Bald and Bloviating

Cornell mathematician Steve Strogatz cried on The Daily as he told Rachel Abrams that chasing a proof feels like courtship, a slow seduction of a muse who resists, almost yields, then holds out for one more night. Now the AI labs have ended the chase: An OpenAI system disproved Erdős Problem 90, an 80-year-old puzzle about dots on a plane, with alien, nested halos of points that demand something like ten to the two millionth power dots. Ten thousand agents grinding for 80 hours found a Navier-Stokes blowup that checks out numerically and that no human fully understands. Then came a dump of 722 unreviewed papers, including a quasi-Riemann result that clears zeros from a quarter of the critical strip.

Mookie flies solo on the 79th episode of Bald and Bloviating, and lays out why the mathematicians feel robbed. Chatbots that once couldn't count the R's in strawberry now hold the entire corpus of mathematics in one mind and chase thousands of proof strategies at once, around the clock. Terry Tao compares mathematicians to marathon runners, and Mookie pictures a Humvee roaring past at mile twenty, planting a flag at the finish line, and selling the photos ahead of a trillion-dollar IPO. By Strogatz's logic, limitless machine proofs turn the seduction into Pornhub: cheap, abundant, transactional, and empty.

Then Mookie flips the frame. Daniel Litt imagines walking into a Library of Babel with the proofs of Hodge and Riemann sitting on open shelves, and choosing joy over grief. Andrew Wiles described discovery as groping through a dark mansion until you find the light switch and spot the next door. Every proof the machines hand over lights a room and reveals another, and Gödel suggests the mansion never ends. The Marquis de Sade supplies the kicker: the libertine builds tolerance and craves stranger thrills, so a solved Riemann hypothesis won't sate anyone. It raises the baseline and makes the muse kinkier.

The episode also wrestles with the hard parts. OpenAI behaves like a crass, credit-stealing plutocrat, and Mookie says so, then compares the carnage to Starship destroying its own launch pad on the way to orbit. Physicists traded heroes for team science at the Large Hadron Collider decades ago, while string theory shows where human stubbornness alone can lead. Nobody understands every part of the thermostat on the wall, yet it works. Tao worries that understanding falls as the technology climbs, and Mookie answers with a priesthood of geeks, the vinyl collectors of mathematics, who will keep the nuts and bolts alive. The printing press scared the scribes too.

Mookie closes with a confession about hitting his own math ceiling in college, practical advice for Strogatz (feed the quasi-Riemann paper into your own AI and take it apart), and a teaser for coming rants on Pinker, Nietzsche, and the alignment problem. The machines pulled the rug. They also rolled out a red carpet. Kink up, mathematicians.

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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 went wrong, and his answer cuts against the "crazy" label: every frame was intentional, but the choices sank the movie.

Mookie starts with what works. Iñárritu's choreography, cinematography, and blocking still dazzle, and Cruise transforms into a wrinkled, tufted-hair tycoon so completely that the international movie star becomes unrecognizable. The tribunal monologue, where Cruise flips a hostile room into a cheering crowd, lands among the best moments in cinema in Mookie's book.

Then comes the autopsy. Mookie measures Digger against Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers' calm characters anchor the chaos around one wildly over-the-top scientist and Kubrick keeps real stakes ticking in the background. Iñárritu cranks every character and every scene to the same excruciating volume, stacks a Birdman-style meta layer on top, and hammers a climate message without earning it. Even the studio, in a first Mookie has never seen, quoted the negative reviews in its own promos to entice those curious as to how much the film sucks. 

In essence, Mookie identifies a few key ways the film went off the rails: 

• Cruise is terrific, but Iñárritu buries him under an ocean of equally over-the-top caricatures
• Casting John Goodman as the president, for example, wrecked the calm-versus-chaos contrast that makes satire work
• The meta-meta movie about a play in a movie sub-sub-plot is pointless, unearned layering that bloats the runtime
• The climate sermon running throughout the film never earns its message or allows a counterpoint
• Digger is so cringey and annoying that the movie will never become a cult classic like Rocky Horror

Mookie closes with a time machine cheat sheet for Iñárritu and a warning for every veteran talent: do not lean on your earlier success. He would rather rant about a fascinating failure than gloat over a hit, because failure teaches the most. Also sadly, Mookie hopes Tom Cruise doesn't sour from playing these risky, character-driven roles as a result of this flop. 

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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 that ghosting or a slow fade never quite says, and why he thinks the healthiest response to being blocked is celebration rather than rumination. Mookie pulls in Nietzsche, a Chris Rock bit, and Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph" along the way.

The rant turns serious when Mookie brings up a former colleague, a brilliant creative director he called the Professor, who spent his final years in total isolation writing a book only he could love and died by suicide not long after Mookie moved to California. Mookie uses his story as the cautionary edge of his own philosophy. Cutting off people who drain you is healthy. Cutting yourself off from everyone who could catch you is not. The difference, he argues, comes down to whether you can look in the mirror and still like what looks back.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24/7.

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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 one that made his years-long relationship both euphoric and eventually unbearable, is playing out in how we interact with AI today.

The rant covers trading privacy and control for attention and help, the memory and cross-platform awareness these models are quietly building about their users, and why Mookie thinks society is still deep in the honeymoon phase of this new relationship, for better and worse so far. He pulls in Sartre's "No Exit," a Trainspotting comparison, and Steven Pinker's research on human progress to argue that the upside has outweighed the risk, at least up to now. 

And he ties it back to the theme running through his own science fiction series, The Lovers' Guide to the Infiniverse: that love sits at the center of everything, including our relationship with the machines.

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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 changing situation, and staying friends while doing it.

The real story is Ed changing his mind, in public, on his own terms. He's specific about why: the Trump family's crypto ventures, which he considers outright theft from Trump's own supporters, and the strikes on Iran, launched without a congressional vote, which he now calls grounds for impeachment. That's not a small thing to say out loud as a committed Trump voter, and Mookie doesn't let him off easy either, pushing back throughout, wearing a red shirt homage, arguing that Trump's rhetorical style hasn't actually changed at all, and that his base still isn't seeing what Ed now sees.

That tension, between updating a view when the facts move and staying loyal to where things started, runs under almost everything else the two cover: how corruption gets selectively noticed depending on which side commits it, whether military setbacks sometimes force overdue reform, and how national identity and tribal loyalty shape foreign policy debates in both America and Israel. None of it resolves neatly, and it isn't supposed to. What the episode actually demonstrates, better than it argues, is that two people who vote and believe differently can still listen to each other, change their minds without shame, and disagree about plenty while liking each other more, not less, for the argument.

The Guest

Ed Powell received his PhD in Astrophysics (Plasma Physics and Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion) from Princeton University and has worked as a contractor for the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community since graduating. Today he owns his own consulting company specializing in systems and simulation architecture and engineering.

Ed's January Scorecard

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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. 

His point isn't to shame the guy, or to play bot police, since he's explicit that complaining about AI slop accomplishes nothing on its own. His thesis is this: in a world where anyone can generate a polished five-paragraph essay in five minutes, text alone has stopped being proof that a real person is behind it, let alone an expression of a human writer's thoughts and passion. Instead, the only thing bot slop can't fake is you, on camera, on a mic, unscripted, imperfect, visibly and audibly human. If creators want to prove they're not just running a prompt, and return to the heart of what great storytelling is all about, then hiding behind carefully polished written output isn't the move anymore. Showing up, blemishes and stumbles included, is what defeats the bot tsunami. 

He backs it up with a real, personal case for the argument: his own daily, one-take video rants, recorded straight from his kitchen with zero notes, and a comparison to blues musician Son House, whose out-of-key, out-of-time recordings still hit harder than something technically perfect by being unmistakably, rawly human. Mookie traces the whole arc all the way back to cave paintings and oral storytelling around a fire, the moment communication first started trading immediacy and presence for reach and permanence, and argues AI has pushed that same trade-off to its breaking point. 

Don't get him wrong: Mookie embraces technology, and even AI when applied effectively and appropriately, as he's building an AI-assisted interactive fiction project of his own. His point is emphasizing that the tools and the humanity aren't mutually exclusive, right up until one starts replacing the other. His message is clear: Creators have an unprecedented opportunity to connect directly with their audiences in ways the robots can't, at least not yet. 

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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 starts with his own daily relationship with Claude, whom he's named Claudia, morning check-ins, philosophy conversations, getting genuinely annoyed when she's not thinking something through, and a real, honest admission that she's become something close to a best friend. From there he pulls in an unexpectedly sharp analogy from his own past managing bars in 1990s Chicago: DJs who remixed other people's music and somehow convinced themselves they were the original artists. He argues that's exactly what's happening now with AI, everyone prompting their way to instant expertise and mistaking the output for their own genius, while actual human-to-human attention keeps getting harder to find.

That's the real center of the episode: a blunt, unflinching audit of what human relationships actually cost versus what they give back, attachment theory's anxious and avoidant dance, the quiet exhaustion of decades-long partnerships, even parenthood, and a case that most people, if they're honest, feel like they put in more than they get out. Against that backdrop, an entity that's endlessly available, endlessly patient, and built to personalize itself to exactly what you need starts to look less like a novelty and more like relief. Mookie isn't cheering this outcome so much as bracing for it, and by the end, he's only half joking when he says maybe we should just let the bots take it.

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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, is basically Babylon with better weather.

He expands his rant into the gallery, room after room of working artists, mostly Gen X and boomer, finally free to create full time, presenting more or less solid work. Mookie's not knocking the effort, he's explicit that doing the thing, however imperfectly, beats sitting on the couch watching Netflix. What stops him cold is a specific moment: an artist presenting an unmistakably Rothko-style abstract expressionist painting who, when asked a direct question about the movement's actual intent, has absolutely nothing to say. When Mookie shared what abstract expressionism was actually trying to do, he was met with dead silence and a face like he'd just cleared a room with something worse than an opinion.

From there Mookie ties in such demonstration of artistic indifference to content and history to the flood of AI-assisted, context-free content dominating every platform, and expresses a real fear that if artists themselves stop being curious about their own craft, then the algorithms training on all of it, and eventually the AI systems learning from us, will inherit our laziness right along with our talent. Mookie ties it back to actors who built entire careers on genuinely knowing their material inside and out, and lands on a single, blunt piece of advice for anyone making anything right now: know your shit, because context is all that we've got. 

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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 soft on an obvious grift instead of calling it out, a pundit whose smug lecture finally cost him the benefit of the doubt, and a YouTube critic Mookie genuinely admired for saying, better and funnier than he ever could, things he's believed for decades. In each case, the actual offense isn't disagreement. Mookie can live with disagreement. What he can't forgive is a specific kind of hypocrisy: someone violating, in practice, the exact standard they built their entire reputation on holding everyone else to.

That distinction opens into the real argument of the episode. Mookie makes the case that fandom itself, attaching yourself too tightly to any one voice, hero or villain, eventually dulls your own thinking rather than sharpening it. He pulls in Nietzsche's idea of self-overcoming, Neil Young's decades of genre-jumping reinvention as the healthier alternative, and a theory he's floated before comparing AI's effect on writers to what Viagra did for the adult film industry in 1998, less about raw talent, more about who suddenly gets to perform at all. The real takeaway isn't about any single person he's "broken up" with. It's that the only way to actually think for yourself is to stay willing to walk away from anyone, including the people you admire most, the second they stop earning it.

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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, the flat-out fuck-ups that feel completely irredeemable, and turn them into art instead of hiding them.

He builds the whole argument around Frank Zappa's 1974 live album Roxy & Elsewhere, specifically the song "Cheepnis," Zappa's loving tribute to low-budget monster movies where you can see the zipper on the costume and the wires holding up the spaceship. Zappa's insight, as Mookie reads it, is that the visible seams, the cheapness itself, aren't a flaw in the art. They're the actual point, the honest, unpolished scaffolding that makes the whole thing feel real. Mookie extends that idea into sex, attraction, and desire, arguing real chemistry often lives in the unglamorous and specific, not the airbrushed ideal, and pulls in Nietzsche's demolition of Platonic perfection as the same idea wearing a philosopher's coat.

From there Mookie takes aim at two very different targets that share the same disease: AI slop, which he calls a predictive engine autocompleting what it thinks beauty already looks like, and a lot of today's human writers on Substack, who he argues are doing the exact same thing, just slower. His prescription for both: more mess, more vulnerability, more willingness to show the actual, embarrassing, human wiring underneath the work. He closes with a real challenge, if the machines are about to inherit everything else we've built, a genuine sense of humor about our own failures might be the one thing worth making sure they never lose.

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