Intelligent Masculinity

About 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. sickofthis.substack.com (https://sickofthis.substack.com/s/intelligent-masculinity?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Nick Paro

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

9 Jan 2026

Latest episode

11 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

49 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Intelligent Masculinity | With Jacob Summers

   “So that is the difference between an intelligent man and a knuckle dragging man is go aim it at the people who are trying to keep other people from having the freedom to find that balance for themselves.” ~ Jacob Summers ~ Masculinity In Review The internet ate this episode twice before it finally held. What survived is audio only, and it is worth the trouble. Jacob Summers — Captain Valhalla to most of the internet, Coach Cap to the rest — spent an hour with Nick working through a question the fitness world keeps refusing to answer honestly: who does strength belong to? Jake ran an LGBTQ-inclusive gym in Tuscaloosa, in the heart of Alabama, and he has watched the answer get contested in real time. He describes himself as a typical himbo with muscles and a heart, which undersells a man who thinks about this more carefully than most people who write books about it. The conversation opens on the fight over gym culture, and Jake refuses both of the easy positions. There are people burying their heads in the sand insisting that white supremacists and Christian nationalists are not moving into fitness and combat sports, and there are people who see it clearly and want to concede the ground. He rejects the second group as firmly as the first, pointing to the men-only gym founded by a man who cheated on his wife and concluded the problem was women — a solution Jake compares, not gently, to the Republican National Convention. The move did not make anyone safer; it just changed who was available to harm. What it did do was advertise a claim, that iron and sweat belong to one political crowd, and Jake’s answer is that the claim was always nonsense: “you will never be able to get a liberal or a leftist out of health and fitness.” His actual argument is structural rather than tribal. The people who only chase the physical, he says, do not last — maybe five or ten good years, rarely more, and rarely with the gains they expected. The ones still lifting into their fifties, sixties and seventies figured out that the body is a door into the rest of the person. “When you develop one part of the body, it by nature improves another part of the person,” he says, and then makes the harder claim: ignore the mind, heart and soul and you will cap the physical, too, because muscles do not fire themselves. Strictness has a place in that picture, but as consistency, not rigidity — you can change the plan, you just do not change it for no reason. Ask him who taught him this and the list is the most quietly radical part of the episode. His father, who used push-ups as discipline but taught resilience underneath them. A friend in the Army, almost forty when he enlisted, who went six days a week and made it a life rather than a phase. A powerlifting community and a set of online role models that did the work local culture would not. Charlie Ritchie, who outlifted the men around her and taught him that masculine and feminine are things you set on your own terms. And his wife Lindsay — who lost most of her weight in an apartment with workout videos before walking into CrossFit, Spartan races and roller derby, and who then made enough room for him to ask questions about himself that he had not been able to ask before. This is the series’ recurring finding, arriving again from a new direction: nobody assembles a self alone, and the men who insist they did are usually the ones doing the most damage. Nick brings his working definition to the table — intelligent masculinity as the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and Jake accepts it, then sharpens it with one word: aim. Everybody is watching where a man points himself. Sex and violence are the two engines, in his reading, and both repression and misdirection fail for the same reason: the energy does not disappear, it comes out sideways and lands on whoever is nearby. So aim the intimacy at your partner, aim the aggression at the barbell, and aim whatever is left at the people working to take other people’s freedom. Call it the anti-bully bully. It is a definition with a target rather than a vibe, which is what makes it usable. Jacob Summers is a veteran, a former gym owner, a competitor, and the voice behind The Better Human Project, and he has been building this framework in public for years. This hour covers the capture of fitness culture, holistic training, the people who shaped him, and a lightning round built out of Mulan that ends somewhere unexpected — on his insistence that you can live almost entirely in the open and still owe yourself a private corner nobody gets to see. What he adds to Intelligent Masculinity is the aiming point. Nick has spent the year assembling a definition from men between nineteen and their sixties; Jake handed it a direction. ~ Nick Paro (https://substack.com/@nickparo) Sources & References * The Better Human Project (https://www.youtube.com/@TheBetterHumanProject) — Jacob Summers’ YouTube project, referenced throughout * Captain Valhalla on Threads, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook (as Jacob Summers) — where the gym-culture thread that started this conversation lives \Actions You Can Take Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! (https://sickofthis.shop/) Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me (https://deflock.me/) Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project (https://www.ordersproject.com/) * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs (https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/) Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective (https://1acollective.com/) 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 (https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever) * Forever at 60% off (https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver) For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe (https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   27 Aug 2026

   Intelligent Masculinity | With Kyle Pacheco

   “So using the words to just tell somebody you can be vulnerable won’t necessarily gain the action that you intended to give. I would say that just like children, modeling that you’re vulnerable is much more of an effective way.” ~ Kyle Pacheco ~ Masculinity In Review Kyle Pacheco ( ClearRoot Intelligence (https://substack.com/profile/412440456-clearroot-intelligence)) spent an hour this week describing a pattern most men will recognize and few will name out loud: you don’t learn manhood, you copy it. He talked about mirroring men he now knows were harmful, about a stepfather’s affair that reshaped his sense of what a father is, and about the moment he realized the friends around him didn’t actually care about him or each other. What makes this conversation matter isn’t the wreckage — it’s what he did with it. Kyle treated his own past as source material to be studied rather than a story to be defended, and that distinction is the entire practice. Better humaning is not the absence of bad models; it’s the deliberate work of becoming a better one. The sharpest idea Kyle offered is that vulnerability can’t be granted by announcement. Telling a man “it’s okay to cry” leaves him exactly where he was, because the invitation costs you nothing and proves nothing. “You’re not showing me your vulnerability,” Kyle said, “so why would I be vulnerable?” His alternative is to go first and keep going first — say out loud at work that you go to therapy, name the ADHD, admit the thing you’re still bad at. He described people at his job responding to that openness who “probably wouldn’t have done it on their own,” and later described colleagues pulling him aside for conversations he never solicited: “I didn’t walk up to them and say, you can talk to me anytime you want. They perceive it by the way I act.” The safety was never offered — it was demonstrated until it was believed. The modeling runs closest to home with his kids, and Kyle was clear that the most honest thing he does as a father is apologize. He admitted he sometimes raises his voice with his four-and-a-half-year-old instead of slowing down, and that his repair now sounds like: that was a mistake, I’m sorry I raised my voice, and what you were doing still isn’t okay. That’s accountability moving in both directions in the same breath — the father holding himself to the standard he’s asking his son to meet. He extended the same logic to his marriage, noting that the relationship his son sees every day for eighteen years is the template, right down to whether affection is something men show in front of other people. Kids pick up far more than we credit them for, which means the lesson is being taught whether or not we intended to teach one. Kyle also complicated the search for a male figure worth copying, and this is where the episode earns its title. His model turned out to be his grandfather — born in 1932, GOP for most of his life, and someone Kyle disagreed with ideologically — who nonetheless treated his wife with a consistency Kyle hadn’t seen anywhere else, taught him woodworking, held him accountable, and refused to go to bed angry. More striking, the grandfather changed: in his seventies and eighties he came around on people he’d spent decades opposed to. Kyle called that the most impressive thing about him, and he’s right — the willingness to be wrong in public, late, is itself a masculine skill worth mirroring. Intelligent masculinity is not about finding a flawless man to imitate. It’s about being able to identify the specific, transferable behaviors worth carrying forward and leaving the rest. None of this stays private, which is why the void matters. We didn’t lose young men because someone else was louder; we lost ground because good men vacated the rooms where culture gets made and assumed the next generation would sort it out on its own. Kyle’s answer is to occupy those rooms deliberately — at work, at home, in the neighborhood, and in the in-person communities he’s trying to rebuild alongside the digital ones. That’s the same discipline behind ClearRoot, the civic-literacy tool he’s building to link money, votes, and action so that being upset can become being useful. Modeling and building are the same reflex pointed at different scales. Kyle Pacheco is the founder of ClearRoot, a senior sales manager, a new MBA, and a father of two who came into this conversation having already done the reflection it asked of him — he said outright he didn’t want to hold back. That preparation is its own answer to the question of how you model better humaning: you show up having already done the work in private, and then you do it again where people can see. He expands this series by demonstrating that the practice scales — from a bedtime apology, to a coworker who finally asks for a minute, to a tool built so strangers can act on what they learn. Refuse to outsource your accountability, live with the consequences of your values, and let people watch you do it. ~ Nick Paro (https://substack.com/profile/189675044-nick-paro) Sources & References * ClearRoot (https://clearroot.ai/) — Kyle’s civic-literacy and research platform (currently in beta; feedback welcome via the in-app form or contact@clearroot.ai (mailto:contact@clearroot.ai)) Actions You Can Take Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! (https://sickofthis.shop/) Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me (https://deflock.me/) Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project (https://www.ordersproject.com/) * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs (https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/) Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective (https://1acollective.com/) 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 (https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever) * Forever at 60% off (https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver) For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Beth Cruz (https://substack.com/profile/178744313-beth-cruz), PJ Schuster (https://substack.com/profile/106448962-pj-schuster), Ann Kramer (https://substack.com/profile/8363417-ann-kramer), ArleneMach (https://substack.com/profile/11289996-arlenemach), Donna Dupont (https://substack.com/profile/61210574-donna-dupont), and many others for tuning into my live video with ClearRoot Intelligence (https://substack.com/profile/412440456-clearroot-intelligence)! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe (https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   20 Aug 2026

   Intelligent Masculinity | Return of the AngryMaleVeteran

   “For me, a part of masculinity is if you lose, you lose. Okay. I didn’t have my best day. Things didn’t go well. I could have done things different or people just didn’t want me to win. This is a democracy, right? So take that, learn lessons, move forward.” ~ AngryMaleVet (https://substack.com/profile/312849776-angrymalevet) ~ Masculinity In Review The third Intelligent Masculinity conversation with AngryMaleVet (https://substack.com/profile/312849776-angrymalevet) starts where the first two left off. Nick and AMV spend an hour walking through voter registration marches, USAF Major Jason Watson who is in pretrial confinement (The One Who Stood for the Oath We Swore (https://sickofthis.substack.com/p/the-one-who-stood-for-the-oath-we)), the Citizen’s Oath drafted by Lawrence Winnerman (https://substack.com/profile/314034871-lawrence-winnerman), and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth campaigning in Iowa for Republican Zach Nunn in an apparent violation of the Hatch Act — and every one of those threads loops back to the same question. When the outcome isn’t yours, who are you? The answer they arrive at is unglamorous and demanding, which is how you know it’s real. The clearest test case is the grift of the sore loser. AMV is blunt about what perpetual election denial actually signals — “it’s the least alpha thing I’ve ever seen in my life” — and Nick pushes him to say why. The answer isn’t about politics; it’s about formation. A man who has never been taught to lose will build a whole economy out of refusing to. The guest traces it back through Trump’s biography — the Emmy, Iowa, sixty-five court losses — and lands on the mechanism that makes it self-sustaining: whining is monetizable, which is why Mike Lindell challenging a primary he lost by eleven points is a fundraising posture rather than a legal strategy. Which means the thing being sold as strength is a business model that requires its customers to stay aggrieved. The oath segment is where the episode does its most original thinking. Nick reads a citizen’s oath written by Lawrence Winnerman, his Banner and Backbone (https://www.bannerandbackbone.com/) co-founder — a near-copy of the oath sworn by officers and naturalized citizens, offered to natural-born Americans who never swear anything at all. The guest’s response is better than agreement — he declines to want it required. “I don’t think I would want anybody to have to swear an oath,” he says, then pivots to what he does want: that people ponder it, asking what the Constitution means to them, what the flag means to them, where their courage actually gets spent. An oath extracted is a loyalty test; an oath considered is a mirror. And on the other side, for those who did swear one, the guest is unambiguous — “It never expires. There’s no turn off button for that.” Keeping faith is the third leg, and it has a name attached: Major Jason Watson, seventeen years in, back in pretrial confinement for calling from the Capitol steps for the impeachment of Trump and Vance. Both men have interviewed him, and both report the same thing — that Maj. Watson insists it isn’t about him, it’s about the movement. Nick sharpens it into a masculinity question: what does it say about a person to accept the consequences of his own values? AMV’s answer refuses the hero frame and puts the weight back on the audience. Maj. Watson threw away a 17-year career because elected representatives wouldn’t spend a fraction of that courage, and the least the rest of us can do is refuse to let it fade into the woodwork. That’s what the November 11th Veterans Day Democracy March (https://veteransfightingfascism.org/) is for — veterans, families, and supporters converging on D.C. for the rule of law and legal election results, which the guest carefully distinguishes from January 6th: “we’re not led by a narcissist sociopath who is feeding us lies.” Then there’s the part that reframes the whole hour. Asked what he gets out of showing up in person — the 1,000 Miles to Memphis march, the immigration conference, the memorial concert — the guest gives the episode its best line: “activism is an antidepressant.” Not a metaphor for morale, but a described mechanism — isolation is the goal from the top, and standing next to people doing the same work is the countermeasure. Nick extends it into an argument about ownership — “the highest office and rank in this nation is voter” — and the guest closes the loop with the sharpest civic instruction of the episode. It is not their seat. It’s the constituent’s seat. So get greedy for seats, outvote the Jeffs, and remember that the worst available option is inaction, because inaction is how the frog boils. AngryMaleVet is a retired combat veteran — twenty-three years, enlisted at seventeen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait — who came home expecting to be done fighting evildoers and found the fight relocated. Across three appearances he has become one of our clearest arguments that masculinity is a practice rather than a posture: measured response over reaction, discipline over dominance, service that continues after the uniform comes off. This discussion is his most important yet, because it takes the abstractions the series has been building — accountability, courage, community — and hands you a date, a website, and a first step. Calm and intelligent, as one listener put it in the comments. That’s the whole project. ~ Nick Paro (https://substack.com/@nickparo) Sources & References * The One Who Stood for the Oath We Swore (https://sickofthis.substack.com/p/the-one-who-stood-for-the-oath-we) an interview with Nick Paro and Maj. Jason Watson * A Discussion with Major Jason Watson (https://angrymalevet.substack.com/p/a-discussion-with-major-jason-watson) with AngryMaleVet * 1,000 Miles to Memphis (https://1000milestomemphis.com/) — the 36-day, 1,000-mile voter registration march from Nashville to Memphis * Veterans Fighting Fascism (https://veteransfightingfascism.org/) — the Veterans Day Democracy March, November 11th, Washington, D.C. * Banner & Backbone Media’s Citizen’s Oath (https://bannerandbackbone.substack.com/p/banner-no-1-renewing-our-nation-through) written by Lawrence Winnerman Actions You Can Take Get your Sick of this Shit merch! * Check out the Sick of this Shop! (https://sickofthis.shop/) Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me (https://deflock.me/) Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project (https://www.ordersproject.com/) * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs (https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/) Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective (https://1acollective.com/) 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 (https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever) * Forever at 60% off (https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver) For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com Thank you Ashleigh Alauren (https://substack.com/profile/337755654-ashleigh-alauren), The Rebel Crone (Shālah) (https://substack.com/profile/60705137-the-rebel-crone-shalah), Ms.Yuse (https://substack.com/profile/322112054-msyuse), Cher (https://substack.com/profile/1493775-cher), Dana Britt (https://substack.com/profile/334260560-dana-britt), and many others for tuning into my live video with AngryMaleVet (https://substack.com/profile/312849776-angrymalevet)! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe (https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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