Podcast
Intelligent Masculinity
Hosted by Nick Paro · EN
A series dedicated to reclaiming what true masculinity is - not an old, fragile masculinity of domination; rather, a new, intelligent masculinity built on accountability.
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Intelligent Masculinity | With Cliff Schecter
4w ago01:14:38Tap to summarizeMasculinity In ReviewThis 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: BroadBannerSubmit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* Sick of this Shit Community Comment FormCall your public servants on important issues:* 5calls.orgJoin the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* deflock.meService members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* Orders Project* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* B. Cognition LabsNick’s NotesI’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 CollectiveSupport 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% offFor support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.comThank 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
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Intelligent Masculinity | With Dean Blundell
Jun 2500:46:12Tap to summarizeMasculinity In ReviewThis 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: BroadBannerSubmit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* Sick of this Shit Community Comment FormCall your public servants on important issues:* 5calls.orgJoin the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* deflock.meService members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* Orders Project* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* B. Cognition LabsNick’s NotesI’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 CollectiveSupport 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% offFor support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.comThank 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
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Intelligent Masculinity | With Lev Parnas
Jun 1801:02:28Tap to summarizeMasculinity In ReviewThis episode takes a man the public knows as a footnote in an impeachment and asks him the question the news never does: not what did you do, but what changed you. Lev Parnas — Soviet-born immigrant, recovering Trump-world insider, the figure at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, and now one of the most relentless voices for the Epstein survivors — joins Nick Paro for an hour that is less confession than autopsy of a conversion. The interview moves from a postcard slipped under a prison door to the 1920s gender politics being sold to teenage boys today, but its spine is a single claim that the Intelligent Masculinity series keeps circling: that the measure of a man is whether he will hold his own accountability rather than outsource it. Lev arrives having lived both halves of that proposition — the outsourcing and the holding — and the value of the hour is that he can describe, from the inside, exactly where one becomes the other. What emerges is a portrait of masculinity defined not by proximity to power but by the willingness to live with what power costs.The most analytically useful thing Lev does is refuse the redemption-story shortcut. Asked what shifted, he declines the clean narrative — no single morning, no waking from a coma a different man — and reaches instead for the language of cults. He describes the mechanism with unsettling precision: the way a leader can tell you the black table is white until you believe it, the way you start, almost without noticing, “looking at ways of how to excuse it for him” rather than agreeing with your own wife. His turning point is not noble. It is a jail cell, ten days of solitary confinement under espionage charges, the enforced silence that — by accident — gave him the first uninterrupted stretch of thinking he’d had in four years. That detail matters because it inverts the usual masculine fantasy of self-made transformation. Lev didn’t conquer the cult; circumstance pried him loose, and only then did the work of accountability begin. The honesty about that sequence is itself the argument: a man who tells you he simply chose to be better is selling you something, and Lev has stopped selling.From there the conversation widens into cultural diagnosis, and this is where Lev’s biography becomes a lens rather than a spectacle. He links the Trump rally moment that first unsettled him — the mocking of a disabled reporter — to a national arc, the slow normalization of cruelty as a style of strength. He names the manosphere directly, the Andrew Tate economy of Bugattis and private planes sold to boys who “don’t see the cost that comes with it,” and connects it to a politics that wants women back in the 1920s. The throughline he draws is that the lack of accountability he practiced personally is the same lack the country has practiced collectively: nobody pays, so the behavior compounds. For a man raised by his mother, grandmother, and sister after his father died when he was eleven, the misogyny is not abstract — it reads as a betrayal of the only people who taught him strength. His insistence that “women is a very important subject” is not a talking point bolted onto a redemption tour; it is, by his account, the oldest and most stable thing about him, the part the cult had to override before it could use him.The Epstein survivors are where the episode’s ethics get concrete, and where Lev’s reframing of accountability does its real work. He rejects the framing that he advocates out of personal stake — “it’s not about what I have to do with the survivors, it’s what we all have to do with the survivors” — and insists the courage belongs to them, not him. But the most pointed argument of the hour is structural: the people who enable abuse, he says, deserve scrutiny equal to the abusers, because Trump and Epstein alike “wouldn’t be able to get away and do the things they’re doing if they didn’t have the enablers.” Then he turns that same blade on his own side of the aisle, calling out journalists he says sat on Epstein-related reporting for eight months to save it for a book. It would be easy to read this as grievance; it is sharper than that. Lev is applying one standard — you don’t get to profit off other people’s harm — without checking the political jersey of the person it lands on, and he is open that it has cost him, including attacks from groups he thought he was fighting alongside. That willingness to be disliked while applying a consistent rule is, in the series’ terms, the discipline of living with the consequences of your values.What keeps the hour from sermonizing is that Lev never lets himself off the hook he’s hanging everyone else on. He talks about the children he wasn’t present for, the pressure he loaded onto his older kids because he was, by his own admission, parenting off a collision of The Godfather and The Brady Bunch with no manual of his own. He admits the pull toward powerful men may have been a search for the father he lost at eleven — a piece of self-knowledge offered without melodrama and then set aside. Even his answer to Nick’s closing Mulan question lands on this register: asked how he is “mysterious as the dark side of the moon,” the former mobster’s reveal is that he is, underneath all of it, “really a mama’s boy.” The vulnerability is not performance; it is the same accountability turned domestic, the recognition that being a good man is “a learning curve” because “we’re not born with a booklet of how to be a father.” This is the show’s thesis rendered in a single life — that better masculinity is just better humaning, practiced out loud, including the parts that don’t flatter you.Lev Parnas is what accountability looks like when it is still in progress rather than safely in the past. He is running for Congress as an independent, archiving what he says he never got to release, and showing up week after week for survivors who owe him nothing — and he does all of it while conceding he would undo nearly everything that made him famous. The conversation Nick draws out is not a victory lap; it is a man narrating, in real time, the difference between the version of himself that excused cruelty to stay close to power and the version that now absorbs the cost of speaking against it. That contrast is the entire point of Intelligent Masculinity, and few guests have embodied both poles of it as starkly as Lev does here. If the series is an argument that strength is the willingness to carry your own consequences, then Lev’s hour is its hardest and most human piece of evidence: proof that the work is available even to someone who spent four years proving the opposite, and that the door out of the cult, once you find it, only opens by walking back through everything you’d rather forget.~ Nick ParoActions You Can Take* Check out the new: Sick of this Shop!* Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBannerSubmit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* Sick of this Shit Community Comment FormCall your public servants on important issues:* 5calls.orgJoin the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* deflock.meService members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* Orders Project* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* B. Cognition LabsNick’s NotesI’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 CollectiveSupport 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% offFor support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.comThank you 🇨🇦 Natalie Woodn’t 🇨🇦, Gretchen Theodorakis, Agent#99, Jack 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈(he/him), Acejonesz, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas! Join me...
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Intelligent Masculinity | With Jarrod Zisser
May 2901:24:22Tap to summarizeMasculinity In ReviewThis episode reframes a conversation that the loudest voices in American culture keep trying to flatten. Jarrod Zisser — independent journalist behind The Take, Marine Corps infantry with two Iraq tours, and a man who walked away from a paying job a year ago to report from federal-occupation flashpoints — joins Nick Paro to do something the moment makes unfashionable: argue that empathy, self-reflection, and respect for the women who actually run our households are not threats to masculinity but the substance of it. The interview moves quickly from Iran and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon to white Christian nationalism and the SAVE Act, but the spine of it is the question of what veterans, and men more broadly, owe a country that is gradually being remade in front of them. Nick closes the conversation with a one-line thesis the series has been building toward all season: intelligent masculinity is the refusal to outsource accountability onto others, and the discipline to live with the consequences of our values and actions. Jarrod’s hour is, in effect, a working demonstration of that thesis.The opening salvo is military, and it sets the analytical register for everything that follows. Jarrod breaks a story on Substack about a sailor’s mother — one of several mothers, it turns out — describing her son losing more than thirty pounds in a month aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, working twelve-hour shifts and passing out in chow lines, while a Gulf posture that should have been hardened against drone and missile strikes months in advance instead absorbs the hits. The point isn’t gossip about Pete Hegseth, whom he names as the obvious symptom; the point is that men with no fallback are being asked to carry consequences that the leadership class refuses to. Jarrod served on FOBs that ran out of chicken-shit clay buildings and held Friday steak nights — the contrast is the argument. When the most powerful military in the world has watched Ukraine wage a drone war for years and still neglects basic force protection, the failure is not technical. It is a failure of seriousness about the people you are spending.The interview’s most useful move is to refuse the journalist-as-neutral-observer pose without abandoning the discipline of reporting. Jarrod stacks his identities deliberately: human first, American second, journalist third. He is candid that this stance puts him in what the current administration calls the antifa corner, and he is candid about the cost — platforms slow-paying anyone reporting on the administration, his family covering the gap, an out-of-the-blue call informing him he is on a list he is now openly proud of. The civic claim underneath the autobiography is that 2026 is not 2008 or 2016, and that pretending it is — the steady-head, just-the-facts neutrality fetish — has become a way of helping the erasure of civil rights happen quietly. The voice this episode commends is the one that says what it thinks while it shows its work, and shows its face while it does.That insistence on showing one’s face becomes the bridge to the masculinity question, and it is the most carefully handled moment of the hour. Nick frames face-showing as a duty for men like him and Jarrod — least-targeted, hardest to take — and Jarrod, without breaking the agreement, pushes back to clarify on behalf of protesters who cover their faces because they are in real danger. Then they widen the lens. Veterans show up in old camis with patches on their helmets because the veteran population is the most forcibly diverse community in the country, and because the title still carries trust. Jarrod’s argument, citing the conversation with Kristofer Goldsmith, is that the oath taken at enlistment doesn’t expire at EAS. The uniform was incidental; the obligation — to the Constitution, against enemies foreign and domestic — was the substance. Done well, this is what veteran patriotism sounds like in 2026: not flag-waving, but the willingness to translate prior consent into present, peaceful presence on a street in Portland or Minneapolis or Delaney Hall, while everyone else assumes someone else will go.The conversation’s most personal turn delivers the masculinity argument the series exists to make. Jarrod was raised by his mother in a household his father abandoned and surrounded by women, in the liberal Bay Area, where being a normal boy did not require being a domineering one. He found his model of the masculine man in a best friend’s father — a third-degree black belt and provider who, in Jarrod’s telling, was also the most respectful husband he ever observed, deferring decisions because his wife was the actual decision-maker. He tells his own kids the same thing about his own marriage when they ask who is in charge: mommy. The political frame is direct — the SAVE Act and the broader white Christian nationalist project want to suppress the woman’s vote on the theory that empathy is a disqualification — and the personal frame is just as direct: a man who needs to be the king of his household is a man whose masculinity is a facade for something else. By the time Nick offers his definition of intelligent masculinity, Jarrod has already filled in the body of it: patience is not weakness, compassion is not weakness, and self-reflection — the five quiet minutes in the shower, the therapy he had to learn it from — is the practice that lets a man hold accountability without breaking under it.Jarrod Zisser is what happens when somebody decides that the oath is still operative and behaves accordingly. He builds his reporting at a fifth-to-seventh-grade reading level because clarity is a civic act; he stacks “human, American, journalist” in that order because anything else mistakes the tool for the work; and he is willing to be on a list and on camera so that other people don’t have to be. This conversation is, in the best sense, an Intelligent Masculinity interview: a veteran modeling the discipline of holding a position publicly, an independent journalist refusing the false neutrality of his own field, and a husband and father naming where his power actually comes from. If the series is an extended argument that better humaning is the substance of better masculinity, Jarrod’s hour is the kind of evidence that argument needs — concrete, accountable, and finished by a man who, asked how he embodies the great typhoon, answered by slowing down.~ Nick ParoActions You Can Take* Check out the new: Sick of this Shop!* Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBannerSubmit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* Sick of this Shit Community Comment FormCall your public servants on important issues:* 5calls.orgJoin the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* deflock.meService members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* Orders Project* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* B. Cognition LabsNick’s NotesI’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!.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% offFor support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.comThank you Noble Blend, Ms.Yuse, ArleneMach, Jack (he/him), SammyD, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jerrod Zisser! 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
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Intelligent Masculinity | With Jonathan Buchwalter
May 2901:06:41Tap to summarizeMasculinity In Review* Check out Jonathan’s sci-fi book series, The Night Sky TrilogyNick Paro sits down with Jonathan Buchwalter — a Holocaust and 20th-century U.S. history teacher, Shelton State adjunct, TikTok historian, and as of a few days ago the newly-elected chairman of the Tuscaloosa County Democratic Party — for a late-night, second-of-the-day Intelligent Masculinity conversation that moves from a 1930 Berlin landlord dispute to a 2026 American press conference without ever changing subjects. Jonathan’s argument, built brick by historical brick, is that the strain of authoritarianism running through American life right now is best read alongside the rise of European fascism — not because the costumes match, but because the propaganda machinery does. His definition of intelligent masculinity, when he finally lands it in the closing arc, is the cleanest answer the show has gotten in months: “mastery over the reptile.” The hour is a working tutorial in why those two things — the political diagnosis and the personal practice — are the same conversation.The episode opens with the Horst Wessel story, and it is worth slowing down to hear what Jonathan does with it. Wessel was a brown-shirted street-fighter in the early Weimar period, killed in 1930 by communist street-fighters after he allegedly threatened an elderly landlady the communists had been looking after. Joseph Goebbels turned the corpse into a movement. “You don’t have to look too hard to see really similar circumstances in our recent history,” Jonathan says, “the death of a propagandist being manipulated into the story of martyrdom for the cause, the use of a corpse really.” He names Charlie Kirk. Nick adds Stephen Miller as the modern Goebbels analog, and notes that the church-with-the-Christian-flag-above-the-Stars-and-Stripes he drives past on his way to Tulsa is where the propaganda actually took. The point is not that Kirk is Wessel. The point is that the technology of martyr manufacture is older than the men running it, and that knowing the history is the only way to recognize the technique in real time.What follows is the most rigorous discussion of religion-and-fascism the series has hosted. Jonathan’s comparative move is to treat religious institutions as variables rather than constants. Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were both authoritarian projects that had to negotiate with deeply organized churches — the Vatican, with its money and its pulpit; the Lutheran Protestant set, with its anti-Semitic inheritance and its Christian charity simultaneously. Mussolini’s acolytes talked about a new civic religion of fascism and then quietly conceded that they had to stand alongside the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church had hard power. The Nazis split the difference: one faction wanted to Christianize Hitler into a savior figure; Himmler’s faction wanted the church to be the next enemy after the communists and the Jews. America in 2026 has no such institution to negotiate with. “Now American organized religion is far less organized,” Jonathan says, and so what fills the vacuum is “disparate megachurches that share some school curricula” — the Church of the Highlands and its pseudo-college, ministering trainings, sponsored Christian universities — nothing remotely like the Lutheran Church of Germany. The friction this analysis produces is the most useful kind. It refuses both the lazy “it can’t happen here” and the equally lazy “it’s the same thing.” It tells you which lever is missing.The Pete Hegseth section is where the historical thread meets the cultural one, and where Jonathan’s central thesis crystallizes. He traces the American religious-political schism back to the late 1920s and 1930s — the Christian socialist tradition of a populist Christ versus the more reactionary, oligarchal tradition of a Christ who helps those who help themselves — and walks it forward through Bill Buckley Jr. versus Martin Luther King Jr., two equally religious men asking opposite questions about who God is to us. The earlier authoritarians, in Jonathan’s reading, believed things. The early Nazis got shot at Beer Hall Putsches; they took real beatings in real street fights with communists. Hegseth has never known struggle. His ideas, Jonathan says, “move in line with whatever is most beneficial to him in the moment.” The cross tattoo, the Christianized masculinity, the sloppy-drunk press conference videos — these don’t create friction in him because there is no underlying belief for the behavior to grind against. “It’s just pure ego. It’s just pure aesthetic.” This is the diagnostic frame the rest of the episode operates inside: an authoritarianism that has stopped pretending to believe in anything beyond its own self-preservation, and a brand of masculinity that has stopped pretending to believe in anything beyond its own image.That frame is what turns the gym-bro section from a sidebar into the show’s payoff. Jonathan grew up in gym culture — his stepdad Jamie was a professional bodybuilder — and his account of the “old heads” is unsentimental but generous. They were honest. They told nineteen-year-olds the truth about tren and test: it will make you absolutely massive, it will also put you at enormous risk, it is not good for you, it is superman serum. The modern MAHA-flavored manfluencer is, in Jonathan’s read, a liar by job description. He sells supplements he knows don’t work, takes gear he won’t admit to, and gleefully tells nineteen-year-olds — boys at the peak of their natural testosterone production, with the best growth vector they will ever have — to start blasting. The bill, Jonathan warns, is years out: an epidemic of joint pain in men’s late twenties, fried testosterone in men trying to start families in their early thirties, men who cannot pick up their own kids because they picked up too much weight at nineteen on a substance they were lied to about. The aesthetic that authoritarianism sold to Hegseth is the same aesthetic the manfluencer sells to the seventeen-year-old: a costume of strength that costs the strength itself.Jonathan’s diagnosis of the seventeen-year-old is precise enough to quote in full. Every generation of young men has wanted women and not known how to talk to them — that part isn’t new. What is new is that the kid can now ask his question of an algorithm instead of a big brother or a dad or a friend, and the algorithm has product to sell. It tells him birth rates are women’s fault. It tells him his sexual market value is low. It tells him to get his jawline sorted, do bone smashing, blast a bunch of tren, and the women will flock. “And it’s all feeding this cycle of anxiety,” Jonathan says. “None of that is approachable, realistic, or grounded in reality in any meaningful way. And so it doesn’t solve your problem. So you get more anxious and you get less able to talk to women and you get less able to interact meaningfully with other people around you. And you come off as more and more of a freak.” The kid goes back to the influencer for more of the thing that made him worse. The dependence forms. The sense of self gets outsourced to “freaks on the internet who are lying to you to sell you something.” Nick connects it to looksmaxxing’s Adam archetype and notes — pointedly — that Adam is the most beta man in scripture, since he let a snake (and Nick has a stronger word for what that snake was) steal his wife. The series’s gleeful crassness on this point is part of its argument: the manfluencer’s Bible Story is a worse reading of the text than a podcast joke.The counterprogramming is Jonathan’s grandfather and his stepdad Jamie, and the episode earns its emotional weight in those passages. His biological father, as far as he knows, is still in jail — long history of drinking, of physical abuse, never around. His grandfather was a steel-industry worker with no education and a history of abuse of his own, and what Jonathan saw in him every day was a man who provided, who asked after others, who shared what he loved. Jamie, his stepdad, was a blue-collar bodybuilder who met a bookworm where the bookworm actually lived. Every Saturday morning, like clockwork: breakfast together while the girls slept, Dragon Ball Z, then the gym. “He just welcomed me into that part of his life without reservation. And didn’t make me feel weak because I couldn’t pick the weight up, didn’t make me feel stupid because I didn’t know how the emotions worked. He was just there showing me how it worked and trying to meet me in the nerdy shit that I was into and bring that in to the physicality that he was into.” That is the opposite of the manfluencer transaction. It is presence instead of product. It is, in the show’s working vocabulary, intelligent masculinity in practice. Jonathan now has a one-year-old son and a daughter, and he names the reservoir directly: he is passing the goodness Jamie gave him forward.The hour’s best definition is also its quietest. Jonathan calls intelligent masculinity “mastery over the reptile” — the discipline to say, I have these big angry feelings, but that doesn’t mean I need to hit something with a stick about it. I feel this drive toward this objective, and that doesn’t mean I have to step over people to get there. When mastery happens, he tells Nick, you find you are not just more satisfied — you become an example. He texted his best friend James recently from the couch, his daughter under one arm, his son enamored with the colors on the TV, his wife laughing at her phone beside him: “This is the most like a man I’ve ever felt in my life, because I had people that loved me and people that I loved and people that I knew could trust...
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Intelligent Masculinity | With Ann Kramer
May 2801:07:30Tap to summarizeMasculinity In ReviewNick Paro sits down with Ann Kramer — a licensed therapist of more than thirty years, creator of the Life Puzzle model, and a clinician who long ago walked out of what she calls the disease model of counseling — for a conversation that begins with a 10-year-old’s temper tantrum and ends, by way of Elon Musk’s bunker, with a vision for a post-AI economy. Ann’s framework is deceptively simple: a human being is built from five edges — physical, emotional, thinking, sexual, spiritual — and the work of a life is filling them in, piece by piece, over decades. The framework is also a quiet indictment. If you walk through the world feeling hollow, in Ann’s reading, it is not because you are broken. It is because nobody taught you how to build the thing that should have been there. Listeners can take the model home and use it: as a parent, as a partner, as a person trying to figure out why the success is not landing.The episode’s most important sentence comes early. “At birth, you have no self,” Ann says. “You have a potential.” That single line reorganizes the rest of the conversation. We are, in her account, a learned species rather than an instinctual one — a salamander knows how to be a salamander twenty-four hours after birth, but a human baby, in her words, “don’t know shit.” The self has to be assembled, and the assembly is developmental. The physical edge starts around age two and ideally finishes by six. The emotional edge starts around seven, when the brain has the equipment to manage what it feels, and “hopefully by about 25 we’ll finish this edge to be really pretty good at it.” The thinking edge kicks in around nine or ten with the neocortex, and the sexual and spiritual edges arrive later — the spiritual one, in most lives, not until the 30s, because we spend our 20s catching up on the work nobody did with us as kids. The framework is patient by design. It treats a person not as a diagnosis but as a construction site.What Ann does with that construction site is the heart of the episode. When Nick describes his son — high IQ, ADHD, emotional dysregulation, “two, maybe three years behind his age in emotional development” — Ann does not reach for a label. She reaches for a metaphor. “If you were teaching him to, say, rollerblade, or a physical skill, right, you wouldn’t put him on, say, a skateboard one time, send him down a hill, and go, ‘Dude, what’s the problem? Why’d you fall off?’ You would know he would go down that hill 25 times before he finally got it right.” Emotions, she argues, are no different. “Practicing emotions is no different than practicing skateboarding. You know, it is repeat and try again, repeat and try again. And we instead, we shame.” Her refrain — “practice, practice, practice” — is not a slogan. It is a rebuke of an ABCD pass-fail culture that asks ten-year-olds to perform emotional mastery on a single take and then punishes them when they cannot. The brain, she reminds us, is still rewiring itself until twenty-five. The patience the kid needs is the patience the parent has to learn first.The hardest piece of advice Ann offers in the whole hour is also the most practical. Nick asks how to stop being more critical of his son than of his daughter — how to break the projection that turns “is he manning up?” into a parenting reflex he didn’t choose. Ann’s answer is two moves long. First, wait till five: breathe in on a five-count and use the breath to ask yourself how you want to handle this. Second, ask yourself how you are feeling before you ask him. The criticism, she says, is almost never about the child. It is the residue of a culture that has been “permeated” into the parent, “whether you like it or not, it’s inside you.” The point is not to be a perfect parent. The point is to slow down long enough to notice when the script of your own boyhood is reaching for the steering wheel. This is where the analytical-literary voice of the show earns its keep — because the move Ann is describing is small, unglamorous, and the single most consequential thing a father can practice. It is also, not coincidentally, the same move she will later prescribe to a billionaire.The pivot to the manosphere is where the episode stops being a parenting primer and starts being a diagnosis of the culture. Ann is unsentimental about Musk and Altman and Thiel and Vance and the Curtis Yarvin school Nick calls “the Rasputin of the day.” “Men especially are taught to look outside themselves, that they are their money, their power, right, their titles,” she says, and she has the receipts — her late husband was a CIO, the marriage put her in rooms full of these men for decades, and she sent more than one of them home to her office. The line that will stick is this one: “Power and self were totally two different things.” Adolf Hitler is her example, deliberately chosen and almost shockingly delivered. He had power. He did not have a self. Musk, in her clinical read, did not have a father who nurtured him; “early on, you boys learn how to just cut off from those emotions. Don’t feel. Go external. Try to get more power. That’ll make me feel good about myself. But it’s an empty — it’s truly an empty thing.” The bunkers, the rocket-measuring contests, the bare-knuckle pursuit of unlimited growth — all of it, in Ann’s frame, is a tell. These are men who never built the inside of themselves, so they keep trying to buy a replacement on the outside, and the outside keeps refusing to take.That diagnosis carries into the episode’s most surprising turn. Ann is not just a therapist with a framework. She has written, she says, a paper called An Integrative Economy: Building the Most Vibrant Economy Ever Imagined — a proposal for a transitional economy organized around wholeness rather than unlimited growth, designed for the world AI is about to deliver to us whether we are ready or not. Her case is unglamorous and exact. The Sam Altmans of the world, she argues, cannot envision a humane post-work economy because they cannot envision a humane interior. “The Sam Altmans, they don’t understand what they’re creating, because they’re so disconnected from their own wholeness, that they can’t envision creating a world where, yeah, great, if AI can help us while we are having these vibrant lives, versus AI: you’re out of work, you’re starving, you’re homeless.” Nick adds the policy hook — universal basic income, government as a service that pays its shareholders, a small-business economy of skill exchange — and Ann sketches her own fantasy in answer: a national volunteer service registry that lets community hours bank like Social Security, plus an income paid to “human capacity development professionals” who build wholeness for their neighborhoods within a one-mile walking radius. The proposal sounds utopian until you notice what it actually is — the suicide-watch story she tells, in policy form.That story is the one to sit with. A man came to one of Ann’s six-week wholeness workshops in Virginia. He had been fired without cause after twenty-seven years at the same company, was on suicide watch, and his entire identity had collapsed because the only edge of his life puzzle he had ever filled in was work. Halfway through the first session, he walked up to Ann on a break. “Wow, I have to thank you. For the first time in my life, I discovered there are 15 other pieces in my life other than this.” Two years later she ran into him and his wife at a restaurant. The company had called him back. He had taken three weeks to return the call. When he did, he told them he was not bringing the same old Joe back — that they were going to change the company, that work mattered but so did the marriages and the children that work had nearly cost him. The story does a lot of quiet work in the episode. It is the proof of concept for the framework. It is also the punchline to the line about the tech bros. Power and self are two different things, and the man who almost died from the absence of one came back, two years later, with the other. The skill Ann gave him is not exotic. She gave him fifteen pieces of paper and asked him to consider that he was bigger than his job.The closing arc lands the show’s central argument with the gentleness of a clinician and the bite of a critic. The men running the manosphere — Tate, Rogan, Fuentes, Shapiro, the influencer-industrial complex Nick names directly — are doing, in Ann’s reading, what the culture taught them to do. “They are doing what our culture teaches them, which is money and power. They’ve succeeded in that. So therefore, ‘I’m somebody.’” The cost is in her office. “I know these men, because I’ve been — in my office, you know, later, they’re crying. ‘I don’t know who I am. Everybody thinks I’m so cool, but deep down inside, I’m this lost puppy.’” The Netflix documentary on the manosphere comes up; every man in it, Ann says, wanted nothing more than to be truly loved by a woman, and every one of them was performing the version of masculinity that guarantees they will not be. Nick takes the line one step further: the underlying hunger is not even to be loved by a woman. It is to be allowed to love yourself. The episode’s argument, finally, is that the manosphere is a business model that sells external power as a substitute for an internal self — and the substitute does not work, has never worked, and is producing a generation of boys who will need decades of therapy to find what they could have been given in childhood for free.Ann Kramer is a licensed therapist of more than three decades, the creator of the Life Puzzle model of wholeness, and the writer behind the Substack Fractured World, Build Wholeness. The interview covered her five-edge framework for building the self, her clinical critique of the disease model of counseling, the developmental case for “practice, practice, practice” i...
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Intelligent Masculinity | E31 - Tim Whitaker
May 800:32:26Tap to summarize“We are the freaking problem. We are the agent of chaos.”~ Tim Whitaker ~Masculinity In ReviewTim Whitaker walked into today’s Intelligent Masculinity discussion with years of experiences - through a faith community that raised him, a church that eventually removed him, and public-facing projects — Tim Whitaker Speaks and The New Evangelicals — built explicitly to help Christians find a path forward that doesn’t end in nationalism. This is the first half of a two-part Intelligent Masculinity sit-down, and Nick frames it accordingly: today is the wider cultural conversation; part two will be the masculinity questions proper. What ends up happening in the meantime is that Tim and Nick map out, in real time, the entire infrastructure that the second half will sit on top of. The episode is a rare thing in this series — a guest who has done his deconstruction work in public, talking with a host who has done his thinking about masculinity in public, and the two frames keep finding each other.Tim’s exit story has a structure he calls the unholy trinity of movements, and he is unusually clear about why each one mattered. Trump was the dam break — not because of policy, but because the same Sunday school teachers who had spent his childhood teaching the importance of sexual purity and saving yourself for marriage suddenly demanded he vote for the man on the cover of Playboy who bragged about assaulting women. He puts the contradiction in its honest form: I’m just doing what you taught me to do — why am I now suddenly the bad guy? Black Lives Matter was the second wake-up call, the moment when friends started sending him videos engineered to turn Ahmaud Arbery into the bad guy and he realized the tradition of truth he thought he’d been standing on was actively lying to him. COVID closed the loop. He watched pastors he respected reframe public health as tyranny, and he kept asking the same theological question: why wouldn’t I wear a mask during a global pandemic, as a Christian, if loving my neighbor as myself is the actual instruction? None of this was political to him at the time. It was a slow recognition that the people teaching him integrity were not, themselves, applying it.The Christian nationalism mapping is where the conversation becomes a useful piece of reporting on who is actually running the federal government. Tim names them without hedging. Pete Hegseth runs the Department of Defense with Crusader iconography tattooed on his body — Tim’s question is how much more obvious you need an example to be. Russell Vought, the architect behind Project 2025, is the quieter version of the same project. Stephen Miller, despite being Jewish, is described as enhancing and leading the Christian nationalist project from inside the administration — a useful reminder that Christian nationalism is a political coalition, not a coherent theology. Paula White, one of the biggest names in the New Apostolic Reformation, has the direct ear of the president on how to think about things. Tim acknowledges the squabbles between the factions — Catholic nationalists, charismatic Christian nationalists, the more reformed Doug Wilson and Hegseth wing — but the political alignment, he says, is functional. They will fight each other over theology and still vote together on policy. That’s the load-bearing observation. The ecumenical disagreements don’t slow down the takeover.Midway through, the episode is interrupted by a YouTube troll — and what would normally be a derail becomes one of the strongest segments of the hour. Nick takes the live shot, and Tim doesn’t flinch. The argument is not about the troll. It’s about the framework the troll is using. America, Tim says, is killing kids, kidnapping five-year-olds, and executing people in the streets — the radical problem in the world is not Islam, it’s the radical Christian nationalism that is taking healthcare from millions of people. Nick extends the thread. The reason most so-called shit-hole countries are considered shit-hole countries is that we spent twenty years bombing them, and the nations that came before us spent decades doing the same. We invented the Global South as a category to bucket nations away from everybody and then blame them for being lesser. He pivots, exactly where you’d want him to, to what’s happening at home — his state shutting down its entire child health food network because there’s no funding, while the same government bombs schools elsewhere. The closing line lands where the title of the second clip in this episode lives: we are the agent of chaos. The 42% of all weapons exported globally is not a minor metric. It is the country’s posture in the world, expressed in dollars and ordnance, and Tim refuses to let the conversation shrink it.The toxic empathy segment is the philosophical core of the discussion - and worth slowing down for and listening to again. Tim names Allie Stuckey as the person who coined the term in its current form — anything that embraces a lie — and then dismantles it with a precision that the analytical-literary frame rewards. He grants the surface case: yes, empathy can be misapplied. The judge who handed a rapist a light sentence because he felt bad for the man’s career was practicing a kind of toxic empathy that hurt the victim and the wider system. But Tim refuses to let the rebuttal stop at definitions. The way the term is actually used today, he says, is to make cruelty defensible — toward queer people, toward women seeking abortion access, toward populations being bombed, toward anyone who suggests the president might not be a great guy. Toxic empathy as a phrase is doing the work of laundering cruelty into virtue, because cruelty is the point. Nick reads the diagnosis back through his masculinity frame and gets to one of the better formulations of the night: men were taught three primary emotions — happy, mad, sad — and we are now down to two, because happy leads to joy, and joy leads to questions, and questions are dangerous to the project. Toxic empathy, in his reading, is the operation that takes happy off the table so that the only languages left for men are mad and sad — the two most explosive, least articulate, most easily weaponized. Tim agrees and extends it. The whole alpha-male performance — the cars, the six-packs, the curated aesthetic — is gay in the structural sense. It is built for the male gaze, addressed to other men, and married to a homosocial economy where women are an afterthought.Nick and Tim spend the closing stretch arguing for a model of masculinity that doesn’t have to perform for any of it, and the contrast lands because they keep grounding it in their actual lives. Tim is almost ten years into a marriage he describes — without any false modesty — as the best freaking marriage ever. He is not walking around ruling his roost with an iron fist. He is empathetic, his wife is a good listener, and they have learned how to do conflict resolution in a way that promotes the flourishing of the marriage rather than scoring points inside it. He notices, with some delight, that the alpha bros are usually divorced or married to someone who isn’t happy. Nick celebrated his eleventh anniversary the week before recording, and the math becomes its own argument: maybe the men who don’t look like alphas, but stay happily married for over a decade, have figured out something the men selling the alpha brand have not. Both men keep returning to the same point — the actual courage in this culture is to be vulnerable on camera, to hug your kids, to cry with them, to admit that the masculinity you’re being sold by Myron Gaines or Andrew Tate or Donald Trump is a sheep imitation of strength masquerading as the wolf.The episode closes on Samwise Gamgee, which is more on-theme than it sounds. A YouTube comment from Queen Home Slice points out that women, by an overwhelming margin, simp for Samwise — the gardener who carries his friend up a mountain — not for the alpha bros. Nick frames it as the male model the second half of this series is going to keep coming back to: caring, kind, gentle, helpful, a good friend. Be a Samwise and not an Andrew Tate. It is a goofy line, said in good humor, and it is also the closest the episode gets to a thesis statement. Tim’s whole project — The New Evangelicals, the Substack, the YouTube, the Instagram, the open DMs, the no-paywall content — is a Samwise project: someone walking alongside other people inside the same world he came from, helping them carry the weight far enough out of it that they can stand up on their own.What makes Tim a useful guest for this series, in the end, is not just his story. It is that he has done the deconstruction work and is still doing it in public, with no paywall and no brand to protect, and he is doing it as a Christian and as a man — the two specific axes that the series cares about. Part two will get into intelligent masculinity directly, with Nick’s working definition — the refusal to offboard accountability, the willingness to live with the consequences of your own actions and values — held up against the cultural machinery this episode just spent an hour mapping. By the time Tim comes back, the listener will have the whole structure in front of them: who runs the government, what they mean by Christian, what cruelty is doing in the language of empathy, and why the alpha brand is the weakest version of masculinity on offer. Tim Whitaker, today, is the guest who makes that map readable.~ Nick ParoActions You Can Take* Check out the new: Sick ...
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Intelligent Masculinity | E33 - Ellie Leonard
May 701:00:31Tap to summarize“When people don’t know you’re coming, they don’t know how to stop you. And so I feel like they don’t know I’m coming. And so I’m just tiptoeing in.”~ Ellie Leonard ~Masculinity In ReviewNick Paro sits down with Ellie Leonard — Substack writer, mother of four, and one of the independent journalists pulling Epstein survivor stories out of the place legacy media stopped looking — for a conversation that begins as a check-in and turns, by degrees, into an argument about who gets to tell which stories, what it costs to tell them, and what kind of men are produced by the homes that raise them. Ellie has been on the show before, back when she was still introducing herself as “the unpaid writer.” She rebranded to the Panicked Writer; Nick floats “the less panicked writer” as the next iteration, since her rent is paid now and the panic in her face has visibly loosened. The joke holds the whole episode in miniature. Ellie has always done serious work. Now the work is finally feeding her, and the rest of us are catching up to what she’s been doing all along.The path here was not short and it was not glamorous. Ellie reached out to over 200 literary agents and was rejected by 153 of them; the rest ghosted. She wrote two books that nobody would publish. She came up through transcript correction work — the kind of behind-the-scenes labor that, as Nick points out, can make or break a case in court — and through years of fly-on-the-wall proximity to the Weinstein, Woody Allen, and Kanye stories. When she pitched her own writing on those subjects, the publishing industry told her, in so many words, that they were tired of women reclaiming their narratives. They were bored. That sentence, casually delivered by a literary gatekeeper, is the thing the rest of the episode keeps circling. The bored editor is the Maxwell-letter problem in microcosm. When the institutions that exist to surface these stories decide they are bored of them, the stories don’t stop being true. They just stop reaching the public — until someone like Ellie picks up a Substack and starts writing them anyway.She came to Substack at the urging of her close friend Tiffany Torres Williams of The Modern Jezebel, who told her to come write because she loved it. The plan was cathartic. Memoir-esque. A little fiction for her kids. And then the election happened, the Epstein stories started moving, and her writing turned. She doesn’t claim it was strategic. She calls it curiosity. Curiosity, in Ellie’s case, turned out to be a discipline — the kind that produces investigative reporting at the rate she now produces it, with a network of sources and survivors and other writers she could not have imagined before this year. Her word for the year, borrowed from Tiffany’s habit, is “plot twist.” She means it.What she has stumbled into is something the rest of journalism has nearly forgotten how to do. She talks about Maritza Giorgio of the Grounded Podcast scooping her up — the calls at 11 p.m., the texts at 2 a.m., the constant low-grade communal triage of writers and journalists who have decided that the work matters more than the byline. Katie Phang and Jim Acosta call her up to ask what she’s working on, what’s stressing her out, how they can help. People share information instead of hoarding it for the scoop. That, Ellie says, is what true journalism looks like when you actually find it — and it does not look like the news as we have been trained to understand it. It looks like dishes being washed and dinners being eaten while people break down what they know on the phone with each other. The legacy version of the business — the one obsessed with breaking news and exclusivity and access — has been so thoroughly captured by celebrity and money that the actual work of telling the public what it needs to know has migrated to Substacks and podcasts and group threads. Ellie is one of the people the work migrated to.The Michael Wolff line lands like a thrown punch and lingers like a bruise. Wolff called Ellie and several other women who have been writing about the Epstein files and called them opportunists. He told them they were caught up in hysteria. Ellie’s read of that is precise: when men of his stature in the industry use words like “hysteria” against women who are reporting on the abuse of children, they are not describing the women’s behavior. They are describing their own discomfort at being reacted to. “I didn’t ask you to do that,” she says of the men whose work she now critiques, “but you did it, and now I’m reacting to it.” That sentence is half the thesis of this whole episode in one breath. Powerful is the word she keeps using for women who do not perform smallness on cue. Hysterical is the word the people who built the structure use back at her. The gap between those two words is where the work lives.The conversation about the language we use lands hard, and it lands without becoming a lecture. Ellie is unsentimental about which words have to go and which we are still pretending are fine. “B*tch” still gets a free pass in music, in casual conversation, in books — Nick names the Dungeon Crawler Carl series specifically and agrees with affection and frustration in equal measure. “Karen” has no male equivalent that lands the same way. “C*nt” is normalized in MAGA discourse against women in the administration whom Ellie and Nick both consider monstrous. Both of them refuse to use it anyway. Ellie’s argument is the unfussy one: we have moved on from words about other groups when we decided to. We can move on from these too. It is not, she says, a burden to learn something new. She mentions a trans person in her life and the work of relearning pronouns and a name; it was not intuitive, and it was not impossible, and it got easier quickly because she stayed consistent and did not make the relearning somebody else’s job. That is the whole argument she’s making about language, scaled up.Nick offers his own corollary, half joke and half operating principle: if you have to insult someone in the regime, use male anatomy, because men’s anatomy is the weak one. Kick a man in the balls and he falls down. Kick a woman in the same spot and she does not. He’s making a point with a grin, but the point is real. The slurs we have been handed are almost all built from the assumption that female bodies are the soft target. They are not. The bodies the slurs were supposedly built around belong to people who carry, deliver, and feed children — the most physiologically demanding work the human animal does — while the actual fragile equipment hangs off the men insisting otherwise. The joke, in Ellie’s hands and Nick’s, becomes a small piece of evidence in the larger case the episode is making. The story we have been told about who is strong was a marketing campaign, and the campaign has been losing for a while.The hour’s most generative thread is the one about raising boys. Ellie has three sons and a daughter, and she talks about her household with the matter-of-factness of someone who long ago decided that the home is not a small project. Her boys come home from school saying things — “that’s a boy job,” “boys can be soccer players, Charlotte can’t” — and they do not get condemned for it. They get a conversation. Their pockets are deeper than her pockets and they notice it; she tells them yes, that is a great question, here’s why. She breastfed all four kids tandem-style well past the cultural cutoff, which means the woman’s body in their household was first a thing that fed them and only later, somewhere out in the world, a thing the magazines sexualized. Her boys grew up associating breasts with hunger and care. The grocery-store checkout aisle was the place that tried to teach them otherwise. Some grocery stores, she notes, have figured this out and gone to family-friendly checkouts. The fact that the rest haven’t is one of the small structural ways boys are quietly trained, before any of them have language for it, to read women as decoration.She is similarly clear about why she will not let her boys’ rights be eroded by the work of teaching them about her daughter’s. Equality, in Ellie’s house, is not subtraction. The boys are not made smaller so the girl can be made bigger. They are taught that all four of them are full people and that the things they will hear at school and on screens are stories, not facts. She watches them grow up gentle and she does not mistake gentleness for weakness; she names it as the result of hearing real conversations at home about real things. This is where Ellie quietly answers the show’s central question without being asked. The home, she says, is 80% of how a small child develops. You do not get to control everything that comes at them out in the world. You get to control what they hear from you. That is what she’s done.Nick brings the definition into the room — intelligent masculinity as the refusal to outsource accountability and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and Ellie immediately folds it into something she’s been working on independently. Even the worst men in public life, she says, would tell you they think they are trying to be better every day. The ones doing the most damage are very often the ones with the strongest internal narrative that they are the heroes of their own story. The work, then, is not just the disposition; it is the willingness to actually look at whether the disposition is producing anything. She tells the Antioch, Tennessee story to make the point. She and her husband worked at a car dealership outside Nas...
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Intelligent Masculinity | E30 - AngryMaleVet
May 701:03:06Tap to summarize“That oath never expires. And I still have that raging fire to help the people of this country get a better life.”~ Angry Male Vet ~Masculinity In ReviewNick Paro sits back down with Angry Male Vet — retired Air Force intelligence officer, 23-year combat veteran, and one of the sharpest voices connecting military reality to civilian political life — for the follow-up conversation they couldn’t finish at E26. What begins as a news-desk reckoning with the Strait of Hormuz, the firing of the Secretary of the Navy, and the structural gutting of Pentagon leadership becomes, slowly and deliberately, a conversation about something quieter and more durable: the work of knowing yourself, the courage it takes to sit still long enough to do it, and what it means that the forces trying to prevent it are doing so on purpose.The episode opens in the middle of things. An indefinite ceasefire with Iran, vessels being seized back and forth in the Indian Ocean, John Phelan removed as Secretary of the Navy, General Randy George fired from the Army Chief of Staff position — all of it mid-war. Angry Male Vet’s read on the chaos is precise without being clinical: Hegseth is a soft individual who cannot tolerate disagreement, and the military is now being stripped of the experienced, opinionated senior leaders who would have said so to his face. He names the Apache pilot investigation that Hegseth shut down within hours — pilots using taxpayer money to perform for Kid Rock — as a crystallizing example of what that softness looks like in practice. Any leader worth his salt would have let the chain of command handle it. Hegseth reached. That’s the tell. The pattern since then has been consistent: fire whoever says something uncomfortable, and call it strength.Nick brings Kristofer Goldsmith’s observation about gas prices — that they’re one of the few things Americans see every day, and therefore one of the few metrics that converts abstract policy into visceral personal experience. Angry Male Vet extends it. In a moment when billionaires are already under a spotlight — making money on insider trading while services dry up and people stop going to the doctor — the pump price becomes the aperture through which the whole structure becomes visible. It’s not the most important cost. But it’s the one that makes you ask the question out loud. He runs the numbers on Arkansas: $2.50 to $4.00 for regular, diesel nearly at $6.00. That’s real math in the South. And it’s moving the conversation in a direction the war’s architects did not anticipate.The Palantir segment lands somewhere between geopolitical analysis and alarm. Nick has looked at the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget proposal and describes it flatly as a Palantir wet dream: drones, AI automation, and full integration into every piece of domestic infrastructure. Angry Male Vet agrees without hedging. It’s the acceleration of something that’s been going on since trickle-down economics — the selling of the country to companies — but now they’re not hiding it. They’re openly using FISA renewals, surveillance infrastructure, and the language of national security to build the monitoring architecture of an oligarchy. The defense against it, he argues, is not primarily legislative. It’s building the kind of community and awareness they’re trying to prevent. Protests, primaries, voter registration, conversation — all of it. He mentions the “No Kings” protests growing to historic proportions. He names Keira Havens and the Citizens Impeachment Coalition as one of the networks doing structural work in the space. Nick connects her to Walter Rhein and Will Fullwood, to candidate interviews he never expected to be doing, to a level of movement infrastructure he’s watching materialize in real time.The formal Intelligent Masculinity segment opens with Nick restating his definition — the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and contrasting it with what Hegseth, Trump, Vance, and Miller actually are: men who perform masculinity for an audience to get likes and clicks and views, and who hold none of the consequences of any of it. He asks Angry Male Vet how he models this in his own life. The answer is one of the more interesting moments in any episode of this show. Angry Male Vet declines the frame. He doesn’t even define it as masculinity or femininity, he says. It’s intelligent humanity. The question he returns to constantly is: am I being honest with myself, and am I being honest with others about how I actually feel? That’s the whole thing. Everything else — the accountability, the self-reflection, the courage to look at your own fractures — is downstream from that one honest question asked without a mask on.He is not particularly gentle about what the mask-wearers are actually afraid of. Hegseth and Miller and those guys — there are deep fractures inside of them that they’re covering with an alpha-male performance because some small group of people will like them and they won’t have to be afraid. But in doing so, they are treating other human beings in inhumane ways to protect a construct that isn’t even real. They call themselves followers of Christ while praying every bullet hits its mark. They are not happy people. They’re shells. And they’re making money selling a dream that is only going to make the lives of the people who buy it worse.Joe Plenzler’s article on Hegseth’s war on woke — specifically on the declaration of empathy as the enemy — becomes the through-line for the middle portion of the episode. Angry Male Vet’s military experience gives him standing here that no think-piece writer has. He was in Afghanistan working the hearts-and-minds approach, sitting across from tribal chieftains and infrastructure discussions and the plain reality that the civilian population either sides with you or you never leave. That is not a woke policy. That is the actual doctrine of winning. If you don’t understand who the people around you are, if you can’t see their values and what they want for their lives, you are creating more warfighters from the people you’re supposed to be helping. Empathy isn’t kindness. It’s intelligence in application. And when Hegseth strips it from the doctrine because it doesn’t fit the brand — he loses before the first engagement.The self-reflection tools discussion is practical rather than therapeutic. Angry Male Vet is not selling a framework. He’s describing a discipline. Unplug. Sit with yourself, which a lot of people are afraid to do. Ask: how am I feeling right now, and why? Not seven seconds after the feeling hits — proactively, before the limbic treadmill takes over. He names a specific habit: noticing when he’s agitated by something that seems objectively minor and pulling it apart. Where is this actually coming from? Is it the thing in front of me, or something underneath it? He locates self-reflection as monumentally important to magnifying your life — not because it’s virtuous, but because it’s how you know whether what you’re thinking and feeling is actually yours, or whether it was put there by two sources hitting you with the same message over and over until you stopped questioning it. That’s the MAGA voter, he says. Not stupid. Victimized by the systematic removal of their own thinking.Nick brings up Nieta Greene and the conversation about the disabling effects of war — specifically what happens to service members coming back from this conflict if the support infrastructure isn’t there ahead of time. Angry Male Vet’s answer is direct: you get red-pilling, black-pilling, accelerationism, addiction, suicide. He’s seen all of them. The antidote is not complicated. Talk about it. Make it okay to say you’ve been traumatized. Create communities — veteran support groups, any support groups — where people can hear that they are not alone. Because the alternative is sitting in it alone until the only escape route that offers relief, even temporarily, is the one that makes everything worse. He describes VA group therapy as one of the most important things he has ever done in his life: a community of people he could talk to without judgment and listen to without judgment and know that not even close was he the only one going through this.The Hegseth anti-woke movement, in his telling, is specifically going to cost lives here. Service members who have bought into the messaging that mental health is weakness, that asking for help is unmasculine, will come back traumatized and will not get better. They will live sadder lives. And they will not understand that they don’t have to — that it can be different — because the possibility was deliberately obscured from them. Depression feels like normal, he says, until you’ve been out of it long enough to realize what you were living in. Those people will never know.The larger thesis lands in the isolation discussion, and it’s where the episode finds its sharpest edge. Nick names it first — this anti-woke bullshit, this personal and national isolationism, is so damaging and destructive to your well-being, and it leads to suicide, and I know because I’ve been there. And then Angry Male Vet frames it structurally. It is a strategic objective. If you’re isolated, you’re not talking to people. You’re not more aware of things. You don’t have empathy for folks who are a different color or love different people — people who are in every meaningful way the same as you, just trying to get through the day and take care of their family. Isolated, you look at those people as objects, as things to hate. That’s the design. This administration can have all the answers. Only listen to me. And it never gets better. There’s no more money in your pocket. You’re not feeling bette...
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Intelligent Masculinity | E29 - K.R. Byers
Apr 1901:03:17Tap to summarize“Admitting that I did something wrong was the first step, and it was incredibly difficult. It took me years to actually fully believe — not just say so that my probation officer didn’t ride my ass — but actually believe: I, Kenyon Byers, have done something wrong. And I have to change.”~ K.R. Byers ~Masculinity In ReviewNick Paro sits down with K.R. Byers — writer, creative satirist, and self-described “just a dude” — for a conversation that moves from video games and Oregon Trail nostalgia into something considerably weightier: creative resistance under authoritarianism, the cost of absent fathers, and the difference between performing accountability and actually living it. K.R. came up in a small mountain town in Idaho, born in 1987, raised by a mother who once threatened to kill him if he turned out gay and a grandmother who told him to just be himself. He writes under his initials by choice, builds Legos, plays Civilization 7 until he wakes up in the nuclear age, and has recently started gold mining on weekends. That contrast — the whimsical life of a curious creative and the very serious journey he’s had to get here — runs through everything he says.The conversation opens on creative resistance, and K.R. is direct about why he shifted his approach. Early on, he wrote whatever he felt — notes about how horrible the president was, the occasional “fuck Trump” when the mood struck. He’s moved away from that, and not because his convictions changed. He doesn’t want to say the name. He doesn’t want to feed the algorithm for someone who, in his read, does ridiculous things specifically to dominate the news cycle and get people talking about him no matter the valence. Instead, K.R. writes allegorically: a recent article on the similarities between cult leaders and serial killers was not labeled as such, but it wasn’t subtle either. He wants to create stories that poke fun at the administration without naming it — to be useful without being another amplifier. He likens the old approach to changing in front of an open window for a stalker. He’d rather close the window and call the cops. The creative shift has mostly helped his mental health. He feels less on edge, less obligated to grind out news content just to stay relevant. He misses, a little, the feeling that he was doing enough for his country. Both things are true.The discussion of influential masculine figures lands on two people who couldn’t be more different in context but point in the same direction. K.R.’s father worked on IBM mainframes when computers filled entire rooms, drove long-haul trucks, split logs, and never once leveraged his intelligence or capability for intimidation. He treated people with empathy and courtesy, lived a strong life without performing it, and modeled what it looks like to face the enemy within rather than projecting it outward. The second figure is Tupac — not the image, but the lyrics. K.R. describes a kind of emotional complexity and systemic awareness in Tupac’s work that he didn’t find in the men around him growing up: a voice from a masculine space that was willing to name grief, name poverty, name the humanity of people the world was throwing away. Both the father and the rapper, in K.R.’s telling, understood that strength doesn’t require an audience and doesn’t require contempt for the vulnerable. That’s his model.The most striking section of the episode concerns K.R.’s biological father — a man who was 38 years old when he impregnated K.R.’s mother at 15. He avoided K.R. for most of his life to escape the consequences of what, legally, was statutory rape. K.R. eventually went to see him, once, because he didn’t want the guilt of being in the area when the man died and having never said hello. The visit lasted long enough for a handshake. His father wouldn’t get out of the chair. Nick’s response is careful and clear: you don’t owe guilt to people who deserve no pity. A man who spent decades running from the consequences of what he did to a child — consequences that were never external, only self-imposed — is not owed a visit, a call, or a feeling. That frailty, Nick says, is exactly what they’re here to name. The refusal to face consequences is the core failure. K.R. listens. He already knows it.Nick shares his working definition of intelligent masculinity: the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of our actions and values — consequences good and bad. K.R. has had direct experience with this. About fifteen years ago, in Idaho, he was caught with three and a half ounces of marijuana — a felony under Idaho law. He stood at a fork: become a statistic, keep breaking the law, keep performing the version of himself that the trauma of his upbringing had built, or take accountability and change direction. He chose the latter, but he’s honest that it took years to actually believe he’d done something wrong rather than just saying so. That gap — between saying “I did something wrong” and believing it enough to reorganize your life around it — is the real work. He did the work. The felony was dismissed the year before last. He hasn’t been back. He names self-evaluation as his ongoing practice: he caught himself using dismissive gendered slurs on another show recently, corrected himself on air immediately, and didn’t make it a production. The hardest ongoing work, he says, is fighting the voice that tells him if he’s not making a billion dollars an hour, he’s a failure as a man. That one, he still fights every day.The episode closes with the Mulan-derived lightning round that ends every Intelligent Masculinity conversation. K.R.’s answers land exactly where his arc has been pointing all hour. Swift as a coursing river: “Make decisions more decisively than I just did.” Force of a great typhoon: “When I come in a room, you know I’ve been there because everything is wrecked.” Strong as a raging fire: “I dance to pop music in the living room by myself, and I’m not ashamed of it.” Mysterious as the dark side of the moon: “I seem like an open book, but there is a lot more to my story and past than I have ever once discussed online.” That last one lands with weight. K.R. has shared a lot today — a mother who called him sissy, a grandmother who told him to be himself, a father who shook his hand and sat back down, a felony, a girlfriend he calls his wife. And underneath all of it, there’s more. That’s not evasion. That’s a man who has learned the difference between being open and being exposed, between sharing what’s useful and giving away what’s yours.~ Nick ParoActions You Can Take* Check out the new: Sick of this Shop!* Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBannerSubmit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* Sick of this Shit Community Comment FormCall your public servants on important issues:* 5calls.orgJoin the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* deflock.meService members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* Orders Project* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* B. Cognition LabsThank you ShālahBPookie - TheRebelCrone, Eric Lullove, Ms.Yuse, Lynn, Ashleigh Alauren, and many others for tuning into my live video with K.R. Byers! Join me for my next live video in the app.Nick’s NotesI’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 CollectiveSupport 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% offA special thank you to those who are a part of the Sickest of Them All~ <a target="_blank" href="https://subst...
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