On this MLK Day 2026 solo rant, Mookie Spitz does what he does best on the 99th episode of No Hair, All Heart: he pulls the pin on a cultural grenade and refuses to flinch when it goes off.

Starting with Martin Luther King Jr.’s most misused line—“judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”— he dives headfirst into the uncomfortable paradox of our moment: a second Trump administration aggressively dismantling DEI and “woke” institutions, while simultaneously benefiting from a multiracial, working-class electoral coalition that flipped traditional political assumptions on their head.

Mookie dissects how MLK’s aspirational color-blind ideal has been selectively weaponized, used both to justify rolling back civil-rights protections and to argue against identity-based policies that were originally designed to correct historic inequities. Along the way, he tears into the lazy binaries that dominate public discourse: woke vs. anti-woke, left vs. right, victimhood vs. bootstraps, moral purity vs. brute power.

His rant ranges wide and wild to dive into:

• The Trump administration’s executive-order purge of DEI language and institutions
• Why some Black intellectuals openly support dismantling affirmative action
• The difference between race neutrality as an aspiration and as a premature policy assumption
• The transgender debate as the cultural fulcrum driving radical political oscillation
• Free speech, religious liberty, and where human decency actually draws the line
• Why corporate virtue signaling and pronoun theater feel hollow, even to people who support civil rights
• How chaos, disruption, and even political ugliness can create conditions for real transformation

At the emotional core of the episode is a deeply human story—told via a friend—that accidentally lands closer to MLK’s dream than most policy papers ever will: a second-grader who proudly submits Taylor Swift as her Black History Month hero, not out of irony or provocation, but because admiration came before identity.

That moment becomes the lens through which Mookie reframes the entire conversation. Not as a denial of racism, not as a dismissal of history, but as a glimpse of what genuine color-blindness might actually look like when it isn’t coerced, gamed, or politicized.

Layered on top is a broader meditation on power, disruption, and truth in a post-institutional age. Mookie draws lines from Trump to FDR, from Nietzsche to Feyerabend, from social media chaos to the collapse of old moral scaffolding. He argues that we’re living through a brutal revaluation of values, and whether it ends in disaster or renewal depends on whether we’re capable of thinking beyond tribes.

His rant is long, messy, provocative, and intentionally unresolved, much like him.

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The No Hair, All Heart podcast goes deep this week with Craig A. DeLarge, MPH, MBA—a seasoned digital health leader, former pharma executive, public-health thinker, and relentless advocate for using technology without letting it eat us alive.

Rather than spoon up a “future of wellness” chat, Mookie and Craig go long-form with an intellectually honest conversation about what actually works at the intersection of healthcare, leadership, and technology—and what absolutely does not.

Craig walks through his post-pharma evolution into his Wise Working Leadership consultancy and what he calls serious play:

• Coaching senior life-science and healthcare executives
• Advising founders and investors in digital mental health
• Building practical frameworks for technology-enabled wellness that normal people can actually use

Together, Mookie and Craig tackle many of the tough challenges, and offer proven solutions:

• Why we live in sick care, not healthcare
• Why prevention sounds obvious but fails systemically
• Why “personal empowerment” is overrated without community
• How startups, legacy companies, and executives keep talking past each other
• Why managed care economics quietly reward dysfunction
• How AI can either accelerate human wellness—or turbocharge delusion

They also dig into digital wellness literacy, not as ideology, but as practice:

• Stress, sleep, movement, relationships, food, and attention
• How tech harms each—and how it can actually help
• Why measurement without meaning is useless
• Why AI is fire: it can cook dinner or burn the house down

The episode also gets personal: Mookie reflects on podcasting as forced humility, listening as a learned skill, and the vital realization that community—not optimization—is the missing link in behavior change.

If you are:

• A healthcare or life-science executive
• A digital health or mental-health founder
• A leader navigating AI, burnout, and complexity
• Or just someone trying to live sanely in a dopamine-engineered world

Craig hits home the truth that:

Technology isn’t the villain.
AI isn’t the savior.
Wellness isn’t a product.
And real change doesn’t happen alone.

The Guest

Craig A. DeLarge is a digital healthcare strategist and mental health advocate & educator at WiseWorking Leadership, where he develops leaders, advises digital mental health firms, and educates citizens about the topic of digital wellness.

He has contributed as a digital & healthcare marketer, strategist, and educator, and has worked at Novo Nordisk, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Takeda, and Johnson & Johnson. He has also taught marketing, communications, leadership, and business ethics at several colleges, including Temple University, Philadelphia University, Chestnut Hill College, St. Joseph’s University, and Penn State University.

Craig holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Marketing and Design Management from Philadelphia University, from the University of Westminster, and King’s College, London. He is also a certified professional coach and published author of The WiseWorking Handbook (2014). He resides in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Craig's Contact Information

Wise Working Website

Stress Test eBook

Newsletter

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Parricide ranks among the most disturbing crimes imaginable: children killing their parents. The crime appears rarely — roughly 1–2% of all murders in the U.S. — yet the psychological impact lands with enormous force.

In this Season 2 premiere of No Hair, All Heart, Mookie Spitz uses a recent, high-profile Hollywood family tragedy as a lens to examine something far more universal and uncomfortable: entitlement, parenting, resentment, gratitude, and the emotional violence that often precedes physical violence.

This episode rejects true-crime voyeurism, and delivers an unsparing reflection from someone who has lived on both sides of the parent–child divide: as a son shaped by fear, contempt, and unresolved anger toward a hard, emotionally distant father, and as a father who deliberately chose the opposite path: the fun dad, the permissive dad, the nice guy. Mookie questions the cost of that choice.

The conversation dissects the collision of wealth, fame, addiction, and enablement in celebrity households, arguing that unlimited resources frequently destroy the very boundaries troubled children need most. Hollywood becomes a metaphor for America itself: a culture that hyper-inflates success, worships celebrity, and then feeds on collapse — a modern pantheon of Greek gods armed with money, power, and catastrophic blind spots.

The rant moves fluidly between cultural critique and personal confession. Mookie confronts his own parenting decisions, his fear of becoming his father, and the uncomfortable possibility that avoiding hardness can breed entitlement just as easily as cruelty breeds rebellion. He reflects on generational trauma, the necessity of separation between parents and adult children, and the evolutionary reality that conflict often fuels independence.

No clean answers appear here. No parenting formula emerges. No redemption arc ties itself neatly with a bow. Instead, the episode offers perspective. Gratitude arrives late more often than anyone admits. “Good enough” parenting stands as the only honest standard. Growing up — for children and parents alike — demands brutality, necessity, and unfinished work.

Mookie's rant delivers a raw, intellectually restless meditation on family, boundaries, fame, failure, and survival — and opens a season focused squarely on the hardest truths of the human heart.

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The 96th episode and season finale of No Hair, All Heart sits host Mookie Spitz down with Claris "Bud" Hyett, an 81-year-old farm boy turned innovative corporate problem-solver, Marine-raised straight-shooter, cancer survivor, and unapologetic truth teller. Doctors gave him months to live—nine years ago. Instead of folding, he keeps fighting, living, thinking...

And storytelling: from growing up on a hard Midwestern farm to shaping major aerospace projects, from a near-death brush-fire experience to messy marriages, brutal family battles, redemption, love, and ultimately pride in the life he built, Bud doesn’t regret a damn thing.

He talks about grit, American culture losing its backbone, education losing its soul, politics losing its honesty, and what it really means to work hard, stand up, build something, and keep going when life beats the hell out of you. He also talks love, loyalty, Freemasonry, marksmanship, near-spiritual moments, and the strange miracle of still being here after doctors counted him out. Rather than gloat or complan, Bud offers profound perspective from a man who earned it the hard way, while still having his own unfinished business.

If you want a conversation that hits reality square in the jaw—resilience, mortality, family, work, and purpose—this is it. Listen, learn a thing or two, and maybe rethink what “a good life” really means.

Bud's Memoir

Where We Belong

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In the 95th episode of No Hair, All Heart, your still-bald host Mookie Spitz sits down with Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers — clinician, sexologist, author, and all-around demolisher of America’s sexual hang-ups — for a blunt autopsy of how a shame-soaked culture raised generations of emotionally stunted adults. They trace the damage from its roots in early Christian patriarchy to modern abstinence-only education, parental silence, porn-distorted expectations, and the collapse of Gen Z male identity.

Dr. Sellers breaks down how sexual shame wires itself into the body from infancy, how it warps relationships, why men are spinning out, and what it actually takes to rebuild a functional, intimate, psychologically grounded adulthood. They dive into the hard questions: the zoomer male backlash, patriarchy’s dead-end power games, America’s moral panic machine, and the core wound at the center of so much cultural chaos.

The conversation pushes past diagnosis into action: from practical frameworks for healing to community-based solutions, to the role psychedelics may play in unwinding generations of trauma. Their podcast is candid, unguarded, often provocative, deeply humane, and exactly the conversation America keeps failing to have.

If you’re exhausted by the sexual confusion, loneliness, rage, and hypocrisy that define so much of modern American life, this episode breaks the silence and clears a hopeful and prescriptive path forward.

The Guest

Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers, PhD, LMFT, CSTS, PAT is a second generation Swedish American therapist, educator, and author whose childhood on her grandparents’ homestead near Puget Sound—within Coast Salish territory—deeply shaped her values of community, resilience, and land stewardship.

As the first in her immigrant family to earn an advanced degree, Tina spent nearly three decades as a professor of marriage and family therapy, medical family therapy, and humansexuality before authoring two influential books: Sex, God & the Conservative Church - Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy and Shameless Parenting, both recognized for their impact on healing the results of authoritarian parenting, religious sexual shame, and trauma, and empowering relational intimacy.

She is the founder and chief advisor to the Northwest Institute on Intimacy—offering postgraduate clinician training in sex therapy and relational health—and Founder and Executive Director of Inanna Rising, a clinician membership collective
dedicated to equitable, just, and patient-centered psychedelic-assisted therapy training and support for activists and clinicians.

Dr. Tina remains committed to social justice, integrity, reciprocity, and weaving cutting edge cultural, spiritual, and sexual healing into a compassionate praxis.

Visit her website: https://www.tinaschermersellers.com/

Follw her on Instagram at @DrTinaShameless & @Inanna_Rising_PAT

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In this deeply uplifting episode of No Hair, All Heart, Mookie Spitz sits down with Chaplain Sy Alli, a man who has lived enough lives for ten people: Air Force veteran, pro wrestler, actor, private investigator, global security expert, and now, chaplain and youth mentor. His story, told with raw honesty and humility, is one of collapse, revelation, and rebirth.

Sy’s path was a carousel of careers and reinventions, from the “Chocolate Playboy” in the wrestling ring, a bodyguard in the dot-com era, a corporate security director in the early cannabis industry. But behind the high-octane résumé was a man drowning in depression and alcoholism, spiraling toward suicide. On April 18, 2015, sitting alone in a locked Denver office with a loaded Glock, Sy prepared to end his life. Then something impossible happened: the lights went out, the world froze, and two familiar presences — his late father and father-in-law — appeared beside him. What followed was a divine intervention that replayed the life he would destroy if he pulled the trigger.

That moment changed everything. Sy put down the gun and picked up a Bible. Five years later, he gave up drinking for good, entered seminary, and became a chaplain. His ministry wasn’t confined to pulpits — it found its home in homeless shelters, cancer wards, and public schools. From counseling suicidal veterans in Marina, California, to mentoring at-risk kids in Salinas through the Alevo program, Sy turned his pain into purpose. The same relentless drive that once fueled his career now fuels his mission: to serve, to heal, and to lift others up.

Together, Mookie and Sy trace a spiritual arc from ego to empathy, from chasing fame to chasing meaning. They talk about grace, gratitude, and God’s humor — how a man who once threw Hershey’s Kisses to adoring wrestling fans now spends his days mentoring children of farm workers and guiding veterans out of despair.

Sy’s journey is proof that salvation isn’t a sermon — it’s an act. His life embodies the idea that faith without compassion is empty, and that giving back is the purest expression of belief. This episode is a testament to second chances, divine timing, and the courage it takes to turn your life into a living ministry.

The Guest

Chaplain Sy Alli resides in Carmel California where he is a Site Success Manager with Elevo Learning, and ministers to several Personal Care Homes in Monterey and works with At-Risk Youths. He has a degree in Criminal Justice and is also degreed in Religious Studies and Chaplaincy, and is a father to three adult kids.

Sy has led many lives: USAF European Powerlifting Champ, Actor, Professional Wrestler, University Lecturer and Dignitary Protection Specialist. His story is of interest to all suffering from mental health challenges.

His Book

"Out of The Storm" is more than just a personal account, it's a call to action. Through Sy Alli's life story, readers will discover the resilience of the human spirit, the importance of faith, and the transformative power of compassion. This book aims to inspire, motivate, and offer a lifeline to those who may be navigating their own storms.

Get his book on Amazon

His Social Media

https://www.linkedin.com/in/syalli
https://x.com/syalli1
https://www.facebook.com/ChaplainSyAlli

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In this powerful and deeply personal 93rd episode of No Hair, All Heart, Mookie Spitz sits down with Ely Winkler, the Director of Advancement at Eshel, an organization devoted to LGBTQ+ inclusion within the Orthodox Jewish community. Their heartfelt conversation cuts through theology, tradition, and identity with candid honesty and unexpected joy.

Ely shares his remarkable journey from being the rabbi’s son in a Modern Orthodox New Jersey synagogue, to coming out at Yeshiva University in 2009, to becoming one of the leading voices for inclusion and reform within a world that still struggles with acceptance. Mookie brings his trademark mix of empathy and wit as they dig into the biblical roots of exclusion, the interpretations of Leviticus, and how faith and tolerance can not only coexist but strengthen each other.

Together they explore...

• How Eshel builds bridges between LGBTQ+ Jews and Orthodox institutions through education, advocacy, and community-building.
• The tensions between tradition and modernity, and why arguing over God’s will is actually a very Jewish thing to do.
• The unique struggles of trans Jews navigating Orthodox spaces — and Eshel’s groundbreaking idea of the “tri-chitza,” a third prayer-space for non-binary and gender-nonconforming people.
• How the trauma of exclusion mirrors Jewish history itself — and why inclusion isn’t just moral, but existential for the survival of Judaism.
• The post–October 7th reality for Jews worldwide, and how unity and compassion have become not just ideals but survival mechanisms.

Their wide ranging and passionate conversation isn’t just a theological debate, but a human story about return, reconciliation, and resilience. Ely’s life becomes a metaphor for the broader Jewish diaspora: leaving home, finding oneself, and coming back not in shame, but in strength. As Ely puts it, “There’s no downside to inclusion — only a stronger, more fabulous community.”

Listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of how identity, faith, and belonging collide, and how organizations like Eshel are quietly reshaping one of the world’s oldest religions from the inside out.

The Guest

Ely Winkler is the Director of Advancement for Eshel, serving Orthodox+ LGBTQ+ Jews, their families, and communities. He is the proud son of a modern Orthodox Rabbi from New Jersey, and currently lives with his partner in Brooklyn, NY. Since coming out of the closet at Yeshiva University, Ely has been an advocate for strengthening the Jewish future through LGBTQ+ inclusion, first by working in Jewish day schools and yeshivot, and now by bringing awareness, developing resources, empowering allies, and expanding LGBTQ+ belonging within Orthodox Jewish communities through his work with Eshel.

The Organization

Eshel's mission is to build LGBTQ+ inclusive Orthodox Jewish communities. Eshel envisions a world where LGBTQ+ people and their families are full participants in the Orthodox community of their choice. We work towards this goal through four pillars: community building for LGBTQ+ people and their parents, advocacy to the broader community, supporting each other, and educating our Rabbis, institutional leaders, and friends.

Learn more: www.eshelonline.org
Support Eshel's Work: www.eshelonline.org/support-our-work/
Orthodox LGBTQ+ Jewish Support: https://www.eshelonline.org/support/

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Welcome to the ninety-second episode of No Hair, All Heart, the brutally honest, hilariously self-aware podcast from writer and ranter Mookie Spitz — here playinmg bald philosopher of modern absurdity.

Today, Mookie delights in turning the small humiliations and generational echoes of life into raw, unfiltered narratives that swing between confession, comedy, and cultural critique by ripping into the shared awkwardness of adolescence — from his own clumsy teenage years fumbling through Chicago winters and premature panic to watching his son navigate love and morality in the age of smartphones, TikTok, and digital confusion.

An intergenerational mirror of shame, humor, and empathy, the personal story is told with surgical precision and zero pretense. Seeing himself in his son, Mookie wonders what kind of agency he's ever had regarding his own fate, and whether or not he's had lasting impact on the lives of his children. At the very least, parenting has offered good stories to tell, and perhaps a few lessons to learn!

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