In this 56th episode of Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz takes the scalpel and chainsaw to one of the most destructive habits in writing: H.A.I.T.E. — “Here’s An Idea, The End.” Too many writers fall in love with clever concepts, elaborate world-building, and exposition, while forgetting the timeless truth that stories live or die on the backs of characters in motion, solving problems to attain clearly expressed goals. Drama isn’t built on ideas, instead on people fighting for something they desperately want.

Mookie unpacks how this mistake derailed his own early attempts at writing longer narratives, especially science-fiction — stories bloated with devices, poker-game gems, and multiverse mechanics — before he finally found his voice by scrapping empty constructs and letting a flawed anti-hero drive the narrative. Along the way, he pulls wisdom from David Mamet, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and even the heartbreak of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble.

He doesn't just rant against passive writing habits, but offers a manifesto for storytelling that bleeds, sweats, and cries through its characters. Whether you’re a novelist, screenwriter, or aspiring creator stuck in the swamp of “cool ideas,” this episode is a wake-up call: stop writing for your ego, start writing from the heart. Because only when your protagonist struggles, suffers, and survives — or fails — does the audience feel the catharsis they came for.

Early Failed "H.A.I.T.E."-ful Short Story

Successful Reboot

The Novel It Evolved Into

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Mookie Spitz takes aim at the contradiction at the heart of the world’s biggest story from this afternoon: Nvidia, now the largest company on Earth, just delivered fiscal Q2 2025 numbers that would make any other CEO weep with joy—revenue up 56% year-over-year to $46.7 billion, net income soaring 59% to $26.4 billion. And yet? The stock slid 4%. The problem isn’t Nvidia’s performance—it’s the whisper that keeps getting louder: are we living through an AI boom, or blowing up the next great bubble?

Mookie doesn't think so, and instead shares the warning signs, the hype cycles, and the stubborn facts that don’t fit the “bubble ready to burst” narrative. He compares this moment to the dot-com crash: hundreds of billions sunk into startups that vanished overnight, and miles of undersea cables lying dormant for years. Yet, eventually, those same cables became the arteries of the modern internet. His claim: today’s billions poured into GPUs, data centers, and training pipelines won’t be wasted—they’re the infrastructure of the next 30 years.

This rant digs in and shows how AI remains a mess, but in ways that suggest transformative times ahead: 

• Market mania and FOMO: why venture capital is showering hundreds of millions on flimsy “AI-for-everything” startups, from tweaked chatbots to pump and dump schemes
• Scarcity of talent: the new rockstars of tech—23-year-old AI engineers—commanding massive signing bonuses, traded like NBA draft picks between rival companies, adding costs
• Sam Altman’s wink and warning: how OpenAI’s CEO admitted, even over dinner with reporters, that hype is running ahead of revenue and most players will lose their shirts with a few big winners
• The adoption lag: how the “AI everywhere” is sluggishly behind user behaviors—pilots failing, ubiquitous negative ROI, and LLMs accounting for only 3–4% of searches compared to Google’s dominance.
• The future of the web itself: a provocative vision where websites vanish, bots become the storefront, and advertising evolves into a battle for which bot pushes which product.

Mookie doesn’t stop at the finance page. He drags in history, philosophy, and pop culture to frame the frenzy: Nvidia’s chips as the new fiber-optic cables, “AI mattresses” as the pets.com of our era, and reinforcement-trained robots as the inevitable bridge between predictive text models and machines that act in the real world. He argues that AI’s trajectory mirrors every great digital revolution: messy, overhyped, scam-filled, but ultimately unstoppable.

At its core, this episode asks: is the AI surge just froth, or the plumbing of the future? Will we look back at this as a bubble that bankrupted fools, or the dawn of an age when AI became as invisible and indispensable as running water?

Brash, analytical, and tart as ever, Mookie Spitz delivers a podcast that’s part market commentary, part philosophy lecture, and part rant against the absurdities of the present. Mookie is raw, skeptical, and unafraid to say the quiet part loud.

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Welcome back to the unapologetic soapbox of Mookie Spitz—your briny, tart, sharp-edged cornichon. A friend just described him that way, not as an insult but as the truest shorthand for who he is: biting, bracing, sometimes overwhelming, but impossible to forget and indispensable in the right mix. This podcast leans into that truth, exploring what it means to embrace the parts of yourself that sting, instead of filing them down for mass approval.

Mookie unpacks the paradox of personality—how the very qualities that make us “too much” are the same ones that make us unique and memorable. He confesses to sometimes steamrolling and delivering opinions like a briny jolt—but he refuses to apologize for it. Because the deeper point is clear: being yourself in a world that rewards conformity, blandness, and algorithm-friendly personas may cost you reach, followers, and even friends, but it can also buy you something rarer—authenticity, persistence, and joy.

With humor, philosophy, and raw honesty, Mookie weaves together:

• Why authenticity often looks abrasive but carries more power than pandering.
• How AI promises to “perfectly connect” content to audiences, while human connection remains messy, subjective, and personal, perhaps ultimately getting this cornichon off the hook
• The trap of endless self-help and reinvention, and the freedom in saying “this is who I am—take it or leave it" and not having to worry about improving what seems altogether good enough
• The paradox of being described with affection and aversion as both annoying and essential, harsh and flavorful—just like that little pickle on the plate that makes the entire meal taste better
• Reflections ranging from TikTok rants and influencer culture to Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian dualities, Aristotle’s metaphors, and the randomness of everyday life.

The podcast is brash, briny, sometimes too much—but it’s also sincere, self-aware, and unmistakably genuine, like the host. Here you'll find something for anyone who’s been told to tone it down and decided instead to turn it up.

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Welcome to the 53rd episode of Bald and Bloviating, the unfiltered podcast of Mookie Spitz—writer, ranter, and anti-tribalist. What began as daily TikTok kitchen tirades from an arm’s length away has grown into a raw, long-form experiment in thinking out loud. No scripts, no handlers, no algorithms appeased. Just blunt honesty, improvisation, and a refusal to play nice with the left-right circus.

Each rant wrestles with the impossible: making sense of a culture buried under 483 exabytes of daily digital noise. Mookie cuts through the Wall with a mix of humor, philosophy, political heresy, and personal scars. From abortion to immigration, from social media tribalism to Second Amendment rights, his so-called Manifesto doesn’t fit into anyone’s party line. Listeners on both sides call him everything from “raging socialist” to “MAGA maniac”—usually after watching less than fifteen seconds. He's not alone, another victim of a society allergic to nuance.

Explorations dive into what it means to live in a fractured world where identity, freedom, empathy, and common sense constantly collide. Guests on his podcasts range from close friends to strangers, acupuncturists to policy wonks, each thrown into the fire of unscripted debate. Expect contradictions, uncomfortable truths, occasional catharsis, and zero patience for the algorithm’s shallow attention span.

So here are the Top 10 Tenets of Mookie’s Manifesto so you know where he stands, and what he'll likely say when he sits and records:

1. Identity is Innate — race, gender, sexuality, selfhood: respect it.
2. Nuance is the Norm — embrace complexity, reject ideological purity tests.
3. Arm the People — but train them like drivers, not vigilantes.
4. Abortion Not Extortion— her body, her call, even if the procedure sucks.
5. Turn the DHS into HR — control the border, match jobs with migrants.
6. Go Full Madisonian — local choice beats federal tyranny.
7. Shrink the G — less federal meddling, more personal responsibility.
8. Let Everyone Rant — free speech > censorship.
9. Grown Markets over Mandates — liberty means risk and consequence.
10. Embrace Common Sense + Empathy — the only ideologies worth having.

Sound Libertarian? Close, yet no official affiliation there, either. What do you think? What's your Top 10 list look like? Jump on the pod and share yours. 

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Mookie Spitz, unable to STFU, isn’t content with simply talking. In this episode, he does something rare: he resurrects Rusty the Puppy—an original screenplay he co-wrote in 2009 with Rusty Yunusoff—and performs it aloud. Screenplays aren’t meant to be read this way; they’re blueprints for films, terse stage directions mixed with dialogue. But what happens when you strip away the camera, the studio, the actors, and repurpose the script as a piece of audio storytelling? That’s the experiment, and the result is something between a radio play, an audiobook, and a confessional memoir.

The story itself is deceptively simple: Rex, a loyal family dog, dies tragically and returns as a ghost—only to find his place in the household taken by a new puppy named Rusty. But what unfolds from this premise is layered and emotionally charged. Love, which should be straightforward, is shown to be messy and easily misread; intentions, even the purest, are twisted and misunderstood; jealousy creeps in as the most tempting and destructive of forces. The war between dogs and cats becomes more than comic rivalry, and becomes a metaphor for devotion versus manipulation, loyalty versus sabotage, love versus power. Through Rusty’s odyssey across suburban meadows, city streets, gang-cat theaters, and even heaven and hell themselves, the screenplay uses animals as mirrors for human struggle: our longing to belong, our fear of being replaced, and our desperate need to hold onto love even after it slips away.

Mookie frames the performance with his own creative backstory. He recalls early morning “spitz-balling” sessions with Rusty—trading riffs before their workdays began, shaping raw sparks into full story arcs. He tells of the thrill of finishing the script, the futility of shopping it around Hollywood as outsiders, and the surreal moment when The Secret Life of Pets trailers surfaced years later, echoing characters and ideas from Rusty the Puppy. Rather than bitterness, though, Mookie finds energy in repurposing the work: posting it on Medium, now reading it into a microphone while insisting that creative efforts don’t die just because they’re ignored. They can live again in new forms, with new audiences.

The episode is many things at once: a dramatic reading of a screenplay never filmed; an experiment in bending format, turning visual cues into an intimate audio experience; and a meditation on why we keep telling stories even when they go unheard. It’s also deeply personal. Beneath the animal fable are questions that haunt anyone who’s ever loved and lost: Can devotion survive change? Is jealousy a form of love or its death sentence? Can intent ever be trusted, or is it always warped by how others perceive it? And most importantly: is love ever truly replaceable, or does it linger, like a ghost dog, long after we’re gone?

If you’ve ever had a pet, a partner, or a friend you couldn’t let go of… if you’ve ever felt overlooked by the world yet compelled to create anyway… if you’ve ever been haunted by jealousy, tempted by bitterness, yet still believed in the redemptive power of loyalty, then this episode will speak to you.

The Blog & Screenplay

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Mookie Spitz is back with Ivor Bajalo—Bosnian-born, Chicago-raised, and millennial to the core—for a high-octane, unapologetic look at how America is unraveling not from foreign wars, but from within. Through the lens of Ivor’s wartime upbringing and post-immigrant insight, they examine how Americans—especially American men—have griped themselves into a corner, trading grit for grievance.

The episode draws sharp parallels between the ethnic implosions of the Balkans and the tribal polarization of the U.S., where identity politics, algorithm-fed rage, and digital victimhood have replaced shared values. The irony? As women adapt, succeed, and dominate in education, work, and culture, the men areb left behind—and they’re the ones doing all the complaining. But instead of evolving, many are retreating: into incel forums, manosphere delusions, or the cult of supplements and podcast prophets.

From there, the conversation jumps into pop culture and film as a mirror to these trends. The action hero has morphed: the musclebound alpha male of the '80s has given way to androgynous, trauma-laden figures like Keanu Reeves and Pedro Pascal—still killing, but quietly existential and emotionally wounded. Rambo once avenged a broken country, yet now John Wick mourns a dead dog with a thousand headshots. The message is clear: men are still fighting—but they’re lonelier, more broken, and no longer the heroes they once imagined themselves to be.

Key Themes Explored:

• Ivor’s birth during Yugoslavia’s death spiral and how real civil wars actually unfold
• Why America’s internal polarization is starting to rhyme with 1990s Bosnia
• The entitlement epidemic: Americans confusing inconvenience with oppression
• How the male victim complex thrives in a society that still favors them
• The success of women and their increasing refusal to clean up male emotional messes
• Action movies as cultural barometers: from buff Schwarzenegger to sad Keanu
• Why young men are losing—at work, in love, and in life—and refusing to evolve
• The Jonnie Fazzoolie archetype: narcissism, tech, hustle, and entitlement on overdrive

Mookie and Ivor don’t just bloviate—they detonate history, politics, gender dynamics, and pop culture, all tossed in the deep fryer with a side of greasy gyros and bitter truth.

Have you ever asked...

• Why are men so angry—and doing nothing?
• Is America headed for a real civil war, or just a psychological one?
• Can you still be a hero if you never leave your apartment?
• And why does Keanu Reeves, of all people, make it all make sense?

What do YOU think? They'd love to hear from you!

Ivor's Bald Ambition Stint

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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 nerd turned Flint water victim whose rage at governmental failure curdled into anti-Democrat fury. 

Meet Bonnie, a transgender Latina sex worker who’s been calling out leftist hypocrisy since the Clinton years—and now rails against the very movement meant to support her. 

Meet Vera, the Puerto Rican lawyer who clawed her way into the elite only to see merit drowned under the weight of identity tokenism. 

And meet Teodor, the Romanian-Venezuelan immigrant who fled authoritarianism only to find himself demanding the arrest of campus protesters in the land of the free.

These are not caricatures. These are the ghosts of Democratic failures—prophets ignored, voters lost, and proof that the rot was there all along. Through their stories, Mookie dismantles the smug illusion of Democratic moral superiority and takes a sledgehammer to the party’s inability to listen, adapt, or win.

Is the American left capable of resurrection, or is the Democalypse complete?

Blog Post

Trans During Trump 2.0

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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 breaks down how AI’s exponential growth in content creation is projected to surpass human output by 2034, and what that means for the internet itself. As bots increasingly chew through the vast reservoir of human-created material—the “food” they need to generate responses—they’ll eventually be forced to consume their own recycled output. 

This self-referential feeding could lead to a cascade of degraded content quality, a phenomenon where originality erodes and the digital world becomes a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting its own distortions.

Mookie asks the big questions:

• What happens when the bots’ diet consists almost entirely of bot-made content?
• Will AGI emerge to create truly original works, making humans irrelevant?
• Or will there be a backlash—a craving for authentic, human-made experiences that AI can’t replicate?

He explores the implications of this content collapse: from the epistemological crisis where truth becomes impossible to verify, to the economic disruption of industries built on human creativity, to the unsettling possibility of an AI ecosystem evolving independently of us. 

Yet amid the chaos, Mookie remains cautiously optimistic, believing that human connection and lived experience will always matter—even as we edge toward a world where bots might not just mimic us, but out-create us.

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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 alluring German scientist. Opposing him is Penny Pitz, a hyper-competent Gen Z entrepreneur determined to prove herself with the launch of her “Thrillionaires Under 30” list and a mind-bending AR event that could redefine media. Their love-hate chemistry fuels a fierce competition: Jonnie sees Penny’s success as an insult, while Penny channels her humiliation over Jonnie into a drive to outshine him on every front.

Adding fuel to the fire is Sol Friedlander, a brash boomer inventor whose cutting-edge AR glasses instantly capture Penny’s imagination and Jonnie's jealousy. Sol's presence sparks a generational clash—old-school discipline and grit versus youthful impulsiveness and bullshit—while simultaneously positioning him as Jonnie's perfect nemesis: everything Fazoolie pretends to be, but isn’t.

Meanwhile, Dr. Casey Floyd, a non-binary experimental and theoretical genius, battles institutional roadblocks and personal demons to the point a partnership with the likes of a Jonnie Fazoolie seems to hold potential. Their alliance is uneasy but essential, as They steal equipment, dodge academic politics, and attempt the impossible. Over everything and everyone looms Alice, the enigmatic, omnipotent being manipulating events from the shadows, suggesting that every rivalry—romantic, generational, technological—might be part of her grand design.

This episode explores the power struggles shaping the Infiniiverse: lovers who become frenemies, scammers pitted against innovators, and human ambition colliding with forces beyond comprehension. Part four sharpens every edge of conflict as Jonnie, Penny, and Sol race toward a showdown that embroils Casey, all inexorably driving toward the design and development of the Transfinite Reality Engine...

Inside the Infiniverse Series

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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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 moment is maximized, and existence becomes a dizzying equation of energy, stimulants, and relentless experience. The tale captures the dangerous allure of speed—both the drug and the lifestyle—where the boundaries between productivity and self-destruction blur into a haze of neon nights and endless days.

As Speedie pushes himself beyond human limits, Mookie’s narrative morphs into a meditation on time itself—how we use it, waste it, and try to outrun it. A fleeting encounter with an old man moving impossibly fast punctuates the madness, a haunting reminder that no matter how much we accelerate, time always wins.

Tune in for a ride through the 90s underground, where the rush is everything, the crash is inevitable, and the clock never stops ticking.

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