Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod

Creative writing in all forms has never been this exciting -- or frustrating. In a time when ChatGPT writes novels, TikTok “authors” go viral, and algorithms decide which stories live or die, Ink vs Algorithm is a podcast dedicated to writers who bleed ink and and publish their heart out. Hosted by writer, ranter, and raconteur Mookie Spitz , each episode features lively conversations with flesh and blood authors who love what they do -- and hate competing with prompt-jockeys and viral Bots. Along the way more stories will be told and laughs shared, living proof the living still matter. Whether you’re a novelist, journalist, pundit, poet, or just a cynic with a keyboard and an attitude, Ink vs Algorithm reminds us all why lived experience still matters — and how extracting and sharing it still takes relentless grit, determination, and a mountain of fought for and refined talent.

Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod is a arts podcast hosted by Mookie Spitz, with 20 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Mookie Spitz hosts Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod, a arts show with 20 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #20

  Stay in Your Lane and Watch It Go Off the Rails

  Sep 23, 202630 minS1

  Mookie flips a familiar piece of career advice on its head: stay in your lane, the guidance handed to nearly every writer, marketer, and creator trying to build an audience. He builds the case around Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, tracing how Newton's absolute universe held for centuries until Einstein tore it apart at twenty-seven by rejecting Newton's core assumption rather than refining it. Kuhn's insight, Mookie argues, applies just as much to building a career or a brand: real shifts come from crisis, and crisis rarely rewards the person who stays put. He draws the line carefully though. Staying in your lane works once you've already claimed one, and he leans on Ries and Trout's classic positioning theory to explain why line extensions like New Coke and Xerox computers failed. But before you've established that mind share, doubling down on a single genre or modality can quietly sink you. Mookie points to Matt Dinniman's "Dungeon Crawler Carl" series as an example of a writer who built a lane by blending satire, social commentary, and multiple genres rather than narrowing into one. The rant turns personal from there. Mookie explains why he stopped treating himself as just a novelist and started spreading across five podcasts, daily TikTok and Instagram rants, and video blogs, treating each one like a gig on tour, testing the room until something sticks. In an AI environment reshaping the rules week to week, he argues finding a lane matters more right now than defending one. Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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  Episode #19

  Josh Adam: Understanding Reality through the Measurement Mind

  Sep 1, 20261h 18mS1

  Mookie found Josh Adam the way both of them hoped strangers still could online, stumbling on one of his essays and immediately recognizing a kindred mind. Josh joins Ink vs Algorithm to talk about his book, The Measurement Mind , and fair warning: their discussion is one of the deepest, most unapologetically nerdy conversations the show has done, working through the actual nature of Reality itself. Josh spent a decade of hour-long gym commutes listening to physics and philosophy audiobooks, and slowly built his own original theory out of it. His core claim: reality isn't made of things, it's made of measurements. Every time anything, a person, a thermometer, a particle, makes a distinction between one state and another, that act of measurement is what pulls raw, unconstrained information into the ordered, causal world we actually experience. Mookie, a lifelong physics obsessive in his own right, meets him step for step, and together they build the idea out from quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's cat, through Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis and Stephen Wolfram's Ruliad, all the way to the multiverse, the anthropic principle, and why an AI can be fluent and intelligent without ever actually experiencing anything at all. What makes the conversation land, though, is watching two genuinely curious, credential-free thinkers, a marketing consultant and a gymnastics coach, work through ideas usually reserved for physics departments, purely because they can't stop wondering about them. They test the theory against the Moon (does it keep bending spacetime if nobody's around to measure it?), against free will, against the meaning of consciousness itself, and land, unexpectedly, on something warm and human: that no matter how mathematical the universe turns out to be, what actually matters is still love, family, and the people sitting across from you. The Guest Josh Adam is a gymnastics coach and the author of The Measurement Mind, a book blending physics, philosophy, and original theory on the nature of consciousness and reality. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife and two sons. More from Josh, including his book: https://www.themeasurementmind.com Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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  Episode #18

  Doctor's Orders: "Put Your Hands On Your Head!"

  Aug 28, 202624 minS1

  Mookie's back on Ink vs Algorithm with another true story that's got no business being this fun to tell. This one's got a needle, a Southern-accented campus doctor barking orders, a soon-to-be Grammy winner squatting in the next apartment over, and a girlfriend who wanted him married before she wanted him gone: cocaine on the pizza counter, a robbery a month like clockwork, and one deeply, spectacularly unglamorous trip to student health services that Mookie still remembers in vivid, wincing detail decades later. The story is Cheepnis in action, the philosophy Mookie laid out a few episodes back on Bald and Bloviating: Zappa, Nietzsche, and the idea that the most humiliating, unpolished, can't-believe-that-happened moments of a life make for the best art we can create/ No developmental editor cutting the adverbs here, no sanding off the embarrassing edges, just the real, ridiculous, occasionally gross truth, told the way it actually happened. And then, without losing a beat of the comedy, Mookie goes somewhere he hasn't quite gone before on the show, peeling back what else was really happening in his life during this exact stretch of reckless, twenty-something chaos, expressed the way he thinks storytelling is supposed to work: not to fix anything, just to turn it into something worth telling. The Short Story Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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  Episode #17

  The Night Bobby Almost Burned the Bar Down

  Aug 24, 202639 minS1

  Mookie returns to Ink vs Algorithm for another solo reading, this one a true story from his nightclub-managing days in 1990s Chicago, and a companion piece to his published novella Greg's Gift. Before diving in, he opens with a real, honest check-in on where his head's at these days: five shows running in parallel, a self-described introverted extrovert New York City emigre now happily isolated in Southern California, and a hard-won sense that his writing has finally earned the confidence it took decades to find. The story itself picks up a thread Mookie's been pulling all season: that the most chaotic, humiliating, out-of-control experiences of our lives are exactly the ones worth telling, not despite the mess, but because of it. The harrowing tale centers on a bartender Mookie liked a little too much to manage properly, the quiet ways enabling someone can start to feel like loyalty, and a single shift where every bad habit Mookie let slide finally came due at once. He tells it in the roman à clef tradition where real events, real people, compressed and shaped for maximum impact, and insists every beat of it happened, down to sending it years later to the real person it's about and getting back a giggling, unprompted confirmation. Mookie closes with an honest look at his own process, why reading his own work aloud makes him a sharper writer every time, and where this story fits into a planned sequel to Greg's Gift he's already hungry to write. The Short Story The Novella Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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  Episode #16

  The Jumper: 30 Seconds of Grief, 30 Years of Laughter

  Aug 21, 202622 minS1

  Mookie steps away from interviews for a solo episode of Ink vs Algorithm , reading one of his own short stories straight from Substack. "The Jumper" is set in a Chicago high-rise insurance office in the early 1990s, where a temp worker watches his two office besties turn a woman's suicide into the day's juiciest gossip, trading grim, escalating details with the same giddy energy they'd use for celebrity news. The story's real target goes beyond the tragedy itself, and implies the strange, almost comic speed with which people absorb someone else's death and keep right on living theirs. Within minutes of hearing the details, the office is already back to flirting, drink plans, and petty jealousy, genuine sympathy flickers for a sentence or two before getting steamrolled by the far more urgent business of the banal everyday. Mookie's upfront afterward describes how the story is true, pulled directly from his own early thirties, temping and adrift in Chicago's John Hancock Building, refusing to grow up in any conventional sense. That admission opens into the real heart of the episode: his theory that the most excruciating, humiliating periods of a person's life are precisely the richest material a writer will ever get, and that financial recklessness, chronically broke, still creating anyway, isn't the wrench in the works, but the engine of it. He traces his own arc from cringing at his early, overwrought Medium posts to fully owning his voice now, volume and unevenness included. The Short Story Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...

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