Intelligent Masculinity | With Ann Kramer

Beschreibung

Masculinity In Review Nick Paro sits down with Ann Kramer — a licensed therapist of more than thirty years, creator of the Life Puzzle model, and a clinician who long ago walked out of what she calls the disease model of counseling — for a conversation that begins with a 10-year-old’s temper tantrum and ends, by way of Elon Musk’s bunker, with a vision for a post-AI economy. Ann’s framework is deceptively simple: a human being is built from five edges — physical, emotional, thinking, sexual, spiritual — and the work of a life is filling them in, piece by piece, over decades. The framework is also a quiet indictment. If you walk through the world feeling hollow, in Ann’s reading, it is not because you are broken. It is because nobody taught you how to build the thing that should have been there. Listeners can take the model home and use it: as a parent, as a partner, as a person trying to figure out why the success is not landing. The episode’s most important sentence comes early. “At birth, you have no self,” Ann says. “You have a potential.” That single line reorganizes the rest of the conversation. We are, in her account, a learned species rather than an instinctual one — a salamander knows how to be a salamander twenty-four hours after birth, but a human baby, in her words, “don’t know shit.” The self has to be assembled, and the assembly is developmental. The physical edge starts around age two and ideally finishes by six. The emotional edge starts around seven, when the brain has the equipment to manage what it feels, and “hopefully by about 25 we’ll finish this edge to be really pretty good at it.” The thinking edge kicks in around nine or ten with the neocortex, and the sexual and spiritual edges arrive later — the spiritual one, in most lives, not until the 30s, because we spend our 20s catching up on the work nobody did with us as kids. The framework is patient by design. It treats a person not as a diagnosis but as a construction site. What Ann does with that construction site is the heart of the episode. When Nick describes his son — high IQ, ADHD, emotional dysregulation, “two, maybe three years behind his age in emotional development” — Ann does not reach for a label. She reaches for a metaphor. “If you were teaching him to, say, rollerblade, or a physical skill, right, you wouldn’t put him on, say, a skateboard one time, send him down a hill, and go, ‘Dude, what’s the problem? Why’d you fall off?’ You would know he would go down that hill 25 times before he finally got it right.” Emotions, she argues, are no different. “Practicing emotions is no different than practicing skateboarding. You know, it is repeat and try again, repeat and try again. And we instead, we shame.” Her refrain — “practice, practice, practice” — is not a slogan. It is a rebuke of an ABCD pass-fail culture that asks ten-year-olds to perform emotional mastery on a single take and then punishes them when they cannot. The brain, she reminds us, is still rewiring itself until twenty-five. The patience the kid needs is the patience the parent has to learn first. The hardest piece of advice Ann offers in the whole hour is also the most practical. Nick asks how to stop being more critical of his son than of his daughter — how to break the projection that turns “is he manning up?” into a parenting reflex he didn’t choose. Ann’s answer is two moves long. First, wait till five: breathe in on a five-count and use the breath to ask yourself how you want to handle this. Second, ask yourself how you are feeling before you ask him. The criticism, she says, is almost never about the child. It is the residue of a culture that has been “permeated” into the parent, “whether you like it or not, it’s inside you.” The point is not to be a perfect parent. The point is to slow down long enough to notice when the script of your own boyhood is reaching for the steering wheel. This is where the analytical-literary voice of the show earns its keep — because the move Ann is describing is small, unglamorous, and the single most consequential thing a father can practice. It is also, not coincidentally, the same move she will later prescribe to a billionaire. The pivot to the manosphere is where the episode stops being a parenting primer and starts being a diagnosis of the culture. Ann is unsentimental about Musk and Altman and Thiel and Vance and the Curtis Yarvin school Nick calls “the Rasputin of the day.” “Men especially are taught to look outside themselves, that they are their money, their power, right, their titles,” she says, and she has the receipts — her late husband was a CIO, the marriage put her in rooms full of these men for decades, and she sent more than one of them home to her office. The line that will stick is this one: “Power and self were totally two different things.” Adolf Hitler is her example, deliberately chosen and almost shockingly delivered. He had power. He did not have a self. Musk, in her clinical read, did not have a father who nurtured him; “early on, you boys learn how to just cut off from those emotions. Don’t feel. Go external. Try to get more power. That’ll make me feel good about myself. But it’s an empty — it’s truly an empty thing.” The bunkers, the rocket-measuring contests, the bare-knuckle pursuit of unlimited growth — all of it, in Ann’s frame, is a tell. These are men who never built the inside of themselves, so they keep trying to buy a replacement on the outside, and the outside keeps refusing to take. That diagnosis carries into the episode’s most surprising turn. Ann is not just a therapist with a framework. She has written, she says, a paper called An Integrative Economy: Building the Most Vibrant Economy Ever Imagined — a proposal for a transitional economy organized around wholeness rather than unlimited growth, designed for the world AI is about to deliver to us whether we are ready or not. Her case is unglamorous and exact. The Sam Altmans of the world, she argues, cannot envision a humane post-work economy because they cannot envision a humane interior. “The Sam Altmans, they don’t understand what they’re creating, because they’re so disconnected from their own wholeness, that they can’t envision creating a world where, yeah, great, if AI can help us while we are having these vibrant lives, versus AI: you’re out of work, you’re starving, you’re homeless.” Nick adds the policy hook — universal basic income, government as a service that pays its shareholders, a small-business economy of skill exchange — and Ann sketches her own fantasy in answer: a national volunteer service registry that lets community hours bank like Social Security, plus an income paid to “human capacity development professionals” who build wholeness for their neighborhoods within a one-mile walking radius. The proposal sounds utopian until you notice what it actually is — the suicide-watch story she tells, in policy form. That story is the one to sit with. A man came to one of Ann’s six-week wholeness workshops in Virginia. He had been fired without cause after twenty-seven years at the same company, was on suicide watch, and his entire identity had collapsed because the only edge of his life puzzle he had ever filled in was work. Halfway through the first session, he walked up to Ann on a break. “Wow, I have to thank you. For the first time in my life, I discovered there are 15 other pieces in my life other than this.” Two years later she ran into him and his wife at a restaurant. The company had called him back. He had taken three weeks to return the call. When he did, he told them he was not bringing the same old Joe back — that they were going to change the company, that work mattered but so did the marriages and the children that work had nearly cost him. The story does a lot of quiet work in the episode. It is the proof of concept for the framework. It is also the punchline to the line about the tech bros. Power and self are two different things, and the man who almost died from the absence of one came back, two years later, with the other. The skill Ann gave him is not exotic. She gave him fifteen pieces of paper and asked him to consider that he was bigger than his job. The closing arc lands the show’s central argument with the gentleness of a clinician and the bite of a critic. The men running the manosphere — Tate, Rogan, Fuentes, Shapiro, the influencer-industrial complex Nick names directly — are doing, in Ann’s reading, what the culture taught them to do. “They are doing what our culture teaches them, which is money and power. They’ve succeeded in that. So therefore, ‘I’m somebody.’” The cost is in her office. “I know these men, because I’ve been — in my office, you know, later, they’re crying. ‘I don’t know who I am. Everybody thinks I’m so cool, but deep down inside, I’m this lost puppy.’” The Netflix documentary on the manosphere comes up; every man in it, Ann says, wanted nothing more than to be truly loved by a woman, and every one of them was performing the version of masculinity that guarantees they will not be. Nick takes the line one step further: the underlying hunger is not even to be loved by a woman. It is to be allowed to love yourself. The episode’s argument, finally, is that the manosphere is a business model that sells external power as a substitute for an internal self — and the substitute does not work, has never worked, and is producing a generation of boys who will need decades of therapy to find what they could have been given in childhood for free. Ann Kramer is a licensed therapist of more than three decades, the creator of the Life Puzzle model of wholeness, and the writer behind the Substack Fractured World, Build Wholeness. The interview covered her five-edge framework for building the self, her clinical critique of the disease model of counseling, the developmental case for “practice, practice, practice” in a pass-fail culture, the parenting reflex of projection and how to interrupt it, the emptiness she reads in the powerful men of the tech-bro era, and her sketch of an integrative economy for the post-AI world. What Ann expands in Intelligent Masculinity is the show’s most rigorous interior architecture to date — a clinical, unsentimental, deeply patient theory of why the men breaking the country are the way they are, and a working, repeatable, neighborhood-scale answer for the rest of us. The series has always argued that better humaning is a practice. Ann’s contribution is the blueprint of the thing we are practicing toward. ~ Nick Paro [https://substack.com/@nickparo] Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! [https://shop.sickofthisshitpublications.com/] * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner [https://www.broadbanner.com/] Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form [https://forms.gle/4WSu8qGkSA7Wxbh98] Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org [https://5calls.org/] Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me [https://deflock.me/] Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project [https://www.ordersproject.com/] * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs [https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/] Thank you Nieta Greene [https://substack.com/profile/117743522-nieta-greene], Ashleigh Alauren [https://substack.com/profile/337755654-ashleigh-alauren], Jai C. Porter🇨🇦 [https://substack.com/profile/27349799-jai-c-porter], Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli [https://substack.com/profile/319295271-assemblywoman-debra-mazzarelli], Michael deCamp [https://substack.com/profile/1680348-michael-decamp], and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 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!. Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off [https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever] * Forever at 60% off [https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver] For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com [info@sickofthisshitpublications.com] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe [https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Intelligent Masculinity | With Jonathan Buchwalter

Masculinity In Review * Check out Jonathan’s sci-fi book series, The Night Sky Trilogy [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D55XBNRT?binding=audio_download&ref_=saga_sdp_cft_dsk&qid=1779415940&sr=8-1] Nick Paro sits down with Jonathan Buchwalter — a Holocaust and 20th-century U.S. history teacher, Shelton State adjunct, TikTok historian, and as of a few days ago the newly-elected chairman of the Tuscaloosa County Democratic Party — for a late-night, second-of-the-day Intelligent Masculinity conversation that moves from a 1930 Berlin landlord dispute to a 2026 American press conference without ever changing subjects. Jonathan’s argument, built brick by historical brick, is that the strain of authoritarianism running through American life right now is best read alongside the rise of European fascism — not because the costumes match, but because the propaganda machinery does. His definition of intelligent masculinity, when he finally lands it in the closing arc, is the cleanest answer the show has gotten in months: “mastery over the reptile.” The hour is a working tutorial in why those two things — the political diagnosis and the personal practice — are the same conversation. The episode opens with the Horst Wessel story, and it is worth slowing down to hear what Jonathan does with it. Wessel was a brown-shirted street-fighter in the early Weimar period, killed in 1930 by communist street-fighters after he allegedly threatened an elderly landlady the communists had been looking after. Joseph Goebbels turned the corpse into a movement. “You don’t have to look too hard to see really similar circumstances in our recent history,” Jonathan says, “the death of a propagandist being manipulated into the story of martyrdom for the cause, the use of a corpse really.” He names Charlie Kirk. Nick adds Stephen Miller as the modern Goebbels analog, and notes that the church-with-the-Christian-flag-above-the-Stars-and-Stripes he drives past on his way to Tulsa is where the propaganda actually took. The point is not that Kirk is Wessel. The point is that the technology of martyr manufacture is older than the men running it, and that knowing the history is the only way to recognize the technique in real time. What follows is the most rigorous discussion of religion-and-fascism the series has hosted. Jonathan’s comparative move is to treat religious institutions as variables rather than constants. Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were both authoritarian projects that had to negotiate with deeply organized churches — the Vatican, with its money and its pulpit; the Lutheran Protestant set, with its anti-Semitic inheritance and its Christian charity simultaneously. Mussolini’s acolytes talked about a new civic religion of fascism and then quietly conceded that they had to stand alongside the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church had hard power. The Nazis split the difference: one faction wanted to Christianize Hitler into a savior figure; Himmler’s faction wanted the church to be the next enemy after the communists and the Jews. America in 2026 has no such institution to negotiate with. “Now American organized religion is far less organized,” Jonathan says, and so what fills the vacuum is “disparate megachurches that share some school curricula” — the Church of the Highlands and its pseudo-college, ministering trainings, sponsored Christian universities — nothing remotely like the Lutheran Church of Germany. The friction this analysis produces is the most useful kind. It refuses both the lazy “it can’t happen here” and the equally lazy “it’s the same thing.” It tells you which lever is missing. The Pete Hegseth section is where the historical thread meets the cultural one, and where Jonathan’s central thesis crystallizes. He traces the American religious-political schism back to the late 1920s and 1930s — the Christian socialist tradition of a populist Christ versus the more reactionary, oligarchal tradition of a Christ who helps those who help themselves — and walks it forward through Bill Buckley Jr. versus Martin Luther King Jr., two equally religious men asking opposite questions about who God is to us. The earlier authoritarians, in Jonathan’s reading, believed things. The early Nazis got shot at Beer Hall Putsches; they took real beatings in real street fights with communists. Hegseth has never known struggle. His ideas, Jonathan says, “move in line with whatever is most beneficial to him in the moment.” The cross tattoo, the Christianized masculinity, the sloppy-drunk press conference videos — these don’t create friction in him because there is no underlying belief for the behavior to grind against. “It’s just pure ego. It’s just pure aesthetic.” This is the diagnostic frame the rest of the episode operates inside: an authoritarianism that has stopped pretending to believe in anything beyond its own self-preservation, and a brand of masculinity that has stopped pretending to believe in anything beyond its own image. That frame is what turns the gym-bro section from a sidebar into the show’s payoff. Jonathan grew up in gym culture — his stepdad Jamie was a professional bodybuilder — and his account of the “old heads” is unsentimental but generous. They were honest. They told nineteen-year-olds the truth about tren and test: it will make you absolutely massive, it will also put you at enormous risk, it is not good for you, it is superman serum. The modern MAHA-flavored manfluencer is, in Jonathan’s read, a liar by job description. He sells supplements he knows don’t work, takes gear he won’t admit to, and gleefully tells nineteen-year-olds — boys at the peak of their natural testosterone production, with the best growth vector they will ever have — to start blasting. The bill, Jonathan warns, is years out: an epidemic of joint pain in men’s late twenties, fried testosterone in men trying to start families in their early thirties, men who cannot pick up their own kids because they picked up too much weight at nineteen on a substance they were lied to about. The aesthetic that authoritarianism sold to Hegseth is the same aesthetic the manfluencer sells to the seventeen-year-old: a costume of strength that costs the strength itself. Jonathan’s diagnosis of the seventeen-year-old is precise enough to quote in full. Every generation of young men has wanted women and not known how to talk to them — that part isn’t new. What is new is that the kid can now ask his question of an algorithm instead of a big brother or a dad or a friend, and the algorithm has product to sell. It tells him birth rates are women’s fault. It tells him his sexual market value is low. It tells him to get his jawline sorted, do bone smashing, blast a bunch of tren, and the women will flock. “And it’s all feeding this cycle of anxiety,” Jonathan says. “None of that is approachable, realistic, or grounded in reality in any meaningful way. And so it doesn’t solve your problem. So you get more anxious and you get less able to talk to women and you get less able to interact meaningfully with other people around you. And you come off as more and more of a freak.” The kid goes back to the influencer for more of the thing that made him worse. The dependence forms. The sense of self gets outsourced to “freaks on the internet who are lying to you to sell you something.” Nick connects it to looksmaxxing’s Adam archetype and notes — pointedly — that Adam is the most beta man in scripture, since he let a snake (and Nick has a stronger word for what that snake was) steal his wife. The series’s gleeful crassness on this point is part of its argument: the manfluencer’s Bible Story is a worse reading of the text than a podcast joke. The counterprogramming is Jonathan’s grandfather and his stepdad Jamie, and the episode earns its emotional weight in those passages. His biological father, as far as he knows, is still in jail — long history of drinking, of physical abuse, never around. His grandfather was a steel-industry worker with no education and a history of abuse of his own, and what Jonathan saw in him every day was a man who provided, who asked after others, who shared what he loved. Jamie, his stepdad, was a blue-collar bodybuilder who met a bookworm where the bookworm actually lived. Every Saturday morning, like clockwork: breakfast together while the girls slept, Dragon Ball Z, then the gym. “He just welcomed me into that part of his life without reservation. And didn’t make me feel weak because I couldn’t pick the weight up, didn’t make me feel stupid because I didn’t know how the emotions worked. He was just there showing me how it worked and trying to meet me in the nerdy shit that I was into and bring that in to the physicality that he was into.” That is the opposite of the manfluencer transaction. It is presence instead of product. It is, in the show’s working vocabulary, intelligent masculinity in practice. Jonathan now has a one-year-old son and a daughter, and he names the reservoir directly: he is passing the goodness Jamie gave him forward. The hour’s best definition is also its quietest. Jonathan calls intelligent masculinity “mastery over the reptile” — the discipline to say, I have these big angry feelings, but that doesn’t mean I need to hit something with a stick about it. I feel this drive toward this objective, and that doesn’t mean I have to step over people to get there. When mastery happens, he tells Nick, you find you are not just more satisfied — you become an example. He texted his best friend James recently from the couch, his daughter under one arm, his son enamored with the colors on the TV, his wife laughing at her phone beside him: “This is the most like a man I’ve ever felt in my life, because I had people that loved me and people that I loved and people that I knew could trust me and that I could trust. And that is mastery over the reptile.” Nick’s own definition lands beside it like a matched pair — “the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of our actions and values.” The four rapid-fire questions out of Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” close the loop. Jonathan’s answer to as mysterious as the dark side of the moon is the line that should hang on the studio wall: “The words you have up here should always outnumber the words you have out here.” Jonathan Buchwalter is a high school history teacher, a Shelton State Community College adjunct in 20th century U.S. and Holocaust history, a TikTok historian at @JohnsterTruck, the newly-elected chairman of the Tuscaloosa County Democratic Party, and the author of The Night Sky Darker — a science fiction trilogy he describes, with great wife-vouched confidence, as “Star Wars if it was written for grown-ups.” The interview covered the propaganda mechanics of martyrdom from Horst Wessel to Charlie Kirk, the comparative role of religious institutions in fascist projects then and the disorganized evangelical landscape of American authoritarianism now, the puritanical sexual shame at the root of the American oligarchal strain, the empty-aesthetic Hegseth archetype, the manfluencer-to-looksmaxxing pipeline weaponizing teenage anxiety, the patient masculinity Jonathan inherited from his grandfather and his stepdad Jamie, and the mastery-over-the-reptile practice he is passing forward to his own son. What Jonathan expands in Intelligent Masculinity is the show’s clearest synthesis to date of its two long-running threads: the political and the personal are the same diagnosis, and the practice of intelligent masculinity is what refuses both versions of the empty aesthetic. The history teacher’s lesson is the activist’s lesson is the father’s lesson. Read more, talk less, master the reptile, and be visible about it for the boys who are watching. ~ Nick Paro [https://substack.com/@nickparo] Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! [https://shop.sickofthisshitpublications.com/] * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner [https://www.broadbanner.com/] Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form [https://forms.gle/4WSu8qGkSA7Wxbh98] Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org [https://5calls.org/] Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me [https://deflock.me/] Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project [https://www.ordersproject.com/] * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs [https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/] Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!. Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off [https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever] * Forever at 60% off [https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver] For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com [info@sickofthisshitpublications.com] Thank you Evan Fields [https://substack.com/profile/12442489-evan-fields], Courtney M 🇨🇦 [https://substack.com/profile/136249074-courtney-m], Under the Golden Boot [https://substack.com/profile/173216193-under-the-golden-boot], Ms.Yuse [https://substack.com/profile/322112054-msyuse], Donna Dupont [https://substack.com/profile/61210574-donna-dupont], and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe [https://sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Gestern1 h 6 min

Intelligent Masculinity | E33 - Ellie Leonard

“When people don’t know you’re coming, they don’t know how to stop you. And so I feel like they don’t know I’m coming. And so I’m just tiptoeing in.” ~ Ellie Leonard ~ Masculinity In Review Nick Paro sits down with Ellie Leonard [https://substack.com/@redpencilscript] — Substack writer, mother of four, and one of the independent journalists pulling Epstein survivor stories out of the place legacy media stopped looking — for a conversation that begins as a check-in and turns, by degrees, into an argument about who gets to tell which stories, what it costs to tell them, and what kind of men are produced by the homes that raise them. Ellie has been on the show before, back when she was still introducing herself as “the unpaid writer.” She rebranded to the Panicked Writer; Nick floats “the less panicked writer” as the next iteration, since her rent is paid now and the panic in her face has visibly loosened. The joke holds the whole episode in miniature. Ellie has always done serious work. Now the work is finally feeding her, and the rest of us are catching up to what she’s been doing all along. The path here was not short and it was not glamorous. Ellie reached out to over 200 literary agents and was rejected by 153 of them; the rest ghosted. She wrote two books that nobody would publish. She came up through transcript correction work — the kind of behind-the-scenes labor that, as Nick points out, can make or break a case in court — and through years of fly-on-the-wall proximity to the Weinstein, Woody Allen, and Kanye stories. When she pitched her own writing on those subjects, the publishing industry told her, in so many words, that they were tired of women reclaiming their narratives. They were bored. That sentence, casually delivered by a literary gatekeeper, is the thing the rest of the episode keeps circling. The bored editor is the Maxwell-letter problem in microcosm. When the institutions that exist to surface these stories decide they are bored of them, the stories don’t stop being true. They just stop reaching the public — until someone like Ellie picks up a Substack and starts writing them anyway. She came to Substack at the urging of her close friend Tiffany Torres Williams [https://substack.com/@modernjezebel] of The Modern Jezebel, who told her to come write because she loved it. The plan was cathartic. Memoir-esque. A little fiction for her kids. And then the election happened, the Epstein stories started moving, and her writing turned. She doesn’t claim it was strategic. She calls it curiosity. Curiosity, in Ellie’s case, turned out to be a discipline — the kind that produces investigative reporting at the rate she now produces it, with a network of sources and survivors and other writers she could not have imagined before this year. Her word for the year, borrowed from Tiffany’s habit, is “plot twist.” She means it. What she has stumbled into is something the rest of journalism has nearly forgotten how to do. She talks about Maritza Giorgio [https://substack.com/@maritsageorgiou] of the Grounded Podcast [https://substack.com/@groundedpodcast] scooping her up — the calls at 11 p.m., the texts at 2 a.m., the constant low-grade communal triage of writers and journalists who have decided that the work matters more than the byline. Katie Phang and Jim Acosta call her up to ask what she’s working on, what’s stressing her out, how they can help. People share information instead of hoarding it for the scoop. That, Ellie says, is what true journalism looks like when you actually find it — and it does not look like the news as we have been trained to understand it. It looks like dishes being washed and dinners being eaten while people break down what they know on the phone with each other. The legacy version of the business — the one obsessed with breaking news and exclusivity and access — has been so thoroughly captured by celebrity and money that the actual work of telling the public what it needs to know has migrated to Substacks and podcasts and group threads. Ellie is one of the people the work migrated to. The Michael Wolff line lands like a thrown punch and lingers like a bruise. Wolff called Ellie and several other women who have been writing about the Epstein files and called them opportunists. He told them they were caught up in hysteria. Ellie’s read of that is precise: when men of his stature in the industry use words like “hysteria” against women who are reporting on the abuse of children, they are not describing the women’s behavior. They are describing their own discomfort at being reacted to. “I didn’t ask you to do that,” she says of the men whose work she now critiques, “but you did it, and now I’m reacting to it.” That sentence is half the thesis of this whole episode in one breath. Powerful is the word she keeps using for women who do not perform smallness on cue. Hysterical is the word the people who built the structure use back at her. The gap between those two words is where the work lives. The conversation about the language we use lands hard, and it lands without becoming a lecture. Ellie is unsentimental about which words have to go and which we are still pretending are fine. “B*tch” still gets a free pass in music, in casual conversation, in books — Nick names the Dungeon Crawler Carl series specifically and agrees with affection and frustration in equal measure. “Karen” has no male equivalent that lands the same way. “C*nt” is normalized in MAGA discourse against women in the administration whom Ellie and Nick both consider monstrous. Both of them refuse to use it anyway. Ellie’s argument is the unfussy one: we have moved on from words about other groups when we decided to. We can move on from these too. It is not, she says, a burden to learn something new. She mentions a trans person in her life and the work of relearning pronouns and a name; it was not intuitive, and it was not impossible, and it got easier quickly because she stayed consistent and did not make the relearning somebody else’s job. That is the whole argument she’s making about language, scaled up. Nick offers his own corollary, half joke and half operating principle: if you have to insult someone in the regime, use male anatomy, because men’s anatomy is the weak one. Kick a man in the balls and he falls down. Kick a woman in the same spot and she does not. He’s making a point with a grin, but the point is real. The slurs we have been handed are almost all built from the assumption that female bodies are the soft target. They are not. The bodies the slurs were supposedly built around belong to people who carry, deliver, and feed children — the most physiologically demanding work the human animal does — while the actual fragile equipment hangs off the men insisting otherwise. The joke, in Ellie’s hands and Nick’s, becomes a small piece of evidence in the larger case the episode is making. The story we have been told about who is strong was a marketing campaign, and the campaign has been losing for a while. The hour’s most generative thread is the one about raising boys. Ellie has three sons and a daughter, and she talks about her household with the matter-of-factness of someone who long ago decided that the home is not a small project. Her boys come home from school saying things — “that’s a boy job,” “boys can be soccer players, Charlotte can’t” — and they do not get condemned for it. They get a conversation. Their pockets are deeper than her pockets and they notice it; she tells them yes, that is a great question, here’s why. She breastfed all four kids tandem-style well past the cultural cutoff, which means the woman’s body in their household was first a thing that fed them and only later, somewhere out in the world, a thing the magazines sexualized. Her boys grew up associating breasts with hunger and care. The grocery-store checkout aisle was the place that tried to teach them otherwise. Some grocery stores, she notes, have figured this out and gone to family-friendly checkouts. The fact that the rest haven’t is one of the small structural ways boys are quietly trained, before any of them have language for it, to read women as decoration. She is similarly clear about why she will not let her boys’ rights be eroded by the work of teaching them about her daughter’s. Equality, in Ellie’s house, is not subtraction. The boys are not made smaller so the girl can be made bigger. They are taught that all four of them are full people and that the things they will hear at school and on screens are stories, not facts. She watches them grow up gentle and she does not mistake gentleness for weakness; she names it as the result of hearing real conversations at home about real things. This is where Ellie quietly answers the show’s central question without being asked. The home, she says, is 80% of how a small child develops. You do not get to control everything that comes at them out in the world. You get to control what they hear from you. That is what she’s done. Nick brings the definition into the room — intelligent masculinity as the refusal to outsource accountability and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and Ellie immediately folds it into something she’s been working on independently. Even the worst men in public life, she says, would tell you they think they are trying to be better every day. The ones doing the most damage are very often the ones with the strongest internal narrative that they are the heroes of their own story. The work, then, is not just the disposition; it is the willingness to actually look at whether the disposition is producing anything. She tells the Antioch, Tennessee story to make the point. She and her husband worked at a car dealership outside Nashville right after they got married. The casual racism was not casual. She set a single boundary on her first day — if I hear it around me, I leave — and the people around her recalibrated immediately. She did not change their hearts. She did not need to. She made it expensive to perform the worst version of themselves around her, and they stopped doing it. That is what living your values looks like in a room where most people aren’t. It is small. It is repeated. It works. The discussion of confronting friends arrives through a chat question and lands on the same point. Both Ellie and Nick agree: you have to do it, and you can do it without humiliating anyone. You pull them aside. You tell them quietly that the word bothers you. You do not deliver a sermon. The friends who care about you will adjust. The ones who don’t will reveal themselves, and the revelation is information you needed. Ellie tells the story of being a kid in a Montana family that used words she didn’t understand were wrong, and a more progressive family that loved her enough to tell her. She was not crushed by the correction. She was grateful. That is the model. Not policing. Loving people enough to give them the chance to grow. The episode’s quietest and most devastating moment comes near the end. Last fall, in Ellie’s network, a 12-year-old boy fell off a parade float during a homecoming parade and was killed in front of his entire community. Everyone is still grieving. Ellie uses the moment not as a digression but as evidence. The boys who saw it happen have been told their whole lives that boys don’t cry, that they have to be strong for the women, that emotion is a thing to be managed and not a thing to be felt. She asks the obvious question: how heart-wrenching is it that we have built a culture where a child cannot break down and weep over a thing that demands weeping? The answer is the whole reason this show exists. We do not teach boys not to feel because feeling is dangerous. We teach them not to feel because the system that profits from masculine performance needs them numb. Ellie’s house teaches the opposite. There is good crying and there is manipulative crying — her kids know the difference — and the good crying, the legitimate kind, is welcome. You can come hug her. You can sit alone. You can do whatever your body needs. That is a working definition of a healthy household, and it is also a political position, whether anyone in the household calls it one. The Mulan lightning round closes the episode with Ellie at her sharpest. Swift as a coursing river: trust your gut and your first response when something happens. Force of a great typhoon: she is not afraid to speak her mind, even when she has been told her whole life she is too loud. Strong as a raging fire: she is a mom, and anyone who steps in front of her kids will see her burn down the world. Mysterious as the dark side of the moon — and this is the line that contains the whole thesis — the bad dudes in the Epstein files have never heard of her, do not take her seriously, and do not know she’s coming. “When people don’t know you’re coming, they don’t know how to stop you.” She is, by her own account, just tiptoeing in. The men whose names the publishers got bored of hearing are about to learn that the boredom of the institutions did not protect them. It just delayed her arrival. What Ellie expands in the series is something few other guest have quite done: she takes the question of intelligent masculinity and locates it inside the homes where boys are made before the world gets to them, and inside the journalism that tells the public what those boys’ future targets actually did. She is doing both jobs at once — raising three sons against the script and writing toward a public that the legacy press decided was tired of survivor stories — and she is doing them with the same disposition. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don’t hoard what you know. Burn down the world for your kids if you have to, and write the article either way. ~ Nick Paro [https://substack.com/@nickparo] Thank you Beth Cruz [https://substack.com/profile/178744313-beth-cruz], Soso's World [https://substack.com/profile/309303179-sosos-world], Jai C. Porter🇨🇦 [https://substack.com/profile/27349799-jai-c-porter], Miss Myra [https://substack.com/profile/35461989-miss-myra], Farmers AGAINST trump. [https://substack.com/profile/277849637-farmers-against-trump], and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard [https://substack.com/profile/39376636-ellie-leonard]! Join me for my next live video in the app. Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! [https://shop.sickofthisshitpublications.com/] * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner [https://www.broadbanner.com/] Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form [https://forms.gle/4WSu8qGkSA7Wxbh98] Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org [https://5calls.org/] Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me [https://deflock.me/] Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project [https://www.ordersproject.com/] * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs [https://www.bcognitionlabs.com/] Nick’s Notes I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective [https://1acollective.com/] Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off [https://sickofthis.substack.com/50forever] * Forever at 60% off [https://sickofthis.substack.com/60saver] A special thank you to those who are a part of the Sickest of Them All ~ Soso [https://substack.com/profile/309303179-soso] | Millicent [https://substack.com/profile/5428714-millicent] | Courtney 🇨🇦 [https://substack.com/profile/136249074-courtney] | Eric Lullove [https://substack.com/profile/66521654-eric-lullove] | Terry mitchell [https://substack.com/profile/32751953-terry-mitchell] | Carollynn [https://substack.com/profile/301213629-carollynn] | Julie Robuck [https://substack.com/profile/208030486-julie-robuck] | Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙 [https://substack.com/profile/356845797-masonsheher] | Kimmy Win [https://substack.com/profile/180488664-kimmy-win] ~ For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com This is a public episode. 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7. Mai 20261 h 0 min

Intelligent Masculinity | With Ann Kramer

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