Bald and Bloviating

In this riotously sharp episode of Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz takes listeners back to the wild, sweaty nights of Chicago’s 1990s dance club scene. Drawing from his time as a barback, bartender, and eventually club manager—plus his Nightlines magazine columns—Mookie resurrects a brutally funny and painfully honest list: the Top 10 DJ Pro-Tips, with a focus on Driving Club Managers Insane.

With the bite of someone who’s seen it all from the other side of the booth, Mookie skewers the egos, meltdowns, and diva antics of DJs who fancy themselves gods while spinning pre-programmed sets of Billboard hits. From clearing out packed floors with marathon “artistic” medleys to trashing soundboards and stiffing bartenders, this countdown blends nostalgia, industry dirt, and savage humor.

But this isn’t just a trip down memory lane. Mookie ties the antics of ‘90s DJs to today’s AI-driven content culture, where shameless mediocrity floods social media with regurgitated slop. Just like bad DJs, many creators confuse remixing with artistry.

Packed with insider anecdotes, biting commentary, and the raw chaos of a subculture that thrived on excess, this episode is both a love letter and a roast. For anyone who’s worked in nightlife—and survived it.

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Mookie Spitz lays out a blisteringly clear thesis: today's AI "creators" are often nothing more than digital-era DJs—bullshit artists hiding behind technology, mistaking curation for creation, and swaggering with a confidence they haven’t earned.

Drawing from his lived experience as a 1990s nightclub bar manager, Mookie compares most of the ego-soaked DJs of that era—who stood in booths playing other people’s records while soaking up the praise bestowed the songwriters and producers themselves—to the current wave of prompt-pushers using AI tools to spit out music, articles, even entire brands. 

Just like those DJs, today’s AI-users carry a bloated sense of artistry built not on effort, but on illusion. They never learned an instrument. Never wrestled with chord structure. Never bombed on stage or agonized over a verse. And because they’ve never faced the resistance that forges real talent, they mistake ease for genius and attitude for authorship.

This episode isn't just a nostalgic rant—it’s a postmortem on artistic authenticity. Mookie weaves in Rick Beato’s takedown of the AI band Velvet Sundown, and expands on how AI-generated music reveals a deeper cultural rot: a collective hunger for results without the journey. Real creators struggle. They suck, fail, improve, and bleed into their work. That’s what gives art its soul. When you skip that process, all you're left with is aesthetic mimicry—soulless output and synthetic confidence.

Core Themes:

• Bullshit Artistry: Whether spinning vinyl or prompting a bot, faking authorship dilutes the meaning of creation.
• Hubris Without Craft: Narcissism is the armor worn by those who never did the work—and AI makes it even easier to fake it.
• The Joyful Struggle: Real satisfaction comes from the grind—learning, failing, improving. AI erases that, and with it, any sense of earned pride.
• The Ghost in the Machine: In the flood of synthetic output, real humans—the ones with stories, scars, and skills—will become the rare signal in the noise.

If you’re tired of watching clout-chasers mistake convenience for talent, or if you’ve ever felt the quiet satisfaction of getting good at something the hard way, this episode is your battle cry. Mookie isn’t just calling out the poseurs—he’s defending the soul of the creative act itself—while acknowledging that AI is a useful tool when used as a sidekick, not the main event. 

The Cited Terrific YouTubers

Sabine Hossenfelder

Veritasium

3Blue1Brown (Graham Sanderson)

Rick Beato

The Cited Beato Video

"This New Artist Completely Sucks..."

The Cited 90s Era Novella

https://medium.com/@mookiespitz/gregs-gift-d256b8a74736?sk=e8ce9c8c362f7a07d482ef1c2cdb11e9

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Mookie Spitz tears apart the flimsy fabric of modern etiquette, dragging it through the mud of our digital cesspool. What starts as a deep dive into why Nixon chose to resign—bowing to protocol over narcissism—explodes into a sweeping, honest exploration of how those old norms have been obliterated by the almighty attention economy.

Welcome to the age of the troll, where behaving badly isn’t just tolerated, it’s fetishized. Where social media has transformed the human need for recognition into a grotesque carnival of self-serving spectacle, rewarding whoever shouts the loudest, lies the boldest, or insults the deepest. Mookie breaks down how platforms built to “give everyone a voice” ripped open the sealed doors of our psyches, letting our ugliest instincts—the bullying, trolling, attention-whoring—spill out unchecked.

He then drills into the kinky underbelly of this new world order: the bizarre dom-sub power games played out on the global stage. Elon Musk emerges as the ultimate brat—an industry titan in tech and space, but a whiny masochist in politics and media, practically begging for punishment with every impulsive tweet or disastrous PR stunt. Trump stands in as the bloviating dom—less an ideological leader, more a circus ringmaster, expertly wielding shock and outrage to keep the crowd hooked.

Along the way, Mookie folds in everything from Jungian shadow selves to Nietzsche’s delight in moral chaos, Gödel’s obsessive insanity, and even the creative but well-defined roles of BDSM. It’s all woven into a hard-hitting thesis: our troll-fueled culture doesn’t just tolerate contradictions—like a genius who’s also an asshole—it craves them, eroticizes them, turns them into entertainment.

Why? Because in a world drowning in content, the surest way to stand out is to be terrible in fascinating ways. And maybe, Mookie argues, we’re all low-key brats online—provoking, poking, pushing boundaries—just waiting for someone to slap us down and give us the discipline we didn’t even know we were craving.

Elone Musk: Idiot Savant

https://mookiespitz.medium.com/elon-musk-idiot-savant-538d1b34c31a

Why Elon Kiss(ed) Trump's Ass

https://medium.com/@mookiespitz/the-1-reason-elon-musk-kisses-donald-trumps-ass-2bb4c40aac5c

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Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace — not because he legally had to, but because he bowed to etiquette, tradition, and the unwritten rules of political “decency.” In this episode, Mookie Spitz unpacks that moment in history when decorum outweighed actual law, especially when the law was murky or absent. Nixon didn’t have to quit. He chose to — because back then, the script said he should.

But today? That script’s in flames. From Nixon to Trump to Musk, Mookie charts how we’ve lurched from resignation and shame to shamelessness, from following norms to blowing them up. Trump flouted every rule of political conduct and still pulled millions into his orbit. Musk trashes presidents, impregnates multiple women, trolls on a platform he bought purely to shitpost — and millions cheer him on.

Mookie doesn’t stop there. He dismantles how all of us — marketers, PR strategists, brand gurus — still cling to old illusions about “reputation” and “playing it safe,” while the reality is people crave boundary-smashing spectacle. He points out that most humans operate on tribal power plays, gossip, and selfish instincts, so it’s no surprise we worship trolls who embody all of that on a global stage.

He also digs into how our tolerance for chaos and narcissism has exploded, fed by social media and now by algorithms that will soon know us better than we know ourselves. It’s a raw, unfiltered riff on power, attention, and why the future might be even more dominated by trollish mega-egos — because secretly, we wish we could be them...

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Jewish agnostic Chicagoan Mookie Spitz and Muslim agnostic Canadian Ali A. Rizvi — who grew up bouncing between Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Pakistan — dive headlong into one of the planet’s most radioactive debates: the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

It’s a showdown years in the making. Normally aligned on nearly everything, from atheism to trashing fundamentalists of all stripes, this time they find themselves on diametrically opposite sides. Ali argues that the Middle East’s tectonic shifts — from Iran’s battered proxies and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 opening, to a new generation of Palestinians crushed by war and ready for anything that looks like stability — might finally have created fertile ground for a version of the mythical two-state solution.

Mookie, meanwhile, calls bullshit. With Netanyahu’s most extremist right-wing government ever holding all the cards, Iran temporarily neutered, Gaza bombed back into the Stone Age, and the West Bank crawling with settlers, he says there’s no pragmatic incentive for Israel’s leadership to concede an inch. Annexation, not coexistence, is the dream they’re closest to realizing.

The two circle everything from Saudi oil leverage, America’s shifting public opinion on Israel, the transactional mind of Trump (chasing a Nobel Prize one luxury jet at a time), to how the Abraham Accords were built on throwing the Palestinians under the bus in the first place. They debate whether Israeli Arabs living inside the Green Line — largely getting on with life — foreshadow what could emerge in Gaza or the West Bank, or if that’s naive fantasy.

They even get personal: hashing out how growing up Jewish or Muslim shapes their cynicism, how liberal Westerners love to play armchair quarterback, and why the whole region’s future might hinge on everything from evangelical Christian delusions about Israel being Jesus’ landing pad to Gulf monarchs trying to distract their own restless populations with concerts, WWE, and F1.

Expect raw, unscripted takes, dark laughs, history lessons without the bullshit, and more than a few rants that’ll piss everyone off. And hey, if you’re still hoping for that elusive “peace in our time”? Tune in and watch that mirage get roasted and served back up warm, depending on you agreeing with Ali or Mookie. 

The Guest

Ali A. Rizvi is a writer, physician, and musician. He is the author of “The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason”, host of the Unlicensed Therapist podcast, and all-round sh*t disturber.

His Book

https://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Muslim-Journey-Religion-Reason-ebook/dp/B01F1YC64M?ref_=ast_author_mpb

His Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/unlicensed-therapist-ali-a-rizvi/id1516920300

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Mookie Spitz brings you the next installment of the unhinged director’s cut you didn’t know you needed. In this series, he takes apart his novel Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine — laying bare the cosmic insanity, twisted characters, and philosophical rabbit holes that drive it.

This pod digs into Episode One: The Birth, where we meet Alice — a quadrillion-year-old Boltzmann brain born out in the frozen corpse of a dying universe. She's godlike, lonely, emotionally stunted, and decides the best use of her infinite power is to chase after Jonnie Fazoolie Junior, the biggest lovable moron across the Infiniiverse. 

Why him? Because amid endless possibilities, she wants the one idiot too oblivious to care. It’s the ultimate cosmic “why do girls go for jerks?” scenario dialed up to eleven.

Mookie also peels back the layers on Penny Pitz, a Gen Z Ivy Leaguer riding the whiplash from crypto boom to billionaire fluff interviews, all while grappling with a culture that's sold her empowerment but handed her existential angst instead. 

Through Penny, Mookie skewers gender dynamics, privilege, identity politics, and the hollow grind of modern success. Meanwhile, Alice is busy pulling puppet strings to get Jonnie and Penny to cross paths — all part of her grand, messy plot to build a machine that might finally let her connect with her chosen fool.

Mix in riffs on dark energy, thermodynamics, Roger Penrose, the collapse of the American male, and Mookie’s gleeful admission that he’s basically writing a Lewis Carroll-meets-Lolita fever dream with multiverse death stakes — and you’ve got a podcast that’s as absurd as it is sharp.

Heads up: If you haven’t read the book, this is spoiler napalm. For everyone else: pour a drink, settle in, and enjoy Mookie ranting about his creation like a mad scientist who’s way too amused by blowing up reality for the sake of an awkward love story.

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Mookie Spitz rants about the messy power dynamics that shape our relationships. Inspired by a fiasco where he got kicked off X for flooding timelines with his novel, Mookie pivots to something way deeper: why so many of us are stuck in lopsided connections where one person gives everything and the other barely gives a damn.

He introduces the 95/5 principle — a stark look at how one partner ends up pouring in 95% of the love, energy, support, money, sex, time, you name it... while the other kicks back, giving just enough (a pathetic 5%) to keep the gravy train rolling. Think it’s rare? Think again. From long-term marriages to casual hookups, from family ties to creative partnerships, this imbalance is everywhere.

Mookie breaks it down:

• How childhood wiring makes some of us relentless givers, always hustling to be loved or even just tolerated.
• Why takers (the “95/5ers”) instinctively sniff out these over-givers, latch on, and keep milking them for all they’re worth.
• How these dynamics don’t just shift — they escalate. That 95/5 easily becomes 98/2 or worse, until you finally snap… only for the taker to toss you breadcrumbs, reel you back, and start draining you all over again.
• The delusion that one day they’ll change and give more — spoiler: they won’t. Their dream scenario is 100/0, where you keep giving and they keep taking, guilt-free.

He also drills into how this dynamic shows up beyond romance: in business deals, friendships, even creative collaborations. And then flips the script, admitting his own pattern of being the chronic giver, questioning why he (and so many like him) keep ending up in these traps.

If you’ve ever busted your ass trying to win someone’s affection, bent over backwards for crumbs of appreciation, or sacrificed your own joy to keep someone else comfortable — this episode is your slap in the face and wake-up call.

Packed with dark humor, self-roasting confessions, and sharp metaphors (including a perfect Yiddish take on waiters and soup disasters), this is relationship psychology without the sugarcoating. Mookie doesn’t just rant — he forces you to stare straight into the mirror and ask: are you the 95 or the 5?

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Mookie Spitz unleashes a cynical, hyperverbal annotation of his new novel Jonnie Fazoolie & The Transfinite Reality Engine through the layers of his latest cosmic fever dream designed to enthrall readers, writers, sci-fi nerds, existential thrill-seekers, or far as this pod goes masochists who want to hear an author lose his mind about his own creation.

Expect spoilers galore here, because this show is meant for people who have read the book, are reading it, or don’t give a shit and just want to hear the author dissect his own reality-bending plot, roast his characters, and reveal how everything from Victoriana to EDM to bar tabs in Chicago infected this story.

Beyond a typical “behind the scenes,” Mookie goes full throttle into the philosophy, the bizarre math and philosophy, the dirty mechanics of writing three-line paragraphs to force his prose into vicious poetic snaps, and the darker drive of why an all-powerful consciousness would fixate on the dumbest loser in existence.

He breaks down the big arc, and how each B-title chapter sets up Jonnie's doomed hero’s journey—The Birth, The Bet, The Band, The Brand, The Boilerplate, The Blowout—and why it all ends with a cosmic faceplant that sets up even higher stakes for the rest of The Lovers Guide to the Infiniverse.

Each episode is a twisted masterclass where Mookie treats you like a captive lit class, except he’s not your pretentious Iowa MFA professor. Instead he’s the bald bastard who actually wrote the book, ranting straight into phone about why he built a universe where reality itself is on the auction block, love is the ugliest addiction, and a clueless con man named Jonnie is stalked across the multiverse by a godlike Boltzmann brain called Alice Void.

And if you’re twisted enough, you can follow along on X. where Mookie is literally tweeting out the entire novel line by line, every hour, six days a week -- because he accidentally forgot to schedule Sundays, so now it’s a theological day off featuring his weekly audio reads and latest Fazoolie updates.... 

Come for the multiverse. Stay for the bitter laughs, the reckless spoilers, and Mookie’s unfiltered philosophy on why chasing what you can’t have is the only story worth telling.

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Mookie Spitz dives headfirst into his manic creative process — from obsessively shaping his sci-fi novel Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine into rigid three-line paragraphs, to pulling off an audacious stunt: tweeting out the entire damn book, line by line, every hour, for 200 days.

This is part confessional, part masterclass in embracing constraints to spark creativity. Mookie breaks down why arbitrary rules (like limiting prose to OCD-tight paragraphs) forced his writing to be sharper, more playful, and weirdly alive — a strategy born from wrestling with his own tendency to ramble into oblivion.

He also gets into the nuts and bolts: transforming his manuscript from Google Docs to Notepad to Excel to CSV, reverse-ordering 4,800 lines, then using Publer to spray them across Twitter. All so his novel can live (backward!) on X, like Borges on methamphetamine.

More than that, his pod is a sermon on the sheer joy of making something just because. No market strategy. No guarantees. Just the luxurious bloviation of a writer entertaining himself — and inviting you to watch, laugh, and maybe catch some of that reckless creative fever.

Follow Jonnie Fazoolie on X

https://x.com/JonnieFazoolie

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In this expansive solo episode, Mookie Spitz takes listeners on a hallucinatory, high-concept journey through the philosophical backbone of his new novel, Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine. The focal point? A chapter titled “Hating Mondays," featuring an object so conceptually loaded it makes Borges’ Library of Babel  look like a cozy bookshelf.

Mookie starts with literary ground zero: Jorge Luis Borges and the mind-warping thought experiment of a library containing every book that could ever be written. From there, he threads this concept through the lens of 21st-century tech — digital photography, quantum computing, and the limits of human creativity — to build his own speculative monstrosity: The Spider’s Jar. a 10-meter-high cylinder containing every possible 3D instantiation of reality— past, present, and future —down to the Planck pixels.

Now imagine it’s been hacked...

But this isn’t just a mere philosophical exercise. It's also the heart of the novel’s plot. The Spider’s Jar becomes a battleground of power and emotion when it’s hijacked by Alice — a cryptic, childlike avatar who claims to possess the “Builder Numbers,” mathematical keys to all of Reality. Mookie reads from his novel and breaks the fourth wall to annotate his own fiction with literary analysis, physics, philosophy, and a touch of twisted humor.

This episode brings it on: Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, Tegmark’s multiverse, quantum determinism, synesthetic memory, and digital reality. It’s one part lecture, one part novel reading, and one part bong-hit dorm-room revelation. 

Whether you’re a Borges junkie, a speculative fiction nerd, or just someone tired of formulaic alien-invasion plots, this is the episode that dares to ask: what happens when a simulation becomes self-aware — and falls in love?

The Novel: Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine

https://a.co/d/ay0uTjD

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