Bald Ambition

Scott Pulcini learned to trade the old school way, battle-tested on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade where he got so fast and so good at electronic trading that he once accounted for ten percent of the entire S&P e-mini futures market's daily volume. By 2002, he was the top trader at his firm, until only three years and roughly fifteen million dollars later, algorithms took over the market and knocked him out of the busi...

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Chris Carolan, founder of the Value-First Team and a HubSpot partner since 2020, joins Mookie on Bald Ambition to talk about what he calls SaaSmageddon, the moment AI starts making the entire software-as-a-service industry, HubSpot, Salesforce, DocuSign, and thousands of platforms like them, genuinely obsolete.

The whole conversation turns on one idea: for the better part of thirty years, the map got swapped ...

Ramon Perez, Executive Director of the Digital Democracy Project, returns to Bald Ambition six months after his first appearance, and this time he's joined by Dan Williams, a Democratic candidate for Florida's 11th Congressional District, who built his entire campaign around Ramon's technology.

Williams, a longtime Disney technologist and current mobile app instructor at Full Sail University, built his own direct democracy app befor...

Mookie welcomes back "our favorite New Jersey Goomba," Tino Chiaviello of Tino Reviews. These two go way back as colleagues in the marketing world, and in this 84th episode of Bald Ambition wander everywhere old friends wander: TikTok's engagement collapse since the platform sold, Tino's storage unit full of reviewed gadgets, Mookie's alluring Claudia versus Tino's British-accented Claude, a genuinely unhinged AI escape-the-sandbox...

Jason Fishman, Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Niche Agency (DNA), joins Mookie on the 83rd episode of Bald Ambition to break down a corner of marketing most people never think about: getting everyday people to invest a few hundred or a few thousand dollars into a company they believe in. He's worked on over 500 capital raises, collectively producing nine figures, using regulated crowdfunding vehicles to get the job done in a complia...

Every major AI company right now is building on the same foundation: the transformer architecture behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Ganesh Krishnan, CEO of AI Hello, thinks that foundation is a dead end for solving AI's biggest unsolved problem — hallucination. He joins Mookie on this episode of Bald Ambition to make the case for something different entirely.

The conversation opens as a real philosophical sparring match: is ...

The market right now is touching valuation levels we haven't seen since right before the dot-com bubble burst. Retail investors are piling into AI and space stocks, chasing SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs like it's 1999 all over again — and Dr. Adam Link, CFP, founder of Fireweed Capital, joins Mookie on this episode of Bald Ambition to explain why the euphoria and the underlying risk have almost nothing to do with each ot...

Michelle Hamilton has spent almost 40 years as a glass sculptor. She's also the Director of AI Adoption at Answer Rocket, running enterprise AI rollouts for Fortune 50 clients. On this 80th episode of the Bald Ambition Podcast, Mookie sits down with her to find out how those two careers connect and reinforce each other. 

Both jobs, Michelle argues, come down to the same skill: visualizing a client's vague need, walking them thr...

Science was supposed to be the one institution immune to the attention economy. It succumbed anyway. Kent Anderson and Joy Moore join Mookie for the 79th episode of Bald Ambition to talk about the already dire implications, and what we should do. 

Kent and Joy have spent decades inside scientific publishing: the editorial and distribution machinery that turns research into the "studies show" headlines you scroll past every day....

Mookie is excited to have Vance Morris on the pod today, a marketing expert who got his start on the opening team of Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resort, spent three and a half years inside Pleasure Island (Disney's one real off-brand experiment), and now owns three home-service businesses in Maryland that he runs on 90 minutes a week — because the systems do the work. No bots answer his phones. No 17-option menu. Just a guy...

Christopher Horrocks is back in the Bald Ambition studio just three months after his first appearance to keep pace and continue to call-out AI confusion and misinformation. Since April, frontier models have become dramatically more capable, companies have invested hundreds of billions more into artificial intelligence, and predictions about AGI have only grown more ambitious. If anything, Christopher's central argument has bec...

On this 76th episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie sits down with Radiant Mobile CEO Paul Fisher and COO Chris Klimis to discuss one of the most contentious questions of the digital age: who should decide what content reaches our phones, our homes, and our children?

Radiant is the first Christian-focused mobile carrier built around content filtering, parental controls, cybersecurity, and faith-based media. Paul and Chris built the compan...

The rules of marketing are changing faster than most companies can keep up. Search engines are becoming answer engines. AI is replacing blue links with synthesized recommendations. And brands that spent years optimizing for algorithms now face a new challenge: how do you stay visible when the machines are deciding what gets seen?

The 75th episode of Bald Ambition features Mookie sitting down with Leah Nurik, co-founder and CEO of Br...

Marketing is changing so fast in the age of AI that half the experts are confused, the other half are terrified, and most business owners are stuck somewhere in between. Fortunately, Jimi Gibson isn't interested in panic, hype, or robot-apocalypse nonsense. Joining Mookie for the 74th episode of Bald Ambition, Thrive's Vice President of Brand Communications lays out a practical playbook for becoming uninvisible in an era where bots...

Jordan West thinks most brands are sleepwalking toward irrelevance while creators are building the next marketing empire in plain sight. In this episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie dives headfirst into the chaotic evolution from “influencer marketing” to what Jordan calls “word of mouth at scale” — a creator-driven ecosystem where TikTok Shop, algorithms, authenticity, and raw capitalism collide. Jordan, ...

Matthew Whyatt has spent decades selling technology to giant corporations, governments, and industries so tangled in bad processes and duct-taped infrastructure that half the employees are basically performing digital exorcisms just to keep the systems alive another week. In this episode of Bald Ambition, Matthew joins Mookie Spitz for a sprawling, sharp-edged conversation about SaaS panic, AI hysteria, consultative selling, corpor...

On this episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz sits down with environmental attorney and activist Gary Lucks to tackle a question millions of frustrated Americans keep asking themselves: “What the hell am I actually supposed to do besides scream at the TV?” Drawing from his book We Are the Power, Gary argues that democracy survives only when ordinary people stop doomscrolling and start organizing.

Instead of vague &ldquo...

Peter Swimm has seen enough AI hype cycles to know where the bodies are buried. Long before ChatGPT turned “AI” into a household buzzword, he was building chatbots, automating enterprise systems, and watching Fortune 500 companies light piles of money on fire chasing shiny tech that promised miracles and delivered chaos. 

In this 70th episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz sits down with the founder of Toilville to ...

Everyone says AI is coming for your job, your art, your privacy, and maybe your soul. Hogan Shrum has a different idea.

In this lively and unexpectedly optimistic episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz sits down with Hogan Shrum, co-founder of PIPPA, a generative AI platform built not to replace creators, but to empower them. PIPPA lets everyday people create animated movies, custom cartoons, educational videos, branded content, and...