Bald Ambition

Mookie Spitz
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Weekly

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

  1. 5h ago

    Jason Fishman: How DNA Turns Crowdfunding Into a Marketing Science

    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 Guest Jason 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.com Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

    Jason Fishman: How DNA Turns Crowdfunding Into a Marketing Science

  2. Jul 23

    Why Ganesh Krishnan is Betting His AI Startup Against Today's LLMs

    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 Guest Ganesh 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 Company https://www.aihello.com Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

    Why Ganesh Krishnan is Betting His AI Startup Against Today's LLMs

  3. Jul 23

    Dr. Adam Link: Stop Paying for Someone Else's Exit Plan By Buying Their IPO

    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 Guest Dr. 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

    Dr. Adam Link: Stop Paying for Someone Else's Exit Plan By Buying Their IPO

  4. Jul 17

    Michelle Hamilton from AnswerRocket Leads AI Adoption That Actually Works

    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 Guest Michelle 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 AnswerRocket https://answerrocket.com/ Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

    Michelle Hamilton from AnswerRocket Leads AI Adoption That Actually Works

  5. Jul 13

    Kent Anderson and Joy Moore: How Science Hijacked Your Attention and Lost Your Trust

    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 b******t, 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 Guests Kent 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 & Podcast https://www.disruptedscience.com/ Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

    Kent Anderson and Joy Moore: How Science Hijacked Your Attention and Lost Your Trust

  6. Jul 8

    Vance Morris on the Power of Stupid Crime Stories, Disney's Underground Tunnels, and Marketing 101

    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 who picks up. The whole conversation keeps landing on the same idea: the fanciest tool in the room usually isn't the one that wins. Disney's underground utilidor tunnels aren't some genius AI-era innovation — they're a 70-year-old trick for keeping the mess out of sight so the magic stays uninterrupted. Vance's newsletter is essentially a print mailer with stupid criminal stories and his daughter's ballet recital photo, and it built more loyalty than any CRM ever has. Fear sells better than happiness. A dollar-off coupon plus a bigger logo plus one good story gets you 95% of the way there. Just cut through the noise, any way you can.  Mookie and Vance also get into the Eisner-Wells era, the Chapek hire nobody saw working, and whether new CEO Josh D'Amaro's parks background signals Disney getting back to basics. They also discuss the actual math on why keeping a customer costs a fraction of finding one, and why most companies still spend $0 of their marketing budget on it. In a moment where everyone's racing to bolt AI onto everything, this episode is a case for the boring and basic stuff that still works. The Guest Vance is a former Birth Control Factory Security Guard and turned that into a wild journey from Disney leader to bankrupt out-of-work executive to carpet cleaner to successful entrepreneur. Today, he’s the guy businesses call when they’re bleeding profit and can’t figure out why. He delivers real-world systems that stop customers from quietly disappearing and stop money from leaking out the back door. He’s the only expert on the planet, who blends direct-response marketing with engineered customer loyalty and retention. https://vancemorris.com/ Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

    Vance Morris on the Power of Stupid Crime Stories, Disney's Underground Tunnels, and Marketing 101

  7. Jun 30

    Christopher Horrocks Returns to Bust More AI Myths

    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 become even more relevant. Mookie calls Christopher the "Mythbuster of AI" because he refuses to accept the false choice dominating today's AI conversation. On one side are those who insist today's models are nothing more than sophisticated autocomplete. On the other are those who believe consciousness, self-awareness, or even AGI is already emerging from large language models. Christopher argues that both camps are making the same conceptual mistake: they're treating AI as a binary when it represents something fundamentally new. That new category is what Christopher calls "virtual intelligence." Today's frontier models display extraordinary cognitive abilities. They reason, synthesize information, write persuasive prose, solve complex problems, and increasingly mimic the texture of human conversation. But remarkable capability should not be confused with genuine subjective experience. Throughout the discussion, Christopher argues that we are projecting human qualities onto systems that remain astonishing simulations rather than conscious beings. That single distinction opens the door to a far broader conversation. Mookie and Christopher explore why people increasingly form emotional attachments to chatbots, why language is such a poor test for consciousness, and why even many of AI's most respected pioneers may be overstating what today's systems actually are. Using examples ranging from Geoffrey Hinton's views on AGI to Magnus Carlsen's intuitive chess mastery, they examine the enormous gulf between performing an intelligent task and possessing an inner life capable of intention, feeling, and lived experience. The discussion also ventures into neuroscience, philosophy, cosmology, and evolutionary biology, asking whether genuine machine consciousness—when it eventually emerges—might arrive in a form completely unlike the language models dominating today's headlines. Ironically, Christopher argues that truly conscious AI might be harder to recognize precisely because today's systems have become so extraordinarily good at simulating it. Ultimately, this conversation is less about predicting the future than accurately describing the present. Artificial intelligence is already transforming the world, but understanding what these systems actually are—and what they are not—may be the most important challenge facing technologists, policymakers, investors, and the public alike. Before humanity can answer the question of whether machines will someday become conscious, Christopher argues that we first have to stop mistaking convincing simulations for the real thing. The Guest Christopher Horrocks is a technologist at the University of Pennsylvania who writes about artificial intelligence, technology ethics, and the human consequences of systems that don't know true from false or right from wrong. His Virtual Intelligence essay series, published at chorrocks.substack.com, develops a philosophical and analytical framework for understanding the generative AI systems now reshaping work, relationships, and public life. He lives in Philadelphia. His Resources https://candc3d.github.io/vi-framework/ Infographic that explains the concepts without needing to read anything in advance https://candc3d.github.io/sampo-diagnostic/ Home page for the free diagnostic tool kit that can be used to evaluate a user's relationship with the system Their Prior Conversation https://www.buzzsprout.com/2455310/episodes/18973680 Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

    Christopher Horrocks Returns to Bust More AI Myths

  8. Jun 24

    Paul Fisher and Chris Klimis of Radiant Mobile on Parental Rights and Free Markets

    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 company around a straightforward premise: parents, not governments, technology companies, social media platforms, or entertainment corporations, should decide what content enters their households. Through carrier-level filtering and a growing ecosystem of faith-based media offerings, Radiant gives families tools and content to exercise that control. What drew Mookie to the conversation was the story behind the mobile tech. As Radiant attracts both enthusiastic supporters and vocal critics, Paul and Chris find themselves at the center of debates over free speech, parental rights, censorship, faith, personal responsibility, and the future of digital culture. Mookie wanted to understand why they built the company, what problems they believe it solves, and why many families have embraced their approach despite the criticism it has generated. The conversation quickly moves beyond mobile phones and content filters. Paul and Chris argue that unrestricted digital access has created serious problems for families, particularly when it comes to pornography, social media, and content they believe children should not encounter. Mookie acknowledges those concerns while also raising broader questions about information silos, cultural fragmentation, and whether increasingly personalized media environments contribute to the polarization that already characterizes much of modern society. Paul agrees that stronger content controls may contribute to more fragmented information ecosystems, but argues that many families willingly accept those tradeoffs in exchange for greater control over what enters their homes.  The episode also explores Paul's transition from celebrity agent and architect of major fashion and entertainment campaigns to entrepreneur focused on digital protection and faith-based media. Chris brings a different perspective, drawing on decades of ministry experience and his work with families struggling to navigate an increasingly connected world. Throughout the discussion, Mookie returns to a theme that extends well beyond Radiant itself. In a free society, people should be able to build the products, businesses, and communities they believe in. That freedom inevitably creates disagreement, and competition among different visions of how people should live, what they should consume, and what values should guide their lives. For Mookie, the question is not whether everyone agrees with Radiant's vision, but the power of an open marketplace to enable entrepreneurs like Paul and Chris to build it and let consumers decide for themselves. Whether listeners agree with Radiant's approach to faith-based content and Mookie's opinion about free speech and open markets or oppose them, this episode goes far beyond one company or one community. It tackles questions of freedom, responsibility, technology, parental authority, and the growing struggle over who controls the flow of information in modern life. More than anything, it examines what happens when people stop waiting for institutions to solve problems and attempt to build solutions of their own. The Guests Paul Fisher is the CEO and co-founder of Radiant, a Christian-focused mobile carrier that combines content filtering, parental controls, cybersecurity, and faith-based media. Before launching Radiant, Paul built a career in the fashion and entertainment industries, representing major models, celebrities, and brands. Today, he focuses on developing technology and media platforms designed to give families greater control over their digital lives. Chris Klimis is the COO and co-founder of Radiant. With more than two decades of ministry experience, Chris has worked extensively with families, churches, and faith communities, addressing issues ranging from digital culture to personal development and family life. At Radiant, he helps shape the company's mission of combining technology, parental empowerment, and faith-based values. The Company https://www.radiantmobile.com/ Send the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show

    Paul Fisher and Chris Klimis of Radiant Mobile on Parental Rights and Free Markets
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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Mookie Spitz
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    83
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Bald Ambition
  • Show Website
    Bald Ambition

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