Masculinity In Review

This episode takes a single loaded word and uses it to pry open a much larger question: what does it actually mean to be deliberate about how you move through the world? Nick Paro brings Dean Blundell — the Toronto broadcaster, Save America movement contributor, and self-described emotional support Canadian — into a conversation that starts with the word “p***y” and ends with disability rights, and never once feels like it drifted. The throughline is restraint as strength. Blundell’s case is that men who insist on their right to say anything have mistaken volume for power, and that the harder, more masculine move is to weigh the consequence and choose. Listeners walk away with a usable framework: not a list of banned words, but a way of asking why a word is in your mouth in the first place.

The opening exchange reframes language as a question of audience rather than entitlement. Blundell, who is 53 and spent fifteen years in morning radio, is candid that words he once used freely — the slur he won’t repeat, the casual “that’s gay” — are gone from his vocabulary, not because someone forced him out of them but because he read David Letterman in Rolling Stone years ago and decided he didn’t want to “throw another log” on anyone’s already-hard journey. His refusal to grandstand is the point: he doesn’t believe in free speech as a thing without cost, because “there’s a consequence for everything you say and you do.” If a word is costing him reach, dropping it isn’t censorship — it’s just the smart play. That, he insists, is what intelligent masculinity looks like in practice. Nick sharpens it from the male side, noting that it isn’t his place to police how women use their own anatomy in language, but it is absolutely his place to talk to men about the words that aren’t theirs to weaponize.

The middle of the conversation is where the two genuinely diverge, and to their credit they let the disagreement breathe rather than resolving it for comfort. Nick, who describes himself as culturally Jewish, presses Blundell on Gaza — citing Lawrence Winnerman’s argument that what’s happening rises to the level of a Holocaust, and stating plainly that he reads it as genocide, a purposeful campaign toward a Jewish-only ethnostate. Blundell won’t go there, and his reason is methodological rather than evasive: he distinguishes between what he knows and what he’s qualified to adjudicate. He’ll call Netanyahu “human garbage,” Ben-Gvir a genocidal extremist, and the whole far-right faction a hostage-taking of every Jew worldwide — but the legal term “genocide” he leaves to the Hague and to people like Nick who have skin in the game. It’s a live demonstration of the episode’s thesis: two men holding incompatible conclusions without either trying to bludgeon the other into agreement.

Underneath the topical sparring runs a quieter, more durable argument about character. Blundell keeps returning to Marcus Aurelius and the four stoic virtues — courage, wisdom, temperance, justice — not as decoration but as a working filter for everything he publishes. “If I’m wrong, tell me I’m wrong,” he says, framing changeability as strength rather than weakness; he is “unmovable unless the data is proper.” His self-described superpower is the discipline of not caring about what he can’t control, a posture he traces through Mark Manson and back to Viktor Frankl finding joy on the far side of the Holocaust. The danger he names is its inverse: the willful ignorance and “false masculinity cosplaying as alphas” that he calls the real pandemic in North America — people with the whole of human knowledge in their pocket who choose discomfort-avoidance over learning. Intelligence, for Blundell, is simply refusing to be one of them.

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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 Lev Parnas, Beth Cruz, Ashleigh Alauren, Jason Gael, LeftieProf, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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