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 blue scorecards, grading Trump’s performance issue by issue, policy by policy, and consequence by consequence.

Mookie approaches the administration from a libertarian-progressive angle, skeptical of power, allergic to authoritarian drift, and deeply concerned about economic inequality, cultural polarization, and democratic erosion. Ed comes from a constitutional conservative and libertarian tradition, prioritizing border security, national sovereignty, economic nationalism, and institutional accountability. Their worldviews often clash. But instead of detonating into predictable outrage, they dissect, challenge, concede, and recalibrate in real time.

They examine immigration and border enforcement, economic policy and tariffs, deregulation and industrial reshoring, AI-driven economic upheaval, government waste and bureaucratic inertia, military posture, foreign policy realignment, cultural fragmentation, and the expanding role of executive power. Every topic is debated through both red and blue lenses, exposing not just policy outcomes, but the moral assumptions underneath them.

Along the way, they find surprising areas of agreement, sharp philosophical fault lines, and uncomfortable truths that neither side particularly enjoys confronting.

Their conversation is less about defending Trump than it is about defending the possibility of meaningful political conversation itself: a space where disagreement sharpens thinking instead of hardening identity, and where argument becomes a tool for understanding rather than domination.

If you’re tired of algorithm-fed outrage, tribal loyalty tests, and conversations that generate more heat than light, Ed & Mookie showcase a model for how Americans can still talk honestly, forcefully, and productively across deep ideological divides.

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.

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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 Byzantine Clusterfuck: complexity used as camouflage.

His rant is a ruthless exploration of how otherwise reasonable people, including writers, thinkers, institutions, couples, conspiracists, corporations, and entire cultures hide their confusion, cowardice, and bad decisions behind layers of overthinking. From conspiracy theories and political narratives to therapy culture, failed relationships, impotence, career paralysis, and bad science fiction, the pattern is the same: when honesty hurts, people pile on explanations.

Mookie dissects:

• Why fear is pain plus simulation—and how that fuels over-intellectualization
• How conspiracy theories are ego protection masquerading as insight
• Why Occam’s Razor terrifies people more than chaos
• How bad sequels (looking at you, 2010) ruin great stories by explaining too much
• Why great storytelling, like life, works best with simple rules and real stakes
• How “depth” is often just insecurity in expensive clothing
• Why many personal crises aren’t mysterious at all: you’re just in the wrong life

Mookie believes in self-exposure more than self-help. So if you’re addicted to sounding smart, allergic to simplicity, or hiding behind endless analysis instead of making a hard choice, his rant will hopefully piss you off, and perhaps help save your life.

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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 blizzard of bullshit into the void?

He walks straight into the psychology of creative obsession: The thrill, the compulsion, the joy of actually loving the work. He owns the truth out loud: He chose happiness over “success.” didn’t chase polish, monetization, or careful strategy. Instead, he chased fulfillment, play, discovery, voice, identity, momentum, and sheer artistic eruption. He rejected perfectionism and paralysis, and stopped waiting for a mythic “right moment.” He created because he wanted to feel alive, and couldn't have done otherwise.

But Mookie doen't romanticize the chaos. The world doesn’t reward volume. Algorithms don’t care about passion. Platforms don’t hand out visibility for heart and effort. “Just keep creating” often masquerades as strategy while failure quietly compounds. Being honest, he tears apart the illusion that activity equals progress, and confronts the aloneness of building without scale, forcing himself to face the brutal tension between expression and relevance. Bottom line, he acknowledges that quality and quantity still fail without targeting, amplification, discipline, and intent.

So this solo rant lives right in the collision: joy vs. results, freedom vs. structure, art vs. market, fulfillment vs. recognition. The Amazon Flywheel runs on deliberate design and relentless momentum, while a blizzard of bullshit runs on catharsis and adrenaline—and rarely sticks. Mookie unpacks what he learned the hard way, and refuses to apologize for choosing joy. Committed to evolving in 2026, he suggests a sharper craft, smarter strategy, clearer branding, intentional amplification… while equally dedicated to not murdering the happiness that fuels all of it.

If you create like hell, drown in your own output, wonder why effort refuses to convert into momentum, or struggle between wanting recognition and wanting to feel alive, this episode won’t flatter you, but it sure as hell might inspire you. At the end of the digital day, whether you succeed or fail, NOBODY CARES. And that, more than any other feeling, is liberating as hell.

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