Bald and Bloviating

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 w...

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 ...

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 o...

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 c...

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. ...

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 start...

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,...

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 s...

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,...

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...

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 on...

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, gra...

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...

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 bullshi...

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 bunk...

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 grow...

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 ...

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 d...

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 book...