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

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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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