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“So using the words to just tell somebody you can be vulnerable won’t necessarily gain the action that you intended to give. I would say that just like children, modeling that you’re vulnerable is much more of an effective way.”
~ Kyle Pacheco ~
Masculinity In Review
Kyle Pacheco ( ClearRoot Intelligence) spent an hour this week describing a pattern most men will recognize and few will name out loud: you don’t learn manhood, you copy it. He talked about mirroring men he now knows were harmful, about a stepfather’s affair that reshaped his sense of what a father is, and about the moment he realized the friends around him didn’t actually care about him or each other. What makes this conversation matter isn’t the wreckage — it’s what he did with it. Kyle treated his own past as source material to be studied rather than a story to be defended, and that distinction is the entire practice. Better humaning is not the absence of bad models; it’s the deliberate work of becoming a better one.
The sharpest idea Kyle offered is that vulnerability can’t be granted by announcement. Telling a man “it’s okay to cry” leaves him exactly where he was, because the invitation costs you nothing and proves nothing. “You’re not showing me your vulnerability,” Kyle said, “so why would I be vulnerable?” His alternative is to go first and keep going first — say out loud at work that you go to therapy, name the ADHD, admit the thing you’re still bad at. He described people at his job responding to that openness who “probably wouldn’t have done it on their own,” and later described colleagues pulling him aside for conversations he never solicited: “I didn’t walk up to them and say, you can talk to me anytime you want. They perceive it by the way I act.” The safety was never offered — it was demonstrated until it was believed.
The modeling runs closest to home with his kids, and Kyle was clear that the most honest thing he does as a father is apologize. He admitted he sometimes raises his voice with his four-and-a-half-year-old instead of slowing down, and that his repair now sounds like: that was a mistake, I’m sorry I raised my voice, and what you were doing still isn’t okay. That’s accountability moving in both directions in the same breath — the father holding himself to the standard he’s asking his son to meet. He extended the same logic to his marriage, noting that the relationship his son sees every day for eighteen years is the template, right down to whether affection is something men show in front of other people. Kids pick up far more than we credit them for, which means the lesson is being taught whether or not we intended to teach one.
Kyle also complicated the search for a male figure worth copying, and this is where the episode earns its title. His model turned out to be his grandfather — born in 1932, GOP for most of his life, and someone Kyle disagreed with ideologically — who nonetheless treated his wife with a consistency Kyle hadn’t seen anywhere else, taught him woodworking, held him accountable, and refused to go to bed angry. More striking, the grandfather changed: in his seventies and eighties he came around on people he’d spent decades opposed to. Kyle called that the most impressive thing about him, and he’s right — the willingness to be wrong in public, late, is itself a masculine skill worth mirroring. Intelligent masculinity is not about finding a flawless man to imitate. It’s about being able to identify the specific, transferable behaviors worth carrying forward and leaving the rest.
None of this stays private, which is why the void matters. We didn’t lose young men because someone else was louder; we lost ground because good men vacated the rooms where culture gets made and assumed the next generation would sort it out on its own. Kyle’s answer is to occupy those rooms deliberately — at work, at home, in the neighborhood, and in the in-person communities he’s trying to rebuild alongside the digital ones. That’s the same discipline behind ClearRoot, the civic-literacy tool he’s building to link money, votes, and action so that being upset can become being useful. Modeling and building are the same reflex pointed at different scales.
Kyle Pacheco is the founder of ClearRoot, a senior sales manager, a new MBA, and a father of two who came into this conversation having already done the reflection it asked of him — he said outright he didn’t want to hold back. That preparation is its own answer to the question of how you model better humaning: you show up having already done the work in private, and then you do it again where people can see. He expands this series by demonstrating that the practice scales — from a bedtime apology, to a coworker who finally asks for a minute, to a tool built so strangers can act on what they learn. Refuse to outsource your accountability, live with the consequences of your values, and let people watch you do it.
Sources & References
* ClearRoot — Kyle’s civic-literacy and research platform (currently in beta; feedback welcome via the in-app form or contact@clearroot.ai)
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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 Beth Cruz, PJ Schuster, Ann Kramer, ArleneMach, Donna Dupont, and many others for tuning into my live video with ClearRoot Intelligence! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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