“What if I’m just a fucking grasshopper? What if that’s what I am? Am I not good enough? I mean, grasshoppers exist. Grasshoppers are valid. Grasshoppers bring value to the world.”
~ Lawrence Winnerman ~
Masculinity In Review
This discussion never says the word “masculinity” until the last ten minutes, and that turns out to be the point. Nick Paro brought Lawrence Winnerman back to talk about better humaning, and what they got instead was a ninety-minute demonstration of it — we follow each other’s tangents through Dungeon Crawler Carl, bioweapons research, Apple’s AI strategy, and a children’s fable about an ant. Watch what we do with the hour and you get a working model of the thing Intelligent Masculinity keeps circling: men talking about ideas without performing certainty, and about themselves without apology.
Lawrence’s account of how he writes ends up being our theme throughout. He describes himself as a “pantser” — a writer who works without an outline, letting the story reveal itself — and then admits that his characters feel like real people in another dimension telling him how their lives go. That sounds like a craft anecdote until he explains what he found there: writing a novel set in the fractured United States of 2042, he realized every one of his main characters was queer, and decided to make that his signature rather than a discovery to be edited around. He is 56, and says it has taken him this long to conclude “this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” The self-knowledge arrived through the work, not before it — which is the opposite of how men are usually told to find themselves.
The AI material is where Lawrence is most useful and most alarming, because he is not speaking as a critic outside the industry. Twenty-five years at Microsoft and Amazon ended with him pushed out of a tech program-management career by the same technology he now uses daily; he has a Claude subscription, taught himself MCP integrations and skill creation, and built a working app — Moondark.app — without knowing how to build apps. That dual position gives his warning weight. He walks through a Stanford result in which an LLM trained on bacteriophage genomes generated thousands of novel designs, 300 were synthesized, and 16 of them lived and replicated. His conclusion is not that AI is bad but that the frenzy is driven by the same scarcity logic as bioweapons and nuclear research: get it before they do, whoever they are.
The counter-argument he offers is genuinely structural, and it’s the most practical thing in this discussion. He splits the field into builders and layerers — labs racing to own all human information versus companies betting intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous and the interface is what matters. He puts Apple in the second camp and reads its apparent AI lag as a deliberate bet rather than a failure. Nick extends the frame outward: the United States does not have to win the model race to matter, it can be the layer that learns from nations already regulating AI and digital privacy better. Lawrence pairs it with concrete policy — a digital bill of rights covering your likeness, your voice print, your DNA, and a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Alaska’s Permanent Fund, taking public stake in the frontier labs that trained on all of our writing. That is what a reimagined economy looks like when someone stops describing the disaster and starts drafting the alternative.
And then there is the grasshopper. Lawrence’s closing thought — that he hates the ant-and-grasshopper parable because it teaches children to aspire out of their own nature — lands as the episode’s real argument about men. The parable is the whole script: be industrious, be useful, produce, and if you make art or play the fiddle you are the cautionary tale. His rejection of it is not a rejection of work. It is a refusal of the premise that there is one correct shape for a life. Nick’s addition sharpens it further — do not let the ant tell you that you cannot become a butterfly either — and the two of them arrive, through a fable, at a version of masculinity that has room for transformation in it.
Lawrence Winnerman writes The Hinge and the Near Field, co-hosts The Daily Whatever with Dana DuBois, and serves as COO of Blue Amp Media. This conversation covered his serialized queer science fiction, the Rewiring the Republic series analyzing 43-odd fixes for American democracy, the case for an integrative economy built with Ann Kramer, and a hard-eyed read on where AI takes us. He is exactly the kind of guest this series needs — a man who found out what he was in his fifties, said it out loud, and then spent the rest of the hour arguing that everyone else should get to do the same.
Sources & References
The Hinge and the Near Field — Lawrence Winnerman’s Substack, home to his serialized novel and the Rewiring the Republic series
Moondark.app — the void-of-course moon tracker Winnerman built with Claude
Nuclear War: A Scenario and its follow-up on biological war, by Annie Jacobsen — the books driving Winnerman’s threat assessment
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman — the LitRPG series anchoring the episode’s opening discussion of tragedy and craft
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Nick’s Notes
I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!
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Thank you Amelia Hall, MSW, CPACC, Ashleigh Alauren, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️🌈, Ayana Madrone 🌻, Ms.Yuse, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lawrence Winnerman! Join me for my next live video in the app.
