Bald Ambition

Host Mookie Spitz sits down again with Dale Cooke, president of Philly Cooke Consulting and FDA Ad Law, known affectionately as the “Yoda of Compliance.” Together, they unpack the chaos rippling through healthcare communications in the wake of CDC restructuring, FDA shake-ups, and a political climate that has turned vaccines—once celebrated as humanity’s greatest public health achievement—into a weaponized political wedge issue.

Coo...

Healthcare and pharma agencies face a tough reality: talent is their lifeblood, but also their greatest liability. On this Labor Day 40th edition of Bald Ambition, host Mookie Spitz sits down with Sameer Duhmale and Andre de Luz, co-founders of Talus, to explore why hiring in healthcare marketing is uniquely difficult, and how their platform offers a way forward.

The Challenges

• Niche Expertise 
• Regulatory Burden 
• Global Fragmentati...

Marketing savvy, political chaos, and raw philosophy collide here as Mookie Spitz—a bald, blunt veteran of advertising and PR—cuts through the confusion to expose how persuasion really works, and why institutions keep screwing it up.

In this episode, Mookie takes on the CDC, the vaccine wars, and the larger collapse of trust in American public health. He starts with a simple truth he learned in the trenches: you can’t make people do...

Former California legislator Mike Gatto sits with host Mookie Spitz for an unflinching look at the collapse of bipartisanship, the failures of political messaging, and the growing civil war inside the Democratic Party.

Gatto reflects on his years in the California Assembly and contrasts that era of rough but workable compromise with today’s toxic climate, where bipartisanship is treated as a relic. He explains why authenticity, not ...

In today's podcast, Mookie unpacks the parallels between consultative selling and political persuasion. With a marketer’s eye and a content creator’s grind — including his own experiment building 15K+ followers on TikTok — Mookie reveals how narratives spread, how attention is captured, and how messaging succeeds or collapses.

Politics is branding. Campaigns are marketing. And in today’s attention economy, the leaders who maste...

In the 36th episode of Bald Ambition, host Mookie Spitz digs into the heart of education with Michelle Waugh—a doctorate-trained scientist who left academia to devote herself to personal tutoring. What makes her story remarkable isn’t just her credentials, but her conviction that personalized learning—built on empathy, patience, and human connection—can succeed where our system repeatedly fails.

Michelle shares how a severely autist...

Mookie sits down with John von Seggern—jazz bassist turned EDM pioneer, educator, and tech innovator—to explore the fault lines opening in the music industry as AI floods the gates. From synthetic Spotify hit-makers like Velvet Sundown to LLMs capable of pumping out a thousand generic tracks a day, AI is rewriting the rules of artistry, authorship, and authenticity.

But John’s not panicking—he’s building a blueprint. As the founder ...

Mookie Spitz flips the script on digital fame and asks: how do you become famous not with humans, but with the machines that shape our world? As a marketing strategist turned content creator, Mookie blends insider PR knowledge with his hands-on experience as a micro-influencer to expose the weird new rules of visibility in the age of AI.

He shares how ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are quietly scraping, dissecting, a...

Sci-fi author Ingrid Moon returns to the pod, this time with voiceover wizard Scott Allen. They join your gloriously bald host, Mookie Spitz, for an unfiltered ride through the making of Biohunter—a post-apocalyptic sci-fi love story between a deadly alien tracker and a teenage human target. They talk shop about audiobooks, content repurposing, and self-publishing in the age of AI. 

Ingrid reveals how the novel began as a pseudonymo...

"Ambition" is taken for granted in our society, a baseline for behavior, and a prerequisite for success and happiness. But at what cost? 

An even more fundamental ask: Why do we persist? Camus called suicide the only serious philosophical question. In this searing episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz confronts that question head-on, tracing two suicides — Andrew, the consummate overachiever whose perfect life crumbled un...

In this loaded episode, your follically-challenged host Mookie Spitz sits down with science educator, technologist, and multi-genre author Ingrid Moon to dissect writing and self-publishing — and why it’s so damn hard to do it well.

They start with Ingrid’s journey from tech marketing to science classrooms to building reference books for sci-fi authors who don’t know enough science. Astrofiction, Biofiction, Robofiction — yes, those...

Host Mookie Spitz — fresh off finishing his second novel — takes a sledgehammer to the hysteria that AI is the death of creative writing. In this unfiltered deep dive, he argues that the heart of any good writing is timeless: storytelling driven by human experience, emotion, and characters you actually care about.

AI? A useful and enthusiastic sidekick. But it can’t live your life, wrestle with your scars, or dream up the flawed, hu...

You finally did it! You wrote the damn book. You self-published it. Congratulations!—now brace yourself, because nobody gives a shit. 

In this brutally honest episode, Mookie Spitz breaks down the gut-wrenching, ego-bruising reality of trying to market and self-promote a book in a world drowning in content and distraction. 

From the raw highs of cracking his own creative code and learning how to write a great novel with Jonnie Fazool...

In this episode, Mookie Spitz unloads on the modern internet — tracing its slide from the glorious chaos of Usenet, IRC, and walled-off forums into today’s algorithm-choked, centralized cesspool. He argues for a smarter, AI-driven return to decentralization: digital “tribes” where like-minded people can gather, free from trolling, doomscrolling, and spam, but still get jolts of outside ideas to keep it fresh.

Along the way, he break...

In this third installment of The Wall podcast series, Mookie Spitz dives headlong into the chaos of modern marketing, media, and the relentless flood of content competing for human attention. Building on his earlier breakdowns of the death of earned media and the inevitable (but not yet imminent) AI targeting revolution, this episode zeroes in on what to actually do right now — before the bots take over.

Mookie unpacks:

• Why even ...

Host Mookie Spitz tears into the brutal reality of digital marketing: your genius content, product, or art is probably DOA — not because it sucks, but because it’s buried under an avalanche of bullshit. 

In this blisteringly honest solo episode, Mookie traces humanity’s obsession with communication from cave paintings to TikTok, shows how billion-dollar platforms throttle organic reach unless you pay up, and rants about how AI might...

In this solo rant, Mookie Spitz dissects the invisible monster we’re all up against—The Wall: a relentless digital flood of content, misinformation, distraction, and algorithmic gatekeeping. He dives deep into how the modern marketer, creator, or brand can barely get a word in edgewise without screaming into a storm of AI-generated junk and viral idiocy.

Mookie unpacks how convenience killed privacy, how everyone’s shouting "We...

From class clown to dancefloor king, Howard Wallach joins Mookie Spitz to talk shop, soul, and set lists. In this episode, we go behind the curtain with a master of moments who’s turned DJing into an art form where empathy and customer service become a force for good. Howard reveals how tragedy shaped his hustle, how being of service trumps being the star, and why building trust beats booking gigs.

You’ll hear how he created an even...

Mookie has a spirited chat with David Garrison, CEO of Connect Networks to discuss the organizational challenges of fragmentation, communication, and misaligned priorities—and what to do about it. The two dive headfirst into how David's networking platform leverages human-centered tech to smash silos, spark curiosity-driven collaboration, and build trust through radically simple one-on-one conversations.

David explains how most...