The Critical Stinker: Why Hero Worship Reeks

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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Hello and welcome to Bald and Bloviating. I'm your bald bloviating host, Mookie Spitz, and I'll be bloviating today about the Critical Stinker. I've ranted before about my idols, whom have fallen, at least by my own humble estimation. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Marr, a host of celebrity pundits whom I at some point admired, often to the point of hero worship. And then they do something, say something, post something to piss me off. And like a spurned lover, I flip and I break up. And it's hard for me to rupture and repair, hard for me to reconcile. And this is great and it sucks. It's great in the sense that you move on. You can get too consumed with a person and a personality. You start listening to the point where their bloviation becomes your own. And it's generally a good idea just to keep moving. Pick up new pundits, new people to admire, perhaps in ways emulate, but keep it frisky. Keep things in motion. Your own creativity, your own ideas. Don't fixate on one point of view or even several points of view with any real continuity. Because you're gonna get dumber, not smarter. Make up your own mind, extract insights from different sources, rekindle it, refabricate it, transform it into your own ideas, your own point of view, your own creative output. That's the good part. The bad part is they still have good stuff to offer. It's not like I have to go cold turkey, it's not a binary situation, it's not like we're dating, it's not like we live together and then they move out and they gotta take all their shit with them. Come on. But it's hard for me, I think, because there's a breach of credibility. When Neil deGrasse Tyson was on stage at the Beacon Theater in New York, and his guest was Michio Kaku of Columbia University, and when Neil asked Michio if he could share any concrete examples of quantum supremacy playing out in the real world, Michio deflected, didn't answer the question because he couldn't, because Michio, I know, is almost completely full of shit. He has banked on his prior reputation as one of the founders of string theory, clearly mathematically adroit, but he has been blowing smoke with hyperbolic, bullshit, alleged science books for a long time now. Wormholes, quantum supremacy, blah blah blah, horseshit, and he pisses me off. Neil, however, at least up to that point, great science communicator, very rational, very reasonable, very personable, very accessible. I liked Neil. I listened to his Star Talk podcast, I read his books. I liked Neil. I didn't think he did as good a job with Cosmos as Carl Sagan, of course. Carl Sagan is kind of like Sean Connery as 007. You can be Piers Brosnan and do a great job with Goldeneye, but Sean Connery is always gonna be 007. And Cosmos is always gonna be Carl Sagan, but that's okay. That's not a fault of Neil's. Neil gave it his best shot, Neil was pretty good, and I like Neil until that fateful evening. Instead of calling Michio out, he just fed into the bullshit. And now again, rationally, I understand. Neil is part of a community. He could not throw it back in Michio's face, and he was the fool who invited Michio in the first place. Why you why are you platforming this guy? But Neil is part of a community. He's gotta play ball. I get it, but I just can't forgive him. The equivalent was Bill Maher when he set up a stool after having dinner with Donald Trump and proceeded to lecture us for over 12 minutes on how Trump the man isn't necessarily Trump the politician or president. And we need to have the maturity and the intelligence to differentiate the two. And I thought to myself, you know what? Fuck you, Bill Maher. You're an arrogant prick. That is self-evident. And that's part of your brand. It's not so much that we put up with it, but in ways we relish it. But that was too much. I was done. I couldn't handle it. I stopped watching Bill Maher. Bill Maher's show, which would be on the podcast Saturday morning. I don't watch any TV. We don't have a TV in the apartment. It's either YouTube videos and preferably podcast formats. I listen to my media, my news, some of the audiobooks, shows like Bill Mar. Used to, not anymore, like Inspector Clouseau said when he destroyed a vintage musical instrument. Adios, Bill Marr, from my world of punditry. That was too much. And it's the same modus operandi. You blew my trust, you blew credibility. You could be up there saying smart bipartisan stuff. I used to love his weekly New Rules analysis. Very good writer, very good presenter. His jokes were funny too, even if they're written by committee. But we broke up after that 12-minute lecture because he blew his credibility. I could no longer trust him. The same guy who would do that. I just couldn't laugh at his jokes anymore. I couldn't appreciate his point of view, even if I agreed with him 90-95% of the time. We were done. Next up on my breakup list is the Critical Drinker. His name is Jordan, and he's a former web developer from Scotland. Started doing YouTube movie reviews back in I think 2012. And over the course of a decade, blew up on YouTube. He's got two million followers plus. He's reviewed hundreds of films. And you see where I'm going with this. I love that guy too. He created his own style. So the visual fabric is just repeating loops of clips of films that he could run long enough so that he doesn't get sued for copyright infringement. So visually, his setups are boring. They're often out of sync with his point of view and review. But that's become a motif of his. And interspersed with these repetitive, often contextually irrelevant clips of movies he's reviewing, he does funny little memes that are his signature from different movies that encapsulate the mood, the expression of what he is talking about. He's got a classic Scottish brogue, and he's got some critical drinker isms that I came to love. So going from the end to the beginning, he signs off every video by saying, That's all I've got today. Go away now. And that contemptuous, dismissive attitude of his own audience, I loved it. It's so contrarian to the kiss-ass sycophincy of what most of social media is, or the idiotic political provocateurs. He's just an arrogant fuck and an asshole. And you see where I'm going with this too. So make note of that. It'll be important later, as he often says, about scenes in movies. He's also got another great Scottishism. So he'll be evaluating a plot sequence or something a character should do or doesn't do. And then he'll rhetorically ask you, the viewer, well, why did X happen in this movie when it was supposed to be Y or we thought it would be Z? And then he goes, Dunno! I love that. And then he'll superimpose a meme of some dude shrugging. And then he has several others which are his signature. Another one is it'll be fine. So calamities are building, there's a moment of crisis and a demand for some kind of resolution in a movie and a script. And then he's just dismissively say, no, it'll be fine. Great, loved it. So I got hooked on his reviews. So I'd watch two or three of them sometimes a day, and he's got a good backlog. So for the past month or so, I was really into the critical drinker. Now, in addition to stylistically just loving how this guy approaches reviews, I loved his reviews. I agree with him 95% of the time, like my Bill Maher assessment. Movies that I hated, he hated for the same reasons. Movies I loved, he loved for the same reasons. He hates 90% of the movies he reviews. I hate 90% of the movies I see. I used to get browbeaten by my peers on Facebook for constantly complaining about every film and not liking anything. And people would dismiss my dismissal of all this cinema as just being the contrarian for the sake of it without really understanding my point of view or appreciating where I was coming from. And the critical drinker gets it, and I get where the critical drinker comes from. A big part of this criticism is the wokeness of film, especially in science fiction and fantasy. He went into the disintegration of classic heroes in the Star Wars franchise, the India Jones franchise, and then even in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where the new writers try to reinvent the franchise for the quote-unquote modern audiences with the message, which is equality, diversity, a DEI brought to film, but in a heavy-handed, stupid way that supersedes good storytelling. So the critical drinker does not come across as racist or misogynist. He's merely saying that there are conventions, foundations of storytelling and cinema that are, in a sense, immutable if you want to make for good storytelling. And when you supersede these principles of great storytelling, great direction, great casting with ideology, regardless of your bent left or right, the output is gonna suck. And I'm on board. I get it, I like it. I've been saying this for decades, and here this guy is successful on YouTube rocking it. What a celebration! And I'm on YouTube, and my YouTube presence sucks. It sucks because I'm all over the place. I don't have a show, an audience, and I'm more nuanced, and I do podcast shows with guests, and I do my solo rants, and then I break them into clips, and I overshare and undershare, and I have no schedule, and my SEO blows. I get all that. And with the Critical Drinker, there there was a sense of admiration, which is bro, you are articulating what I have felt and bloviated about for decades in a coherent, fun, and very quirky, very Scottish kind of way. And I love it. You are awesome, bro. Great. Now, here's where we're going with this. I'm browsing his and I come across Rogue Elements, and then I read the backstory. Back in 2022, he raised 330,000 pounds of monies on a Kickstarter, where, and this is even better in principle. He's like, I'm sitting here shitting on everyone else's movie, and people have been saying, well, it's easy to shit on a movie, it's harder to make one, bro. So he decided to make one. So he had the goal of 20,000 pounds. He blew it out the door because of his popularity on YouTube, and people gave him big monies to make his own fucking movie, and then he's got his own series of novels. See, I write novels, and this guy, Jordan, writes novels, and I shit on movies, and he shits on movies, and I agree with almost everything he says. He's a writer, he's a ranter, he's on YouTube. I can relate to this guy, and this guy's very successful, and he earns it and he deserves it. And I'm I'm I'm not jelly of him. I'm I'm admiring this guy. This guy's rocking it. Drum roll, please. I admired him until not only did I watch the piece of shit that he ended up creating with his 330,000 pounds, Rogue Elements, the movie sucks. It's bad. But I'll even forgive him for that, which is okay, you had the balls and wherewithal to actually get the money together, and then you actually hired a director, and then you cast actors, and you actually made your shitty script happen. And a script isn't a book, and maybe your mistake was strategic to try to bring your own detective character, Ryan Drake, I think, to life. Instead of thinking out of the box and thinking what would be optimal for a project like this. And maybe your books kind of suck too. I flipped through them and they look pretty conventional there, Mr. Critical Drinker. But again, I will give you almost infinite slack, bro, for fucking up your own Kickstarter project with a shit movie after you're Mr. Critic. And now the movie sucks, interestingly and ironically enough, based on all the criteria that the critical drinker himself uses to shit on everyone else's movie. Story sucks, the dialogue is stilted and cliche, the continuity is bad, etc. etc. So he made all the sins that you do for a movie like this after he identified all of them on everyone else's films. Now, part of my benefit of a doubt, at least regarding the content, is it's hard to brand yourself. It's hard to adapt your own ideas to your own output. And I've seen this happen a million times. I've been working in the agency world, the advertising world for two decades. And I've seen this time and time again when agencies fuck up their own branding. So an agency will make millions doing the creative and the messaging and the concepting for the brand identity of products and services and even companies. And they do a great job. That's their lifeline. That's their cash cow. They're good at this. But when they look in the mirror and they try to brand their own agency, they seem to forget every rule in the book. Their methodology disintegrates somehow in this self-reflective process. And the output sucks. Over and over again, I've seen this, and I've seen individual, terrific branding experts, people who are awesome at this when it comes to someone else's product or service or company or capability, and then they direct it on themselves and it makes no sense, it doesn't resonate, and they most significantly break all their own rules. So this is pretty common. So you're off the hook for all that shit, Critical Drinker, because I love your reviews. But here's where you lost me permanently and forever. I saw your review of your own shitty movie. And here's the thing. You blame the costs mounting. You blame the timeline. You were a fucking asshole. And in this ball dropping of your own accountability and responsibility, and your own inability or unwillingness to appraise your own shit show with the same unabashed, ostensibly objective appraisal of you as critic, you lost me. You lost me for fucking ever. Because I could forgive you even for that, but emotionally I cannot listen to you rant on about some other film in the exact same tone and with these fun critical drinkerisms. And uh and your voice and your accent and your harsh attitude that you leveled against the fucking actress in the movie that you wrote, that you produced, and that you were accountable for. You suck, bro. You blew it. And I see you've got another Kickstarter, trial by fire, and it's already raised like a hundred thousand pounds. And I also noticed that your overall viewership hasn't fallen since the debacle of rogue elements. And this to me makes sense. I think most people online don't give a shit. So a small subset of millions of people who watch your videos got into this idea of you making your own video. Very small percentage. And of those who did participate gave them your gave them, gave you their money and had some expectations for success, the funnel narrows even further in terms of. People paying attention and understanding what a good product is and taking this shit seriously. And frankly, seeing the inherent hypocrisy of your own review of your own shitty movie. I'm in the minority of the minority of the minority. And frankly, if you hear this, you don't give a shit either. Because you're successful. This was a minor speed bump in everything that you're doing. And jokes on me and other assholes like me criticizing your criticism of your criticism because you turned around and got another project going, and you're going to give this another world. And who knows? Maybe this next pilot, you actually learned from all your mistakes. Mistake number one being you didn't take ownership of the project. That's why it fucked up, first off. And the second worst fuck up was you didn't take ownership of you fucking up that project. But maybe this next project won't fuck up because you'll preclude it by learning your lessons. And other people have started out with abject failures and turned it around. And this doesn't say anything about your future career. It could fizzle or you could be the guy. I don't know, and I don't care. My point of this whole rant, though, is coming to understand why I feel this way, and then ultimately what it means to my ability to connect with other artists, hold people in esteem, and understand really the nature of this racket. And in a similar way, the plus is just move on. I had a month of watching arguably 50 critical drinker videos and laughing my ass off. But it's time to move on. Will this compromise my entertainment? Dunno! But it'll be fine. And as far as all your exploits go, not that you give a shit, that's all I've got for you today. So go away. And lastly, I want to thank you. And I want to thank Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Maher. And frankly, all the relationships I've had throughout my whole life. Sometimes, almost all the time, you just need to move on. Sometimes it's sudden, sometimes it's gradual. But we learn from every interaction with everyone we encounter. Whether it's romantic, a business colleague, a creative, aspirational, fist-pumping kind of relationship like mine with these folks, and it's all good. End of the day though, you gotta be your own person, you gotta be your own creator. I don't think Pablo Picasso sat around wondering why he had a falling out with so and such or so and such. He was too busy making pottery, watercolors, murals. Guy was kind of busy. Stay busy, my friends. I had another friend who commented on a rant I did comparing AI for writers to Viagra for porn stars. And the point I was making was that back in the day of 70s, 80s, 90s, vintage porn, classic pornography, as we would call it, you saw the same guys over and over again in all the movies. And the reason, with a little bit of deliberation, a little bit of analysis, is it's hard to keep it up in a room full of people staring at you with cameras rolling and lights blazing. Action! Cut. There's a lot of stimulation. But these handful of guys who you saw over and over again throughout the pornography of the 70s, 80s, and 90s were in the select few who, for whatever reason, were able to concentrate. 1998 brought Viagra, and with that, the democratization of male performers in pornography. So you pop a few pills, and then you have a better chance of keeping it up with a room full of people and a director yelling at you and having to shoot and reshoot, so to speak, one scene after another. AI similarly is giving that kind of power to just about anyone to write just about anything. So I thought that's funny. And I extrapolated to show how scarcity is a good thing for the creative arts. And abundance, especially unlicensed, unbridled, ubiquitous, democratized abundance, isn't necessarily a good thing for the arts. And my friend commented well, pornography isn't the same because writers these days are up against the machines who could do so much, and writers now are more threatened than the porn stars of the late 90s. But this kind of misses the point. Where everyone does it differently. And the only way that I can do it is to stay true to what I like. And I jump genres and I do all sorts of different stuff, take it or leave it, beat me, bore me. Most of you might still ignore me, but it's really about being true to oneself. I was talking about Neil Young with my younger kid, who's my roommate here in Southern California. He's 19 and he's learning how to fly airplanes and he's awesome. And uh, I support him in the sense of paying his rent and buying him his Costco food. But he's pretty much on his own. He's got his own car that he pays for, insurance that he pays for, spending money that he earns, all of which from waiting tables at a Fufi Bistro in Newport Beach. He's 19 and he's rocking it and he's doing it. And he goes, Hey Mookie, what do you think of Neil Young? And I realized that Neil Young, and I hadn't thought about it that much before, is a lot like my other heroes, including Frank Zappa that I was referring to earlier. And Neil Young jumped genres and even ideologies, perceptively, from year to year, decade to decade, from country and folk to grunge to electronic music, from being the weed smoking hippie to being a neo-foe Reaganite, personal responsibility and accountability. You go Neil. And the reason he did that was the same reason Zappa does it, and frankly, is the same reason I do it, is that you get pinned down to one point of view, you get you get pigeonholed into one form of expression, and it gets stale. It gets stale not only for your audience, but it gets stale for you. And if it gets stale for you, it's certainly gonna get stale for your audience. So knock on the statue, be a philosopher with a hammer, like Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, just before he lost his mind, his most productive last year, 1888. Penned off four books, I think, including Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. He basically did a coup de grace for himself and his thinking on the values that we hold as being empty. Whether it's Christianity, Socratic rationalism, our sense of right and wrong and morality, we just gotta get over it and get over ourselves. The übermensch, the overman, is Kaufman translated it so much better than a lot of the others. It's not superman, it's overman. It's self-overcoming. And the best way to get over your own bullshit is not to continuously ingest the bullshit of others. I saw a headline pop up on my Doom Scrolling the other night. Like, Earth-shattering news, Bill Mayer is jumping on the Trump train after Zoran Mandami and the Democrat Socialists of America gained so many victories in the primaries. I don't give a shit. I don't care. Who and who gives a fuck what Bill Maher thinks or says? That's what happens when you follow somebody for too long. Their shit becomes your shit. And it does make a difference. And it's not fine. And you gotta get beyond dunno. And that's all that you should have for people. And they should go away now. And in that freedom, and in a sense, isolation, you could find a true sense of self. You actually have an opinion. You go, boy, you go, girl, you go anything and everyone in between. Have your own goddamn opinion. And sometimes the only way to do that is to free yourself up of everybody else's opinion. So when they do piss you off finally and you can't handle it anymore, then just break free because it's the happiest, healthiest, best thing for you as a thinking, discerning person, let alone artist. And that is all I have for you today. Goo away now! Thanks for listening. Like, comment, share. Now that I have fewer guests this week in my other podcasts, I get to fall back into these solo rants, which I enjoy and I've missed. I'm gonna make it a point of just scheduling these in anyway because they're too much damn fun. Thank you.