Bald and Bloviating

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 time with the second Trump administration fully underway and the consequences no longer theoretical. HP argues that America is facing a moral crisis...

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 shared allergy to tribal nonsense — conduct a brutally honest audit of the first year of Trump’s second term. Instead of trading talking points, they build parallel red and b...

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 isn’t just pain—it’s pain with imagination . And when that fear gets dressed up as sophistication, theory, ideology, or “deep analysis,” you get what Mookie calls the...

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 content, thousands of posts, a full science-fiction novel, new communities, endless publishing—and he asks the blunt question: is he building an Amazon Flywheel, or just hurling a...

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 political tennis.  Their intense and fun conversation swings from Reaganomics and the imminent attack on Venezuela to immigration raids and Nixon's Southern Strategy...

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 Cockroach as Critic is part homage, part exorcism, and part manifesto for late-life reinvention. Mookie draws parallels between Kafka’s bureaucratic dread and the gen...

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 warning for your inner hack: this one hurts. From Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s single-sentence novels to Picasso’s 50,000 pieces of relentless output, Mookie dismantles t...

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.  Starting with Barry Weiss’s meteoric rise from Substack renegade to corporate media powerhouse, Mookie rewinds to 2015 to trace his own improbable web of conn...

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, this episode captures the raw energy of a cultural carnival where camp, commerce, and creativity collide. Mookie shares what it really feels like to stand...

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. The episode opens on the Jimmy Kimmel suspension saga, where late-night jokes, FCC jawboning, and Trumpian pressure collide. It’s not really about Kimmel, tho...

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 straight into today’s fractured cultural and political landscape. The connective tissue? A phrase he once shouted across a barroom floor, echoing Dorothy a...

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 cuts straight to the marrow of discourse. Yes, Mookie delivers an ode to his big f@cking mouth —the blessing and curse of speaking without a filter. He di...

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—spirals into bigger questions of taste, truth, and the price of authenticity. Mookie traces his own path from blogging obscurity to millions of TikTok video...

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. What starts as a riff on the age-old battle between dogs and cats evolves into a deeper meditation on human nature, cynicism, cowardice, an...

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...

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 whis...

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 sti...

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....

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 stud...

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 epis...

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 homeles...

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 writ...

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...

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...

In this third installment of Inside the Infiniverse , Mookie Spitz dives even deeper into the opening Episode of his new sci-fi novel, Jonnie Fazzoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine . What begins as Penny Pitz’ routine interview for her Thrillionaires Under 30 list mutates into something far more volatile—a Gen Z date masquerading as journalism, where attraction and revulsion keep flipping...