Bald Ambition

Mookie sits down with John von Seggern—jazz bassist turned EDM pioneer, educator, and tech innovator—to explore the fault lines opening in the music industry as AI floods the gates. From synthetic Spotify hit-makers like Velvet Sundown to LLMs capable of pumping out a thousand generic tracks a day, AI is rewriting the rules of artistry, authorship, and authenticity.

But John’s not panicking—he’s building a blueprint. As the founder of Futureproof Music School, he’s developing a new kind of music education: AI-assisted, human-centered, and ruthlessly focused on originality. Together, Mookie and John get deep into how musicians can harness AI without becoming prompt-puppets—using it to enhance workflow, not replace their soul.

They also tackle:

• The collapse of aesthetic standards in the age of generative sludge
• What music schools get wrong—and how Futureproof is rewriting the model
• Why creativity must involve friction, failure, and struggle
• Building communities that fight back against algorithmic mediocrity
• The rise of personalized learning powered by AI, not dictated by it
• The growing crisis of musical differentiation in an over-saturated, under-inspired landscape

Whether you’re an amateur producer, a session veteran, or an AI skeptic trying to make sense of the chaos, this episode is an engaging conversation about where music is headed—and what it will take to keep humans in the loop.

The Guest

John von Seggern, CEO and founder of Futureproof Music School, brings over 30 years of experience as both a professional musician and an education innovator. After leading online programs at Dubspot and Icon Collective, he saw firsthand how rigid, outdated models failed to meet the needs of today’s artists. In response, he created Futureproof—a music school that blends personalized mentorship with AI-enhanced learning, offering students flexible, scalable, and industry-relevant training.

A longtime collaborator with avant-garde legends like Jon Hassell, von Seggern grounds Futureproof’s curriculum in real-world musical expertise. His project-based, tech-integrated approach empowers students to build their own creative identities while mastering the tools of modern music production. With Kadence, the school’s AI tutor, and a focus on community-driven learning, von Seggern is redefining what it means to prepare artists for the music industry of tomorrow.

The School

https://futureproofmusicschool.com/.

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Mookie Spitz flips the script on digital fame and asks: how do you become famous not with humans, but with the machines that shape our world? As a marketing strategist turned content creator, Mookie blends insider PR knowledge with his hands-on experience as a micro-influencer to expose the weird new rules of visibility in the age of AI.

He shares how ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are quietly scraping, dissecting, and reassembling every piece of content you put online—turning even the smallest blog or podcast into part of a vast AI training set. Along the way, Mookie recounts the surreal moment he asked ChatGPT about himself and got back a detailed, eerily accurate portrait pulled from his own work, plus an otherwise largely overlooked friendship with singer Beck.

From “doping” the algorithms to flood them with favorable data, to the rise of “clankers” who abuse AI for cheap content, this episode dives into how brands, governments, and everyday creators are already gaming the bots. Mookie argues that AI is now the ultimate PR audience—and knowing how to prime it might be the most important media strategy of our time.

Whether you’re an influencer, marketer, or just curious about how AI is rewriting the rules of reputation, this provocative episode breaks down the future of fame in a machine-driven world.

Beck is a Winner, Baby!

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Sci-fi author Ingrid Moon returns to the pod, this time with voiceover wizard Scott Allen. They join your gloriously bald host, Mookie Spitz, for an unfiltered ride through the making of Biohunter—a post-apocalyptic sci-fi love story between a deadly alien tracker and a teenage human target. They talk shop about audiobooks, content repurposing, and self-publishing in the age of AI. 

Ingrid reveals how the novel began as a pseudonymous writing challenge—complete with a mystery book cover and fake name—and ended as a full-fledged sci-fi saga complete with morally conflicted characters and actual emotional stakes (imagine Dances with Wolves meets The Most Dangerous Game, with fewer buffalo and more cloning). Mookie compares notes on the struggle of doing bad German dominatrix accents while reading his own fiction out loud. Scott shares war stories from behind the mic—including the horror of accepting a voice gig before reading the manuscript, only to find out midway that it goes full weird.

They deep-dive into audiobook production (hint: color-coded dialogue and wrestling with audio files), the psychological toll of switching voices like a caffeinated sociopath, and what it’s like to hear your own writing read back to you in someone else's voice—better than you imagined but also slightly unsettling, like hearing your dog say your name.

Then it gets existential. AI narration, KDP’s soulless “Read Now With a Robot” button, and the philosophical death spiral of bots making content for other bots. Can real emotion survive a whispering LLM? Do the robots stutter convincingly yet? Does anyone really read anymore, or are we all just huffing 10-minute audio chunks while reheating lasagna?

It’s a heartfelt, hilarious, and occasionally unhinged conversation about storytelling, collaboration, and fighting for human creativity in the face of algorithmic mediocrity. Perfect for writers, listeners, aspiring voice actors, and anyone terrified that their next favorite novel might be written—and narrated—by Skynet. Spoiler: Ingrid and Scott are still human. For now. And Mookie remains bald. Surprise! 

The Author

Ingrid Moon is an author, editor, and science teacher. She currently has four science fiction novels, three audiobooks, and three science reference books for worldbuilding, with more on the way. Ingrid is a Southern California native who can't surf because she spent most of her youth navigating mountains and watching sci-fi television, all of which inspired her writing career. 

Her Resources

book website: https://bit.ly/biohunter 

author website: https://ingridmoon.com

Sign Up for Newsletter: https://bit.ly/moon-news 

The Voice Talent

https://scottallenvoice.com/

Ingrid On the Pod

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2455310/episodes/17466904

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"Ambition" is taken for granted in our society, a baseline for behavior, and a prerequisite for success and happiness. But at what cost? 

An even more fundamental ask: Why do we persist? Camus called suicide the only serious philosophical question. In this searing episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz confronts that question head-on, tracing two suicides — Andrew, the consummate overachiever whose perfect life crumbled under a mysterious twitch, and Jacob, the anxious recluse who finally pulled the trigger after securing freedom from work.

These weren’t random chemical misfires. They were dark, paradoxical answers to lives misaligned with their owners’ deepest needs. Jung suggested our unconscious mind doesn’t negotiate; it sabotages what it hates. Sometimes a panic attack is your soul pulling the fire alarm, desperate to stop the charade before it’s too late.

Mookie cuts past easy pop-psych platitudes to ask brutal questions:

• What if your depression is your psyche’s last-ditch effort to save itself?
• What if your anxiety is a perfectly rational protest against a marriage, a career, a social role that’s slowly strangling you?
• What if real healing doesn’t come from coping better, but from burning it all down and building something truer from the ashes?

Layered with riffs on Freud, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, and the tragic illusions baked into the American dream, this episode lays bare how modern ambition often ends in psychic civil war. The unconscious rebels, the conscious mind resists, and too often the person is destroyed in the crossfire.

Maybe the real madness isn’t found in panic attacks or depressive spirals — but in stubbornly clinging to a life that’s wrong at its core. Sometimes the sanest act is the riskiest: quit, leave, detonate. Change everything... And see what happens!

Blog Seed

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"Ambition" is taken for granted in our society, a baseline for behavior, and a prerequisite for success and happiness. But at what cost? 

An even more fundamental ask: Why do we persist? Camus called suicide the only serious philosophical question. In this searing episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz confronts that question head-on, tracing two suicides — Andrew, the consummate overachiever whose perfect life crumbled under a mysterious twitch, and Jacob, the anxious recluse who finally pulled the trigger after securing freedom from work.

These weren’t random chemical misfires. They were dark, paradoxical answers to lives misaligned with their owners’ deepest needs. Jung suggested our unconscious mind doesn’t negotiate; it sabotages what it hates. Sometimes a panic attack is your soul pulling the fire alarm, desperate to stop the charade before it’s too late.

Mookie cuts past easy pop-psych platitudes to ask brutal questions:

• What if your depression is your psyche’s last-ditch effort to save itself?
• What if your anxiety is a perfectly rational protest against a marriage, a career, a social role that’s slowly strangling you?
• What if real healing doesn’t come from coping better, but from burning it all down and building something truer from the ashes?

Layered with riffs on Freud, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, and the tragic illusions baked into the American dream, this episode lays bare how modern ambition often ends in psychic civil war. The unconscious rebels, the conscious mind resists, and too often the person is destroyed in the crossfire.

Maybe the real madness isn’t found in panic attacks or depressive spirals — but in stubbornly clinging to a life that’s wrong at its core. Sometimes the sanest act is the riskiest: quit, leave, detonate. Change everything... And see what happens!

Blog Seed

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In this loaded episode, your follically-challenged host Mookie Spitz sits down with science educator, technologist, and multi-genre author Ingrid Moon to dissect writing and self-publishing — and why it’s so damn hard to do it well.

They start with Ingrid’s journey from tech marketing to science classrooms to building reference books for sci-fi authors who don’t know enough science. Astrofiction, Biofiction, Robofiction — yes, those are real, and they’ll save your story from embarrassing “space magic"...

Then it’s all in on the struggles:

• The agony of finishing a book when your brain craves endless worldbuilding.
• The harsh truth that most “new ideas” are stale genre tropes — and why that might actually be a good thing.
• How finding a close-knit writers’ group is the secret weapon to stay sane and keep your plot from face-planting.

Mookie rants about trying to hack attention in a world drowning in content. He describes how his first 500-page illustrated Santa Claus epic baffled readers who couldn’t tell if it was for kids or deranged adults. Then he reveals why his latest sci-fi novel, Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine finally nailed it:

• A raw, savage take on the mess that is 2025, crammed into tight three-line blocks that read like Twitter poetry on meth.
• A bad guy that’s literally a Boltzmann brain floating at the edge of a dying universe — obsessed with a loser she can’t have.
• A narrative style chopped into tweet-sized punches that force every line to matter — and rewrite your brain on how to read).

They tear into why most indie authors fail at story — chasing intricate lore instead of broken people trying to survive. Why character arcs matter more than your perfectly mapped kingdoms. Why even if your idea is another alien invasion or Mars colonization, it’s your twist, your voice, your messed-up characters that breathe life into tired tropes.

Also on deck:

• How to edit your work so it stops sucking, and why line editing is more brutal (and necessary) than you think.
• The tension between satisfying genre fans who crave familiar beats vs pushing the story into new places.
• Why finished is always better than perfect, and why marketing your book is a separate beast that no one warns you about.

If you’ve ever wanted to write (or just watch two writers spiral into their own creative hangups), you’ll feel right at home.

The Guest

Ingrid Moon is an author, editor, and science teacher. She currently has four science fiction novels, three audiobooks, and three science reference books for worldbuilding, with more on the way. Ingrid is a Southern California native who can't surf because she spent most of her youth navigating mountains and watching sci-fi television, all of which inspired her writing career. 

Her Resources

author website: https://ingridmoon.com

editor website: https://ingridmoon.com/authors

goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5035674.Ingrid_Moon

amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Ingrid-Moon/author/B0CKKMRL88

instagram: @ingridmoonauthor

facebook (author business): https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553084507674

Sign Up for my Newsletter: https://bit.ly/moon-news 

Mookie's New Sci-Fi Novel

Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine

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Host Mookie Spitz — fresh off finishing his second novel — takes a sledgehammer to the hysteria that AI is the death of creative writing. In this unfiltered deep dive, he argues that the heart of any good writing is timeless: storytelling driven by human experience, emotion, and characters you actually care about.

AI? A useful and enthusiastic sidekick. But it can’t live your life, wrestle with your scars, or dream up the flawed, hungry people who drive real narratives. Mookie spells out exactly how he used large language models like ChatGPT as a supercharged research partner and idea spark, never as a ghostwriter. 

From diving down quantum physics rabbit holes to generating slick alternative phrasing and Gen Z lexiconography, AI helped gamify and expand his process — but it didn’t (and couldn’t) write his book, or propel the characters creating the drama through their organic interactions. 

Highlights include:

• Why great writing isn’t about ideas — it’s about people. Plot, world-building, even brilliant lines of prose all crumble if they’re not anchored by raw, emotional stakes.
• How AI shines at the polish. Need sharper metaphors, wilder speculative tech jargon, or a gnerational twist on dialogue? The models deliver. But they don’t know your characters or your lived your shit — that comes from you.
• The trap of chasing your idols. Mookie confesses how years trying to write like Pynchon or play guitar like Yngwie wasted time he could’ve spent finding his own voice, and analog for relying on others (or bots) to do the lifting. 
• Why sci-fi often gets it wrong. Too many writers let clever concepts suffocate real human drama. Mookie’s approach starts with flawed characters, then layers on the heady stuff as window dressing for added thrills and spills. 
• His quirky three-line paragraph style. Like lyric poetry, it forces precision and rhythm, shaping stories that read almost like song lyrics or tweets -- enabling him to actually tweet the whole book! Check out @JonnieFazoolie.

Throughout, he makes it clear: AI can’t replace a writer who has something real to say. But it can dress up your story in new colors, hand you fresh angles, and let you explore ideas at warp speed. It’s a turbocharged thesaurus and research librarian, not an author.

So if you’re scared AI is coming for your soul — relax. If your story is good, it’ll stand on its own. And if it isn’t? No amount of machine learning will save it. Listen in. Then get back to telling your own damn story — because no bot ever lived your life.

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You finally did it! You wrote the damn book. You self-published it. Congratulations!—now brace yourself, because nobody gives a shit. 

In this brutally honest episode, Mookie Spitz breaks down the gut-wrenching, ego-bruising reality of trying to market and self-promote a book in a world drowning in content and distraction. 

From the raw highs of cracking his own creative code and learning how to write a great novel with Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine—a sci-fi romp starring a hustler who accidentally invents a universe-hopping machine—to the obvious realization that most of his friends and family won’t even read it, Mookie tells it exactly like it is.

He rants about drowning in a sea of indifference while reaching out to fellow writers and artists, blasting his novel on X. line by line, reading his entire book on podcast platforms, and dreaming of a Netflix deal... Spoiler: despite the chaos he keeps writing and ranting, because he fucking loves it!

If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, if you’re lost in the grind of hawking your masterpiece to an indifferent universe, or if you just want a darkly funny, philosophical gut-check on what this insane hustle really takes, tune in.

His Novel In Case You Care

Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine

Follow Him On X.

@JonnieFazoolie

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In this episode, Mookie Spitz unloads on the modern internet — tracing its slide from the glorious chaos of Usenet, IRC, and walled-off forums into today’s algorithm-choked, centralized cesspool. He argues for a smarter, AI-driven return to decentralization: digital “tribes” where like-minded people can gather, free from trolling, doomscrolling, and spam, but still get jolts of outside ideas to keep it fresh.

Along the way, he breaks down why Twitter became a global trash fire, how Facebook sold out its own garden walls for ad dollars, why TikTok’s AI actually gets it (for now), and how the future might belong to our bots — with or without us. It’s sharp, irreverent, and maybe a bit unhinged, but it’ll make you rethink what “fixing the internet” should really look like.

Listen in if you want a brainy rant on how we got here, where we’re headed, and how we might claw our way out.

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In this third installment of The Wall podcast series, Mookie Spitz dives headlong into the chaos of modern marketing, media, and the relentless flood of content competing for human attention. Building on his earlier breakdowns of the death of earned media and the inevitable (but not yet imminent) AI targeting revolution, this episode zeroes in on what to actually do right now — before the bots take over.

Mookie unpacks:

• Why even brilliant content dies on the vine without emotional resonance and inclusivity.
• How today’s most effective campaigns — from insurgent political races to street-level social media blitzes — flip the traditional model by making the audience the story.
• The hard truth that platforms like TikTok can skyrocket or ghost identical content purely based on subtle communal affinities and algorithmic whims.
• What old-school repetition and top-down broadcasting get wrong in a fragmented, hyper-reactive media landscape.
• The real role of paid vs. earned media in an era when data is power, but power is jealously guarded by walled gardens and opaque algorithms.

He also draws striking parallels to broken systems in healthcare data — illustrating why interoperability and transparency are the future not just for medicine, but for how ideas and products find their audiences.

Packed with practical, tough-love insights for creators, marketers, entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to move the needle, this episode is part reality check, part blueprint. The pod is a straight-shooting look at what it takes to scratch, climb, and maybe — just maybe — punch through the wall.

The Wall, Part 1: Death of Earned Media

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2455310/episodes/17400105

The Wall, Part 2: Birth of AI Marketing

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2455310/episodes/17415048

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