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.

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