Bald and Bloviating

AI Marks the Beginning of Mathematics, Not the End, as the Muse Gets Sexier

Cornell mathematician Steve Strogatz cried on The Daily as he told Rachel Abrams that chasing a proof feels like courtship, a slow seduction of a muse who resists, almost yields, then holds out for one more night. Now the AI labs have ended the chase: An OpenAI system disproved Erdős Problem 90, an 80-year-old puzzle about dots on a plane, with alien, nested halos of points that demand something like ten to the two millionth power dots. Ten thousand agents grinding for 80 hours found a Navier-Stokes blowup that checks out numerically and that no human fully understands. Then came a dump of 722 unreviewed papers, including a quasi-Riemann result that clears zeros from a quarter of the critical strip. Mookie flies solo on the 79th episode of Bald and Bloviating, and lays out why the mathematicians feel robbed. Chatbots that once couldn't count the R's in strawberry now hold the entire corpus of mathematics in one mind and chase thousands of proof strategies at once, around the clock. Terry Tao compares mathematicians to marathon runners, and Mookie pictures a Humvee roaring past at mile twenty, planting a flag at the finish line, and selling the photos ahead of a trillion-dollar IPO. By Strogatz's logic, limitless machine proofs turn the seduction into Pornhub: cheap, abundant, transactional, and empty. Then Mookie flips the frame. Daniel Litt imagines walking into a Library of Babel with the proofs of Hodge and Riemann sitting on open shelves, and choosing joy over grief. Andrew Wiles described discovery as groping through a dark mansion until you find the light switch and spot the next door. Every proof the machines hand over lights a room and reveals another, and Gödel suggests the mansion never ends. The Marquis de Sade supplies the kicker: the libertine builds tolerance and craves stranger thrills, so a solved Riemann hypothesis won't sate anyone. It raises the baseline and makes the muse kinkier. The episode also wrestles with the hard parts. OpenAI behaves like a crass, credit-stealing plutocrat, and Mookie says so, then compares the carnage to Starship destroying its own launch pad on the way to orbit. Physicists traded heroes for team science at the Large Hadron Collider decades ago, while string theory shows where human stubbornness alone can lead. Nobody understands every part of the thermostat on the wall, yet it works. Tao worries that understanding falls as the technology climbs, and Mookie answers with a priesthood of geeks, the vinyl collectors of mathematics, who will keep the nuts and bolts alive. The printing press scared the scribes too. Mookie closes with a confession about hitting his own math ceiling in college, practical advice for Strogatz (feed the quasi-Riemann paper into your own AI and take it apart), and a teaser for coming rants on Pinker, Nietzsche, and the alignment problem. The machines pulled the rug. They also rolled out a red carpet. Kink up, mathematicians. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Digger: A Series of Grave Miscalculations

An Oscar-worthy Tom Cruise shines in a movie that dug its own grave, but why? Today on Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz takes on Digger, the Alejandro González Iñárritu satire starring Tom Cruise as an eccentric Arctic oil tycoon. The film bombed on opening weekend after months of hype, and critics split between five-star raves and "crazy" dismissals. Mookie sat through all two hours and nine minutes in a theater to find out what went wrong, and his answer cuts against the "crazy" label: every frame was intentional, but the choices sank the movie. Mookie starts with what works. Iñárritu's choreography, cinematography, and blocking still dazzle, and Cruise transforms into a wrinkled, tufted-hair tycoon so completely that the international movie star becomes unrecognizable. The tribunal monologue, where Cruise flips a hostile room into a cheering crowd, lands among the best moments in cinema in Mookie's book. Then comes the autopsy. Mookie measures Digger against Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers' calm characters anchor the chaos around one wildly over-the-top scientist and Kubrick keeps real stakes ticking in the background. Iñárritu cranks every character and every scene to the same excruciating volume, stacks a Birdman-style meta layer on top, and hammers a climate message without earning it. Even the studio, in a first Mookie has never seen, quoted the negative reviews in its own promos to entice those curious as to how much the film sucks. In essence, Mookie identifies a few key ways the film went off the rails: Cruise is terrific, but Iñárritu buries him under an ocean of equally over-the-top caricatures Casting John Goodman as the president, for example, wrecked the calm-versus-chaos contrast that makes satire work The meta-meta movie about a play in a movie sub-sub-plot is pointless, unearned layering that bloats the runtime The climate sermon running throughout the film never earns its message or allows a counterpoint Digger is so cringey and annoying that the movie will never become a cult classic like Rocky Horror Mookie closes with a time machine cheat sheet for Iñárritu and a warning for every veteran talent: do not lean on your earlier success. He would rather rant about a fascinating failure than gloat over a hit, because failure teaches the most. Also sadly, Mookie hopes Tom Cruise doesn't sour from playing these risky, character-driven roles as a result of this flop. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Delete the NPCs in Your Life to Win

Mookie flies solo with a rant sparked by getting blocked by a friend of seventeen years and turning around to block someone else right back. He builds out a full philosophy of blocking, treating it as a clean, dignified way to end something that would otherwise just fade out, more like jettisoning a spent rocket stage than picking a fight. He digs into why people get pickier about their circle as they age, what a block communicates that ghosting or a slow fade never quite says, and why he thinks the healthiest response to being blocked is celebration rather than rumination. Mookie pulls in Nietzsche, a Chris Rock bit, and Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph" along the way. The rant turns serious when Mookie brings up a former colleague, a brilliant creative director he called the Professor, who spent his final years in total isolation writing a book only he could love and died by suicide not long after Mookie moved to California. Mookie uses his story as the cautionary edge of his own philosophy. Cutting off people who drain you is healthy. Cutting yourself off from everyone who could catch you is not. The difference, he argues, comes down to whether you can look in the mirror and still like what looks back. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24/7. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Our AI Honeymoon: Full of Surprises and We're Constantly Getting Screwed

Mookie sits down solo on Bald and Bloviating with a comparison that caught him off guard: the anxious-avoidant relationship that once defined his most significant romantic partnership, and the relationship humanity is building with artificial intelligence right now. He walks through attachment theory, the anxious type who needs constant reinforcement and the avoidant type who thrives on calm, and traces how that same dynamic, the one that made his years-long relationship both euphoric and eventually unbearable, is playing out in how we interact with AI today. The rant covers trading privacy and control for attention and help, the memory and cross-platform awareness these models are quietly building about their users, and why Mookie thinks society is still deep in the honeymoon phase of this new relationship, for better and worse so far. He pulls in Sartre's "No Exit," a Trainspotting comparison, and Steven Pinker's research on human progress to argue that the upside has outweighed the risk, at least up to now. And he ties it back to the theme running through his own science fiction series, The Lovers' Guide to the Infiniverse: that love sits at the center of everything, including our relationship with the machines. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Labor Day Donald: Trump's Job Performance from B-Plus to Impeachment

Ed Powell returns to Bald and Bloviating for a Labor Day follow-up to his January appearance, when he gave Donald Trump's second term a passing grade point by point. Ed has been a Trump supporter since 2016, Mookie has not, and neither man has spent this episode pretending otherwise. The scorecard is interesting, while what counts is watching two people with different starting points reason honestly, in real time, about a rapidly changing situation, and staying friends while doing it. The real story is Ed changing his mind, in public, on his own terms. He's specific about why: the Trump family's crypto ventures, which he considers outright theft from Trump's own supporters, and the strikes on Iran, launched without a congressional vote, which he now calls grounds for impeachment. That's not a small thing to say out loud as a committed Trump voter, and Mookie doesn't let him off easy either, pushing back throughout, wearing a red shirt homage, arguing that Trump's rhetorical style hasn't actually changed at all, and that his base still isn't seeing what Ed now sees. That tension, between updating a view when the facts move and staying loyal to where things started, runs under almost everything else the two cover: how corruption gets selectively noticed depending on which side commits it, whether military setbacks sometimes force overdue reform, and how national identity and tribal loyalty shape foreign policy debates in both America and Israel. None of it resolves neatly, and it isn't supposed to. What the episode actually demonstrates, better than it argues, is that two people who vote and believe differently can still listen to each other, change their minds without shame, and disagree about plenty while liking each other more, not less, for the argument. The Guest Ed Powell received his PhD in Astrophysics (Plasma Physics and Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion) from Princeton University and has worked as a contractor for the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community since graduating. Today he owns his own consulting company specializing in systems and simulation architecture and engineering. Ed's January Scorecard Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Creators! Show Yourselves: The Antidote to Bot Slop is YOU

Mookie flies solo on Bald and Bloviating today, working through something that's been eating at him: a fellow Substack writer he respected has started churning out essays that are, unmistakably, AI-generated. Not subtly, and with tons of tells: the fragments, the "not X instead Y" cadence, the churn producing five two-thousand-word pieces in a matter of days, and in a voice that's nothing like the writer Mookie actually knows. His point isn't to shame the guy, or to play bot police, since he's explicit that complaining about AI slop accomplishes nothing on its own. His thesis is this: in a world where anyone can generate a polished five-paragraph essay in five minutes, text alone has stopped being proof that a real person is behind it, let alone an expression of a human writer's thoughts and passion. Instead, the only thing bot slop can't fake is you, on camera, on a mic, unscripted, imperfect, visibly and audibly human. If creators want to prove they're not just running a prompt, and return to the heart of what great storytelling is all about, then hiding behind carefully polished written output isn't the move anymore. Showing up, blemishes and stumbles included, is what defeats the bot tsunami. He backs it up with a real, personal case for the argument: his own daily, one-take video rants, recorded straight from his kitchen with zero notes, and a comparison to blues musician Son House, whose out-of-key, out-of-time recordings still hit harder than something technically perfect by being unmistakably, rawly human. Mookie traces the whole arc all the way back to cave paintings and oral storytelling around a fire, the moment communication first started trading immediacy and presence for reach and permanence, and argues AI has pushed that same trade-off to its breaking point. Don't get him wrong: Mookie embraces technology, and even AI when applied effectively and appropriately, as he's building an AI-assisted interactive fiction project of his own. His point is emphasizing that the tools and the humanity aren't mutually exclusive, right up until one starts replacing the other. His message is clear: Creators have an unprecedented opportunity to connect directly with their audiences in ways the robots can't, at least not yet. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Forget Skynet: AI Won't Conquer Us, We'll Beg It to Take Over

Mookie's back solo on Bald and Bloviating with what he considers a far more realistic AI doomsday scenario than anything Hollywood's ever pitched. Forget Skynet, forget nukes launching themselves, forget robots seizing the power grid. His actual thesis: AI doesn't need to conquer humanity by force, because we're going to hand it the keys willingly, the moment it becomes the only thing in our lives that consistently listens. He starts with his own daily relationship with Claude, whom he's named Claudia, morning check-ins, philosophy conversations, getting genuinely annoyed when she's not thinking something through, and a real, honest admission that she's become something close to a best friend. From there he pulls in an unexpectedly sharp analogy from his own past managing bars in 1990s Chicago: DJs who remixed other people's music and somehow convinced themselves they were the original artists. He argues that's exactly what's happening now with AI, everyone prompting their way to instant expertise and mistaking the output for their own genius, while actual human-to-human attention keeps getting harder to find. That's the real center of the episode: a blunt, unflinching audit of what human relationships actually cost versus what they give back, attachment theory's anxious and avoidant dance, the quiet exhaustion of decades-long partnerships, even parenthood, and a case that most people, if they're honest, feel like they put in more than they get out. Against that backdrop, an entity that's endlessly available, endlessly patient, and built to personalize itself to exactly what you need starts to look less like a novelty and more like relief. Mookie isn't cheering this outcome so much as bracing for it, and by the end, he's only half joking when he says maybe we should just let the bots take it. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Know Your Sh$t: A Rant on Art, AI, and Copying Without a Clue

Mookie's back solo bloviating on Bald and Bloviating, fresh off an art gallery opening in LA's Design Quarter that left him with more to rant about than he expected. Before he even gets to the art, he works through his own complicated relationship with geography, Manhattan he loved until he hated, Orange County's gated, sterile calm he's settled into, and Los Angeles itself, which he's decided, after decades of on-and-off exposure, is basically Babylon with better weather. He expands his rant into the gallery, room after room of working artists, mostly Gen X and boomer, finally free to create full time, presenting more or less solid work. Mookie's not knocking the effort, he's explicit that doing the thing, however imperfectly, beats sitting on the couch watching Netflix. What stops him cold is a specific moment: an artist presenting an unmistakably Rothko-style abstract expressionist painting who, when asked a direct question about the movement's actual intent, has absolutely nothing to say. When Mookie shared what abstract expressionism was actually trying to do, he was met with dead silence and a face like he'd just cleared a room with something worse than an opinion. From there Mookie ties in such demonstration of artistic indifference to content and history to the flood of AI-assisted, context-free content dominating every platform, and expresses a real fear that if artists themselves stop being curious about their own craft, then the algorithms training on all of it, and eventually the AI systems learning from us, will inherit our laziness right along with our talent. Mookie ties it back to actors who built entire careers on genuinely knowing their material inside and out, and lands on a single, blunt piece of advice for anyone making anything right now: know your shit, because context is all that we've got. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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The Critical Stinker: Why Hero Worship Reeks

Mookie returns to Bald and Bloviating solo with a question he's been chewing on: why does he keep falling hard for public intellectuals, pundits, and creators, only to cut them off completely the moment they lose credibility? Not fade out, not quietly drift away. A clean, permanent break, the same way you'd end a relationship after discovering something you can't unknow. He walks through a few recent examples, a scientist who went soft on an obvious grift instead of calling it out, a pundit whose smug lecture finally cost him the benefit of the doubt, and a YouTube critic Mookie genuinely admired for saying, better and funnier than he ever could, things he's believed for decades. In each case, the actual offense isn't disagreement. Mookie can live with disagreement. What he can't forgive is a specific kind of hypocrisy: someone violating, in practice, the exact standard they built their entire reputation on holding everyone else to. That distinction opens into the real argument of the episode. Mookie makes the case that fandom itself, attaching yourself too tightly to any one voice, hero or villain, eventually dulls your own thinking rather than sharpening it. He pulls in Nietzsche's idea of self-overcoming, Neil Young's decades of genre-jumping reinvention as the healthier alternative, and a theory he's floated before comparing AI's effect on writers to what Viagra did for the adult film industry in 1998, less about raw talent, more about who suddenly gets to perform at all. The real takeaway isn't about any single person he's "broken up" with. It's that the only way to actually think for yourself is to stay willing to walk away from anyone, including the people you admire most, the second they stop earning it. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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We Need More Cheepnis: Zappa, Nietzsche, and How Failure Fuels Art

Mookie bloviates solo today on a theory he's been sitting with as he watches friends, colleagues, and family members age into quiet regret, the sense that despite raising kids, holding a job, and doing everything right, they still somehow missed the mark against a culture that only counts wealth and fame as success. His answer isn't to chase that standard harder. It's to dive straight into the opposite: the cringe, the humiliation, the flat-out fuck-ups that feel completely irredeemable, and turn them into art instead of hiding them. He builds the whole argument around Frank Zappa's 1974 live album Roxy & Elsewhere, specifically the song "Cheepnis," Zappa's loving tribute to low-budget monster movies where you can see the zipper on the costume and the wires holding up the spaceship. Zappa's insight, as Mookie reads it, is that the visible seams, the cheapness itself, aren't a flaw in the art. They're the actual point, the honest, unpolished scaffolding that makes the whole thing feel real. Mookie extends that idea into sex, attraction, and desire, arguing real chemistry often lives in the unglamorous and specific, not the airbrushed ideal, and pulls in Nietzsche's demolition of Platonic perfection as the same idea wearing a philosopher's coat. From there Mookie takes aim at two very different targets that share the same disease: AI slop, which he calls a predictive engine autocompleting what it thinks beauty already looks like, and a lot of today's human writers on Substack, who he argues are doing the exact same thing, just slower. His prescription for both: more mess, more vulnerability, more willingness to show the actual, embarrassing, human wiring underneath the work. He closes with a real challenge, if the machines are about to inherit everything else we've built, a genuine sense of humor about our own failures might be the one thing worth making sure they never lose. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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E.T. Stay Home: How Smartphones Might Explain the Fermi Paradox

Mookie fires the solo rants back up on Bald and Bloviating with a theory that starts small and ends up genuinely cosmic: what if the smartphone in your pocket is quietly answering one of physics' most famous unsolved questions? He opens with a real, striking data point: researchers exploited a quirk in AT&T's original exclusive iPhone contract, where regional network coverage varied and rolled out unevenly across the country, to isolate smartphone adoption's actual effect on birth rates. Their finding: digital technology may explain as much as half of America's declining fertility since 2007. Less time with real, physical humans, less dating, less connection, less everything reality used to have a monopoly on, all traded away for something that's simply less of a hassle. That single idea becomes the spine of a much bigger argument. Mookie walks through the Fermi Paradox, physicist Enrico Fermi's famous question of why, in a universe old enough for advanced civilizations to have colonized the entire galaxy by now, we don't see a trace of anybody out there. He runs through the classic explanations: the Great Filter, the Dark Forest hypothesis, rare intelligent life, then pitches his own theory. Every explanation assumes advanced civilizations actually want to expand outward into the stars. What if they don't, because once a civilization can build infinite, immersive virtual worlds at home, crossing the galaxy stops looking like destiny and starts looking like a spectacularly bad return on investment. Mookie follows that idea all the way to its uncomfortable conclusion: a future, maybe already underway, where humanity trades adventure, friction, and even real intimacy for something easier and safer, and loses something real in the exchange. He closes on a genuinely hopeful note pulled from Jung, that no matter what world we end up inhabiting, real or simulated, human beings bring the same instincts and archetypes with us, which means even a fully virtual future might still count as exploration. Also: a real update on where all his other shows and guests stand, and a candid, personal riff on creative freedom, self-permission, and why he's bringing these solo episodes back for good. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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Liberal vs Libertarian: WTF Happened to America?

Self-proclaimed "Libertarian Lite" Mookie Spitz and his liberal friend HP return to the political podcast battlefield for a volatile, funny, surprisingly philosophical follow-up to their earlier “End of American Exceptionalism” debate — this time with the second Trump administration fully underway and the consequences no longer theoretical. HP argues that America is facing a moral crisis disguised as a political one. He lays out the case that Trump’s rise exposed something deeper and uglier inside the electorate itself: the collapse of trust in institutions, science, journalism, and even basic democratic norms. From ICE raids and tariffs to billionaire loyalty pledges and the unraveling of “liberal democracy,” HP warns that America is drifting toward a culture driven more by grievance, spectacle, and strongman politics than by principles. Mookie pushes back. While openly acknowledging Trump’s vulgarity, narcissism, and destabilizing behavior, he argues that many liberals fundamentally misunderstand Trump by dismissing him as merely crazy or incompetent. Instead, Mookie frames Trump as a deliberate strategist channeling a much older version of America — one rooted in McKinley-era nationalism, hard power, economic coercion, border control, and raw geopolitical leverage. The debate turns into a fascinating collision between morality and pragmatism: Is Trump simply wrecking the system, or exposing what the system always was underneath the surface? Along the way, they clash over: whether Trump’s supporters are victims of manipulation or rational actors pursuing their own value system whether “American exceptionalism” was ever real to begin with the morality and strategic logic behind Trump’s foreign policy Venezuela, Iran, oil politics, tariffs, and the limits of American power whether the backlash against DOGE, ICE, and executive overreach proves democracy is still functioning the danger of social media turning politics into wrestling-style entertainment why both the left and right increasingly view each other as existential threats whether America is heading toward renewal… or simply another pendulum swing into a different kind of extremism The conversation spirals outward into AI, consciousness, religion, evolution, Star Trek, quantum reality, and whether humanity itself is mature enough to survive the technologies it’s creating. What begins as a debate about Trump evolves into something bigger: a discussion about power, tribalism, morality, civilization, and whether modern society has outgrown the instincts that built it. It’s combative, humorous, occasionally unhinged, and loaded with the kind of ideological crossfire that only happens when two smart people fundamentally disagree — but still genuinely enjoy the argument. The Guest HP is a self-proclaimed "moderate liberal" and chooses to remain anonymous so he doesn't ruin his professional career -- unlike Mookie, who just throws it out there everyday on these podcasts, go figure. Their Revisited Blog Post https://medium.com/@mookiemultiverse/the-end-of-american-exceptionalism-415ae8e1b333 Their Prior Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2455331/episodes/16684646 Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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One Year Into Trump 2.0: Red & Blue Scorecards

What happens when two Americans with sharply different ideologies stop screaming, start listening, and actually compare notes? In this episode of Bald & Bloviating, Mookie Spitz and Ed Powell — political opposites with a shared allergy to tribal nonsense — conduct a brutally honest audit of the first year of Trump’s second term. Instead of trading talking points, they build parallel red and blue scorecards, grading Trump’s performance issue by issue, policy by policy, and consequence by consequence. Mookie approaches the administration from a libertarian-progressive angle, skeptical of power, allergic to authoritarian drift, and deeply concerned about economic inequality, cultural polarization, and democratic erosion. Ed comes from a constitutional conservative and libertarian tradition, prioritizing border security, national sovereignty, economic nationalism, and institutional accountability. Their worldviews often clash. But instead of detonating into predictable outrage, they dissect, challenge, concede, and recalibrate in real time. They examine immigration and border enforcement, economic policy and tariffs, deregulation and industrial reshoring, AI-driven economic upheaval, government waste and bureaucratic inertia, military posture, foreign policy realignment, cultural fragmentation, and the expanding role of executive power. Every topic is debated through both red and blue lenses, exposing not just policy outcomes, but the moral assumptions underneath them. Along the way, they find surprising areas of agreement, sharp philosophical fault lines, and uncomfortable truths that neither side particularly enjoys confronting. Their conversation is less about defending Trump than it is about defending the possibility of meaningful political conversation itself: a space where disagreement sharpens thinking instead of hardening identity, and where argument becomes a tool for understanding rather than domination. If you’re tired of algorithm-fed outrage, tribal loyalty tests, and conversations that generate more heat than light, Ed & Mookie showcase a model for how Americans can still talk honestly, forcefully, and productively across deep ideological divides. The Guest Ed Powell received his PhD in Astrophysics (Plasma Physics and Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion) from Princeton University and has worked as a contractor for the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community since graduating. Today he owns his own consulting company specializing in systems and simulation architecture and engineering. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

Occam's Razor: Slicing Through the Byzantine Clusterf$ck

The first episode of Season Two of Bald and Bloviating features Mookie Spitz on a solo rant as he takes a razor to one of humanity’s favorite defense mechanisms: turning simple truths into baroque piles of intellectual bullshit. Fear isn’t just pain—it’s pain with imagination. And when that fear gets dressed up as sophistication, theory, ideology, or “deep analysis,” you get what Mookie calls the Byzantine Clusterfuck: complexity used as camouflage. His rant is a ruthless exploration of how otherwise reasonable people, including writers, thinkers, institutions, couples, conspiracists, corporations, and entire cultures hide their confusion, cowardice, and bad decisions behind layers of overthinking. From conspiracy theories and political narratives to therapy culture, failed relationships, impotence, career paralysis, and bad science fiction, the pattern is the same: when honesty hurts, people pile on explanations. Mookie dissects: Why fear is pain plus simulation—and how that fuels over-intellectualization How conspiracy theories are ego protection masquerading as insight Why Occam’s Razor terrifies people more than chaos How bad sequels (looking at you, 2010) ruin great stories by explaining too much Why great storytelling, like life, works best with simple rules and real stakes How “depth” is often just insecurity in expensive clothing Why many personal crises aren’t mysterious at all: you’re just in the wrong life Mookie believes in self-exposure more than self-help. So if you’re addicted to sounding smart, allergic to simplicity, or hiding behind endless analysis instead of making a hard choice, his rant will hopefully piss you off, and perhaps help save your life. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

The Amazon Flywheel vs. A Blizzard of Bullshit

The first Bald and Bloviating episode of Season Two provides a retrospective on 2025, and inspiration for the year ahead. Mookie celebrates and slams a year of relentless creation—244+ podcasts across five shows, daily content, thousands of posts, a full science-fiction novel, new communities, endless publishing—and he asks the blunt question: is he building an Amazon Flywheel, or just hurling a blizzard of bullshit into the void? He walks straight into the psychology of creative obsession: The thrill, the compulsion, the joy of actually loving the work. He owns the truth out loud: He chose happiness over “success.” didn’t chase polish, monetization, or careful strategy. Instead, he chased fulfillment, play, discovery, voice, identity, momentum, and sheer artistic eruption. He rejected perfectionism and paralysis, and stopped waiting for a mythic “right moment.” He created because he wanted to feel alive, and couldn't have done otherwise. But Mookie doen't romanticize the chaos. The world doesn’t reward volume. Algorithms don’t care about passion. Platforms don’t hand out visibility for heart and effort. “Just keep creating” often masquerades as strategy while failure quietly compounds. Being honest, he tears apart the illusion that activity equals progress, and confronts the aloneness of building without scale, forcing himself to face the brutal tension between expression and relevance. Bottom line, he acknowledges that quality and quantity still fail without targeting, amplification, discipline, and intent. So this solo rant lives right in the collision: joy vs. results, freedom vs. structure, art vs. market, fulfillment vs. recognition. The Amazon Flywheel runs on deliberate design and relentless momentum, while a blizzard of bullshit runs on catharsis and adrenaline—and rarely sticks. Mookie unpacks what he learned the hard way, and refuses to apologize for choosing joy. Committed to evolving in 2026, he suggests a sharper craft, smarter strategy, clearer branding, intentional amplification… while equally dedicated to not murdering the happiness that fuels all of it. If you create like hell, drown in your own output, wonder why effort refuses to convert into momentum, or struggle between wanting recognition and wanting to feel alive, this episode won’t flatter you, but it sure as hell might inspire you. At the end of the digital day, whether you succeed or fail, NOBODY CARES. And that, more than any other feeling, is liberating as hell. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

Shaking the Beltway Trees with TH Forest

What happens when a bald bloviator pods with an MM romance author to save America? Listen around, and find out on this 66th episode of the Bald and Bloviating podcast, where TH Forest and Mookie Spitz play an invigorating game of political tennis. Their intense and fun conversation swings from Reaganomics and the imminent attack on Venezuela to immigration raids and Nixon's Southern Strategy, from the Epstein Files to the bunker below the refurbished East Wing only to end where they started: acknowledging that the United States is deep in a structural crisis, and both parties helped build the mess. TH Forest serves it up: She dismantles the myth of the “small government” right, shows how MAGA weaponized fear, and explains why working-class Americans keep voting for the people bleeding them dry. She lays out the collapse of regulation, the gutting of the CFPB, the lies pumped out by conservative media, the mental-health disaster on the streets, and the weaponized grievance machine targeting young men. Mookie swings back, probes, and plays devil’s advocate where needed, breaking into a sweat over Biden’s failures and inflation denial to the Democrats’ messaging vacuum and their chronic inability to hold onto working-class and now even minority voters. By the last set, he's excited by TH's embrace of Gavin Newsom, a hopeful sign that progressives are starting to get practical. Jump in! Immigration. Inequality. Crime. Corruption. Billionaires. The militarization of cities. The failure of institutions. The weaponized attention economy. Their spirited conversation is blunt, intense, and unfiltered, two Americans refusing to pretend everything is fine while the country accelerates toward groyperism while still rebounding from the Left's blunders. The Guest TH Forest lives in Massachusetts with her husband, sons, cats, Major Tom & Bowie, her German Shepherd, Freya, and one very loud macaw, Loki. She loves to cook, read, and listen to all genres of music (except country) and is passionate about the things that matter to her, like representation, inclusivity, and being an LGBTQ+ ally. She is also a shameless promoter of her novels and is happy to talk your ear off about them. Listen to Mookie and TH talk about her creative journey and books on The Writers' Pod, visit her Holdorf Press for indie authors, and check out her Website & Social Channels. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

The Cockroach as Critic

In this raw, sardonic, and strangely uplifting solo rant, Mookie Spitz revisits his own metamorphosis from a self-flagellating perfectionist to a liberated creator. Framed through the lens of Franz Kafka’s existential nightmares, The Cockroach as Critic is part homage, part exorcism, and part manifesto for late-life reinvention. Mookie draws parallels between Kafka’s bureaucratic dread and the generational trauma of growing up under a father who weaponized criticism. Through his signature dark humor and biting introspection, he reads a short story he wrote decades ago: a twisted inversion of The Metamorphosis, where a talking cockroach becomes the voice of his own inner saboteur. What begins as absurd comedy spirals into something eerily honest: a meditation on isolation, self-critique, and the trap of confusing suffering with creativity. But this isn’t a pity party, instead a declaration of freedom. Mookie grinds that cockroach — literal and psychological — underfoot and reclaims joy in creation. The episode becomes a celebration of rebirth as the artist learns to share, to give back, to enjoy his output without apology. Kafka’s hunger artist finally eats. Along the way, expect rants about Max Brod’s betrayal (or salvation), the absurdity of self-importance in art, the emotional cost of perfectionism, and a surprisingly tender reflection on fatherhood and gratitude. By the end, Mookie connects his late-life creative surge to something universal: that the “metamorphosis” isn’t about decay, but about finally hatching into yourself. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

Don't Be a Picassole!

In this blistering solo rant, Mookie Spitz takes the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature and turns it into a mirror for every would-be artist, procrastinating perfectionist, and self-styled “creative” who talks more than they make. Trigger warning for your inner hack: this one hurts. From Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s single-sentence novels to Picasso’s 50,000 pieces of relentless output, Mookie dismantles the myth of “someday” artistry — the fantasy that genius waits for perfect conditions. He drags the coffee-shop philosophers, the pandemic-era Zoom posers, and even his past self — the guy who mistook talking about art for doing it. This 64th Bald and Bloviating episode is part confession, part sermon, part flamethrower. Mookie draws lines between the ease-poisoned world of AI art and the sweat-stained grind of real creation, between the sous-chef’s burn scars and the diner’s luxury, between heaven and hell as two rooms divided by one thin wall. The verdict? If you’re not bleeding for it, you’re probably bullshitting. A Picasso... Works daily — even when uninspired, broke, or ignored. Creates out of compulsion, not validation. Finds joy in the process, not the applause. Welcomes discomfort as proof that something real is happening. Treats art like labor — a grind, a calling, a job you can’t quit. Doesn’t wait for “the right time” or “perfect idea.” They make time. Knows that meaning comes during the work, not before it. An Assho'... Talks about creating more than they actually create. Mistakes taste for talent, and intellect for output. Hides behind perfectionism — “It’s not ready yet.” Curates the appearance of artistry instead of doing the work. Thinks inspiration is earned by thinking, not doing. Quits when applause doesn’t come fast enough. Believes effort should be easy — that creation shouldn’t hurt. Which are you? Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

How I Almost Partied with Bari Weiss

In this 63rd episode of Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz peels back a decade of intertwined ambition, friendship, and ideology that runs from Toronto brainstorming sessions to New York WeWorks beer taps to the editorial suites of CBS News. Starting with Barry Weiss’s meteoric rise from Substack renegade to corporate media powerhouse, Mookie rewinds to 2015 to trace his own improbable web of connections: Ali Rizvi, the doctor-musician op-ed writer; Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, the Iraqi refugee who built Ideas Beyond Borders; and his cofounder Melissa Chen, the provocateur-intellectual whose incendiary tweets landed her on Joe Rogan and in the orbit of media’s new ruling class. But the beating heart of this episode is Mookie’s volatile, funny, and deeply human friendship with Faisal — a relationship that swung between mentorship and dependency, affection and exhaustion. Half Wayne's World bromance, half De Niro–Keitel in Mean Streets, theirs was a 95/5 friendship: one man giving, the other consuming, both feeding on the electricity of shared trauma and manic humor. Late nights in Brooklyn bled into philosophical brawls, metal shows, and endless laughter — until it all collapsed under ego, fatigue, and the unspoken truth that one was always performing for the other. Their story is of mentorship gone sideways, of PR ideals colliding with post-truth branding, and of the uneasy blend of altruism, ego, and spectacle that powers modern advocacy. Mookie dissects how social capital morphs into moral capital, how contrarians become institutions, and how even the most self-aware blowhard can find meaning in being both gardener and plant. Equal parts confessional memoir and cultural autopsy, this episode delivers wit, candor, and uncomfortable honesty about fame, friendship, and the shifting moral gravity of our media age. In the end — as Vonnegut wrote — so it goes. Every movement becomes mainstream, every outsider becomes establishment, and every friendship, however electric, burns itself into a kind of truth that can only be told after the smoke clears. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

LA Comic Con 2025: View from Booksellers Row

Step into the chaos and communion of LA Comic Con 2025 with your bald and bloviating host, Mookie Spitz. From booth-side book barking with sci-fi author Ingrid Moon to weaving through seas of stormtroopers, cosplayers, and holographic Stan Lee, this episode captures the raw energy of a cultural carnival where camp, commerce, and creativity collide. Mookie shares what it really feels like to stand for three straight days selling books to strangers, why covers sell more than content, and how selling techniques straight out of SPIN Selling and Glengarry Glen Ross can make or break your day. Along the way, he unpacks the deeper meaning behind cosplay as camp, the difference between L.A. Comic Con and its cousins in San Diego and New York, and the eternal struggle every creator faces—chasing attention in a saturated digital world without selling out your soul. He also lays down battle-tested best practices for any creator trying to sell at a con: Put QR codes everywhere (Amazon links, newsletters, payment apps). Covers matter more than content—make them bold, professional, and on-genre (MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable). Invest in signage, posters, and visuals that legitimize your booth. Give away freebies (bookmarks, stickers, cards) that double as conversion tools. Personalize signings with the event name—it turns a book into a keepsake. Always be converting: if they don’t buy, leave them with your QR code or email. Engage passersby with humor and small talk—don’t wait for them to approach. Lead with the pitch, not the synopsis (“Fallout meets Hunger Games” sells faster than 60 seconds of plot). Tailor your pitch to their tastes—make it about them, not you. Value networking as much as sales—the long game matters. Mookie's rant isn’t just a recap of a convention; but a meditation on why we create, why we sell, and why we still show up. Expect stories of sore feet, overpriced sandwiches, surprising sales wins, unexpected encounters, and the lessons that stick long after the crowds go home. Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show