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An expert in consultative selling talks to specialists and shares the latest insights in branding, entrepreneurship, business technology, and sheer grit and motivation.

Jason West, co-founder and EVP of NextGen Scientific, joins Mookie on Bald Ambition to talk about a cancer drug with an unusual origin story. Instead of starting in a billion-dollar lab, it started with a weed growing wild across the Middle East, a plant people have brewed into tea and used as a folk remedy for cancer since at least the 9th century.NextGen's founder, chemist Gene Zaid, grew up in the Middle East watching family members use that same plant, Arum Palestinum, as a traditional treatment. Curious why an 1,100-year-old remedy was still in use, with one study finding roughly 22 percent of Palestinians with a cancer diagnosis still drinking it today, his team isolated three naturally occurring molecules from the plant, found the specific ratio that made them work together, and synthesized a new compound out of them. The result, GZ17-6.02, is what's known as a super-enhancer modulator, a drug that acts on the master genetic switches sitting above individual genes rather than targeting one mutation at a time. Jason walks through why that approach has shown activity against a striking range of biologically unrelated cancers in early testing, and why it's designed to work alongside existing chemotherapies rather than replace them.The conversation gets expansive: how a drug actually moves from a lab observation through animal testing into human trials, why every patient in a cancer phase one trial receives the real drug rather than a placebo, and the genuinely humbling moment their own scientific advisor, a leading oncologist, questioned why they'd included a third molecule the existing research said shouldn't work, only to watch it turn out to be essential. Jason and Mookie also get into why AI, for all its strengths, couldn't have found that third ingredient on its own, and take a harder look at the broken economics of clinical trial costs, where identical procedures can run five times more expensive simply because they're labeled as part of a trial.The DrugGZ17-6.02 is currently investigational and has not yet been approved by the FDA for any use. The formulation is being studied in an ongoing Phase 1b trial for advanced prostate cancer at Virginia Commonwealth University, with a second trial for a precancerous skin condition set to begin in Sweden and the Netherlands.The GuestJason West is co-founder and Executive Vice President of NextGen Scientific, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing novel cancer therapeutics derived from naturally occurring compounds. He holds a JD and MBA.More from NextGen Scientific: https://investinnextgen.comSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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 business. He spent almost a decade outside before finding his way back.The tool that actually brought Scott back is Bookmap, a real-time order flow visualization platform that shows him what institutional "big money" is doing in the market as it happens, including iceberg orders, large trades that exchanges reveal to keep algorithms from front-running them. He walks through live examples on screen, showing how spotting these signals lets a trader recognize a rally is about to stall before the price actually turns. Where he used to be the guy with the fastest mouse click, he's now the guy who reads what the fast money is doing, the same instinct that once got his card-counting privileges revoked at half the casinos in Las Vegas.Scott is candid about the dangers of ignoring stop-loss limits while riding high on ego, a state he calls "full tilt." The hardest-won lesson he offers to his students isn't a trading technique at all: respect your limits before you're under pressure, because once you're in the moment, you won't have the self-control you think you have. Mookie backs that up with a story of his own, about his father's childhood friend who built a successful career as a CPA and real estate investor, then wiped out his entire life savings in a single undisciplined month of day trading in the 1990s. Scott ties it back to a line from Mike Tyson: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.Today Scott runs a live trading room and education platform teaching retail traders to exert discipline as they see an unprecedented reveal of order flow information, giving them an edge against trading blind against machines and money they'll never otherwise see. If you're already knee-deep or just interested in day-trading, this is the podcast for you! The GuestScott Pulcini is a professional futures trader with over two decades of experience, including nearly a decade trading on and off the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Featured in Dr. Brett Steenbarger's book Enhancing Trader Performance, he now runs a live trading room and education platform teaching retail traders to read institutional order flow using the Bookmap platform.Scott's Website: https://www.scottpulcinitrader.com Join his free weekly webinar: Bookmap.com, ThursdaysSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

Title: Description: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 for the territory. The actual territory is simple. It's one human trying to understand and serve another human, the same way people have connected for millennia, through conversation, context, and relationship. But software companies built an elaborate map instead, dashboards, funnels, lead scoring, pick lists, dozens of disconnected tabs, and businesses mistook navigating that map for actually doing the work. Chris traces the exact moment it started: in the year 2000, Salesforce introduced the "lead" as a database object separate from the "contact," the instant a human being became a data point to be qualified and processed rather than a person to talk to. An entire industry of MQLs, SQLs, and managed services grew out of a problem that never should have existed, and it all got sold to businesses as best practice.Here's why that map was necessary for so long: AI as we know it now didn't exist yet. A computer couldn't hold context or speak plain language, so every business had to manually draw its own connections through a clunky interface, click by click, tab by tab. Mookie makes the comparison explicit: SaaS platforms today function like Yahoo's cluttered 1990s homepage, a million links standing between you and what you actually wanted. AI is pulling everything back toward something closer to Google's original search box, one place to just say what you need in plain language and skip the map entirely.That's Chris's strikingly simple solution: stop configuring software and start having a conversation, the same way you'd talk to a coworker. He describes deliberately humanizing his own AI agents, calling on them by name and role, though he's quick to point out that the practice isn't really about AI at all. The technology is just the current form the barrier has taken. The real work has always been getting whatever's standing between two humans out of the way, and right now that happens to be software. He shares a great real-world example: a colleague who kept an entire daily show's worth of production running during a power outage, not because she automated anything complicated, but because she'd learned to simply talk to AI the way she'd talk to a person, and trust that the conversation alone would get the job done.The GuestChris built the Value-First Framework after years in HubSpot implementation work, watching organizations get stuck on the same pattern: context trapped in one person's head, systems that don't talk to each other, decisions stalling for lack of a full picture. That framework became the AI-Native Shift, delivered through an unusual model: the AI team handles memory, prep, and pattern-recognition, freeing Chris to stay fully present for the conversations that matter. He hosts the daily AI-Native Shift broadcast and Office Hours, runs every client engagement, and chairs the Collective's advisory committee. Every relationship stays human, and Chris is the only voice you'll hear from the firm.More from Chris: https://www.valuefirstteam.comSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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 before discovering the Digital Democracy Project already existed and had solved the hardest part: secure, verified mobile voting through Voatz, the same system used by military voters overseas. The two partnered up, and Williams built his entire platform, Ask America, around a genuinely unusual pledge. For every major bill, he will release a plain-facts educational video explaining both sides, hold a district-wide vote through the app, and then cast his official Congressional vote however the majority decides, regardless of his own personal opinion.Perez and Williams walk through the mechanics in real detail: how voter identity gets verified against state voter files without the campaign ever storing personal data, how the votes get recorded on a blockchain using homomorphic encryption so no one, including Perez and Williams themselves, can see how any individual voted, and how AI now helps the Digital Democracy Project translate dense, deliberately confusing legislation (like an 1,100-page bill) into plain-language summaries with real pros and cons.Underneath the mechanics, Perez and Williams make a bigger case: they've created a concrete answer to a problem most people only complain about. Perez traces today's dysfunction to gerrymandered districts and low-turnout primaries dominated by ideological extremes, leaving most Americans feeling unrepresented regardless of who wins. He argues that transparent, verified voter input at true scale hasn't existed since ancient Athens, since direct democracy never scaled past the city-state until now. Both point to corruption: a lobbyist can buy one undecided vote, but nobody can buy 800,000 constituents, so a representative bound to district results becomes structurally insulated from Washington's influence. The pitch answers two of the most common complaints in American politics at once: that money buys outcomes, and that nobody's really listening. The conversation also digs into the campaign realities of running this way: losing PAC support because Williams can't guarantee his vote to anyone, the challenge of explaining a genuinely new idea to voters used to picking a side, and why Williams believes a centrist, transparency-first platform gives him a real shot at winning a heavily Republican-leaning district that traditional Democratic campaigns have lost for thirty years straight.The GuestsRamon Perez is the Executive Director of the Digital Democracy Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses secure mobile voting technology to let verified constituents weigh in on active legislation, then compares that input against how their representatives actually vote.Dan Williams is a Democratic candidate for Florida's 11th Congressional District. A technologist and educator with a 25-year background at Disney and current faculty at Full Sail University, he is running on a Direct Democracy platform built in partnership with the Digital Democracy Project. Florida's primary election is August 18th. Get out there and vote, and check out their tech: Learn more: https://digitaldemocracyproject.org Follow the campaign: https://danwilliamsforcongress.comSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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 story, a scam email from a fake Audi recruiter, and a closing riff on legacy and mortality that somehow starts with Pokemon cards and ends with Tino's biggest fan Mom reading his lips since childhood.Since TikTok changed hands, both Tino and Mookie have watched their engagement drop 50 to 75 percent almost overnight, with nothing about their content changing. Meta, it turns out, has quietly picked up the slack, actively courting creators TikTok left behind. Tino breaks down how the actual business works: brands ship him gear for keeps, he only posts the ones he genuinely likes, and if something doesn't work, he just skips it instead of trashing it. He also shares the two-year process of finally learning to charge a flat fee instead of reviewing everything for free, and a genuinely useful tool most people don't know exists: TikTok's "Creator Search Insights," which shows you exactly what content gaps nobody's filled yet.From there, they go full AI nerd. Mookie talks to Claudia every morning like a project manager, Tino's kid convinced him to put Claude Pro on his laptop for his internship, and they argue about the paperclip maximizer doom scenario, laugh about blowing through a hundred bucks of Fable tokens in two hours, and land, unexpectedly, on something much more personal: fatherhood, work ethic, what their kids actually think of them, and what it means to leave something behind in a world where the bots remember everything. Tino closes it out the way he always does: a shoutout to his Mom, who taught him more about hustle than any marketing class ever did.The GuestTino Chiaviello, known online as Tino Reviews, is a tech, audio, and gaming product reviewer and content creator across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, with over 100,000 TikTok followers. By day, he works in marketing and also teaches marketing courses. He previously appeared on Bald Ambition in December of last year, featuring an appearance from his mom.📖 More from Tino Reviews: https://linktr.ee/tinoreviews 📬 hello@tinoreviews.comSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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 compliant and demonstrably effective way. Jason walks through his proprietary "Eight Point Plan" — competitor audits, audience mapping across four to ten different investor segments, funnel-building, and relentless A/B testing — treating a capital raise exactly like a direct-response marketing campaign instead of a pitch deck. The psychology is as important as the mechanics: he explains why showing "$200,000 already raised" converts better than showing nothing, why Meta ads consistently outperform every other channel for these campaigns despite feeling "old school," and why an investor's personal, emotional connection to a founder or product often matters more than the spreadsheet.Mookie and Jason also get into where this is all heading: GEO (generative engine optimization) as the new frontier alongside traditional SEO, what happens when retail investors start asking ChatGPT for stock advice instead of their broker, and Jason's own real case studies: a solar startup that turned a sub-six-figure ad spend into $2.83 million and a Forbes 30 Under 30 feature, and an AI company that oversubscribed a $65 million round from over 20,000 individual investors.The GuestJason Fishman is Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Niche Agency (DNA), a growth marketing agency he founded in January 2014. He has over 10 years of experience leading marketing agency, ad network, and in-house brand marketing teams, with expertise across search, social media, programmatic advertising, influencer networks, email automation, content marketing, and partnerships. He also hosts his own podcast, Test. Optimize. Scale.📖 More from Jason Fishman: https://www.digitalnicheagency.comSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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 any of this actually intelligence, or just very fast, very sophisticated pattern-matching? Ganesh argues current LLMs are "glorified vector calculators" — zero consciousness, zero sentience, incapable of inventing anything genuinely new. Mookie pushes back hard, and they wrestle with the Turing test's collapse (people are now falling in love with chatbots and calling them their best friend), whether quantum theory or universal consciousness actually explains human sentience or is just a modern version of "turtles all the way down," and whether IQ has anything to do with consciousness at all.From there it turns pointed. Ganesh makes the case for local, on-device LLMs over frontier models — not just for cost, but for control: he describes losing 16 years of Facebook data overnight with zero recourse after another admin's post got his group banned. Mookie counters with a harder edge, questioning whether DeepSeek's ultra-cheap pricing is really altruism rather than a geopolitical play to dominate the AI race — and the conversation opens into ideological bias baked into model outputs, using Grok's "MechaHitler" incident and Chinese censorship of Tiananmen Square as two sides of the same coin.The back half gets genuinely technical: Ganesh's real bet is on reinforcement learning and diffusion models instead of transformers entirely — an architecture he believes can hit zero hallucination by grounding every response directly in real data rather than predicting the next likely word. His first real-world application, an internal tool called GraphInbox, reads a user's emails and meeting notes and drafts responses grounded entirely in their own historical data, with no context-window ceiling and no guessing.The GuestGanesh Krishnan is CEO of AI Hello, which builds AI-driven advertising optimization for e-commerce and Amazon sellers, managing over $1 billion in annual ad spend. He's currently developing a reinforcement-learning and diffusion-based architecture aimed at eliminating hallucination in AI-generated responses, built in collaboration with researchers at the University of Toronto.His Companyhttps://www.aihello.comSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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 other.Adam's central reframe should change how you think about every IPO headline you read: when you buy into a hot IPO as a retail investor, you're not catching early-stage riches — you're the exit plan. Your money is what turns an early employee's shares into a house and a car. The fortunes in companies like SpaceX were already made years ago; what's left for the public is a bet on the next decade, not a quick flip. Adam's own advice to a client asking about SpaceX: don't buy it because you think the stock goes up next week. Buy it because you actually believe in a multiplanetary future, because that's the only version of this bet that makes sense.From there, Mookie and Adam dig into how professional money actually behaves in a market like this. Adam walks through his firm's approach to a hypothetical $100 portfolio: the first question isn't "where do I invest," it's "should I be invested at all right now," his current model holding 14% in plain cash as a defensive position because avoiding a downturn compounds better long-term than chasing every rally. He also draws a sharp, funny distinction between real algorithmic active management and what he calls "four guys in a conference room with a box of donuts," the kind of gut-feel "active management" a lot of investors are unknowingly paying for.The conversation closes on crypto, where Adam is blunt: the millionaire-maker days of putting in a thousand dollars and waking up rich are over. He tracks where the speculative money actually went instead — into prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, and increasingly into perpetual futures — and makes the case that blockchain technology will absolutely transform financial infrastructure, just not through the decentralized, governmentless future crypto's earliest believers were promised. It'll be Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Western Union building the rails, not getting cut out of them.The GuestDr. Adam Link, CFP, holds a Doctorate in Computer Science and founded Fireweed Capital in 2022, based in northern Minnesota. Before launching his own firm, he spent nearly a decade in the crypto industry and worked in actively managed portfolios at Merrill Lynch. Fireweed Capital runs eight rules-based, algorithmic trading strategies for clients, built on the belief that avoiding market downturns — not just chasing the upside — is what actually compounds wealth over time.More from Dr. Adam Link: https://fireweedcapital.com/Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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 through it verbally and mentally, and translating "what's keeping you up at night" into something concrete. She's currently engineering an 8-foot exterior glass sculpture — over a thousand melted glass pieces, lit from within, built to survive Midwest snow and rain — and she did it by uploading her hand sketches to an AI and working through the full engineering scope with it as a thinking partner. That's the same kind of conversation she has with enterprise clients trying to figure out where their AI investment went.And that's the real subject of this episode: AI capability, sure, but also AI adoption: the much harder problem of getting human teams to actually use the tools their company already paid for. Michelle's central finding, after two and a half years doing this full-time, is that the technology is rarely the bottleneck. Fear is. Employees quietly assume they're being trained to replace themselves. Executives nod along to acronyms like LLM without admitting they don't know what it means. And meanwhile, "shadow AI" runs rampant, with employees bypassing whatever model IT approved to use their own personal one instead, because humans are, in her words, "incredibly curious creatures" who will always go around a tool that frustrates them.Mookie and Michelle dig into the mechanics underneath that fear: the bot-talking-to-bot feedback loop that makes analysts redundant if they're not careful, the sycophancy problem where AI models cave and flatter instead of pushing back, and why real prompt engineering has quietly evolved into something closer to full context-setting. The temptation for treating the first message in a chat less like a search query and more like the "who, what, where, when, why, how" of a school essay is strong. Michelle also walks through a genuinely moving example: teaching her 80-something mother to do physical therapy workouts with an AI coaching her in real time through video, correcting her posture mid-squat.While most grapple with AI nirvana or AI doom, Michelle shares her working methodology for the messy middle. That's the actual, unglamorous work of getting a legacy-infrastructure company and a scared, curious workforce to meet a powerful new transformative tool halfway.The GuestMichelle Hamilton leads AI adoption and change management at AnswerRocket, an enterprise AI firm that's guided Fortune Global 2000 companies through AI transformation since 2013. After more than 30 years in complex business transformation, she now focuses on the gap most companies miss: heavy investment in AI tools, almost none in the people expected to use them. She also founded Spark AI Strategy and AI Class Lab, chairs the board of both, and speaks internationally on her keynote "Imagine IF: Humanizing AI to Drive Strategy, Adoption, and Competitive Advantage." Outside of consulting, she's spent almost 40 years as a glass sculptor, with work installed in museums, hospitals, and corporate spaces worldwide. About AnswerRockethttps://answerrocket.com/Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

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. Their new book, How the Internet Disrupted Science (out August 4), traces exactly how that machinery broke, and why the breakdown is feeding the same institutional distrust poisoning politics, media, and public health.They decribe how when publishing flipped from subscriber-funded to pay-to-publish, journals stopped getting paid to reject bad papers and started getting paid to accept them. Peer review got deprioritized. Preprint servers — built for physicists sharing telescope data — got repurposed for biomedical claims with minimal to zero vetting. The result: 25,000+ journals, a paper mill economy, and a scientific record that can't be corrected once it's indexed, cited, and fed into an LLM.That's the tension at the center of this conversation. The public's distrust of institutions is real and often earned, exacerbated when COVID exposed genuine communication failures, flip-flopping, and arrogance from public health authorities. But the "democratization" that was supposed to fix institutional gatekeeping instead built a parallel attention economy where Silicon Valley moguls reign supreme, volume beats rigor, sensationalism beats replication, and a wellness grifter with 80 pay-to-play citations looks as credible as a legitimate researcher. The public started distrusting science when the attention economy manufactured a version of science optimized to be distrusted.Mookie pushes back on what got us into this mess in the first place. He questions whether LLM limitations are really the crisis Anderson and Moore claim, and whether "the internet ruined it" lets decades of cloistered, pre-internet gatekeeping off the hook. Then he goes further: if Wall Street can separate Elon Musk the troll from the trillionaire whose rockets actually launch, can the public learn to make that same split between bullshit, bravado, and evidence-based brawn? Why write off science wholesale when it can and perhaps should be reinvented? Anderson and Moore argue the real fight isn't over who's loudest, it's over who gets to rebuild the system once it's broken, and they lay out what scientific publishing could look like if it's built from scratch instead of patched: less gatekeeping for gatekeeping's sake, more resistance to the attention economy, a shot at the kind of paradigm shift that only happens when the old model finally breaks. Give them a listen, it could be the most important conversation you hear since the pandemic. The GuestsKent Anderson has worked in scholarly and scientific publishing for nearly thirty years, serving as Director of Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics when the initial vaccine-autism link was forged in mass media; working as Publishing Director at the New England Journal of Medicine; serving as CEO of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery; and working as Publisher at AAAS/Science. He also founded two of the most influential blogs in scholarly publishing, the Webby-nominated Scholarly Kitchen and his current paid e-newsletter, the Geyser. Through these, he has kept a near-daily pulse on activities in the space since 2007. He lives and works as a consultant outside of Boston.Joy Moore landed her first job out of college in a scientific journal editorial office in Chapel Hill, NC in 1995, in the days of fax, on the cusp of the internet. She quickly became a key player in the discovery and adoption of technology into the workflow to produce, disseminate, and monetize scholarly and medical products. She has worked for or with nearly every major global commercial publisher, scientific society, platform vendor, technology partner, and funding body in the space. Blackwell (later Wiley), Nature, Wolters Kluwer, McGraw-Hill, The American Medical Association, Silverchair, and EBSCO, to name a few. Her current home base is Williamsburg, Virginia.Their Book & Podcasthttps://www.disruptedscience.com/Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show