Bald Ambition

Josh Dorfman, a climate entrepreneur, wins by not talking about climate. He started out building tech, and now he tells tech founders to stop talking about their tech. His whole career runs on a paradox: the harder you sell the science and the gizmos, the faster buyers tune out. Josh hosts the Supercool podcast and newsletter and co-founded Plantd. He joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Bald Ambition to explain why the smartest green companies hide their best arguments, and when they should shout them.

Plantd builds homes out of grass, and its toughest competitor has nothing to do with lumber. Its toughest competitor is inertia: the human willingness to accept mediocrity even when a better product costs the same. Climate data won't move that wall. Neither will a spec sheet. Lower costs, better performance, and a better life do the moving, and the climate win slips in behind them as a halo. Josh's rule holds whether you trust climate science, doubt it, or tune it out.

The paradox has a twist of its own. Josh says the rule holds about 99 percent of the time, and he keeps an eye on the other one percent. When every brand stops talking about climate, the brand that owns it suddenly stands out. Climate First Bank puts climate right in its name, pays a strong interest rate, and puts its deposits into solar instead of fossil fuels. Its pitch promises a good deal for your wallet and the planet. Know your segment, and lead with whatever moves it.

Plantd hides its own breakthrough in plain sight. The company grows a grass about ten times faster than trees, slices it thin, and presses it into plywood-style panels in a factory with no smokestack. The panels store more carbon than their production releases. Builders hear none of that. They hear moisture resistance and performance, and D.R. Horton, the country's largest homebuilder, ordered 10 million panels.

Josh brings more proof from his own show. Zum made Oakland's school bus routes so efficient that the district needed 74 buses instead of 136, then electrified the fleet and sold the batteries' stored power back to the utility. At Trove, a resale engine for major brands, the CEO told a staff of devoted environmentalists that the first rule of Trove is that nobody talks about the environment.

Josh learned the lesson the hard way. He went from would-be CIA spy to selling Kryptonite bike locks in 1990s China, then turned activist, until one Thanksgiving his brother greeted him with "here he is again to make us all feel guilty." That jab led to The Lazy Environmentalist and two decades of persuading people with benefits instead of scolding. Along the way Mookie and Josh dig into the Achilles heel of brilliant founders, the power of repetition, and why people need to hear a message seven times before they hear it once.

The Guest

Josh Dorfman is a climate entrepreneur, author, and media builder. In 2021 he co-founded Plantd with two former SpaceX engineers. The company makes carbon-negative structural panels from fast-growing perennial grass at its North Carolina factory, and Fast Company named it one of the World's Most Innovative Companies in 2024. Josh served as Plantd's founding CEO and now leads its brand as CMO. He also hosts the Supercool podcast and weekly newsletter, which spotlight founders and operators scaling low-carbon businesses. Two decades ago he created The Lazy Environmentalist, a media brand that included a Sundance Channel series, a SiriusXM radio show, and two books.

https://getsuper.cool/

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Bald Ambition hits 100 episodes, and Mookie celebrates the only way a creator with five podcasts, daily TikTok rants, and six platforms can: he lies down on the creator couch and asks a pro to diagnose his own brand. Jackie Zuk, the modern media visionary who founded Next On Scene Media and turns founders into visible authorities, makes the Mookie Multiverse a live case study any creator or small business can borrow from.

Mookie confesses his branding crisis. One community falls for a viral rant, then catches him an hour later talking science fiction or politics and wonders who this bald guy is. Jackie's prescription fits in a sentence: you are the brand, so keep everything under one roof and give each day a theme, the way a talk show host covers everything on a schedule viewers can count on. In marketing terms, Mookie trades a house of brands for a branded house.

Then Jackie opens the playbook she built over eleven years, starting from a podcast she ran out of her guest-room closet. Visibility alone no longer cuts it, she argues. You need to be known and remembered. Earned media buys credibility, paid media buys guaranteed reach, and press features now feed the AI chatbots that recommend experts. Win the first three seconds with a question that makes people feel something. Own your email list, because a social platform can vanish tomorrow. She ends with the hard truth every rising creator needs to hear: more visibility brings more trolls, so do the inner work before you step into the spotlight.

The Guest

Jaclyn "Jackie Zuk" Zukerman Delory helps high-performing founders, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and brands become visible authorities through human-first media, PR, storytelling, and content strategy. As founder of Next On Scene Media, she pairs a casting-agent background with her own media platform, including Next On Scene Magazine and the Next On Scene podcast, which draws a reported 40,000 monthly downloads. A New York native, she moved to Boston without knowing anyone, styled Padma Lakshmi on Bravo's Top Chef, and turned a guest-room-closet podcast into a full-service agency over eleven years. Her work has appeared in USA Today, OK Magazine, NBC, CBS, and Fox News, and she contributed to the anthology The Gift: 26 Extraordinary Women Share Their Stories of Magic and Transformation with the World. She speaks, leads workshops, and sits on panels about visibility, podcasting, PR, and social media.

Connect with Jackie: https://www.nextonscene.com

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Salespeople skip the homework. Managers cancel the coaching calls. Prospects lose interest while the proposal crawls through legal. Sales leaders have lived with these problems for decades, and most stopped trying to fix them. Matt Oess thinks AI finally changes the math.

Matt Oess, founder and CEO of Revenue Growth Agent and a fractional chief revenue officer with TechCXO, joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Bald Ambition to explain how he built an AI sales wingman in the middle of the SaaSmageddon, the 2026 selloff that hammered Salesforce and other software giants after new Claude tools from Anthropic sparked fears that AI agents would replace per-seat software.

Revenue Growth Agent starts where generic CRM add-ons stop. RGA learns each client's value proposition, case studies, pricing, past proposals, and statements of work, so the AI knows the company as well as its best rep. From there, it compresses an hour of pre-meeting research into a two-minute brief built around the prospect's likely pain points. After the call, it reads the transcript, scores the conversation against MEDDIC (a popular sales qualification framework), and hands the seller the five questions to bring to the next meeting. When the prospect asks for a proposal, RGA drafts a bespoke three-page version, complete with the customer's own words and an ROI case, while the excitement still runs hot.

Matt and Mookie trade war stories about consultative vs transactional selling, sales stars promoted into management jobs they never wanted, and enterprise deals that die from sheer bureaucratic inertia. Matt also shows how an MCP connection (a standard that lets AI assistants plug into other software) lets Claude run his morning meeting prep on autopilot and push updates straight into Salesforce and HubSpot. His bigger goal: turn the CRM from a tool managers use to watch sellers into a tool sellers actually want to open and boost their strengths. 

The Guest

Matt Oess is the founder and CEO of Revenue Growth Agent (RGA), an AI-native sales execution platform that helps B2B sales teams convert more first meetings into qualified opportunities, a stronger pipeline and tailored proposals. A seasoned revenue growth executive, technology entrepreneur and sales transformation expert, Matt brings more than 25 years of experience spanning engineering, enterprise sales, marketing, business strategy and executive leadership.

Learn more at https://www.revenuegrowthagent.com/

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Law firms keep writing checks for fresh leads while dozens of the leads they bought two months ago sit in chase mode, with nobody calling them back. Rafi Arbel wants lawyers to see that money leaking out of the funnel, and he built the software to show them.

Rafi, a former litigator turned marketer and president of Market JD and Performance JD, joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Bald Ambition to talk about why legal marketing plays by different rules. Google files legal services under “your money or your life,” the category where a bad answer can wreck someone’s future, and Rafi treats that as a responsibility rather than a keyword play. Industry knowledge separates the pros from the generalists: property damage searches pull huge volume, but personal injury lawyers want bodily injury cases, because that’s where the fees live.

Performance JD marries marketing data (impressions, clicks, leads) with what happens inside the firm’s CRM: qualified leads, unanswered calls, signed cases, lost cases. AI scores every lead against the firm’s own criteria, so an intake team staring at stale leads from September can call the most promising ones first. The platform also credits first-touch attribution, the channel that first introduced a prospect to the firm, so a lawyer never defunds the SEO campaign that earned the trust just because a Facebook retargeting ad closed the deal. Managing partners get one executive view of what they spent and what came back. And because Performance JD stores the data independently, the firm keeps its history when it fires its agency.

Two Chicago kids at heart (Rafi once sold peanuts and Pepsi at Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park, and Mookie was born on the South Side and grew up North), they also weigh billboards against digital, and map how lawyers can get found when clients ask ChatGPT or Claude instead of Google: a strong SEO foundation, listings in the major legal directories, and citations from authoritative publications, like the New York Times mention one of Rafi’s clients landed the morning of the recording.

The Guest

Rafi Arbel is the president and founder of Market JD, a Northbrook, Illinois digital marketing agency for law firms, and Performance JD, its platform that ties marketing spend to signed cases and ROI. He studied business administration as an undergraduate, earned his law degree, and practiced law for about six years before spending roughly eight years in sales at Thomson Reuters. While there, he earned his MBA from the University of Chicago, and he launched Market JD in 2010 to combine everything he learned in law and business. 

Connect with Rafi at https://marketjd.com/

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Online sellers today are caught in what Krisztián Király calls a "double squeeze": ad costs on Meta and Google keep climbing, while shoppers expect personal service and fast delivery, while Amazon and Temu crowd the same market. Most stores react by dumping more money into traffic. Krisztián's advice: stop pouring water into a leaky bucket and fix the leaks. Even the best online stores convert only a few visitors out of a hundred, so the real money sits in the traffic you already paid for.

OptiMonk, the Hungarian company where Krisztián runs international partnerships, creates the patch kit experience. He chats with Mookie on the 97th episode of Bald Ambition about how the platform converts visitors into customers by collecting first-party data the moment it connects to your store, then targets each on-site message by where the visitor came from and how they behave. A shopper who clicks through from a Facebook ad sees one headline. A subscriber arriving from your email sees another. A $200 cart abandoner gets free shipping, and a $10 one gets a friendly nudge.

The newest twist: an agentic campaign builder. You describe the campaign you want in plain English, or connect ChatGPT or Claude through an MCP server, and the agent builds it without you ever logging in. You approve it and it goes live. OptiMonk's Conversion Lift module goes further and uses AI to rewrite headlines and generate lifestyle images for hundreds of product pages at once, with built-in A/B tests to prove what works.

Krisztián doesn't oversell any of it. He calls the pop-up a knife: it can save a life or hurt someone, depending on who holds it. Software can't write your strategy or tell you who your customers are. Two bald Hungarians, recording on the eve of the anniversary of the 1956 revolution, make the case that personalization only works when you know your customers better than your friends.

The Guest

Krisztián Király serves as International Partnership Manager at OptiMonk. He previously ran his own digital marketing agency in Hungary for more than five years, focused on conversion rate optimization and e-commerce. He has held thousands of calls with online store owners, small businesses, and marketing agencies around the world. He lives in Velence, a small lakeside town between Budapest and Lake Balaton.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-kiraly/

The Company

OptiMonk started about twelve years ago in Debrecen, Hungary, as a simple pop-up tool and grew into an AI-powered conversion rate optimization platform. About 30,000 websites and online stores use it. Its tools include personalized on-site messages, the Conversion Lift product page module, cart recovery offers based on cart value, and an agentic campaign builder that works in plain English or through ChatGPT and Claude. OptiMonk integrates with Shopify, Klaviyo, and hundreds of other platforms. 

https://www.optimonk.com/

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Job hunting runs on two broken filters: software screens resumes for keywords, so the candidate who wrote "strategy" beats the one who can execute it, and interviews reward whoever charms the room, so the smooth talker beats the quiet star. Michael Kamins spent twenty years advising Fortune 500 consumer brands, and he watched both filters fail: companies couldn't find real skill, and nearly half their new hires left within eighteen months.

Pyvot, the platform he co-founded, replaces the resume with a "Living Portfolio" built for one industry: consumer packaged goods and retail. Candidates join free and upload a resume, and Pyvot turns it into a starting profile. They then add what a resume can't show: work samples from projects that mirror real industry problems, like landing a new soda on a major retailer's shelf; written answers to the classic behavioral interview questions; a work-style and personality profile; and their deal-breakers on salary, remote work, and benefits. 

Companies pay to join, and they fill out a portfolio of their own covering their culture, ways of working, and perks. Pyvot then matches the two portfolios against each other, not against a list of keywords. Candidates can also hire and get expert advice from vetted industry veterans as coaches, and those veterans pay Pyvot a monthly fee for access.

AI handles the heavy lifting. Google's Gemini models parse resumes, run mock interviews tailored to specific CPG roles and score them, grade project work with detailed feedback, flag biased wording in job postings, and calculate a fit score between each candidate and each job. But Pyvot draws a hard line: the AI ranks and advises, and it never rejects anyone. A human always makes that call.

On this 96th episode of Bald Ambition, host Mookie Spitz and Mike dig into what sets Pyvot apart from LinkedIn and Indeed. Candidates own a portfolio for life, interviews start from answers they've already thought through, and companies get rated by candidates on how fast they respond. Mike also explains why his team scrapped its first build for looking like a LinkedIn clone, and why companies should read Gen Z's job-hopping as agility, not disloyalty.

The Guest

Michael Kamins is CEO and co-founder of Pyvot, the workforce technology platform behind the Living Portfolio™. He spent more than two decades in executive leadership consulting across CPG, retail, healthcare, pharma, industrials, and technology, including time on the global executive team at The Gap Partnership, where he ran a $92M+ P&L spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. He started his career as an Ombudsman with the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Inspector General and holds an M.S. in Negotiations and Conflict Management. He founded Pyvot on a simple conviction: a one-page resume is a poor substitute for proof of what a person can do.

https://pyvotnow.co/

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For a decade, PR played marketing's secondhand stepchild: hard to measure, and easy for a CFO to slash. Now the credibility PR builds shapes what AI says about a brand, and LeadersPR founder Evan Boyer calls this moment a golden era for the discipline.

On this 95th episode of Bald Ambition, Evan tells host Mookie Spitz why most clients miss opportunities: they walk in demanding "ink" and skip the strategy. He fixes that with a disciplined sequence. First, he defines the audience precisely, down to how those people consume news and whom they trust. Next, he builds messages that tell the story cleanly and coaches leaders to deliver them everywhere, from TV interviews to sales meetings and town halls. Then he maps the most efficient route from where the brand stands to where it wants to go.

He measures success with the same rigor. A thousand likes mean nothing if the coverage skipped the key message or missed the audience. What counts: the right people hearing the right story, and the brand showing up when an issue in its space breaks. That kind of authority takes months to build, and Evan still builds it the old way, with phone calls, sharp angles, and emails a human wrote. AI speeds up his research, but he holds himself to one rule: never hand a client anything he spent less time on than they will spend reading it.

Join us for a terrific conversation about Marketing & PR in the AI age!

The Guest

Evan Boyer is the founder and CEO of LeadersPR, a PR consultancy for organizations that want to earn visibility in traditional media and in AI search. With about fifteen years in PR, he specializes in audience strategy, messaging, media relations, and reputation. He works directly with clients as a senior strategist and partners with other marketing specialists on larger programs.

https://www.leaderspr.com/

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Gen Z is the first generation to grow up on social media and the first to openly question hierarchy at work, and their Gen X and Millennial managers keep misreading the signals. Anjan Kasi, a Gen Z leadership coach and TEDx speaker with a software engineering background, joins Mookie Spitz on Bald Ambition to untangle the mess. Mookie brings the view from the other side of the desk: a Generation Jones business consultant who works with Zoomers, has Zoomer kids, and has plenty of questions.

Anjan's diagnosis centers on visibility running in both directions. Managers hand out tasks and rarely check in, and Gen Z hires work in relative isolation and deliver finished projects with no sign of how they got built. Anjan warns that ignoring young talent costs far more than learning to manage it, especially as Gen Z climbs toward a quarter of the US workforce and become the consumers of the future. 

Mookie inists that corporate purpose campaigns have targeted Gen X and Millennials for years, and the Zoomers he knows care more about money, travel, and flexibility than mission statements. Anjan answers with a sharper definition of purpose: the impact a job has on one real person's life. From there the conversation turns practical.

What managers can do:

• Connect each role to the impact it has on a real person's life
• Give feedback every month or every two weeks, since twice a year leaves Gen Z guessing
• Spell out the specific moves that earn the next level so people can track their own progress
• Manage for outcomes and drop the compliance mindset

What Gen Z can do:

• Show your thinking, because managers can't advocate for what they can't see
• Tie every task to the outcome the company wants
• Make the case for a raise by describing the problem six months ago and what changed since
• Build habits that hold under pressure, because goals fade and habits take over

Anjan also lays out VISIONx and the Pressure-Proof Promotion Method: three habits (ownership, visible thinking, and staying grounded under pressure) that he teaches to Gen Z and their managers together through role-play. The conversation takes on Gen Z's AI anxiety too. Anjan tells graduating students that humans doing machine-like work are struggling, while humans doing human-like work are in demand: built on intuition, creativity, and judgment. He also explains how to show all three in a job interview. Mookie closes with a career workshop story confirming Anjan's insights, and a reminder that every generation annoys the next, and the friction forces everyone to improve.

The Guest

Anjan Kasi Sampath is a TEDx speaker and Gen Z leadership coach whose talk has been watched more than 400,000 times. He’s the creator of the VISIONx™ framework and the Pressure-Proof Promotion Method™, which trains early-career professionals and the managers above them to close the trust gap between them — not through workshops, but through observable behavioral habits. His own turning point came in 2008: thirty days into his first corporate job, during the financial crisis, his manager told him to prove his value or lose the position. With no mentor and no blueprint, he built — under pressure — the exact habits he now teaches. Anjan is John Maxwell certified, spent 25 years in corporate and coaching roles before this work, and is a contributing author alongside Les Brown in Your Story Heals. He speaks on what separates the people who get noticed from the people who get managed out — especially now, as AI changes what used to signal talent in the first place.

Website: https://www.anjankasispeaks.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjan-kasi-sampath/

TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD2FH0aHCSg

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Carlo D'Amore spent years scraping by as an off-Broadway actor before he found the business hiding inside his own street theater. In 2009 he turned a two-page essay about a 19th century murder into The Ryan Case 1873, an interactive show that walked audiences through the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side and earned a Drama Desk nomination. That show became Live In Theater, a company that now drops corporate teams into unrehearsed, three-act mysteries where the CEO and the janitor play by the same rules.

Carlo joins Bald Ambition to talk about what happens when businesses hire actors instead of comedians for their team-building events. He draws a sharp line between short-form improv comedy and the long-form improvisation his actors use to build a real story around a group of strangers, and he explains why COVID pushed Live In Theater onto Zoom and multiplied the company's reach along the way. Clients like Google and Netflix now book sessions between four hundred and six hundred times a year, some returning again and again because a shared story builds trust faster than a slide deck does.

The conversation also covers Carlo's new project helping college students rehearse real interaction through theater, his stance on AI (he uses it to run his business but refuses to let it near his actors), and the math behind walking away from Broadway money to build something nobody else was doing.

What booking a session looks like:

• Reach out through liveintheater.com and hear back from the team within 24 hours
• Talk through your group's size and what you're celebrating so they can match you to a story
• Get a short prep email beforehand (dressing up and mixing a cocktail are optional)
• Log onto Zoom, Google Meet, or an in-person New York event and let the actors take it from there

The Guest

Carlo D'Amore is the founder and creative director of Live In Theater (LIT), the interactive theater company he built in New York City in 2009 after his debut show, The Ryan Case 1873, earned a Drama Desk nomination. He is an award-winning actor with Broadway credits including "Summer and Smoke" at the Roundabout Theatre Company and "Latinologues" at the Helen Hayes Theater, along with film and television credits on HBO's "Oz" and ABC's "Pan Am." Live In Theater has since worked with clients including Google, Netflix, and CVS across New York, Madrid, and Austin. 

Visit Live In Theater

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Rivka Tadjer joins Mookie on Bald Ambition to make one thing clear: cybercrime and cybersecurity aren't the same fight. Most banks and corporations keep their own infrastructure locked down tight. The opening criminals actually use is the human being working around it, whether that's a CEO wiring five million dollars off a deepfake video call or anyone who leaves a laptop logged into Amazon overnight. Tadjer, CEO of ZeroHack, spent 20 years as a business and technology journalist, including a stretch on the team that put the Wall Street Journal online in the 1990s, before serving on the White House's National Infrastructure Advisory Council cybersecurity working group for the banking industry. For the last decade she's focused entirely on the people problem, teaching individuals, families, and executives the habits that actually stop a hack.

Those habits get specific fast. Tadjer runs through her core best practices for anyone carrying a phone in 2026:

• Lock your SIM card and change the PIN from your carrier's default (usually 1111 or 1234), since an unlocked SIM lets criminals reroute your authorization codes to their own phone
• Sign all the way out of every app and browser before closing your laptop, including Amazon, Gmail, and anything storing payment info
• Turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop, and location services when you aren't actively using them
• Clear your cache and cookies right after logging into anything sensitive, like the IRS or Social Security
• Stop using your downloads folder as permanent storage, since it's part of the same browser data a hijacker can index
• Skip free credit monitoring offers like Experian, which pools your financial data in one place hackers love to target
• Keep one secure email strictly for banking and brokerage, and build a "trash persona" with consistent fake details for high-risk categories like gaming, crypto, and dating apps
• Get cyber insurance, often bundled into a homeowners policy for as little as $25 a month
• Never send a domestic wire transfer. Banks are legally liable for ACH and check fraud, but not for wire fraud

The conversation also digs into a real tension: marketing wants you findable, consistent, and searchable everywhere, while Tadjer's entire security philosophy argues for fragmenting your personal identity into something no algorithm can fully map. She and Mookie work out where that line actually falls between building a business brand and protecting a bank account, plus why AI is about to make phishing scams more personalized than any human hacker could manage alone. Reach Rivka at ZeroHackSecure.com, where she also runs a free newsletter with alerts on emerging scams.

The Guest 

Rivka Tadjer is the CEO of ZeroHack and its Cybercrime Boot Camp, based in New York. She spent 20 years as a business and technology journalist covering privacy, security, identity theft, data mining, AI, and supply chains before shifting her focus a decade ago to cybercrime prevention, incident response, and forensic cyber investigation. Tadjer served on the White House's National Infrastructure Advisory Council Cyber Security Working Group for critical infrastructure and holds a patent as co-inventor of a secure payments app that replaces university student ID cards. She now works directly with executives, families, and small businesses to close the human gaps that cybercriminals exploit, and she serves on advisory boards supporting school security and communities facing racism, antisemitism, and LGBTQ threats. 

www.zerohacksecure.com

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