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Masculinity In Review
A photographer with a doctorate in biology is not the obvious guest for a show about masculinity, which is exactly why this episode works. Nick Paro brings on Jason P. Odell — self-employed in Colorado Springs, a PhD out of UC Riverside “back in a previous lifetime” — and the conversation turns quickly into something other than a politics segment. It becomes an argument about how anyone decides what is true, and what happens to men, and to a country, when evidence is no longer permitted to change a mind. Jason names the mechanism early: the refusal to “allow any evidence to alter our worldview,” and the decision instead to “alter the world to support our worldview.” Nick pulls that back toward the series’ own working 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.” What comes out of the hour is a practice rather than a position: check yourself, then go find a room where you are not the smartest person in it.
The sharpest stretch is not about the administration at all. It is about a Democrat. Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the election official convicted of tampering with voting machines, and Jason — who voted for him twice — refuses to soften it. He walks through what was actually available to anyone who thought the sentence ran long: an appeals court, a parole hearing, the ordinary machinery of a judicial system. Polis instead reached for executive authority right after the legislature had recessed for the summer, which Nick names on the spot as “the coward’s way.” What Jason wants from the moment is smaller and harder than partisanship — “forget masculinity for a minute, just straight up leadership” — the willingness to say out loud that in the state of Colorado the rule of law applies to you too, and that “you don’t get off easy because your political positions differ from mine.” The failure isn’t ideological. It’s a man holding real authority and spending it, as the two of them land on it, “performing for an audience of one.”
Underneath the politics runs a quieter argument about knowledge, and it may be the most durable thing Jason brings. “Science by design, it is a process,” he says. “It is not a dogma.” The point is not that scientists are always right; it is that the entire apparatus is built to say this is the best explanation we have given what we know today and then survive being wrong tomorrow. He illustrates it twice — with a biology textbook from the mid-1950s that had essentially nothing to say about DNA because the structure hadn’t been published yet, and with a paper from the mid-90s, funded by nobody famous and certainly not Moderna, that got a piece of mRNA into a living mouse cell and watched it make the intended protein. Thirty years later that unglamorous result underwrites the mRNA vaccines, which an FDA is now reluctant to approve. Government pays for basic research, Jason argues, precisely because “a company will not invest a trillion dollars into an idea that may never pan out.” Certainty is the cheap thing. Revisable belief is expensive, and we have stopped paying for it.
The best question of the episode is Nick’s, and it isn’t about Washington. He notices what Jason didn’t say — “what I did not hear you say is that you feel guilty” — and asks how a man keeps an honest accounting of his advantages without collapsing into self-flagellation. Jason’s answer is unusually clean. He names specifics: grandparents who promised to cover college before he was born, a mother home for most of his childhood, public schools that actually worked, a health insurance premium that “went up 600% this year” that he is still, by his own admission, lucky enough to pay. Then he declines the guilt outright — “you can’t diminish yourself for accomplishing something, even if you had assistance” — because he still had to attend class, still wasn’t a straight-A student, still barely got into graduate school, still learned “real quick that I was not the smartest one in the room.” What privilege changes is the road, not the destination: “the barriers that you had were quite lower than the barriers that a lot of other people have.” Nick draws the line where it belongs — “when privilege becomes entitlement, we’ve crossed a line” — and Jason answers that what we are watching now is “entitlement writ large.”
Jason P. Odell writes The Photographer’s Perspective, came to Substack in January of 2025 to make himself write again, and carries a biology doctorate he now mostly uses as a lens on what public life has lost. Across the hour he and Nick worked through RFK Jr. and the dismantling of federal health agencies, Colorado’s purple political geography, the shift from a parent asking a child what went wrong to “lawnmower parenting” that mows down every obstacle before the kid reaches it, and Nick’s ledger argument that USAID returned about “$1.20” for every dollar spent — that “it is more profitable to save lives than it is to kill them.” The closing Mulan round found Jason quoting John Wooden on being swift as a coursing river — “be quick, but don’t hurry” — describing the typhoon as acting from “informed intelligence and trying to lift up others at the same time,” measuring the raging fire by finishing what he starts even “if it takes till two in the morning,” and locating his own mystery in the plain fact that “we don’t always present everything on the outside that we have on the inside.” What he adds to Intelligent Masculinity is the scientist’s particular humility: not a man who has the answer, but a man who has a method, and the nerve to let it prove him wrong.
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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 Amy Gabrielle, The Rebel Crone (Shālah), Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, Nieta Greene, Sandra, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jason P. Odell 📷! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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