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/

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Science was supposed to be the one institution immune to the attention economy. It succumbed anyway. Kent Anderson and Joy Moore join Mookie for the 79th episode of Bald Ambition to talk about the already dire implications, and what we should do.

Kent and Joy have spent decades inside scientific publishing: the editorial and distribution machinery that turns research into the "studies show" headlines you scroll past every day. Their new book, How the Internet Disrupted Science (out August 4), traces exactly how that machinery broke, and why the breakdown is feeding the same institutional distrust poisoning politics, media, and public health.

They decribe how when publishing flipped from subscriber-funded to pay-to-publish, journals stopped getting paid to reject bad papers and started getting paid to accept them. Peer review got deprioritized. Preprint servers — built for physicists sharing telescope data — got repurposed for biomedical claims with minimal to zero vetting. The result: 25,000+ journals, a paper mill economy, and a scientific record that can't be corrected once it's indexed, cited, and fed into an LLM.

That's the tension at the center of this conversation. The public's distrust of institutions is real and often earned, exacerbated when COVID exposed genuine communication failures, flip-flopping, and arrogance from public health authorities. But the "democratization" that was supposed to fix institutional gatekeeping instead built a parallel attention economy where Silicon Valley moguls reign supreme, volume beats rigor, sensationalism beats replication, and a wellness grifter with 80 pay-to-play citations looks as credible as a legitimate researcher. The public started distrusting science when the attention economy manufactured a version of science optimized to be distrusted.

Mookie pushes back on what got us into this mess in the first place. He questions whether LLM limitations are really the crisis Anderson and Moore claim, and whether "the internet ruined it" lets decades of cloistered, pre-internet gatekeeping off the hook. Then he goes further: if Wall Street can separate Elon Musk the troll from the trillionaire whose rockets actually launch, can the public learn to make that same split between bullshit, bravado, and evidence-based brawn? Why write off science wholesale when it can and perhaps should be reinvented?

Anderson and Moore argue the real fight isn't over who's loudest, it's over who gets to rebuild the system once it's broken, and they lay out what scientific publishing could look like if it's built from scratch instead of patched: less gatekeeping for gatekeeping's sake, more resistance to the attention economy, a shot at the kind of paradigm shift that only happens when the old model finally breaks. Give them a listen, it could be the most important conversation you hear since the pandemic.

The 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/

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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/

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