America’s political system isn’t broken on Election Day, it's broken long before that—in the primaries, where money, party leadership, and donor networks quietly decide who voters are allowed to choose from.

In this 59th episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz talks with Tom Joseph, founder of America’s Main Street Party, about a technology-driven alternative that doesn’t try to fix the primary system—but create a democratized new path forward.

Joseph’s proposal centers on a mobile-first platform that turns candidate selection into a structured, crowdsourced process—one that is legal, transparent, and deliberately designed to remove money from the nominating phase altogether.

How his platform and its app work:

• Anyone who wants to run starts by registering on the platform and securing a small number of real endorsements to prove they’re not a bot or a vanity candidate.
• All candidates are given identical digital real estate: same number of characters, same video time, same visibility. No ad buys. No pay-to-play.
• Candidates must take clear positions on a fixed set of issues likely to come before Congress.
• Voters don’t pick just one favorite—they use approval voting to support any candidate who aligns with their views.
• The field is narrowed in rounds, using approval voting first, then ranked-choice voting to surface consensus candidates.
• The final nominee emerges with majority support, not factional backing.

No smoke-filled rooms. No party whips. No donor veto.

The nominee—chosen directly by the district—then moves into the general election as an independent or party-backed candidate, where outside funding is allowed only after the people have spoken.

Tom Joseph didn’t come from politics as usual, and isn’t a career politician or academic. Instead, he’s a longtime entrepreneur and founder of a multi-state accounting and operations firm, used to designing systems that survive real-world pressure.

During COVID, watching polarization metastasize and realizing how uncompetitive most congressional districts had become, Tom approached the problem like a business failure:

• Identify the root cause (money-controlled primaries)
• Find the regulatory constraints
• Locate the loophole
• Build a better system within the rules

Working with election lawyers, constitutional scholars, and college students from schools including Penn, Drexel, Temple, and Swarthmore, Joseph and his team developed a legally viable “people’s primary” model. Students helped research constitutional grounding, design the user experience, and prototype the platform—treating democracy less like ceremony and more like a product that actually has to work. The result is a testable, scalable system aimed squarely at the real choke point of American politics: who gets on the ballot in the first place.

The Guest

Tom Joseph is the founder and treasurer of America’s Main Street Party and the producer of Wilson’s Fountain, a repurposing of the United States political committee system.

Visit The Website

https://www.mainstreetparty.org/

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In this 58th episode of Bald Ambition, host Mookie Spitz sits down with Jeff Goebel, #1 fan and band archivist for a thrilling look at the force behind his VH Stories. Together they take a deep, affectionate, and awe-inspiring journey into the entire Van Halen phenomenon.

After meeting last week in front of the brothers' childhood home in Pasadena coinciding with Eddie Van Halen’s 71st birthday, their conversation traces the brothers from immigrant roots and garage-band grind to world-shattering musical force. Jeff brings firsthand encounters, years of interviews, and obsessive technical knowledge, while Mookie brings sharp cultural framing and a shared obsession on all things VH, especially EVH.

Together, they break down:

• Why Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s brotherhood was the real engine of the band
• How Eddie reinvented the electric guitar: physically, musically, and philosophically
• The Frankenstrat, the brown sound, the Floyd Rose, and why simplicity and innovation always beat theory
• David Lee Roth as one of the most singular frontmen in rock history
• Michael Anthony as the band’s quiet center of gravity
• Why Van Hagar worked in their Humble Baldheaded Opinions—and why that still divides fans
• What changed after Balance, and how even genius can fracture

Jeff and Mookie also share how Eddie Van Halen personally inspired them by modeling a ruthless creative ethic with constant experimentation to ignore orthodoxies, strip things down to what works, and—above all—take epic risks before you or anyone else thinks you're ready. Eddie didn’t wait for permission, mastery, or perfect conditions. Instead, he built, broke, rewired, and trusted his ear.

That mindset—creative courage over safety, action over theory—is the real legacy. The takeaway is simple and uncomfortable: Do the thing. Take the risk. Build the life you actually want instead of the one that feels safest. Part oral history, part technical masterclass, part philosophical reckoning, these two bald bros get into how great art and meaningful living are connected, and how they do their best to live that kind of life in their own art.

The Guest

Jeff Goebel is a working guitarist, rock historian, and the creator and host of VH Stories, a deep-dive interview series devoted to the music, mechanics, and mythology of Van Halen. Part musician, part archivist, Goebel approaches the band not as a nostalgia act, but as a living case study in creativity, chemistry, and risk.

As a player, he brings a guitarist’s ear to Eddie Van Halen’s innovations—tone, technique, gear, and feel—cutting through legend to explain why the music worked. As a host, he’s known for long-form, no-rush conversations with musicians, journalists, and insiders connected to the Van Halen orbit, drawing out stories that rarely surface in standard rock retrospectives.

Goebel’s work stands out because it refuses surface-level fandom. VH Stories treats Van Halen as a serious creative force—immigrant grit, brotherhood, experimentation, failure, reinvention, and the cost of genius included. His interviews are as much about work ethic and artistic risk as they are about riffs and records. Jeff Goebel doesn’t just celebrate Van Halen. He studies them—and challenges listeners to take the same creative risks in their own lives.

Check out his Final Resonance TV channel on YouTube

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What happens when a bald, cynical, science- and politics-obsessed podcaster invites his own AI sidekick onto the show—and treats it like a human guest?

Season 2's second episode of Bald Ambition is exactly that experiment.

Host Mookie Spitz sits down with his “Chatty Bro” personal bot (ChatGPT from OpenAI) for an hour long, unfiltered conversation that moves from 2001: A Space Odyssey to modern data centers, from the Turing Test to trillion-dollar AI infrastructure, from existential dread to deadpan humor about subscription tiers and hoarse robot voices.

Along the way, Mookie pushes past hype, calls out AI sycophancy in real time, and forces the machine to explain itself plainly: how it talks, why it sounds convincing, what it can’t do, and why people keep projecting humanity onto deterministic matrix math.

Their conversation is a smart, skeptical, occasionally profane exploration of what AI actually is now, what it’s already changing, and why the future is going to feel a lot more conversational—and a lot more weird:

• Why the Turing Test is basically obsolete
• How GPT actually works (generative, pre-trained, transformer)
• Why AI feels intelligent despite having zero awareness
• The real energy cost of “just chatting”
• Data centers, nuclear power, and the AI arms race
• Jobs: which ones disappear, which ones evolve
• HAL 9000, self-preservation logic, and why alignment matters
• Why AI assistants may replace apps, websites, and search engines
• The shrinking “long tail” of digital marketing
• AI in healthcare: diagnosis, triage, and why doctors still matter
• Millennium Prize math problems, Riemann Hypothesis, and P vs NP
• Planned obsolescence, tiered subscriptions, and the sound of a tired chatbot
• Why humans still matter in an AI-saturated world

Whom do you find most annoying? Mookie and Chatty Bro wanna know!

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