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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Noriko Yokoi, co-founder of 3cubed.ai, returns to Bald Ambition a year after her first appearance to talk about how AI search is rewriting the rules of digital marketing. The conversation ranges across GEO, AEO, and what happens to decades of marketing practice once AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini start answering questions directly instead of just linking to a results page, while the real value is in the practical takeaways Noriko lays out along the way:

Noriko's Best Practices

• Practice "search everywhere optimization." Show up across platforms, but be deliberate about it given a finite budget, don't spread evenly, prioritize where it counts most.
• Make YouTube a priority specifically. Video transcripts are highly machine-readable, which means even low-view videos can feed directly into how AI models answer related questions.
• Structure your own website so bots can actually read it. It's no longer sufficient on its own, but it's still the necessary starting point.
• Invest in real brand differentiation. Generic, undifferentiated content gets down-ranked by AI models, while a genuine point of view gets picked up and cited.
• Build third-party authority, not just owned content. Citations in press, trade journals, and specialized publications carry real weight in AI search, especially in subject-specific or regulated fields.
• Get adjacent to specialized, credentialed sources. If a scientific study or expert publication touches your category, find a way to reference or connect to it, since AI systems favor that kind of authoritative material.
• Keep publishing, don't rest on past wins. AI search leans toward recent content, so a strong result today doesn't guarantee visibility next month.
• Stay hands-on with the tools yourself. Theorizing about AI search from the sidelines means falling behind fast, the only reliable way to keep up is direct, regular use.
• Bring a low barrier to entry into your own thinking. Newer, less experienced marketers are competing successfully purely on results, so let go of assumptions that tenure alone should count for more than it does right now.

Underneath all of it, both Noriko and Mookie are candid that nobody's actually cracked this yet. Noriko describes the current moment as sitting at the bottom of a valley where everyone knows the old rules stopped working, but no dominant platform has emerged to define the next ones the way Google once did. Their honest, shared advice: stop waiting for certainty, and get in there.

The Guest

Noriko Yokoi is the co-founder of 3cubed.ai, an agentic AI consulting firm specializing in marketing and content automation for regulated industries like healthcare and life sciences. A 20-year veteran of major Madison Avenue advertising agencies, she holds an MSc and PhD from the London School of Economics.

https://3cubed.ai

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Bill Harper, founder and Chief Creative Officer of BrandBossHQ, joins Mookie on Bald Ambition to break branding down to something deceptively simple: a narrative you choose, an expectation it creates, and, if the experience delivers, a reputation that sticks. Every real branding failure, Bill argues, traces back to skipping that first step and talking about the product instead.

Bill's central case study is great: FedEx didn't win by being cheapest or friendliest, they won by naming the exact fear a business traveler feels when a package has to arrive on time, and promising to solve it. He runs the same lens over Liquid Death, a company that turned plain canned water into a $1.4 billion brand in seven and a half years by understanding a very specific, very real feeling, not wanting to look uncool holding a bottle of water at a party, and committing to it completely. The conversation's sharpest line lands here too: you cannot create demand from nothing. It already exists in people. Your only job is capturing it.

From there Bill and Mookie dig into why so many businesses lose the plot entirely: finance teams optimizing purely for short-term performance marketing, AI making content production nearly free while making original differentiation more valuable than ever, and the specific temptation that kills mature brands, chasing line extensions instead of staying relentlessly good at the one thing customers already love them for (In-N-Out and Five Guys both come up as the anti-example done right).

The episode closes with a genuinely fun live thought experiment: what would Bill actually tell Apple's brand-new CEO, John Ternus, about reinventing the company for the AI era, and whether Apple's next great product might not be a device at all, but something that finally disappears.

The Guest

Bill Harper is the co-founder, CEO, and Chief Creative Officer of BrandBossHQ, a brand strategy and marketing agency helping growth-stage companies build category-defining brand stories. He also hosts The Bill Harper Show and The Billion Dollar Brand podcasts.

Get in touch: https://www.brandbosshq.com

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Brian Samson, founder of Plugg Technologies, joins Mookie on the 89th episode of Bald Ambition to talk about how AI has completely inverted the logic of hiring overseas talent. Eleven years ago, Brian used a small investor check to move to Buenos Aires and build a services company for FinTech startups, chasing lower engineering costs and, as it turned out, falling hard for Argentina's culture and quality of life along the way. Three companies and over 500 placements later, he's built Plugg into a firm connecting US businesses with senior engineering talent across Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia.

The real subject of the conversation is a profound shift Brian's watching happen in real time. Nearshoring used to be a straightforward cost play, find cheaper developers, save money, accept some quality tradeoff. AI broke that math entirely. Routine coding is increasingly handled by AI agents, which means companies need fewer engineers overall, but the ones they do need have to be senior enough to architect systems, judge whether an AI's output is actually correct, and push back when it isn't. Brian and Mookie also dig into just how uneven AI adoption really is, even inside companies that consider themselves cutting edge, and Brian shares a startling anecdoate from the CEO of Nvidia, reportedly willing to fire a $500K engineer over not spending enough on AI tokens, a KPI Mookie calls exactly backwards.

The conversation's most cutting edge material, though, is cultural. Brian makes a detailed, specific case for why Latin America's flatter, more conversational business culture beats the rigid hierarchies he's encountered elsewhere, illustrated by a chilling real story about a plane crash caused entirely by a co-pilot too deferential to correct his captain. Brian also explains why Plugg deliberately doesn't vet engineers on technical skill alone, instead mapping each client's specific hiring biases and needs first, a system producing a striking 90 percent retention rate.

The Guest

Brian Samson is the founder of Plugg Technologies, a leading nearshore fi rm connecting Latin America talent with U.S. companies. Brian has spent 11 years focused on nearshoring, including living as an expat in Argentina. As a founder, he has grown 3 separate companies from $0 to $4m ARR each. Prior, he was a VP of talent for several SF based tech companies including an IPO and an acquisition. He holds an MBA from UCLA and he and his wife are advocates for foster care, having adopted a baby girl.

https://plugg.tech

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