G-0PEXN4B5CS Pasco – I Went to Mexico to Expose Corruption and Came Back to Fix Myself - The Brave Man Project with Hamish Niven

Episode 8

Pasco – I Went to Mexico to Expose Corruption and Came Back to Fix Myself

Published on: 12th August, 2026

Pasco – I Went to Mexico to Expose Corruption and Came Back to Fix Myself

Pasco sold everything, flew to Central America with a backpack full of camera kit, and set out to break a corruption story that would make his name. Somewhere in Mexico, he realised the story was about him — and that shaming people changes nothing.

Sound Bites

  • "I was reliant on weed to relax me. I was reliant on it to go to sleep. I was reliant on it to come down off an energetic day."
  • "the more I do this work of practicing self-reflection and witnessing others, I realised the more it is all about the stories we tell ourselves, our identity, who we are is made up of these stories"
  • "the sustainable change is the slow one, it's the hard graft, it's the individual, it's never gonna be these big, big changes"
  • "In fact, I've not been in a Men's Circle where a man has decided not to share."

Pasco Ashton

6 men on Hackney Downs, sitting on the grass through the summer of 2020 because it was the only place they were allowed to meet. Pasco had been to one men's circle, liked what it did for him, and asked his mates if they were up for it. They said yes. 4 ½ years later, there are now 55 trained facilitators, running Circles across Europe, 1 Circle in the USA and 1 on the way in Asia.

Ashton got there the long way around; ecology, photography, Al Jazeera, chasing a career of service he couldn't quite name. 2 close friends took their own lives. He was smoking weed every day to get to sleep. And the big-systems change he'd spent his twenties mapping turned out, in the end, to run through one man at a time.

What We Explore

  • Losing two friends to suicide, and the internal loneliness of being a man with no one to talk to.
  • The "cheeky" joint, the "social" cigarette — the small words we use to shrink our own behaviour
  • Why macro-scale greed and power struggles are just someone's internal fear, scaled up
  • What actually makes a room psychologically safe, and why "safe space" has stopped meaning anything
  • Rejecting money for four years, then realising it's the water of the system and just needs to flow

Mentioned in This Episode

  • No More Mr. Nice Guy — the classic men's workbook where a lot of men first find the words "Men's Circle"
  • Vice and Al Jazeera — where he worked as a journalist before walking away from that path
  • Mexico — the assignment where he realised blaming and shaming doesn't create sustainable change
  • His Dads' Club in Sheffield. Where 350 local dads joined, inside a year

Connect with Pasco

Free trial: four circles, no cost, no obligation — and the circles are the core of it. Members also get the two annual UK hikes and ad hoc London events. Pasco's note on finding them: just search "Men's Circle" and they're there.

Website: https://menscircle.club/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/menscircle.club/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@menscircle_club

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@menscircle.club

LinkedIn – Pasco: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pasco/

LinkedIn – Men's Circle: https://www.linkedin.com/company/menscircle/

A little about Hamish Niven

For 25 years, I lived a life that looked successful from the outside. Inside it was falling apart, and I was throwing fuel on the fire — addiction, alcohol. I was on a steep path to self-destruct.

November 2018. I chose life, and had to change everything.

I built The 13th Room because nothing like that existed when I needed it.

The Brave Man Project — this podcast. It is about men, but not just for men. Men who broke under the weight of their own performance. Men who rebuilt and climbed so much higher.

The 13th Room is a space for the successful man who needs to change and knows it. 13 sessions, you and me. No fixing. Pure witnessing. Starts with a free 20-minute conversation.

Podcast website: https://thebravemanproject.com

Hamish's website: https://hamishniven.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBraveManProject

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamishniven/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamish.niven

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamishniven/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hamishniven

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About the Podcast

The Brave Man Project with Hamish Niven
Stories of men who have fallen and climbed higher.
This is not a podcast about fixing yourself. You are not broken machinery.

The Brave Man Project is for the man who is brilliant at his job and dead behind the eyes - the one everyone swears is fine. Raw, unedited conversations with men who wore the mask so long they forgot their own face, and men who took it off and found the world in Technicolour.

No formulas. No five-step plans. No burnout experts. Just the truth about what falling cost them, and what it actually took to build something real.

The show moves through two lenses.

The Mirror reflects the lie you've been telling yourself: "I'm alright, mate." Men who were Captain of the Universe, who loaded bricks onto their backs until the weight turned lethal - the heart attack at thirty-seven, the iron mask worn through a marriage, the three drinks needed to sleep. Then they fell. And they chose to look. Their story is your story, a few years back. And they got out.

The Window expands the view. Men who woke up and saw in colour - not because their circumstances changed, but because they did. They don't reflect your collapse. They prove you were never broken to begin with. The Mirror asks, "is this you?" The Window asks, "could this also be you?"

Your host, Hamish Niven, spent twenty-five years filming other people's lives while avoiding his own. Professional, reliable, the man who always showed up - all of it a performance. When addiction brought him down, he didn't find recovery. He found the man buried alive under his own competence. He holds the space here the way he wishes someone had held it for him: no judgement, no advice, no applause.

This is for the man tired of the noise and the bullshit. The man exhausted from carrying a mask. Whether the universe is currently kicking you into the foetal position, or you're simply sick of the black-and-white grind.

The performance is over. The real work starts now.

About your host

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Hamish Niven