta; feedback welcome via the in-app form or contact@clearroot.ai) 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, PJ Schuster, Ann Kramer, ArleneMach, Donna Dupont, and many others for tuning into my live video with ClearRoot Intelligence! 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 Kyle Pacheco

  3. Aug 20

    Intelligent Masculinity | Return of the AngryMaleVeteran

    “For me, a part of masculinity is if you lose, you lose. Okay. I didn’t have my best day. Things didn’t go well. I could have done things different or people just didn’t want me to win. This is a democracy, right? So take that, learn lessons, move forward.” ~ AngryMaleVet ~ Masculinity In Review The third Intelligent Masculinity conversation with AngryMaleVet starts where the first two left off. Nick and AMV spend an hour walking through voter registration marches, USAF Major Jason Watson who is in pretrial confinement (The One Who Stood for the Oath We Swore), the Citizen’s Oath drafted by Lawrence Winnerman, and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth campaigning in Iowa for Republican Zach Nunn in an apparent violation of the Hatch Act — and every one of those threads loops back to the same question. When the outcome isn’t yours, who are you? The answer they arrive at is unglamorous and demanding, which is how you know it’s real. The clearest test case is the grift of the sore loser. AMV is blunt about what perpetual election denial actually signals — “it’s the least alpha thing I’ve ever seen in my life” — and Nick pushes him to say why. The answer isn’t about politics; it’s about formation. A man who has never been taught to lose will build a whole economy out of refusing to. The guest traces it back through Trump’s biography — the Emmy, Iowa, sixty-five court losses — and lands on the mechanism that makes it self-sustaining: whining is monetizable, which is why Mike Lindell challenging a primary he lost by eleven points is a fundraising posture rather than a legal strategy. Which means the thing being sold as strength is a business model that requires its customers to stay aggrieved. The oath segment is where the episode does its most original thinking. Nick reads a citizen’s oath written by Lawrence Winnerman, his Banner and Backbone co-founder — a near-copy of the oath sworn by officers and naturalized citizens, offered to natural-born Americans who never swear anything at all. The guest’s response is better than agreement — he declines to want it required. “I don’t think I would want anybody to have to swear an oath,” he says, then pivots to what he does want: that people ponder it, asking what the Constitution means to them, what the flag means to them, where their courage actually gets spent. An oath extracted is a loyalty test; an oath considered is a mirror. And on the other side, for those who did swear one, the guest is unambiguous — “It never expires. There’s no turn off button for that.” Keeping faith is the third leg, and it has a name attached: Major Jason Watson, seventeen years in, back in pretrial confinement for calling from the Capitol steps for the impeachment of Trump and Vance. Both men have interviewed him, and both report the same thing — that Maj. Watson insists it isn’t about him, it’s about the movement. Nick sharpens it into a masculinity question: what does it say about a person to accept the consequences of his own values? AMV’s answer refuses the hero frame and puts the weight back on the audience. Maj. Watson threw away a 17-year career because elected representatives wouldn’t spend a fraction of that courage, and the least the rest of us can do is refuse to let it fade into the woodwork. That’s what the November 11th Veterans Day Democracy March is for — veterans, families, and supporters converging on D.C. for the rule of law and legal election results, which the guest carefully distinguishes from January 6th: “we’re not led by a narcissist sociopath who is feeding us lies.” Then there’s the part that reframes the whole hour. Asked what he gets out of showing up in person — the 1,000 Miles to Memphis march, the immigration conference, the memorial concert — the guest gives the episode its best line: “activism is an antidepressant.” Not a metaphor for morale, but a described mechanism — isolation is the goal from the top, and standing next to people doing the same work is the countermeasure. Nick extends it into an argument about ownership — “the highest office and rank in this nation is voter” — and the guest closes the loop with the sharpest civic instruction of the episode. It is not their seat. It’s the constituent’s seat. So get greedy for seats, outvote the Jeffs, and remember that the worst available option is inaction, because inaction is how the frog boils. AngryMaleVet is a retired combat veteran — twenty-three years, enlisted at seventeen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait — who came home expecting to be done fighting evildoers and found the fight relocated. Across three appearances he has become one of our clearest arguments that masculinity is a practice rather than a posture: measured response over reaction, discipline over dominance, service that continues after the uniform comes off. This discussion is his most important yet, because it takes the abstractions the series has been building — accountability, courage, community — and hands you a date, a website, and a first step. Calm and intelligent, as one listener put it in the comments. That’s the whole project. ~ Nick Paro Sources & References * The One Who Stood for the Oath We Swore an interview with Nick Paro and Maj. Jason Watson * A Discussion with Major Jason Watson with AngryMaleVet * 1,000 Miles to Memphis — the 36-day, 1,000-mile voter registration march from Nashville to Memphis * Veterans Fighting Fascism — the Veterans Day Democracy March, November 11th, Washington, D.C. * Banner & Backbone Media’s Citizen’s Oath written by Lawrence Winnerman 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 Ashleigh Alauren, The Rebel Crone (Shālah), Ms.Yuse, Cher, Dana Britt, and many others for tuning into my live video with AngryMaleVet! 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 | Return of the AngryMaleVeteran

  4. Aug 16

    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

  5. Aug 14

    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!

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
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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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