Bald and Bloviating
A nonpartisan bald news junky talks to his fellow Americans from all political stripes, and dissects top stories and rants about their implications -- along with other personal, science, and tech discussions.
Episodes
79 episodes
Digger: A Series of Grave Miscalculations
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 ...
Delete the NPCs in Your Life to Win
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 tha...
Our AI Honeymoon: Full of Surprises and We're Constantly Getting Screwed
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 art...
Labor Day Donald: Trump's Job Performance from B-Plus to Impeachment
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...
Creators! Show Yourselves: The Antidote to Bot Slop is YOU
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 ...
Forget Skynet: AI Won't Conquer Us, We'll Beg It to Take Over
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. ...
Know Your Sh$t: A Rant on Art, AI, and Copying Without a Clue
Mookie's back solo bloviating on Bald and Bloviating, fresh off an art gallery opening in LA's Design Quarter that left him with more to rant about than he expected. Before he even gets to the art, he works through his own complicated ...
The Critical Stinker: Why Hero Worship Reeks
Mookie returns to Bald and Bloviating solo with a question he's been chewing on: why does he keep falling hard for public intellectuals, pundits, and creators, only to cut them off completely the moment they lose credibility? Not fade ...
We Need More Cheepnis: Zappa, Nietzsche, and How Failure Fuels Art
Mookie bloviates solo today on a theory he's been sitting with as he watches friends, colleagues, and family members age into quiet regret, the sense that despite raising kids, holding a job, and doing everything right, they still somehow misse...
E.T. Stay Home: How Smartphones Might Explain the Fermi Paradox
Mookie fires the solo rants back up on Bald and Bloviating with a theory that starts small and ends up genuinely cosmic: what if the smartphone in your pocket is quietly answering one of physics' most famous unsolved questions?H...
Liberal vs Libertarian: WTF Happened to America?
Self-proclaimed "Libertarian Lite" Mookie Spitz and his liberal friend HP return to the political podcast battlefield for a volatile, funny, surprisingly philosophical follow-up to their earlier “End of American Exceptionalism” debate — this ti...
One Year Into Trump 2.0: Red & Blue Scorecards
What happens when two Americans with sharply different ideologies stop screaming, start listening, and actually compare notes?In this episode of Bald & Bloviating, Mookie Spitz and Ed Powell — political opposites with a shar...
Occam's Razor: Slicing Through the Byzantine Clusterf$ck
The first episode of Season Two of Bald and Bloviating features Mookie Spitz on a solo rant as he takes a razor to one of humanity’s favorite defense mechanisms: turning simple truths into baroque piles of intellectual bullshit. Fear i...
The Amazon Flywheel vs. A Blizzard of Bullshit
The first Bald and Bloviating episode of Season Two provides a retrospective on 2025, and inspiration for the year ahead. Mookie celebrates and slams a year of relentless creation—244+ podcasts across five shows, daily cont...
Shaking the Beltway Trees with TH Forest
What happens when a bald bloviator pods with an MM romance author to save America? Listen around, and find out on this 66th episode of the Bald and Bloviating podcast, where TH Forest and Mookie Spitz play an invigorating game of polit...
The Cockroach as Critic
In this raw, sardonic, and strangely uplifting solo rant, Mookie Spitz revisits his own metamorphosis from a self-flagellating perfectionist to a liberated creator. Framed through the lens of Franz Kafka’s existential nightmares, The Cockro...
Don't Be a Picassole!
In this blistering solo rant, Mookie Spitz takes the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature and turns it into a mirror for every would-be artist, procrastinating perfectionist, and self-styled “creative” who talks more than they make. Trigger warn...
How I Almost Partied with Bari Weiss
In this 63rd episode of Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz peels back a decade of intertwined ambition, friendship, and ideology that runs from Toronto brainstorming sessions to New York WeWorks beer taps to the editorial suites of CBS News.&nbs...
LA Comic Con 2025: View from Booksellers Row
Step into the chaos and communion of LA Comic Con 2025 with your bald and bloviating host, Mookie Spitz. From booth-side book barking with sci-fi author Ingrid Moon to weaving through seas of stormtroopers, cosplayers, and holographic Stan Lee,...
Mookie's Weekly Bloviation: Birthday Pizza & Jam Sandwiches
Mookie Spitz is back with another scorched-earth rant, weaving together politics, comedy, health, and mathematics into one restless through-line: we are making ourselves—and our country—miserable by wallowing in blame and self-victimization.
"Liars and Cowards and Thieves, Oh My!"
The 60th episode of Bald and Bloviating takes a bloviating look at America in 2025 through the eyes (and the big bald head) of host Mookie Spitz. In this solo rant, Mookie drags listeners from the chaos of his Chicago nightclub days in the ’90s...
Ode to My Big F@cking Mouth
Where does unfiltered honesty collide with a society drowning in bullshit? Let's try here: Hosted by Mookie Spitz, a self-described loudmouth, blowhard, and provocateur, he rants in this episode to dismantle the fake civility of our age and cut...
Mookie's Weekly Bloviation: Charlie Kirk, Batgirl, and AJR
In this week’s bloviation, Mookie Spitz lets loose in true Bill Burr fashion—no prep, no filter, just raw improvisation. What starts as a riff on the grind of creative practice—writing, podcasting, and the compulsion to keep your “chops” sharp—...
Mookie's Weekly Bloviation: 9/4/2025
Mookie Spitz, self-proclaimed “Bloviator in Chief." channels the spirit if not the talent of Bill Burr into his 57th Bald and Bloviating episode, and his first "Weekly Bloviation": he hits record with zero prep, zero filter, and maximum honesty...
Writers, Stop the H.A.I.T.E.!
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, elab...
