Bald and Bloviating

Nine months in, and Trump’s second term has officially birthed, leaving the American left shattered, stunned, and scrambling. In this blistering episode of Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz digs deep into the wreckage of the Democratic Party—not through polls or punditry, but through the raw, lived experiences of four former true believers who now feel betrayed, abandoned, and politically homeless.

Meet Kevin, the Latino science ner...

Mookie Spitz takes listeners on a winding journey from a 1998 car overflowing with chihuahuas to the existential crossroads of human creativity in the age of AI. Using a hilarious yet unsettling analogy of a cat and chihuahua locked in a grotesque ecosystem, Mookie frames the future of digital content as a similar closed loop—one where large language models (LLMs) devour everything we’ve ever written, filmed, posted, or recorded.

He...

Part four of Inside the Infiniverse plunges into the escalating rivalries that drive the heart of Mookie Spitz’s multiverse saga. At this midpoint of Jonnie Fazzoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine, tensions between characters reach new heights, shaping the direction of the story.

At the center is Jonnie, a broke hustler chasing redemption—or at least another big scam—by building a universe-jumping machine inspired by an allur...

In this high-octane episode, Mookie Spitz takes listeners back to the chaotic pulse of the mid-90s with one of his favorite pieces from his Metro Mookie days. Sir Speedie, Lord of Crystal and Duke of Meth, is a fever dream of a story about a man who bends time, stretches space, and lives four days’ worth of life in one manic, drug-fueled sprint.

Through Speedie’s wild eyes, we experience a world where sleep is irrelevant, every mome...

In this third installment of Inside the Infiniverse, Mookie Spitz dives even deeper into the opening Episode of his new sci-fi novel, Jonnie Fazzoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine. What begins as Penny Pitz’ routine interview for her Thrillionaires Under 30 list mutates into something far more volatile—a Gen Z date masquerading as journalism, where attraction and revulsion keep flipping the table.

Penny walks into Jonnie Faz...

Mookie Spitz reads Whacking Moki, a short story based on a true story that captures the brutal clarity of nature and the unexpected bonds forged in the face of death.

The tale follows Dieter Dunt, a former Alabama radical who reinvented himself as a diner owner in rural Wisconsin, and his friendship with Leo and Tess Tesla, a Jewish couple from Chicago who escape urban sprawl by immersing themselves in the rugged northern wilderness...

Mookie Spitz rewinds to 2001, when French beauty queen Elodie Gossuin was crowned Miss France—and almost immediately became the subject of a tabloid-fueled smear suggesting she was transgender. What started as a rumor spun by the New York Daily News spiraled into a cultural flashpoint, one that exposed deep veins of transphobia, media sensationalism, and societal discomfort with identity long before “woke” was even part of the lexi...

Mookie Spitz dives into the world of management archetypes with a mix of humor, hard-earned scars, and unfiltered truth. Drawing on his chaotic years running Chicago nightclubs in the 90s—where powder-fueled nights bled into daylight columns for control-alt-delete op-eds—Mookie revisits lessons that still hit hard in the corporate world today.

He breaks down the three types of managers you’ve either worked for, worked with, or—if yo...

In this blistering solo episode, Mookie Spitz rips away the sanitized headlines and drills into the raw truth behind Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Far from the usual media spin, Mookie lays out how the Netanyahu government—propped up by hardline ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir—is systematically turning Gaza into an unlivable wasteland while accelerating settlement expansion in the West Bank. The goal? Not peace. Not c...

In this riotously sharp episode of Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz takes listeners back to the wild, sweaty nights of Chicago’s 1990s dance club scene. Drawing from his time as a barback, bartender, and eventually club manager—plus his Nightlines magazine columns—Mookie resurrects a brutally funny and painfully honest list: the Top 10 DJ Pro-Tips, with a focus on Driving Club Managers Insane.

With the bite of someone who’s seen it...

Mookie Spitz lays out a blisteringly clear thesis: today's AI "creators" are often nothing more than digital-era DJs—bullshit artists hiding behind technology, mistaking curation for creation, and swaggering with a confidence they haven’t earned.

Drawing from his lived experience as a 1990s nightclub bar manager, Mookie compares most of the ego-soaked DJs of that era—who stood in booths playing other people’s records ...

Mookie Spitz tears apart the flimsy fabric of modern etiquette, dragging it through the mud of our digital cesspool. What starts as a deep dive into why Nixon chose to resign—bowing to protocol over narcissism—explodes into a sweeping, honest exploration of how those old norms have been obliterated by the almighty attention economy.

Welcome to the age of the troll, where behaving badly isn’t just tolerated, it’s fetishized. Where so...

Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace — not because he legally had to, but because he bowed to etiquette, tradition, and the unwritten rules of political “decency.” In this episode, Mookie Spitz unpacks that moment in history when decorum outweighed actual law, especially when the law was murky or absent. Nixon didn’t have to quit. He chose to — because back then, the script said he should.

But today? That script’s in flames. From Nixo...

Jewish agnostic Chicagoan Mookie Spitz and Muslim agnostic Canadian Ali A. Rizvi — who grew up bouncing between Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Pakistan — dive headlong into one of the planet’s most radioactive debates: the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

It’s a showdown years in the making. Normally aligned on nearly everything, from atheism to trashing fundamentalists of all stripes, this time they find themselves on diametr...

Mookie Spitz brings you the next installment of the unhinged director’s cut you didn’t know you needed. In this series, he takes apart his novel Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine — laying bare the cosmic insanity, twisted characters, and philosophical rabbit holes that drive it.

This pod digs into Episode One: The Birth, where we meet Alice — a quadrillion-year-old Boltzmann brain born out in the frozen corpse of ...

Mookie Spitz rants about the messy power dynamics that shape our relationships. Inspired by a fiasco where he got kicked off X for flooding timelines with his novel, Mookie pivots to something way deeper: why so many of us are stuck in lopsided connections where one person gives everything and the other barely gives a damn.

He introduces the 95/5 principle — a stark look at how one partner ends up pouring in 95% of the love, energy,...

Mookie Spitz unleashes a cynical, hyperverbal annotation of his new novel Jonnie Fazoolie & The Transfinite Reality Engine through the layers of his latest cosmic fever dream designed to enthrall readers, writers, sci-fi nerds, existential thrill-seekers, or far as this pod goes masochists who want to hear an author lose his mind about his own creation.

Expect spoilers galore here, because this show is meant for people who have ...

Mookie Spitz dives headfirst into his manic creative process — from obsessively shaping his sci-fi novel Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine into rigid three-line paragraphs, to pulling off an audacious stunt: tweeting out the entire damn book, line by line, every hour, for 200 days.

This is part confessional, part masterclass in embracing constraints to spark creativity. Mookie breaks down why arbitrary rules (like...

In this expansive solo episode, Mookie Spitz takes listeners on a hallucinatory, high-concept journey through the philosophical backbone of his new novel, Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine. The focal point? A chapter titled “Hating Mondays," featuring an object so conceptually loaded it makes Borges’ Library of Babel  look like a cozy bookshelf.

Mookie starts with literary ground zero: Jorge Luis Borges and t...