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

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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

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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

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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

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Colleen Coffman spent decades as a special effects and makeup artist, building monsters for haunted houses and horror films, working alongside actors like Wes Studi and Lou Diamond Phillips, designing wigs for the Kansas City Ballet. But on this episode of Ink vs Algorithm, she joins Mookie to talk about something stranger than anything she ever built for the screen: a lifelong habit of seeing entities most people don't, and the sketch diary she'd kept of them for years, which vanished during a move in 2014 and reappeared, completely out of nowhere, from a stranger on Facebook exactly one day after she found herself missing it.

That diary became her book, The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, and Colleen walks through some of what's in it: sylphs, satyrs, and a genuinely unsettling personal encounter with a duende, a small, physical creature she watched steal a pair of socks from her late uncle's closet and knew, on instinct, not to follow. Mookie and Colleen dig into where these experiences might come from: Jung's archetypes, the idea of a "thinning veil," and whether these entities represent something genuinely external or a very old, very human way of processing the unexplainable.

What ties all of it together, the entities, the art, the feeling that something else is present, is a kind of sensitivity most people have trained themselves out of. Mookie frames it as something that was never really about belief in the first place, but about lived experience, and the same creative openness that lets someone tap into and express what they're feeling, whether that's through art or through encounters like Colleen's.

That same idea becomes the emotional center of the conversation once the topic turns to 2020. Colleen traces a direct line from pandemic isolation to a lasting breakdown in empathy, patience, and basic human contact, in her own family and everywhere she looks, and argues the same capacity, the willingness to actually feel another person's presence, drives both her entities and her fractured relationships.

Mookie connects it back to why he started podcasting in the first place, a very Socratic argument that real understanding only happens face to face, never through a screen. They land together on something genuinely simple as the antidote: slow down, look people in the eye, and remember that everyone else is struggling too, the same open-hearted attention that let Colleen see sylphs and satyrs in the first place.

The Guest

Colleen Coffman is a semi-retired special effects and makeup artist for stage and film, and the author of The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, published by Hangar 1 Publishing. Her film work includes Nailbiter and The Stylist, and her stage credits include productions with the Kansas City Ballet.

Get the book:

https://hangar1publishing.com/products/the-adventures-of-a-sketch-diary

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Mookie's an "old veteran hoofer" Pynchon fan, having discovered the iconic author in the 1980s and obsessing ever since, while Matthew Nelson, now finishing his doctorate on Pynchon's fiction at the University of St Andrews, found him a different way entirely: at 14, in the paranoid, hypermediated fog right after 9/11, in a world already reshaped by YouTube and conspiracy spirals that the acclaimed novelist seemed to have predicted decades early. That generational gap consisting of two readers separated by almost thirty years, arriving at the same obsessive body of work from opposite ends of American history, is the engine running underneath this compelling conversation.

And Pynchon rewards their long-haul, cross-generational reading, because the same handful of obsessions recur across his entire fifty-year bibliography, deepening each time. Boundary and duality above all: the line between animate and inanimate running through V., the split between the elect and the preterite — and a stark black-and-white racial duality — driving Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon's literal and figurative obsession with the lines humans draw across land, people, and ideas. Underneath all of it sits Pynchon's vision of paranoia, entropy, and authoritarian control, ordinary people caught inside what Mookie calls a "labyrinthine hellscape" they can never fully discern.

From that foundation, the conversation turns personal and sharp. Mookie stakes out a provocative claim: Pynchon's male protagonists (Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, Zoyd Wheeler, Doc Sportello) are neutered on purpose, stripped of agency, cultural precursors of Cold Play, the Star Wars sequels, and other cultural disasters, while his women (Oedipa Maas, Maxine Tarnow) are the ones actually driving the drama. Matthew complicates that instinct, arguing the loser protagonists are avatars for collective helplessness under a system too vast to fight, not failures of nerve. They debate whether Against the Day is self-indulgent Pynchon competing with his own literary heir David Foster Wallace, trade an uncomfortable personal story about meeting DFW in person, and land, finally, on the biggest question of all: whether Pynchon, underneath the conspiracy and the entropy, is reaching for something transcendent. His most sprawling novel ends, after all, on a single word: grace.

Fair warning, this episode of Ink vs Algorithm goes full inside sports on Pynchon. If you've read him, buckle up. If you haven't, it might just be the push you need to start.

The Guest

Matthew Nelson is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews, working under supervisor Gavin Hopps. His thesis research concerns the theological implications of Thomas Pynchon's fiction, investigating how Pynchon's postsecular work questions both secular and religious constructions of reality, and situating it within the Gothic literary tradition — specifically American Gothic, alongside Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.

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Natalie Saar joins Mookie for another episode of Ink vs Algorithm to share how she writes three books a year while also working, starting with the story of how her first published novel came out of a panic attack. She wrote her way through the anxiety, read back what came out afterward, and realized there was a psychological thriller in it: a stalker with OCD so compulsive about order that he fills exactly one notebook per victim and physically cannot bring himself to write a second page, no matter what he witnesses. That's the origin story for a career that's since spanned psychological thrillers and personal-development nonfiction, self-published since 2012 — most recently Fake It Till You Make It: The Science of Feeling Rich, with Let It Be Easy next.

Mookie and Natalie discuss how the comparison trap and a lack of "time affluence" is what truly makes people feel poor, wealth instead described as the freedom to spend your hours how you want. Natalie unpacks a genuinely useful reframe: satisfaction is a cheap emotion (a candy bar gives you satisfaction), but excitement is the signal worth chasing, and she now protects a chunk of every weekend for decisions based purely on what excites her, not what's productive. They dig into resistance, too — not as a signal to quit, but as something to interrogate honestly: is this hard because you're avoiding growth, or because it's genuinely wrong for you?

The back half turns into one of the more candid conversations about writerly voice this show has had. Natalie has ghostwritten for celebrities, written financial marketing copy, and wandered through enough professional "voices" that she now deliberately writes throwaway pages — sometimes just to delete them at the end of the day — purely to stay in touch with what she actually sounds like underneath all the client work. Her own friends, when asked, consistently prefer her earliest, least-polished books, because they sound the most like her.

That sets up the AI conversation. Natalie's framework is sharp and specific: she'll let AI handle anything a computer reads — SEO headers, metadata, GEO optimization — but nothing a human reads. Research, yes, with primary sources double-checked by hand, because in her experience it's right maybe 40% of the time. Actual prose, never. Her broader bet is genuinely optimistic: because readers invest real hours in a book, they're better judges of quality than viewers or listeners skimming video or music, and as AI slop floods every category, human voice becomes the differentiator, not a liability.

They close out with hard-won, unglamorous marketing tactics: Goodreads giveaways, BookBub ads, reverse giveaways, and Natalie's own backlink-building site for indie authors, plus a real warning about the increasingly sophisticated scam emails targeting self-published writers with fake agents, fake award nominations, and fake TV deals. Instead: be real, and keep writing!

The Guest

Natalie Saar is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles, California. She has been telling stories to anyone who will listen since she was able to talk. After years of consuming true crime content, she developed a love of thrillers. Her stories feature everyday situations — but with an added twist. “Becoming 1% Better” is her first work of nonfiction, born out of a love of general curiosity about how we can better ourselves and treat those around us better. It's a finalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards (CIBA) for Mind and Spirit Non-fiction. By day, she works as a marketing writer and content strategist; she also runs The Indie Authors, a site built to help self-published writers get discovered.

Her Websites & Books

https://nataliesaar.com/

The Indie Authors Project

https://www.theindieauthors.com/

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Reading fiction has become "a girl thing," and an entire generation of boys now pay for it. Mookie sits down with UK author Malory (yes, one name — think Sting, but with lots of typing) to dig into why literacy stats are cratering for young men worldwide, and why the fix isn't more "important" books, it's fun ones they love to read.

They dig into a defense of pulp fiction, the mechanics of why LitRPG works where traditional YA fiction hasn't, describe the genre's video-game style "system" that tracks stats and rewards competence, and why stories of everyday heroes overcoming adversity resonate. They also discuss why publishing quietly stopped wanting male protagonists and how a teacher's assumption about "who the good readers are" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by age fourteen.

Then the conversation turns to Malory himself, and how he went from burned-out day job to full-time author in four years. His professional writer's journey started on Royal Road, the crowdsourced fiction platform where he serialized a chapter a day. There he learned the hard way to write rapidly, consistently, and with good quality, while thousands of strangers picked apart everything wrong with every word. That brutal, real-time feedback loop is where he actually learned to write, and where the deadline discipline got hard-coded: break the schedule, lose the audience.

His craft sharpened further through Raconteur Press's themed anthologies: a Buck Rogers pulp month, a hardboiled noir month, each with a hard word-count ceiling that beat the ramble out of his prose and made his longer 100k+ word litRPG series tighter. He talks through his actual process: 5 a.m. starts, treating writing like "another nine-to-five," not waiting for inspiration, nor taking days off because he might not feel it. Malory also shares lessons learned from co-writing, hitting Audible's 40-hour sweet spot for readers doing long American truck hauls, and why he now has several ongoing series plus new ones signed for next year.

Malory and Mookie also get philosophical, and wrestle through the paradoxes and illusions of the "tortured genius" myth. For Malory, writing is a contract with an audience, and being responsive to readers isn't selling out, it's the job. That leads into the AI reckoning hitting litRPG, and why Malory's shifted away from pure pen-name anonymity toward doing more podcasts and interviews. He understands that human readers are most responsive to human writers, especially ones with a real track record fueled by their lived experience, not LLM matrix math.

For Malory, writing is about deadlines, discipline, writing for a younger version of himself, and an older version of his 9-year-old son. For you, this podcast provides inspiration, best practices, and a rare glimpse into the world of creativity, publishing, and creative success.

The Guest

Malory is a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy fan writing LitRPG and Progression Fantasy, books built on strong characters, action, and snark. His philosophy: write fun stories people actually want to read, because the world needs more escapism. That drive led him to write his first Boy's Own Adventure for his son, chasing the golden age of classic heroics. Winner of the 2026 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, he's partnered with Aethon Books, Legion Publishers, LitForge, and Soundbooth Theater, plus regular anthology work at Raconteur Press. Outside writing and doctoral research, he's rereading Terry Pratchett or watching England's cricket team collapse again.

His Website

https://maloryauthor.com/

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