Sick of this Shit Publications: Intelligent Masculinity

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!

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Angry Male Vet

Nick Paro — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:28:40 GMT

“The most productive investment anyone can make is to look within and figure out what you haven’t come to grips with. Are there things from your past that you’re still dealing with but don’t want to face? Having the courage to turn inward and face yourself — that allows you to navigate life in a better way.”

~ Angry Male Vet ~

Masculinity In Review

For this 26th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, sits down with — a retired combat veteran, Air Force intelligence officer, and outspoken political commentator — for a conversation that moves between war, leadership, accountability, and the kind of strength that doesn’t ask for applause. The two met at the Abolish ICE live event in Minneapolis, a tribute to Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Goode, and the connection carried forward into this episode. What emerges is a grounded, direct examination of what it means to lead with professionalism and empathy — on the Pakistani border, in the halls of military command, and inside your own head.

Angry Male Vet spent nine months on the Pakistani border working with villages and tribes on infrastructure and security — a mission that demanded more than tactical competence. He describes the work as requiring two things above all else: professionalism and empathy. He recounts sitting with a tribal chieftain through an interpreter, discussing road and school construction, while the chieftain explained plainly that the Taliban or the Haqqani Network would return as soon as American forces left. That kind of clarity — understanding the impossible position of a community caught between armed factions — is what shaped his leadership. Professionalism means you follow your oath and execute your mission. Empathy means you don’t lose sight of the human beings on the other side of it.

The conversation shifts to the present moment, and Angry Male Vet does not soften the picture. With U.S. forces striking Iran, conscientious objector filings spiking service-wide, and commanders raising reservations up the chain, the military is under pressure from multiple directions. His message to active service members is straightforward: remember your oath, follow lawful orders, refuse unlawful ones, and take notes — because accountability will come. He points to specific moments of pushback already happening: the AH-64 Apache investigation that Hegseth shut down within two hours, the U.S. SOUTHCOM commander who resigned over the Venezuela strikes, and the behind-the-scenes resistance that likely prevented any move on Greenland. The institution is not monolithic. There are people inside it paying attention.

The conscientious objector filings, he argues, are not a sign of weakness — they are one of the clearest expressions of masculine strength in this moment. It takes more courage to stop, name your objection, and put it on record than to go along with the current. He draws a direct line between this kind of moral independence and the masculinity the show is built around: not bravado, not performance, but the willingness to stand for something at personal cost. The U.S. strike on a school in Manab that killed 175 elementary schoolgirls — brushed aside by Hegseth and Trump — is exactly the kind of action he says military members have a legal and ethical obligation to refuse if the target sets expand further. That refusal is not insubordination. Per the UCMJ and the oath every service member takes, it is the requirement.

When Nick asks who shaped his model of masculinity, Angry Male Vet names his father and Barry Sanders. His father worked on IBM mainframes and drove long-haul trucks, split logs and raised a family — and never once leveraged his intelligence or capability for intimidation. He treated people with courtesy, practiced empathy, and believed the real battle was the one inside yourself. Barry Sanders gets named for a different reason: he would make a run that left the entire stadium stunned and then hand the ball to the referee and walk back to the sideline. No dance, no speech. He did his job and got ready to do it again. Both examples point to the same thing — strength that doesn’t require an audience.

Angry Male Vet brings 23 years of service, deployments across three theaters, and a practitioner’s understanding of what it actually costs to lead well under pressure. This conversation threads military ethics, political accountability, and the internal discipline required to be the kind of man — and the kind of soldier — who does the right thing when no one is watching. Nick closes by naming what the series is building toward: more voices, more perspectives, and a clearer picture of what intelligent masculinity looks like when it’s lived rather than performed. In Angry Male Vet, that picture is sharp — a man who measures strength by the courage to face yourself first, and the world second.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Forrest Page

Nick Paro — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:49:25 GMT

“It was a very unique spot. You could tell that they’ve been through something, some kind of trauma. There’s almost a look to trauma that I deal with a lot in my day job that you can usually see. But at the same time it was conflict-free. An event with thousands upon thousands of people in a small parking lot, shoved together in front of this space, and I just don’t recall conflict. I don’t recall yelling, anger, anyone having any sort of exchange that wasn’t positive.”

~ Forrest Page ~

Masculinity In Review

Forrest Page walked into the George Floyd Memorial in Minneapolis carrying a camera and left carrying something he wasn’t expecting: clarity about what community actually looks like when it’s built to last. For 18 years, he’s been a teacher in Michigan - and is currently a physical education teacher at a Juvenial Detention Center. For decades, he’s been a father, a photographer, and a quiet radical. In this discussion, Nick and Forrest dig into what that means — through the work of raising kids, showing up to events, and building institutions that don’t replicate the failures of the men who came before.

The spine of this conversation is privilege and responsibility. Forrest grew up in a home where his father chose teaching over money, where his mother held the household together while carrying an impossible load, where being “good” wasn’t optional. He internalized early that being a man meant sacrifice for others and willingness to grow when challenged. Those lessons shape everything: his work with Valor Media, his approach to parenting four children through a time of political violence, his quiet presence at events where the community is still processing collective trauma. Forrest doesn’t perform activism. He lives it — and he’s teaching his kids - both at home and as a teacher - to do the same without pretense or moral grandstanding.

The Abolish ICE event forced Forrest to reckon with something deeper: the power of a community that has learned to hold space for trauma while refusing to reproduce violence. The thousands of people gathered in that parking lot had come through George Floyd’s murder, the uprisings, the backlash, and the ongoing occupation of their city by federal agents. Instead of fracturing, they held. Instead of cycling violence, they created something rare — a space where anger and joy existed at the same time, where people who had been traumatized by the state could still laugh, still sing, still recognize each other as human. That’s what Forrest photographed. That’s what changed him.

But this conversation isn’t sentimental. Forrest is frank about what he can and can’t control as a white parent, about the limits of being nice, about the weight of carrying four kids through a moment when democracy itself is contested. He talks about traveling with his family knowing that ICE agents are at airports, knowing he has options that immigrant families don’t have, and committing anyway to being present — to using his privilege as a tool rather than a shield. That’s the work of intelligent masculinity: not the fantasy of standing apart from power, but the harder practice of standing in it and redirecting it toward what the community actually needs.

Forrest’s father modeled this for him — a man who stepped off the ladder in his late twenties, took a pay cut, worked nights at a pizza place while going to school during the day, and chose to spend decades teaching kids in public schools. His mother modeled something equally important: the work of caring for a household, making good people happen, doing the invisible labor that allows other people’s dreams to matter. Forrest inherited a practice, not a checklist. And he’s spending his life teaching it — in a classroom, at an event, to his kids, to whoever is paying attention.

The question at the heart of intelligent masculinity is simple but relentless: What are you willing to sacrifice for something larger than yourself? Forrest’s answer isn’t heroic. It’s domestic. It’s the disciplined work of choosing people over status, growth over ego, and community over the comfort of being right. Forrest Page — teacher, father, photographer, and activist — shows up to this conversation without performance and without pretense, and expands the series’ argument that the most durable form of masculinity is the kind built quietly, across decades, in service of people who are counting on you.

~ Nick Paro

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CULTURE | The Commitment To Community

Nick Paro — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:25:05 GMT

Practice Together To Win

There is a lie that fragile masculinity tells men early and repeats often: that strength is solitary. That the real man doesn’t need anyone. That asking for help is weakness. That vulnerability is exposure. That depending on others is a liability. It is one of the most effective lies ever sold to men—because it is just credible enough to feel like earned wisdom, and just wrong enough to quietly destroy the men who believe it.

Masculinity is not a solo practice. It never has been. It is a commitment to community—and communities that refuse to grow together do not win.

We have established, across the first five articles, that intelligent masculinity begins with accountability, is shaped by inheritance, demands definition, is sustained by discipline, and requires offense. This article adds the final load-bearing wall to that initial structure: none of it works in isolation. A man who has done the internal work but refuses to show up for others is not intelligently masculine—he is just a well-organized island. And islands, by design, do not hold anything else up.

The Void Is Not Neutral

Let’s start with the most urgent practical reality of this series: when good men disengage, someone else fills the space. This is not a metaphor. It is the operating mechanism of the current crisis.

Men and boys who are searching for direction, identity, and belonging are not waiting in a neutral vacuum until the right voice comes along. They are being actively recruited—by ecosystems built specifically to exploit disconnection, manufacture grievance, and deliver a sense of brotherhood without accountability. The manosphere did not succeed because it was right. It succeeded because it showed up—consistently, loudly, and in the spaces where no one else was standing.

The practical lesson is simple: a void of intentional community is an invitation for unintentional harm. When men of good values leave the mentorship, the modeling, the coaching, the correction, and the community-building to chance—they are not being neutral. They are actively ceding ground.

This is why participation is not a lifestyle preference. It is a structural requirement of intelligent masculinity.

What the Team Actually Looks Like

The “team” shows up in four concrete, intersecting forms—and intelligent men are building all four.

Mentorship. —in our episode 16 conversation—described actively mentoring young boys not just as a teacher anymore, but also as an elder. His approach was not to tell them what to do—it was to ask them questions that force them to think and decide. He guided a young man through a conflict of values with a friend, helped him examine what he actually stood for, and trusted him to arrive at his own conclusion. That is mentorship done right: it transfers capacity, not compliance. The goal is not boys who follow your instructions—it is boys who internalize the standard and carry it forward without needing you in the room.

Will said it plainly: kids have the ability. They just need the prompting, the guidance, the facilitation. Our job—whether we have children of our own or not—is to provide that.

Modeling. , in episode 15, issued a direct challenge to the men watching: go show off your masculinity. Not performatively—not for validation—but visibly and on purpose. Jack described wanting a community where kids come into the house and feel welcome and safe. That kind of home does not happen by accident. It is built through deliberate, consistent modeling. Children—your own, your neighbors’, your siblings’—are watching what men do when things go wrong, how men handle conflict, how men treat people who have less power than they do. The model is always running. The only question is what it is teaching.

Accountability among men. Episode 16 surfaced one of the most practical skills in this entire series: calling out the men around you. This is not comfortable. I said it directly—it is not comfortable when you have to call out your own friends, your own people that you love. But living in integrity with yourself is a far better way of living for yourself and everybody else. The locker room dynamic that allows harm to spread through silence is not an accident of group psychology—it is a failure of individual accountability. When you see it, you name it. When you hear it, you interrupt it. Silence is not neutrality—it is endorsement.

Community over competition. Jack—episode 15—named one of the most underacknowledged wounds of men who were shaped early toward emotional intelligence: the silos. Men who rejected toxic norms in their adolescence were frequently punished for it—shamed into separate communities, told they were too sensitive, too soft, too different—and then lost one another. The result was good men scattered across matriarchal communities, LGBTQIA+ spaces, veteran networks, BIPOC circles—everywhere except in community with each other. The work now is deliberately breaking those silos. Not because those communities are wrong—they were lifelines—but because men of good values need to be in the room together, finding the intersectionality of those silos, building something that compounds instead of fragments.

The Flame Spreads or It Doesn’t

Will further provides us the architecture of stewardship. It begins internally—with the cultivation of your own values, your own discipline, your own standard. Then it moves outward—into mentorship, into modeling, into the interruption of harm, into the construction of spaces where others can arrive and be handed something real. The flame is not kept. It is shared. And the sharing is not optional—because a flame that is hoarded eventually goes out.

The practical version of this: start with where you already are. You do not need a platform, a nonprofit, or a formal mentorship program. You need:

A commitment to be the man worth copying in every room you are already in.
The willingness to interrupt harmful behavior when you see it—among friends, in the locker room, on the sideline.
One younger person in your life you are actively and intentionally in relationship with—asking them questions, helping them examine their values, trusting them to grow.
An honest look at whether you have found the other men who share your values—and if not, a decision to stop waiting for them to find you.

None of these require extraordinary circumstances. They require presence and intention.

The Recruitment Problem

There is a piece of this series that is easy to misread. When we say men need to be recruited into intelligent masculinity, it does not mean we are in the business of convincing every man. Some men are not ready. Some are too deep in grievance ecosystems to hear anything yet. Some will require time and sustained relationship before anything lands.

But some men—more than we typically assume—are already asking the right questions and just do not know where to go. They see the fragile masculinity around them and feel the wrongness of it without having language for it. They are the ones who, as Jack said, will watch this and think: holy shit, I can do this. Those men do not need to be argued into anything. They need to be invited into something.

That is the recruitment ask: show men something worth joining. Not a movement against feminism. Not a reaction to wokeness. Not a coalition built on what we hate. A community founded on what we are building—accountability, discipline, stewardship, presence, and the willingness to hold the line because the line is worth holding.

The men in this community are doing that right now. The question is whether we are doing it loudly enough, consistently enough, and in enough places to matter.

What You Can Do This Week

The philosophy is established. The definition is clear. The practice is documented. Now the only question is execution—and execution happens in specific, doable actions.

Identify one person to mentor. You do not need a title for it. It can be a nephew, a neighbor’s kid, a younger colleague, a friend who is struggling. Make yourself available. Ask questions. Stop giving answers so quickly.
Find your men. If you do not have a small group of men whose values match yours—seek them out. The series itself is a starting place. The Mankind Project is another. Your local community has them too—they are just scattered and waiting to be found.
Interrupt once this week. When you hear dehumanizing language—toward women, toward anyone—say something. One interruption, done clearly and without cruelty, models more than an hour of conversation. You do not have to turn it into a seminar. You just have to say: that’s not how we talk here.
Model publicly. Let your kids, your neighbors’ kids, the kids on the team you coach see you apologize, see you admit you were wrong, see you help without being asked, see you treat service workers like people. The model runs whether you’re narrating it or not. Run a good one.

Masculinity does not prove itself in isolation. It never has. It proves itself in how a man shows up for the people around him—in the mentorship he offers, in the harm he interrupts, in the community he actively builds, and in the next generation he is willing to steward forward. A man who has mastered his own discipline but refuses to share the flame has done half the work. The other half is the commitment to community.

Now go live that commitment.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Joe Walsh

Nick Paro — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:00:47 GMT

“What's masculine is to be tough enough to sit down and not debate and not fight — but to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation. That's what, in my mind, a real man should learn how to do."

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 24th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, Nick Paro sat down with pro-democracy advocate, former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, for a conversation that refused to stay comfortable — and was better for it. Joe, who once occupied a seat inside the Tea Party machine and voted for Trump in 2016, has spent the better part of eight years publicly dismantling the version of masculinity that got him there: loud, reactive, and allergic to accountability. This episode tracks that dismantling — not as a political story, but as a human one. Joe walks through how the inability to lie, a stoic Irish Catholic father who softened before he died, and the discipline of listening to understand rather than to respond all reshaped the man he is today. Nick and Joe don't agree on everything — they say so plainly and often — and that tension is exactly the point. What we take away from this conversation is a concrete, unpolished model of what it looks like to actually do the work of becoming a better man.

Joe’s change didn’t begin with an ideology shift — it began with the refusal to lie. When the right-wing media apparatus told him his job was to tell listeners what they wanted to hear, he couldn’t do it. He describes colleagues sitting him down and spelling it out: say what the audience wants, or lose the platform. Joe chose truth over the gravy train. That choice cost him professionally, but it’s also what made the path forward possible. The lesson for men is direct: integrity under pressure isn’t a personality trait — it’s a decision, made repeatedly, often when the cost is high.

Accountability showed up not as a concept but as a practice. Joe has publicly apologized, by his own count, thousands of times in eight years. He describes the early years as standing naked in front of a camera — fully exposed, fully accountable — and finding that process genuinely healing. He draws the sharpest contrast to Trump’s response after accidentally killing school children in a military strike: no ownership, no apology, no acknowledgment. Joe’s framing is simple and surgical — a real man apologizes when he fucks up. He doesn’t caveat it. He doesn’t negotiate around it. He owns it and moves.

The conversation between Joe and Nick about listening splits the act in two. Joe names the old version: listening to respond, to pounce, to demolish a point before it finishes. He describes sitting on TV panels in full attack mode, barely hearing the person across from him. The shift to listening to understand changed how he processed everything — from Black Lives Matter to transgender identity to his own father’s late-life evolution. He didn’t agree with everything he heard. He learned from it anyway. Nick and Joe demonstrate this live throughout the episode: on the SAVE Act, on Israel, on voter access, they hold their positions and keep the conversation open. That’s the practice, not just the theory.

Joe’s most pointed critique isn’t aimed at the right — it’s aimed at Democratic men. He argues directly that the manosphere filled a vacuum the left created by refusing to engage on culture. Too many Democratic men, in his view, won’t roll up their sleeves and be guys — won’t fight, won’t speak plainly, won’t hold the floor on culture war terrain. He came to the Democratic Party not because of policy alignment but to help defeat what he calls an existential threat. He believes Democrats already hold positions most Americans support. He just needs them to say so out loud and stop flinching. That’s not a partisan observation — it’s a masculinity one.

In the end, we see Joe Walsh — a former Republican Congressman, Tea Party architect, and Trump voter who has spent the last eight years doing the opposite of what the culture rewarded him for: apologizing publicly, listening deliberately, and building bridges to people he once dismissed. This episode isn't a redemption story — Joe resisted that framing — it's a working document of what masculine accountability looks like when it's actually practiced instead of performed. He brings the insider knowledge of someone who helped build the machine and the credibility of someone who walked away from it at personal cost. In a series built around the refusal to outsource accountability, Joe models what it means to own your consequences — not once, but as a sustained, daily choice — and expands Intelligent Masculinity's argument that the work of being a better man never stops.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Matt Gordon

Nick Paro — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:37:11 GMT

“If an infantry fucking Marine can understand this shit, anybody can understand this shit. You just gotta be willing to open your fucking mind and accept the goddamn truth.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 23rd interview of Intelligent Masculinity, Nick Paro sits down with Matt Gordon — Marine Corps veteran, nine-year infantry guy, and the man behind the USMC Angry Veteran platform — for a conversation that covers war profiteering, rape culture, white male accountability, and what therapy actually looks like when you go in honest. Matt came off a live event in Minneapolis, where the two met at an Abolish ICE gathering honoring Alex Pretty and Renee Nicole Good, and the energy from that meeting carries straight through this episode. What unfolds is less of a formal interview and more of two white men refusing to let other white men off the hook — for the wars they sell, the violence they excuse, and the accountability they dodge. Listeners come away with a clear framework: the problem isn’t masculinity itself, it’s what men do with power when no one’s watching and nothing’s forcing them to grow.

The playbook hasn’t changed — and veterans know it. Matt names the pattern without flinching. The U.S. runs one play — build a justification, bomb a country, follow the money — and he walked through what that looks like from inside the institution that executes it. His read on the current conflict in the Middle East: the same lie structure as Iraq, the same billionaire beneficiaries, and a Secretary of Defense who belongs on a movie set rather than running a military. His critique of Pete Hegseth isn’t partisan commentary — it’s a veteran drawing a direct line between grandstanding leadership and Americans getting killed for ego and profit. When Matt says the Department of Defense has become the Department of Wannabes, he’s not being funny. He’s giving a structural diagnosis.

Rape culture doesn’t fix itself — fathers have to fix it. The conversation moves into one of its most direct stretches when Matt breaks down judicial outcomes for white men who sexually assault women and the message those outcomes send to everyone watching. The cases aren’t abstractions — they’re documented, named, and placed next to the consequences a Black man would face for the same crime. Matt’s argument is clean: the problem is not that women need better strategies for avoiding assault. The problem is that men are not being taught, held, or expected to not assault. His standard in his own house — anything but yes means no — isn’t a policy position, it’s a parenting commitment. And he says plainly that fathers who aren’t making that commitment are setting their children up to become predators. He said what he said.

White men have to be the ones who say something — out loud, in the room. Matt and Nick spend time on a tactic that doesn’t require a platform or a policy position: make it uncomfortable. When someone says something sexist, racist, or homophobic in your presence, you don’t have to argue. You just stop laughing. You let the silence sit. Matt describes this as one of his favorite things to do — staring down a man who said something shitty until the discomfort forces a reckoning — and he’s not joking about its effectiveness. The deeper point is that 70 percent of white men voted for Trump in 2024, and that number isn’t a coincidence. It reflects a group that has never been expected to do otherwise. Matt’s argument is that white men are the ones who created the void that Tate and Rogan and Fuentes filled, and white men are the only group with the specific social leverage to reclaim it.

Therapy isn’t a destination — it’s an ongoing practice, and it takes honesty. Matt has been in therapy for eight years with the same therapist. He’s 42 and still unpacking things. His point isn’t that therapy solves you — it’s that therapy is the practice of not letting new damage pile up unexamined. He went through five or six therapists before finding one he could actually talk to, and he’s direct that not connecting with a therapist isn’t failure — it’s information. The instruction is simple: keep going until you find someone who has no skin in the game of your life and can help you see yourself clearly. And when you get there, be honest. Not for anyone else. For you. The version of yourself that comes out the other side isn’t a different person — it’s the same person who decided to stop running.

By the end we see Matt Gordon — a nine-year Marine Corps veteran and the creator behind USMC Angry Veteran — a platform built on taking ideas forged in difficult spaces and translating them into language that anyone willing to listen can use. This episode is an hour of two white men refusing to perform the kind of masculinity that keeps other people small, and instead doing the harder thing: naming exactly where men, white men specifically, have dropped the ball and what picking it back up actually requires. Matt describes himself as an angry, empathetic asshole shaped by Mattis’s discipline, Mr. Rogers’ patience, and the strong women he deliberately surrounds himself with — and that combination produces something rare on this series: a veteran who came out of one of the hardest institutions in the country and decided accountability, not armor, was the more powerful thing to carry forward.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Ken Harbaugh

Nick Paro — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:04:39 GMT

“At its core, toxic masculinity — the opposite of intelligent masculinity or positive masculinity — is about cowardice. And you can push insecurity and overcompensating and all of that into it, but I think if you frame it in terms of cowardice, it not only skewers the performative cosplay of the Pete Hegseths and the Markwayne Mullin, it allows viewers and fans and others to begin to see it when it crops up. And I’m thinking just in one instance of that picture of Markwayne Mullin — like the epitome of performative masculinity — standing up in a Senate hearing, challenging the head of the Teamsters to a fight, talking about being downrange on a mission so classified that he can’t talk to senators about it. And yet there’s that photo of him on January 6th, cowering behind the real men defending him and his colleagues. He is not at the tip of the spear. He is literally cowering. And that to me is a great picture of that fundamental truth about toxic masculinity, which is that it’s about cowardice.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 22nd interview of Intelligent Masculinity, Nick Paro sits down with Ken Harbaugh — former Navy pilot, veteran service organization leader, and host of the Ken Harbaugh Show on the Midas Touch Network — to pull apart what happens when performative masculinity stops being embarrassing and starts being dangerous. The two met in Minneapolis at the Abolish ICE Live event honoring Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good – and that shared context shapes the entire conversation. Ken frames the current political moment — from Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon to Markwayne Mullin’s Senate hearings to become the next Director of Homeland Security — as a case study in the specific rot that results when deeply flawed, insecure men gain institutional power and disguise bluster as leadership. This discussion traces the roots of that rot through Christian nationalism, warrior cosplay, and a cultural definition of success so narrow it destroys the people chasing it. Everyone can come away with a working vocabulary for identifying performative masculinity in real time and a model for what the alternative actually looks like.

Performative masculinity is, at its core, cowardice. Ken argues that the clearest through-line in every example of toxic masculine behavior — from Josh Hawley sprinting down a Senate hallway on January 6th to Markwayne Mullin hiding behind real officers while claiming combat credentials he never earned — is cowardice wearing borrowed armor. The bluster is not incidental to cowardice – it is produced by it. Ken makes the point that this framing is more useful than words like insecure or fragile precisely because cowardice is legible. It names what is happening. It lets people recognize the pattern the moment they see it rather than needing to diagnose the psychology underneath.

Warrior cosplay and Christian nationalism are fused — and the fusion is dangerous. Pete Hegseth is the clearest example Ken raises: a man with a makeup room adjacent to his Pentagon office, whose idea of leadership is chest-thumping on camera while calling for an end to rules of engagement. Ken describes this version of Christianity — fire, brimstone, no quarter for the enemy — as idolatrous, and fundamentally inconsistent with the faith Hegseth claims. The danger is not just theological incoherence; it is that a man running the Department of Defense is treating the military as a vehicle for a crusade. Veterans, Ken says, have a specific responsibility to name this. They know the guy at the bar who talks like this. They know exactly what it is.

Real heroism does not wear itself on its sleeve. The counterweight Ken brings is his grandfather — a B-17 pilot in the Pacific who flew home with a 20-millimeter cannon round through his thigh, was awarded a Silver Star, and never once bragged about it. That silent dignity was the point – not a form of emotional suppression. The clips and articles were around the house. You had to pry the stories out of him. Ken draws the contrast explicitly: the heroism that is real does not need an audience. The contrast with Markwayne Mullin — a man who has never served but describes classified missions to Senate colleagues — is sharp enough to be its own definition.

Bravery is not a military credential — it is a human one. One of the most direct corrections Ken makes is severing the automatic equation between service and bravery, or between bravery and masculinity. He names nurses as among the bravest people he knows — and given that Alex Pretti, an VA ICU nurse who spent his career in veterans’ final moments, was the reason both men were in Minneapolis, the point carries weight. Teachers are in the same category. The standard Ken holds up is not uniform or service branch; it is whether you show up for the most vulnerable people in the room. That is the measure.

Success has been defined so narrowly that it is destroying the people who achieve it. Ken ran for Congress in a district Trump won by over 30 points. He did not win the race. With time, he came to see the campaign differently — as something that built real infrastructure, launched significant careers, and proved resistance was possible in places people had written off. The reframe is not consolation; it is structural. He extends it directly to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel: men who, by capitalism’s narrowest metric, are successful, and who Harbaugh describes as complete failures in life — no friends, children who despise them, legacies built primarily on harm. The counterproposal is simple and direct: the ultimate measure of a successful life is having people who love you around you when it ends.

In the end, we see Ken Harbaugh for more than what we saw before – he is a Navy pilot, a two-time veteran service organization leader, a former congressional candidate, and the host of a show built specifically to counter the kind of political moment this episode dissects. What he brings to Intelligent Masculinity is a veteran’s precision — the ability to identify, from lived experience, exactly what a man is compensating for when he performs strength rather than exercising it. This conversation ties together threads the series has been building since its first episode: accountability cannot be outsourced, bravery is not a credential, and success defined by accumulation alone produces lonely, destructive people. For Ken, masculinity looks like his grandfather in the deer blind — not many words, no performance, just steady presence and the expectation that you carry what you shoot.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Wajahat Ali

Nick Paro — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:06:38 GMT

“I would add another aspect of intelligent masculinity — spending time knowing yourself. There's a great saying in Islam, and it's in most traditional traditions: know yourself and you'll know your creator. And this includes knowing the bad parts of yourself, the weak parts of yourself, the messy parts of yourself. That requires radical honesty with yourself. Where am I good? What am I bad at? What do I take pride in? Where can I get better? Maybe it's not the women's fault. Maybe it's not the immigrants' fault. Maybe there's something inside me — something broken, or maybe I'm projecting something, maybe there's an insecurity. That's an intelligent aspect of masculinity — which is why it's so frightening that Marc Andreessen, one of the broligarchs, is literally saying he's not into self-reflection.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 21st interview of Intelligent Masculinity, brought — writer, commentator, and host of The Left Hook — into the conversation. This conversation aired during Ramadan, with Waj fasting and still showing up fully present — which both acknowledged as a framing for the conversation. They covered what a prophetic model of masculinity actually looks like in practice, how men learn to externalize blame instead of looking inward, and what changes when men stop running from self-reflection and start treating it as a discipline. This is one of the most spiritually grounded conversations — at time mirroring the discussion with — and one of the most honest about the gap between the masculinity men inherit and the one they actually choose.

Waj opened by naming what’s visible across the current political and media landscape: men who perform strength because they lack it. He called them cosplay crusaders — broken men LARPing dominance. Pete Hegseth banned photographers over an unflattering photo. Marc Andreessen publicly announced he does not self-reflect. Kash Patel proposed having UFC fighters train federal “officers”. These aren’t displays of power; they’re displays of damage. Waj’s argument is that the through-line for most of these men is the same — unprocessed father wounds that never got named — and that understanding the source is the first step toward building something different.

The alternative Waj offered came directly from his faith. As a practicing Muslim, he drew on the prophetic model of masculinity — the example of the Prophet Muhammad, who never struck his children, never raised his voice at his wife, and treated restraint and gentleness as expressions of strength rather than departures from it. There’s a narration of the Prophet cutting away the section of his shawl rather than disturb a sleeping cat. That image — a man powerful enough to let small things be — cuts directly against the domination model that currently passes for strength in American culture. Waj’s point is not religious in the narrow sense — it’s practical. Warmth, presence, and self-governance are what actually earn trust and love from the people closest to you.

His father supplied the lived model. Waj described a man who immigrated from Pakistan, raised a family with his mother for 48 years, and never once asked where she was going, penny-pinched her independence, or treated her freedom as a threat to his identity. His father was secure — genuinely, quietly secure — and that security transmitted. Waj connected it directly to his own marriage: his wife Sarah has told him that his confidence, his refusal to perform jealousy, is part of why she chose him. Masculine insecurity compounds downward through relationships. Masculine security does the opposite.

When Nick walked Waj through the series’ working definition — intelligent masculinity as the refusal to outsource accountability and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — Waj affirmed it and pushed it forward. He added a layer: radical honesty about who you actually are. The good parts, the weak parts, the messy parts. There’s a saying across Islamic and broader traditional traditions — know yourself and you’ll know your creator — and Waj named that self-knowledge as the root of everything else the series has been building toward. You cannot own what you will not look at. Accountability without self-knowledge is performance.

Waj was candid about his own relationship with introspection: he has OCD inherited from his father, he ruminates more than is healthy, and he spent years confusing self-punishment with self-improvement. He named the distinction plainly — auditing yourself to grow is productive masculine practice; beating yourself down until you can’t get up is not. Over the last decade he’s shifted toward what he called “humble swagger”: taking honest stock of where he’s fallen short while also giving himself credit for what he’s actually built. Nick echoed it with the series’ own framing — self-reflection is not a license for self-destruction — now you know, so you can grow. That balance between clear-eyed assessment and genuine self-regard is what productive reflection actually looks like, and it’s a model worth passing down.

In the end we see that is a writer, public commentator, and practicing Muslim who has spent years speaking plainly about the failures of toxic masculinity while modeling something different. This conversation brought spiritual depth, biographical honesty, and real humor to the Intelligent Masculinity series — and his addition of self-knowledge as the foundation beneath accountability pushes the series’ central thesis meaningfully forward. Waj doesn’t just describe a better masculinity; he’s built one inside a working marriage and a public career, and he’s willing to show the construction.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Pete Dominick

Sick of this Shit Publications — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:30:27 GMT

"She got really upset with me. She was like, you're talking down to me in front of my boyfriend. And she was absolutely right. And I just gave her a full-throated apology — to her face, then again later in a text message. I made sure not to defend myself in any way. None of that. Apologize fully without defending yourself. Do it in such a way that it is definitely sincere and you will build every relationship. I think people view that as strength because it's being decent. And that is so much stronger in my mind than someone who doesn't do that or someone that doesn't have that as a guiding principle and practice in their life. To be conciliatory, to apologize, and to mean it is a hard thing to do. But if you do it, you're a better person, certainly a stronger man."

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

For the 20th interview in the Intelligent Masculinity series, sits down with comedian, talk show host, and girl dad — and lands on one of the most direct definitions of a principled life the series has encountered. Pete comes to the conversation having navigated a career shift from road comedian to activist-journalist, a separation after a long marriage, the death of a family dog, and a father's transition into an empty nest — all while running a daily podcast and showing up as a present parent. What anchors the whole conversation is something Pete returns to again and again: the refusal to abandon his principles, even when that costs him professionally, relationally, or financially. This discussion gives all of us a clear, practical framework — developed through Stoicism, Buddhism, therapy, and a well-placed older brother — for what it looks like to live with integrity rather than just talk about it.

Your principles have to be named before they can be lived. This is where Pete traces his moral formation back to his older brother, who introduced him to punk rock, Noam Chomsky, anti-racism, and anti-sexism during Pete's adolescence — at the exact moment when those lessons would stick. The brother, a nonconformist who got bullied for it, modeled something Pete absorbed: that your worst fear should not be failure, but becoming unoriginal, or worse, abandoning what you actually believe. Pete's clearest fear throughout this conversation is not losing money or relationships — it's losing his principles. He draws a direct line from naming that fear to the choices he's made, including walking away from a 15-year run at Sirius XM after refusing to stay silent when the company rehired Steve Bannon.

An unqualified apology is a structural practice, not a personality trait. Pete didn’t grow up as someone who lacked words — he had too many, and the problem was knowing exactly how to win an argument while the relationship lost. Marriage counseling gave him three anchors he still works with: don’t take things personally, don’t make assumptions, and don’t get defensive. He describes a recent moment with his 21-year-old daughter on a ski trip where he criticized her skiing in front of her boyfriend. She called it out directly. He issued a full apology — in person and again in a follow-up text — without attaching a single qualifier or explanation. He doesn’t frame this as noble. He frames it as structurally necessary: apologize fully, without defending yourself, and the relationship gets stronger. This echoes what said on the series before him (listen here) — the most important thing a man can do is an unqualified apology.

Modeling a healthy breakup is an act of fatherhood. When Pete’s wife told him she wanted to separate, his first instinct was anger, rejection, and the desire to keep fighting. His older brother stepped in with a frame that redirected everything: your daughters are watching, and they will be broken up with someday, and what they see you do now is what they’ll know how to do then. Pete stayed in the house until his younger daughter got her license, drove her to school every day because he wanted those car moments, and then moved 10 minutes away. Three years later, he and his ex-wife still talk, share dinners, and co-parent with clarity. He’s not holding that up as universal advice. He’s pointing to the specific practice: ego is the enemy of a healthy separation, and setting your ego aside to protect your kids is not a sacrifice — it’s the job.

Straight men, especially white ones, have to show up for people who aren’t. Pete puts it plainly: straight white men have been the architects of most systemic harm, which means they carry both responsibility and unique leverage to confront it. He distinguishes personal suffering — which he says is real and not to be dismissed, pointing to his brother-in-law who died by suicide — from systemic suffering, which operates at a different scale and requires different work. He describes jumping in on group texts to confront a friend talking nonsense, confronting Jesse Watters on-camera by asking him to name the soldiers he claimed to honor, and advocating for a family in his community with a trans child rather than making the parents carry the full public weight of it. His frame: the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

A daily practice that is the self-evaluation period for everything else. Pete's self-reflection tools are really concrete: 20 minutes each of meditation, journaling, exercise, and reading. The meditation does one specific thing — it trains you to notice when you're inside a thought spiral, name it, and set it down. He's not claiming enlightenment. He's describing a maintenance practice for a person who covers the news every day, has navigated real loss, and carries the anxiety that comes with self-employment and a principled life. The reading is Stoic and Buddhist: Marcus Aurelius, Pema Chodron, Ryan Holiday. The point isn't originality — the four cardinal Stoic virtues are 2,000 years old. The point is finally using what's already been handed to us. And as our friend added in the Live chat — “it’s better to be genuine than be ‘original’”.

As we bring it all together — we saw as a comedian who stopped going on the road to be home with his daughters; a talk show host who got pushed out of corporate media spaces for refusing to make peace with the people running it; and a man who has moved through separation, loss, and the edge of an empty nest while staying committed to a personal code he can actually name. What this interview adds to the Intelligent Masculinity series is a specific and earned articulations of principled living — as the practical daily stance that costs something and pays dividends that can't be measured in money or status. For Pete, intelligent masculinity looks like showing up as water over rocks: not ignoring the obstacles, not pretending they aren't there, but refusing to get stuck.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Steven Acheson

Sick of this Shit Publications — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:15:13 GMT

“It really goes back to watching men perform badly throughout my life — men who have been my father figures more or less, who in various ways succeeded, but in various ways failed to step up to the moments and been absent when they shouldn’t have been. And I just never wanted my stepson or my biological son to ever feel like they were alone and didn’t have somebody there to support them and to be there for them along the way. So I made a conscious promise to myself that I was going to be a better dad than the men I’ve had as father figures in my life.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

On this 19th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, has an incredibly raw and honest conversation with — someone who grew up on a fifth-generation Wisconsin dairy farm, enlisted in the Army almost by accident at 19 after a civil engineering apprenticeship fell through, and deployed to Sadr City in 2005 as part of a brigade commander's personal security detail — running over 400 missions through the worst IED corridors in the country, attending more than 60 funerals in 11 months, and sustaining a back injury that ended his forward observer career. He came home, answered his post-deployment health assessment honestly when his NCOs told him to say no to everything, and became the only soldier in his platoon to actively seek mental health treatment — a pattern of choosing clarity over comfort that defines how he operates today. Now 40, living in rural Wisconsin at 100% VA disability rating, he is a stay-at-home dad to a first-grader named Aldo and a freshman in college, a partner to high school science teacher Steph, and an organizer for High Ground Veterans Advocacy alongside his long-time battle-buddy . This conversation moves through combat trauma, the power of true friendships, the decision to be present for his kids instead of career-chasing, and what it means to break a family pattern of absent and harmful men — and Steven brings the receipts: a list his oldest sister built for him capturing how she sees him practicing intelligent masculinity in real life.

Steven is the person who found after a suicide attempt (listen here). The two met on day one of basic training, maintained a running friendly competition through AIT, were assigned to the same duty station, deployed together, and lived together post-deployment when Kris was at his lowest. Steven's presence in that moment was intentional — it was the product of a relationship built and maintained deliberately over years. This powerful moment reinforces an early discussion with in a prior Intelligent Masculinity conversation (listen here): men need at least one person they can cry in front of without explanation, and that person has to be built before the crisis arrives.

As the conversation moves forward, Steven recounted an important moment in a story familiar to too many veterans — answering his post-deployment health questionnaire truthfully at a time when everyone around him was coached to deny everything. He flagged PTSD symptoms that were already showing up physically — chewed-off knuckles, sleep disruption — and went on to seek mental health treatment on his own initiative. The consequence of that honesty was what it always should be — the intentional first steps on a slow path toward processing what happened. The takeaway here is concrete: when a system hands you a form and pressures you to lie on it, answering accurately is not weakness — it is the prerequisite for getting anything useful out of that system.

Moving into the discussion on accountability, Steven names his partner Steph as his single greatest influence, and he is specific about why: she identified language he was using — patterns that came from growing up in a military and rural conservative environment — and named them clearly, without softening the message. He received that feedback, worked on it, and still slips. The model he describes is not one of wholesale transformation but of ongoing, imperfect recalibration. The instruction for men in the audience is not to wait until your language is perfect, but to stop treating correction as an attack and start treating it as information.

While discussing generational trauma, Steven spoke on what he told his younger half-brother directly: it's up to us to end this. He didn't leave it abstract. He said the words. His family history includes men who were absent, harmful, or both — and rather than carry that silently forward, he made an explicit promise to himself that his stepson and his biological son would never feel alone or unsupported the way he sometimes did. That promise is now visible in his daily choices: declining career opportunities, staying home, coaching sports he didn't particularly enjoy, and consistently showing up. Naming the pattern is not sufficient on its own, but it is where the decision starts.

The conversation built as Steven recalled the years spent after leaving the military doing informal counter-recruiting presentations at high schools — writing the full war debt on the board and asking students who they thought was going to pay for it. He describes this as work he eventually stepped back from for his own mental health, but Nick presses the point: progressive and pro-democracy veterans need to be louder right now, because the political right has claimed veteran identity through sheer volume. Using the veteran tag deliberately — not as the whole of your identity, but strategically — is a way of filling a void that gets filled with something else if you leave it empty.

Towards the end, Steven discusses the years spent in the background of Kristofer Goldsmith’s advocacy work — advising and believing in him when others didn't — without needing to be the face of it. The framing Nick introduces, and which Steven affirms, is that not being the main character in someone else's story is a valid and sometimes more important role. The ego-driven version of masculinity requires constant centrality; whereas, the growth-driven version recognizes that your moment to step forward will come, and that building someone else's capacity in the meantime is not a demotion — it’s the plot.

Steven arrives at a particular point in the series arc — after ’s civic organizing, ’s institutional advocacy, ’s reclamation of identity, and ’s intersection of faith and public service — and brings something these conversations have been approaching but hadn't yet centered on: what it looks like to carry acute trauma and a clear commitment to not pass it forward, at the same time, over decades. His story doesn't begin with a platform or a cause. It begins on a dairy farm, runs through Sadr City, and lands in a living room where he is the one who shows up — for his kids, for his partner, for Kris at his lowest, for civilians who never heard a veteran speak plainly about what war actually costs. What connects him to every guest before him is the through-line which has been building since the first interview with : intelligent masculinity is not a fixed identity, it's a practice — and the form it takes changes from person to person while the commitment underneath it doesn't. ’s is the version that looks like presence, honesty, and a promise kept.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Joe Plenzler

Sick of this Shit Publications — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:54:29 GMT

“In order to be good, you have to do good, and [this] definition of evil is more like Edmund Burke. It’s the ability to do good and [then] not doing it. So evil doesn’t have to be a specific act. It just has to be the ability to make a better decision and choosing not to.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 18th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, — Marine Corp combat veteran, communications leader, and fierce advocate for those who served — shares his experiences about service, loyalty, institutional failures, moral injury, media narratives, and the burden veterans carry long after the uniform comes off. This is a discussion about accountability.

Joe makes something clear early in our discussion: the Marine Corps gives young men something many of them have never had before — structure, expectation, standards, and camaraderie. It gives meaning, direction, and a meaningful purpose larger than just the self. But the camaraderie that binds warriors in combat doesn’t automatically translate to life at home — a country which loves the symbolism of service, yet constantly struggles with the responsibility of reintegration. Joe pushes against the lazy cultural script that says:

“They signed up for it.”

Yes — they signed up to serve, to protect — yet, none signed up to be discarded.

Joe speaks plainly about the Iraq generation — young men sent into chaotic, politically murky conflict environments with incomplete strategy and shifting narratives. The cost was more than just physical — it was psychological, it was moral, and it was existential. War accelerates maturity in some areas and freezes development in others. You return with hyper-competence in chaos…and no real roadmap for an ordinary life. That gap creates dislocation, alienation, anger, and silence—and that silence often compounds the damage. Joe argues that masculine culture often amplifies that silence — especially among combat veterans. Strength becomes suppression, loyalty becomes isolation, and stoicism becomes a trap to hide everything behind a mask — but suppression isn’t discipline, it’s a deferred collapse.

One of the most powerful threads in this conversation is Joe’s articulation of moral injury. PTSD is a clinical framework whereas moral injury is spiritual. It’s what happens when your internal moral code collides with the realities of war, bureaucracy, or political decision-making. You can do everything right tactically — and still wrestle with what you were part of. That wrestling is conscience — and that’s true strength. Joe pushes back against reducing veterans to trauma stereotypes because the story isn’t one of fragility — this is the story is unresolved weight which has become corrosive — personally and nationally.

As someone deeply embedded in communications and public messaging, Joe understands narrative warfare. He calls out two distortions:

The romanticization of service.
The weaponization of veterans in political messaging.

Both strip all of the nuance out of the conversation. Veterans are either saints or victims — rarely are they full human beings navigating complex transitions. Joe argues for something harder: accountability in leadership, truth in storytelling, and responsibility in how we deploy young men. Intelligent masculinity requires honest language — not propaganda.

Joe’s post-service career reflects something important: discipline and mission don’t evaporate — they redirect into service after service. He channels Marine Corp precision into advocacy, communications, and institutional critique — and that’s a model worth studying. He shows us that masculinity isn’t defined by the battlefield — it’s defined by what you build after it. represents a version of masculinity that is loyal without the blindness, strong because of reflection, patriotic while critical, and disciplined but adaptive. Joe shows that those blends matter.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Nick Paro

Nick Paro — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 01:34:03 GMT

“Ego wants to win arguments. Discipline wants to build something that lasts. The problem with ego-driven masculinity is that it’s loud but fragile. Discipline is quiet, but it compounds. It shows up every day. It doesn’t need applause. And it doesn’t collapse when someone disagrees with you.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

I have had the distinct pleasure of working with them for the majority of my time here on Substack. From our first conversation, I knew that this was someone whom I admired, who cared, and who wanted to make the world a better place. Nick is someone who has sacrificed, suffered, and grown. He is someone who pursues a life in which his growth can propel others’ growth.

I went into this interview with the goal of better understanding my friend, and I left knowing a man who has fought and clawed his way back from the darkest of places to become a beacon of hope for thousands, and a shoulder to lean on for his friends.

Nick focuses on becoming a better human, and his series on intelligent masculinity is the purest distillation of a great challenge he took on. Not because he was asked, but because he saw a need. Men are the problem, ego has become the core of Western masculine identity. Creating a society of dangerous, entitled, and hateful men who are taught that they are entitled to whatever they want.

It is men who have to confront this ugly reality and set the record straight. Nick is leading the charge on this, and because of him, this discussion is spreading beyond a small community and providing an opportunity for men to reflect and change.

It is my distinct pleasure to present this interview with Nick Paro, my good friend, an inspiration, and a warrior. On and off the battlefield, whichever one he finds himself on.

Thank you, Nick.

— Not Your Son.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Will Fullwood

Nick Paro — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:37:49 GMT

“A lot of people think masculinity is about these big moments — but it’s really about the small ones. It’s whether you keep your word. Whether you stay consistent. Whether you choose discipline when no one would notice if you didn’t. That’s what builds trust. That’s what builds character.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 16th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, sits down with to explore masculinity through the lens of integrity, discipline, and quiet accountability. Will reflects on growing up without perfect role models, learning responsibility through adversity, and defining humaning not as masculinity through dominance — but as consistency. At the core of the conversation is a powerful through-line:

Being a man isn’t about control. It’s about showing up — especially when it’s uncomfortable.

This discussion deepens the series’ central thesis: intelligent masculinity is practiced in everyday decisions, not declared in slogans.

Will speaks candidly about growing up without flawless examples of masculinity. Instead of inheriting a blueprint built on gendered lines, he had to construct his own understanding of what being a man meant. That process required him to observe what not to replicate, identify the traits worth keeping, and then choosing discipline over impulse. This mirrors a recurring theme in the series that masculinity is not always inherited intact—sometimes it is assembled piece by piece, and that assembly requires self-awareness.

One of the most important threads in the interview is emotional responsibility. Will pushes back against the idea that masculinity requires emotional suppression. Instead, he emphasizes emotional management—not exploding, not deflecting, and not blaming others for internal discomfort . These distinctions are important when describing the guardrails which offer guideposts for intelligent masculinity to learn from—the understanding that suppression leads to resentment, expression without discipline leads to chaos, practiced management leads to lasting growth, and active participation is required or you don’t really have values, just slogans.

What stands out in this conversation is Will’s emphasis on the small, daily decisions. Decisions which aren’t heroic acts or grand speeches; rather, they are actively following through, admitting when you’re wrong, being present in the moment, and making the harder choices, quietly. In Will’s case—as with the case of so many of the other men—masculinity is cumulative, never static and always working to grow—because cumulative behavior is what truly defines your character.

Will also acknowledges that a person’s growth is rarely linear. There are always missteps, ego flares, and failures—what separates mature masculinity from fragile masculinity is the response. Do you double down—or do you adjust? Intelligent masculinity is always correctable—willing to say “now you know, so you can grow.”

In the end, this discussion with Will reinforces and sharpens key pillars of our overall series. He highlights that integrity is consistency over time; accountability is internal before it can become external; masculinity is measured in actions and behavior, not volume; that meaningful growth most often requires some level of discomfort, and emotional management is true strength. If our earlier guests emphasized service, faith, trauma interruption, or platform responsibility— emphasizes the everyday—and sometimes the everyday is the hardest arena to enter and stay in.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Jack

Sick of this Shit Publications — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:18:13 GMT

“Growing up with an abusive father gave me a very clear example of what masculinity can become when it’s rooted in control and fear. I watched how anger was used as power. And I made a conscious decision that if I was going to live as a man, I was not going to live like that. I wasn’t going to repeat it. I had to build something different — something steadier, something safer.”
~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 15th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, sits down with for a deeply personal conversation about trauma, transition, and the uneven terrain of support. Raised by an abusive father and a mother struggling with her own unresolved trauma, Jack found refuge in a grandmother who offered space and stability.

As a trans man who has lived both female-presenting and male-presenting lives, Jack offers rare insight into masculinity from both sides of the social divide. His journey reframes intelligent masculinity not as inheritance or dominance — but as something consciously built through reflection, healing, and self-discipline.

Jack’s story is one of unsteady mentorship and no clear male modeling—his story is one shaped by contrast: an abusive father whose masculinity was rooted in control and volatility; a mother living within her own trauma, often emotionally unavailable; and a grandmother who created space — quiet, nonjudgmental, stabilizing space. These disparities matter because intelligent masculinity is often easier to define when you have healthy examples. Whereas Jack did not—he had to build it himself.

Jack’s relationship with his father forms the psychological backdrop of the conversation. He opened up about the distorted lessons of masculinity he learned at the hands of abuse: that power equals fear, authority equals unpredictability, and strength equals domination. When those are your earliest exposures to “manhood,” masculinity becomes something to either fear or reject. For Jack, that early model did not become destiny—it became a warning on what not to do or be. The absence of safe masculinity forced him to reflect on what real strength looks like, without the cruelty. It also left scars—and a lingering self-doubt.

On the other side of that abuse, Jack sees what his mother was going through and uses that as context. When a parent is fighting their own internal battles, emotional availability becomes scarce and support becomes inconsistent at best—that combination creates a unique form of isolation. In that environment, Jack’s concepts of masculinity had to emerge through observation and trial. His growth into accepting his adult masculinity required separating compassion for his mother’s trauma from accepting the consequences it had on him. That separation is emotional maturity—and is at the heart of Jack’s journey.

In contrast to volatility and instability, Jack’s grandmother offered him the space he desperately needed—no yelling, manipulation, or conditional love—just room to exist as himself. That space became foundational, because masculinity is a thing that can be constructed—and to construct something, it needs the space to feel safe enough to emerge. In providing this space, his grandmother did not define him—she allowed him to discover himself without fear. And that kind of support can be life-saving.

Perhaps the most unique dimension of this discussion is Jack’s lived experience as both female-presenting and male-presenting. He has lived and understands many of the things men do not: what it feels like to be dismissed, what it feels like to be talked over, what it feels like to move through the world without physical safety assumptions, and what changes when those assumptions shift. He describes the jarring experience of being treated with increased deference once male-presenting—conversations changing tone and authority is assumed rather than questioned. That contrast exposed an uncomfortable truth that masculinity carries unearned social power. And the difference between intelligent and not, is whether you use it recklessly or responsibly.

In the end, there is something profoundly important underlying all of Jack’s emotional discipline. To Jack, restraint is a concrete need—it is the power to be corrective. Where his father used anger, unpredictability, and fear as power— practices regulation as responsibility, he models consistency, and shapes masculinity to mean safety.

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On Offense

Nick Paro — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:45:28 GMT

There is a mistake that well-intentioned men often make when rejecting fragile masculinity: they retreat—they soften their language—they avoid conflict—they speak carefully, quietly, defensively. In this process they are trained to confuse restraint with passivity. That mistake is no longer sustainable—and in truth, it is actively harmful.

Intelligent masculinity is not merely a response to bad masculinity. It is a replacement for it—and replacements do not necessarily win by being polite—and replacements never win by being timid.

Fragile masculinity thrives when intelligent men stay reactive—consuming the void left by timidity—feeding on grievance, certainty, and spectacle—while it advances precisely because it goes on offense while others hesitate. This outdated, reactionary masculinity does not wait to be invited—it is insidious, seeking to assert itself when not wanted, recruiting by shifting blame and removing accountability from the source—intentionally normalizing harm through the repetition of dominance, over growth through stewardship.

When intelligent masculinity limits itself to critique and explanation without concerted action, it willingly cedes ground. Leaving space for louder, simpler, more dishonest narratives to dominate men who are searching for meaning, direction, and belonging. This is why neutrality is not a virtue—silence is a position—and our absence is a gift to the worst actors in the room.

Going on offense does not mean becoming the thing we oppose. Offense has never been the acts of aggression, dominance, humiliation, or coercion—it is not an excuse to engage in rage or cruelty—and it is not a set of strict ideological purity tests. Going on offense means we take the initiative—defining masculinity clearly and publicly, before others do it for us. We openly model strength without apology—directly confronting harm as it happens rather than offering endless explanations. We offer alternatives—intentionally building opportunities instead of only criticizing failures.

Where fragile masculinity requires us to wear a mask and fight without reason—intelligent masculinity demands directed growth and actionable results.

Across every conversation in this series, one truth has become unavoidable: intelligent masculinity is calm—but it certainly is not quiet. It is a discipline that is measured and ethical while never being hesitant or timid. At its core, intelligent masculinity unapologetically asserts three things:

Accountability is non-negotiable. Harm does not become acceptable because it was traditional, emotional, popular, or authorized.
Strength includes containment. Self-regulation is not optional. Men who cannot govern themselves should not be trusted with power over others.
Participation is required. Masculinity is proven in community — in work, family, culture, and conflict — not in isolation or online performance.

These are not mere preferences for masculinity—they are the baseline standards. And standards must be enforced to exist.

Going on offense also means being honest about what intelligent masculinity is against—without centering our identity there. We are against:

domination masquerading as leadership,
grievance framed as purpose,
emotional discharge mistaken for honesty,
cruelty justified as “truth-telling”, and
men being trained to fear accountability.

Yet we do not build masculinity against these things—we build it to last—aiming for something. That something is:

stewardship instead of spectacle,
reliability instead of intensity,
courage that survives boredom,
authority that accepts consequence, and
leadership that creates safety.

This distinction between against and for matters—and is at the heart of this project. Whereas fragile, reactionary masculinity needs constant enemies to stay coherent—intelligent masculinity does not.

If intelligent masculinity is serious about replacing fragile masculinity, it must do the following—consistently and publicly:

Model. Be the men worth copying. Not louder. Not purer. Just steadier and more openly.
Interrupt. Call out dehumanization, misogyny, and domination when they appear — especially among other men. Silence is endorsement.
Build. Create spaces, media, language, and community that offer men direction without grievance.
Recruit. Stop pretending men will “figure it out on their own.” Show them something better and invite them into it.
Hold the Line. Do not water this down to avoid discomfort. Discomfort is not harm. Accountability is not abuse.

This is cultural replacement grounded in a lifetime of disciplined growth and understanding—not culture war built on made-up enemies, blameless actions, and shifted accountabilities. This is the way.

There is no future where intelligent masculinity wins by being passive. The men most vulnerable to fragile masculinity are not looking for theory. They are looking for practical orientation—a way to understand their power, their anger, their responsibility, and their place in the world. If we fail to offer men and boys a disciplined, ethical, assertive model of masculinity—someone else will offer them a dangerous one. So this is the shift—from explanation to assertion, reaction to initiative, dominance to stewardship—and go from defense to on offense. Intelligent masculinity does not ask for permission to exist. It shows up, sets standards, and lives with the consequences.

And you know what? That is strength.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Qasim Rashid, Esq.

Nick Paro — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:24:10 GMT

“There’s no such thing as serving God without first serving humanity… If your religiosity doesn’t translate into dignity and care for your neighbor, then it’s just ego. There are no asterisks on humanity."

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 14th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, I sit down with for something completely different, yet entirely on theme. Where all of the other interviews have focused on masculinity directly through the lenses of fatherhood, discipline, and self-correction—Qasim takes us in a wonderful new direction: faith, built around a life of service where acts towards humanity always precedes professed faith to a God. And in doing so, Qasim reinforced and sharpened the series thesis that:

Intelligent Masculinity is the refusal to outsource accountability onto others—and the discipline to live with the consequences of your actions and values.

Throughout this conversation, we see Qasim return to a powerful idea: masculinity begins when we separate the ego and embrace active self-reflection.

This self-reflection fuels one of the most important through-lines of the conversation where Qasim insists that reaction is a choice—road rage, spousal conflict, public disagreement, online provocation—and that choice is the difference between intelligent masculinity and not. He frames this choice as the pause between the stimulus and the response—that moment when you bite your tongue, take that breath, and think. That is discipline. That is intelligence. That is power. And this moment of control is what separates those willing to accept accountability for their actions, and those who aren’t.

Perhaps the clearest practical moment of the entire interview came when discussing boundaries. Qasim described deliberately keeping his hands visible in group photos to remove ambiguity and ensure no boundary is ever crossed. He also stated plainly:

“Keeping your hands and your eyes to yourself is not something you should struggle with.”

This is intelligent masculinity in its simplest form. It is: respecting consent, accepting “no” as a complete sentence, and taking responsibility for male behavior instead of blaming women. He reinforced this again with certainty when it comes to consent:

“No is a complete sentence.”

This clarity matters in a culture where men often look for loopholes—and intelligent masculinity closes loopholes.

Qasim brings us to a place we haven’t gone before with his discussion on an important theological distinction: there is no such thing as serving God without first serving humanity. He referenced a teaching where a person deeply devout in prayer but cruel to their neighbor is condemned, while someone less outwardly religious but kind to their neighbor is elevated. That principle cuts against authoritarian religious nationalism—and it asserts:

Humanity has no asterisks.
Rights are not conditional.
Faith that harms neighbors is ego, not devotion.

And this aligns profoundly with the evolving series arc where masculinity that claims divine justification for domination is not intelligent—it is insecure.

Qasim also offered a powerful reflection on male privilege — not as superiority, but as unexamined safety. His story about realizing, as a teenager, that he could run at night without fear while his female friend could not, was a defining moment of awareness. Acknowledging privilege without weaponizing it and recognizing safety disparities without defensiveness—that is intelligent masculinity. It doesn’t deny reality—it accepts it—and then works to correct it.

Another key contribution to the series: structured self-reflection. Through daily prayer and meditation, Qasim described carving out intentional time to detach from noise and re-evaluate his responsibility to others. He framed this as a constant internal struggle—not against others, but against ego—and telling us:

“The greatest struggle is the struggle against the self that incites you to do wrong.”

This echoes earlier guests in different language: the discipline described by , the cultural history of , the personal accountability of , and the intentional reflection of . Qasim’s articulation gives spiritual vocabulary to a theme that has been building organically through the series.

As we bring this discussion together, Qasim adds new depth to three critical elements within the overall series:

He spiritualizes accountability without weaponizing religion.
He frames boundaries and consent as a male responsibility, not female safeguards.
He reinforces that ego is the real threat—not emotion, not vulnerability, not connection.

And perhaps most importantly of all, recenters masculinity around service—not leadership for control, not strength for dominance, and not faith for exclusion—rather service towards all of humanity.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Marlon Weems

Nick Paro — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:35:34 GMT

“If I got pissed off every time something like that happened, I’d just run my own blood pressure up. Writing about it lets me examine it. Sometimes I realize I was wrong. Sometimes I realize I reacted better than I would have years ago. But I try to be honest with myself — because if you’re not honest with yourself, you’re not growing.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 13th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, sits down with for one of the most layered conversations in the series so far. What unfolds is not a rigid definition of masculinity, but a lived evolution — from corporal punishment to restraint, from reaction to regulation, and from ego to reflection. Marlon’s story moves through Arkansas, Wall Street, fatherhood, race, humiliation, discipline, and writing as therapy. At the center of it all is a quiet but powerful truth:

“Growth does not happen by accident. It happens when you are willing to examine yourself honestly.”

Marlon begins by describing the men who shaped him—a stepfather who raised him as his own (until he didn’t), an uncle who prepared him for racial hostility in professional spaces, and a mother who filled in the gaps. Two lessons stand out from this:

Ambition through expectation — being pushed intellectually, even when it felt harsh.
Survival through restraint — knowing when not to react.

One of the most striking stories involves his uncle warning him before entering a predominantly white investment firm:

“The first time someone calls you a slur, you can’t hit them — because you’ll be the one who loses everything.”

That lesson becomes foundational. Here we see masculinity is about long-term survival and strategic control, not about dominance or retaliation. This is Intelligent Masculinity in practice: you don’t outsource your reaction to someone else’s provocation.

Perhaps the most vulnerable portion of the discussion centers on Marlon’s two phases of fatherhood. With his older sons, he describes a harsher approach—belt, switch, intimidation—not out of cruelty, but because that was the model he inherited. Later, raising his younger children—particularly his daughter—something shifted. He describes a moment when he struck his daughter lightly in discipline and saw hurt, fear, and disbelief in her eyes:

“I couldn’t live with that look.”

That was the pivot. He did not double down and he did not justify it—he evolved. Discipline became regulation instead of force. Authority became presence instead of threat—and that is intelligent masculinity.

It’s correction, not perfection.

One of the most powerful stories in the interview is a childhood memory where Marlon was caught stealing a bar of soap. Instead of being beaten, Marlon was marched back into the store and made to confess publicly to the manager. There was no physical punishment—just accountability and embarrassment. He never stole again because the lesson wasn’t fear—it was natural consequence. For Marlon, masculinity is modeled as ownership, public accountability, and long memory.

When asked how he self-reflects, Marlon gives one of the most important answers in the entire series—writing. He describes revisiting a memory of judging someone’s appearance at a formal dinner and realizing, decades later, that the bias revealed more about him than them. Writing forced him to confront that truth—through the written reflections he did not frame himself as a victim or excuse himself—he examined himself and became disciplined. He teaches us that intelligent masculinity requires actively reviewing your own behaviors, identifying our own biases, and correcting internal narratives.

One of the more subtle threads in the interview is the theme of projection. After moving to North Carolina, Marlon recounts neighbors openly admitting they Googled him to verify who he was—unable to reconcile his appearance with his résumé. Instead of exploding in anger, he reframes it and refused to allow every micro-aggression to destabilize him, knowing that anger would consume his peace. This isn’t dismissal of racism—it’s disciplined energy management. He chooses when to engage, when to document, and when to move on. That is power under control.

The playful Mulan-inspired closing questions (“swift as a coursing river,” “force of a great typhoon,” etc.) reveal something deeper. When asked about being swift, Marlon tells a story about nearly losing $250,000 in a trading error — and how composure saved him. When asked about being a raging fire, he speaks about persistence and refusing to accept defeat. When asked about mystery, he tells stories of being scrutinized, Googled, and underestimated — and choosing humor over bitterness.

As tells us and shows us—strength here is not loud, it is steady.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Bobby Jones

Nick Paro — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:02:48 GMT

“When you die, there’s a birth year, a death year, and the dash in between. How did you define the dash? Did you maximize your time to help other people? Because you can slap your name on a building, but buildings fall. What lasts is how you conducted yourself and who you lifted while you were here.”

~ ~

Masculinity In Review

In this 12th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, sits down with retired Navy Commander, contributor, and founder of Veterans for Responsible Leadership for one of the most grounded and powerful discussions in the series to date. What begins as a sharp political critique evolves into a deeply personal exploration of fatherhood, emotional regulation, service-based leadership, and legacy. Bobby frames masculinity as reliability, partnership, self-discipline, and generational impact. At the core of his philosophy:

“It’s not about you.”

Early in the discussion, the conversation confronts the political spectacle dominating the news cycle. But rather than getting stuck in outrage, Jones pivots toward something deeper: the collapse of responsibility at the highest levels of power.

From there, we sharpen the series’ thesis: Masculinity without accountability becomes a spectacle, hidden behind a mask—while masculinity with discipline becomes intentional service. And that word—service—defines this entire interview.

When asked about the most influential masculine figure in his life, Bobby does not hesitate: his father. Born into Jim Crow poverty in northern Florida, his father fought his way into college football, played in the NFL during an era without massive contracts, and worked night shifts so he could attend his children’s games.

What stood out the most was the refusal to boast—a humble, yet unapologetic expression of power. Bobby recalls that his father just did the work and never sought any accolades for it—the importance of the actions, not the perceived need for praise that might (or might not) follow. This boiled down into an important contrast for our discussion: lasting masculinity comes when you accomplish first, speak intentionally while performative masculinity is one where you speak constantly and accomplish very little. Bobby names this difference plainly:

“The legacy of a man is not how much he obtains, but who he affects and how.”

That line alone could define the rest of the series.

When pressed for a concrete definition, Bobby offers us a three-part framework:

Mental fortitude to push forward in difficulty,
Emotional awareness of your own shortcomings, and
Commitment to partnership rather than domination.

He calls out a serious, ongoing cultural regression: instead of stepping up as equals to strong women and marginalized communities, too many men attempt to tear others down to protect their own mediocrity—and his message is blunt:

“Step your game up.”

In a society obsessed with ranking, comparison, and grievance—Bobby re-centers masculinity around self and community improvement—not personal entitlement.

A powerful moment emerges when Bobby discusses the so-called “emotional” critique often aimed at women in politics . He uses this to fuel a philosophy we can all adopt:

“Emotion powers courage.”

He takes this a step further and issues a simple challenge: if you cannot understand your own emotions, you cannot lead effectively. He invokes Abraham Lincoln writing condolence letters and Eisenhower facing D-Day—leaders who absolutely felt fear and grief—but processed it in service of others. Emotional regulation and intelligence, not suppression, becomes the dividing line.

Perhaps the most resonant concept of the episode is one Jones returns to with gravity:

The dash.

On every gravestone there is a birth year, a death year, and a dash in between. That dash is the legacy. Bobby left us with a question:

“How did you define the dash?”

It’s simple—and devastating in its clarity. Did you maximize your time to help others? Were you reliable when things fell apart Did you collaborate, or compete destructively? In a culture obsessed with accumulation, Bobby reminds us that wealth fades—while meaningful impact echoes.

Bobby outlines his self-evaluation process in practical terms: writing goals down physically in a notebook, rejection of vague dreaming in favor of defined execution, and the conscious effort to ask himself daily if he get better or did he get worse? Bobby highlights this with a quote from Jimmy Johnson:

“You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. There is no in-between.”

Growth requires discomfort—discomfort requires humility—humility requires partnership. And without those, masculinity collapses into grievance.

Our discussion closes with levity—sports jokes, Falcon heartbreak, playful reflections—where even those moments reinforce the underlying theme that masculinity requires control, emotional intelligence, and emotional literacy over flatness. Bobby jokes about being underestimated throughout his career and sometimes “sandbagging” intelligence for strategic advantage—and even that story underscores a recurring theme of perception vs. substance. In the end, we find that real strength doesn’t need to announce itself—it shows up consistently, often quietly, and leaves an impact that will resonate through generations. showcases that unyielding, unapologetic strength as he defines what ends up between the dash.

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Intelligent Masculinity with Arturo Dominguez

Nick Paro — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:01:21 GMT

“Intelligent masculinity is really nothing more than common sense. You want respect? You have to give it. You can’t say toxic masculinity means all masculinity is toxic—that’s not what it means. It means stripping away the parts that harm people. You can be strong, protective, rational, and compassionate at the same time.”
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Masculinity In Review

In this 11th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, sits down with journalist and Decolonized Journalism publisher to examine masculinity through the lenses of culture, community, immigration, race, and family. The conversation reframes intelligent masculinity as communal responsibility rather than rugged individualism, cultural respect rather than strict purity politics, and unbridled joy as resistance in the face of unrelenting chaos.

Our discussion opens with a cultural celebration—Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at the 2026 Super Bowl—before we pivoted into the needed, deeper conversation: the political power of representation.

For Arturo, culture is living memory—its resistance and survival—and survival, especially in marginalized communities, has always required collective strength. He highlights an under-discussed topic in Stater masculinity discourse:

“Latin American and Caribbean cultures, despite machismo elements, often maintain stronger communal frameworks than white Protestant American individualism.”

This becomes the central contrast in our discussion:

White Christian nationalist masculinity → domination, purity, superiority
Communal masculinity → protection, responsibility, uplift

Arturo explicitly names how toxic masculinity merges with white nationalism, imperialism, and foreign policy aggression. In our framing, masculinity is more than just a personal stance—it shapes geopolitics.

One of the most important themes throughout our discussion is Arturo’s critique of “bootstrap masculinity.” This old, Protestant ethic of self-reliance—“I don’t need help”—is a cultural distortion that intentionally isolates men from community support systems. He contrasts this with his learned, communal traditions from Cuba; the differences between community-first “Latin American” vs the self-first “Euro American” social structures; and the use of parallel systems supporting interdependence within immigrant neighborhood.

Where rugged individualism says:

“I built this alone.”

Communal masculinity says:

“We survive together.”

Arturo’s reframing fits perfectly with the underlying political thesis that: democracy is community at scale—and fascism is abuse at scale.

Arturo’s reflections on his mother and grandmother provide us the needed emotional anchor. These women shaped his understanding of masculinity through respect and protection. His grandmother’s pride in Afro-Cuban heritage, her insistence on honoring African lineage, and her refusal to erase culture in favor of assimilation illustrate a key point:

“Intelligent masculinity does not erase identity to feel safe. It protects it.”

When asked to define intelligent masculinity, Arturo strips it down to a list of deceptively simple traits: be respectful, be rational, be compassionate, add protection without dominating, and be reflective before reacting. He repeatedly emphasizes that toxic masculinity is not “all masculinity”—it is masculinity stripped of respect—and his framing is refreshingly direct:

“You get what you give in this world. If you want respect, you must give it.”

That golden rule framing—do unto others as you want done unto you—is behavioral discipline.

One of the strongest moments in the interview is Arturo’s discussion of self-reflection. He discusses this through a history of fighting Nazis, defending his family physically, and the responsibility around owning firearms. While also drawing an important line:

Self-reflection is how you ensure you are defending—not becoming the aggressor.

This is critical—as intelligent masculinity requires discipline in force—while shedding the false model of passivity. Arturo’s “three steps ahead” mindset—thinking through consequences before acting—embodies this principle. He offers a powerful insight:

Most of life is outside your control. Your reaction is not.

That distinction may be one of the clearest definitions of intelligent masculinity in the entire series.

Another powerful theme emerges near the end: joy. Even amid all of the political chaos, constructed fears on immigration, targeted threats to Cuba, and rising community instability—Arturo emphasizes finding small moments of happiness. Moments separated from escapism or denial—rather, intentionally using joy as a survival strategy.

In our understanding of intelligent masculinity, joy becomes an integral, intentional discipline—not a vain indulgence—and shows us the power of using it.

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