Bald and Bloviating

Mookie Spitz
  • 5.0 (1)
  • News Commentary
  • Updated Weekly

A nonpartisan bald news junky talks to his fellow Americans from all political stripes, and dissects top stories and rants about their implications -- along with other personal, science, and tech discussions.

  1. Sep 27

    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

    Delete the NPCs in Your Life to Win

  2. Sep 23

    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

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

  3. Sep 7

    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

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

  4. Sep 6

    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

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

  5. Sep 2

    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

  6. Aug 31

    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

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

  7. Aug 27

    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

    The Critical Stinker: Why Hero Worship Reeks

  8. Aug 24

    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 f**k-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

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

A nonpartisan bald news junky talks to his fellow Americans from all political stripes, and dissects top stories and rants about their implications -- along with other personal, science, and tech discussions.

Information

  • Creator
    Mookie Spitz
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    78
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Bald and Bloviating
  • Show Website
    Bald and Bloviating