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Intelligent Masculinity

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by Nick Paro

40 episodes

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Podcast Overview

A series dedicated to reclaiming what true masculinity is - not an old, fragile masculinity of domination; rather, a new, intelligent masculinity built on accountability. <a href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/s/intelligent-masculinity?utm_medium=podcast">sickofthis.substack.com</a>

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1/9/2026

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Recent Episodes

July 2, 2026

Intelligent Masculinity | With Cliff Schecter

Masculinity 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: <a target="_blank" href="https://shop.sickofthisshitpublications.com/">Sick of this Shop!</a>* Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.broadbanner.com/">BroadBanner</a>Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* <a target="_blank" href="https://forms.gle/4WSu8qGkSA7Wxbh98">Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form</a>Call your public servants on important issues:* <a target="_blank" href="https://5calls.org/">5calls.org</a>Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* <a target="_blank" href="https://deflock.me/">deflock.me</a>Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ordersproject.com/">Orders Project</a>* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/">B. Cognition Labs</a>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 <a target="_blank" href="https://1acollective.com/">1A Collective</a>Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you* <a target="_blank" href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever">Forever at 50% off</a>* <a target="_blank" href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver">Forever at 60% off</a>For 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 <a href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe</a>

June 25, 2026

Intelligent Masculinity | With Dean Blundell

Masculinity 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: <a target="_blank" href="https://shop.sickofthisshitpublications.com/">Sick of this Shop!</a>* Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.broadbanner.com/">BroadBanner</a>Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* <a target="_blank" href="https://forms.gle/4WSu8qGkSA7Wxbh98">Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form</a>Call your public servants on important issues:* <a target="_blank" href="https://5calls.org/">5calls.org</a>Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* <a target="_blank" href="https://deflock.me/">deflock.me</a>Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ordersproject.com/">Orders Project</a>* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/">B. Cognition Labs</a>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 <a target="_blank" href="https://1acollective.com/">1A Collective</a>Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you* <a target="_blank" href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever">Forever at 50% off</a>* <a target="_blank" href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver">Forever at 60% off</a>For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.comThank you <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/35788031-lev-parnas">Lev Parnas</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/178744313-beth-cruz">Beth Cruz</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/337755654-ashleigh-alauren">Ashleigh Alauren</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/565121-jason-gael">Jason Gael</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/116079548-leftieprof">LeftieProf</a>, and many others for tuning into my live video with <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/34833166-dean-blundell">Dean Blundell</a>! 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 <a href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe</a>

June 18, 2026

Intelligent Masculinity | With Lev Parnas

Masculinity 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.<a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/35788031-lev-parnas">Lev Parnas</a> 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.~ <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/@nickparo">Nick Paro</a>Actions You Can Take* Check out the new: <a target="_blank" href="https://shop.sickofthisshitpublications.com/">Sick of this Shop!</a>* Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.broadbanner.com/">BroadBanner</a>Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter:* <a target="_blank" href="https://forms.gle/4WSu8qGkSA7Wxbh98">Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form</a>Call your public servants on important issues:* <a target="_blank" href="https://5calls.org/">5calls.org</a>Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:* <a target="_blank" href="https://deflock.me/">deflock.me</a>Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ordersproject.com/">Orders Project</a>* Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/">B. Cognition Labs</a>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 <a target="_blank" href="https://1acollective.com/">1A Collective</a>Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you* <a target="_blank" href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever">Forever at 50% off</a>* <a target="_blank" href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver">Forever at 60% off</a>For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.comThank you <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/290887129-natalie-woodnt">🇨🇦 Natalie Woodn’t 🇨🇦</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/15661846-gretchen-theodorakis">Gretchen Theodorakis</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/285244656-agent99">Agent#99</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/394852192-jack-hehim">Jack 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈(he/him)</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/287704978-acejonesz">Acejonesz</a>, and many others for tuning into my live video with <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/35788031-lev-parnas">Lev Parnas</a>! 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 <a href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe</a>

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What is Intelligent Masculinity?: A series dedicated to reclaiming what true masculinity is - not an old, fragile masculinity of domination; rather, a new, intelligent masculinity built on accountability. <a href="https://sickofthis.substack.com/s/intelligent-masculinity?utm_medium=podcast">sickofthis.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Information about guest appearances is not available.

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