Celebrity Interviews

Ghostbusters' Ernie Hudson, Author Paul Shemella, and Retired Captain and Author Donna Roman Hernandez

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor Ernie Hudson, beloved as Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters. Hudson recounted that the role was anything but a given, since director Ivan Reitman, with whom he had worked the year before on Spacehunter, initially felt he was wrong for the film and would not even see him. It took months to land an audition, which he eventually won. Hudson said he always believed Ghostbusters would be a hit, given the funny cast and sharp script, but never imagined it would endure for decades and inspire such fiercely loyal fans. He recalled how, after Ghostbusters, fans and strangers alike began sharing their own ghost stories with him, a fitting lead-in to his appearance on the paranormal series The Haunting Of, airing Saturday, September 10th at 11 a.m., in which he revisits and shares personal experiences with the unexplained. Grateful and busy with a slate of projects, he said it is a great time in his career and that he feels blessed.

Neil then welcomed author Paul Shemella, a retired Navy SEAL captain, lecturer, and caregiver whose memoir Into the Mist: An Alzheimer's Journey chronicles his wife Lena's illness and his devotion to her. Shemella explained that dementia is an umbrella term, like cancer, covering some hundred conditions, of which Alzheimer's is the most common at roughly seventy percent, with other forms requiring different approaches. He spoke candidly about starting out knowing nothing, even about a wife whose healthy living seemed like it should have prevented the disease, and about learning as he went. He pointed to encouraging research and to lifestyle habits that can lower risk, and framed his work, sharing what he wishes he had known, as a ministry to help other caregivers cope more effectively. He counts himself lucky that Lena, now unable to speak or walk, still smiles, and his mantra is to live from one smile to the next.

The hour closes with a Criminally Good with Sherrie and Jen simulcast, presented by Storehouse Media Group, welcoming Donna Roman Hernandez, a retired thirty-year New Jersey police captain turned award-winning filmmaker, author, podcaster, and victim advocate. Roman Hernandez shared that she pursued the badge because she admired her father, an Essex County constable, only to endure decades of abuse from him at home, and she chose law enforcement anyway to help others who might have a bad parent too. Rising from a Newark 911 dispatcher to captain of an all-male department, a promotion she had to fight to have affirmed, she served as the county's domestic violence liaison and a trainer for the attorney general's office, all while never disclosing her own experience, out of a fear, common among officers and especially women, of being seen as weak. Her memoir, Battered Blue, released through her company Blue Force Films, weaves in her late mother's handwritten diary to honor a dying wish to tell their shared story. She reflected that the community she served became a kind of shield of armor, a place where, unlike in her childhood home, she felt safe and could see the good her work did, and that surviving the danger at home made the street feel manageable. Above all, she spoke of transforming pain into empathy and purpose, meeting victims not as someone reciting a training guide but as someone who has lived it. Find Ernie Hudson on The Haunting Of, Paul Shemella's Into the Mist on Amazon, and Donna Roman Hernandez's Battered Blue wherever books are sold.

America's Got Talent Host Terry Crews, Author Chris Klein, GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle, and the Wounded Sisters

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Terry Crews, host of America's Got Talent, ahead of the show's nineteenth season. Crews, an unabashed fitness devotee, joked with fellow big guy Neil about staying in top shape and called working in entertainment a total privilege. He explained that he landed the hosting job almost by design, telling his agent to push the envelope and make him a guinea pig by putting him where audiences would never expect to see a former athlete his size. That willingness led first to hosting the spinoff AGT: Champions and then the flagship, a run now six seasons deep with no end in sight, and he said he wants to make it impossible to imagine the show without him. Recalling how, as a Midwestern kid, performing in Los Angeles felt as far off as going to Mars, Crews described his favorite part of the job as reassuring wide-eyed contestants that they truly belong on that stage. His enthusiasm for the talent, he said, is genuine.

Neil then welcomed returning guest, author Chris Kline, to discuss her autobiography, newly re-edited and re-titled Diamond in the Rough after a first release as Shake, Rattle, and Roll. Klein explained that she reissued the book with a fresh cover and edit once she was unhappy with the original production, and walked through a life story she frames around faith and the supernatural, from her years as a missionary to encounters she recounts as true rather than spooky. Where a previous book of hers was a novel tracing demonic influence passed down through four families, this one is her own account, offered, she said, both for readers who believe in the supernatural and for those simply curious to learn more. She presented the experiences throughout as her personal testimony.

The hour closes with a series of simulcasts. On GildaGram, Dr. Gilda Carle weighed how earlier generations let children roam until dark and even ride the subway alone, asking whether today's caution raises kids to be independent or fearful, while acknowledging the world has genuinely changed. In a second segment, she turned to the universal ordeal of a crying baby on a plane, praising the passenger who offered to hold an overwhelmed mother's infant and framing the moment as a public test of maturity that only the baby is allowed to fail. Finally, on the Wounded Sisters podcast, bestselling author Mary Shearer Eckert marked her thirtieth wedding anniversary with a reflection on faith as the bedrock of a lasting marriage, giving thanks for the blessings and the hard times alike. Find Terry Crews on America's Got Talent and Mary Shearer Eckert's Wounded Sisters on Amazon.

Golden Globe Winner Meg Tilly, First Responder and Author James Meuer, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a conversation with Golden Globe-winning actress Meg Tilly about the Netflix film War Machine. Tilly first reflected on growing up in a big blended family of twelve, where her sister Jennifer Tilly broadened everyone's horizons, writing plays for the kids to act out and dreaming grandly enough to show them there was a whole world for the taking. A dancer who had performed on the series Fame, Meg fractured her back and could no longer dance, and, with dyslexia making the era's fallback jobs impractical, realized acting was something she had done her whole life. Jennifer let her crash in her Los Angeles apartment and showed her the ropes. In War Machine, a layered satire from director David Michod, Tilly plays Gene McMahon, the wife of Brad Pitt's four-star general. She spoke about portraying the quiet strength and loneliness of a military spouse who raises a child largely alone while her husband serves, and about the film's deeper reckoning with the human and political cost of war, where every action, like a pebble dropped in a lake, sends ripples outward. Praising Michod's talent and Netflix's craftsmanship, she said it is the rare film that rewards a second viewing and leaves audiences knowing a little more than before, and predicted it would spark strong reactions, which she welcomed. Now also a published novelist, she said she felt blessed to have played her part in it.

Neil then welcomed James Meuer, a longtime first responder and author of Damaged: A First Responder's Experiences Handling Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Meuer described PTSD not as a weakness but as a normal response to abnormal events, explaining how the brain refuses to let go of what it has seen, surfacing as anger, hypervigilance, sleeplessness, and flashbacks that can be triggered by something as small as a dog barking, and how the culture of being ten feet tall and bulletproof keeps too many from admitting they are struggling. Over a career from 1986 to 2011, he said, the hardest calls involved children, and the one that haunted him most, a young girl he writes about in the book's first chapter, stayed with him for decades. Years later he found her memorial online and left a note, and her mother reached out, a reconnection that finally lifted a guilt he had carried and brought him peace. He was candid that for years he had stuffed every difficult call into a backpack he never unloaded, until it finally broke him, and that counseling, friends, and simply talking things through were what turned it around. His message throughout was that the hardest and most important step is asking for help and talking about it, that first responders are human, and that healing is possible.

The hour closes with two GildaGram simulcasts featuring Dr. Gilda Carle. In one, she explored the growing phenomenon known as living apart together, couples who sleep in separate bedrooms, or even keep separate homes, and report happier, stronger marriages, sharing the story of a woman who has thrived doing so for twenty-five years. In the other, she reacted to an article about adult children pressing wealthy parents to buy them homes and bankroll their lifestyles, sharing one father's insistence that his children first learn to earn so that whatever they build rests on firm ground rather than sand. She used it to champion self-reliance and to argue, drawing on her own lean early years, that the closest bonds are often forged while building something together from nothing, and offered pointed commentary on a culture of entitlement. Find Meg Tilly's War Machine on Netflix and James Meuer's Damaged wherever books are sold.

William McNamara (UFO), AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, and GildaGram.

The Neil Haley TV Show 08-9-26: Actor William McNamara on The Mike Vilardi Show, AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Mike Vilardi Show simulcast, hosted by Mike Vilardi, welcoming veteran actor William McNamara. Known for Copycat, Chasers, Surviving the Game, and Stealing Home across a 35-year career, McNamara returned to talk about his self-made series The Trouble With Billy, ten episodes he wrote, directed, produced, and stars in as a wildly exaggerated version of a fallen 1990s actor, complete with his pit bull and a beat-up car, now streaming on the independent platform Red Coral Universe. He described building it on a shoestring with friends and a cast that includes the late Tom Sizemore, Sally Kirkland, and Billy Baldwin, and how a union pension-and-health dispute stalled distribution for years before he found the show a home, part of a deliberate shift later in his career toward writing and directing his own material rather than waiting on casting calls. The conversation took an unexpected turn into the real-life inspiration behind the show's off-planet premise, as McNamara shared what he describes as genuine close encounters. By his account, around 2004 and 2005 in the small towns of Salt Point and Harriman in New York's Hudson Valley, he had contact with multiple craft, including a silent, triangular object with no visible propulsion that hovered just above the ground and that he says he followed for some 45 minutes, along with an even stranger encounter, in another small Hudson Valley town, that he recounts in vivid, unsettling detail. He framed those experiences, offered as his own testimony, as part of the seed for the show's premise, in which his character believes he was taken off-planet for a decade, and noted he is a frequent guest on the UFO and disclosure circuit. Find the show at thetroublewithbilly.com.

The hour continued with an AI Office Hours simulcast, where Neil and co-host Pat Riley traded notes on their ongoing experiments with artificial intelligence agents and assistants. Riley shared a hard-learned lesson about keeping a close eye on runaway costs when an automated task quietly burns through its budget faster than expected, and the importance of not tinkering with a setup that is already working. He passed along a favorite use case in which someone traveling abroad set an AI agent to repeatedly scan a humane society's website, matching photos and descriptions, until it flagged a listing that turned out to be their lost cat. Neil described his own deep dive into letting an AI assistant take on more and more of his workflow, from booking appointments to lining up sponsorship interest for the NHL Wraparound Podcast to building projects like a children's book, marveling at the productivity while cautioning that it is exhausting and demands a human in the loop. He recounted an agent that hallucinated its own book cover yet still drove a real sale for a client, using it to illustrate both the promise and the pitfalls, and the pair agreed the central challenge now is learning to manage your agents, with a person watching over them, rather than simply turning them loose. Their throughline, echoed by listener comments Neil read on air, was that AI is at its best as a force multiplier for a human who stays in charge, not a hands-off replacement.

The program closes with a GildaGram simulcast where Dr. Gilda Carle unpacked a sensational viral story about a scorned spouse's over-the-top revenge on a cheating partner, using the jaw-dropping tale as a springboard to talk about betrayal, consequences, and the depths of a partner's hurt when trust is broken, and the wiser paths a person might choose instead. Find William McNamara's The Trouble With Billy at thetroublewithbilly.com.

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Love Is podcast simulcast, co-hosted by Kim Sorrelle, welcoming actor Scott Valentine, remembered as Nick Moore on Family Ties. Valentine spoke about resilience, recounting how being run over by a truck left him paralyzed and told he would never walk again, and how he refused to accept that verdict. He framed setbacks as manure to clean off before climbing back on the horse, insisting that when someone treats you like dirt it defines them, not you. He credited his good fortune working with Michael J. Fox, Michael Gross, Meredith Baxter, Justine Bateman, and creator Gary David Goldberg, then centered the conversation on Red Coral Universe, the ad-supported streaming platform he built with partner Larry Meistrich to give independent creators a real voice and a fair share of the profits, splitting revenue from dollar one and opening the door to makers the big platforms overlook. Find it at redcoraluniverse.com.

Neil then joined a Criminally Good with Sherrie and Jen simulcast, presented by Storehouse Media Group, welcoming Matthew B. Cox, a former licensed mortgage broker who became a notorious white-collar offender and once landed on the U.S. Secret Service's most-wanted list before serving time in federal prison. Cox recounted how, since his release, he has reinvented himself as a true-crime author and the host of the popular YouTube show Inside True Crime, where he interviews law enforcement and former criminals, occasionally joking that a guest turns out to be less former than advertised, for an audience of more than a million subscribers. He explained that he began writing behind bars, penning memoirs of fellow inmates, among them Efraim Diveroli, whom he was incarcerated alongside, and clarified a common mix-up: he did not write War Dogs, the film that drew from a Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson, with Jonah Hill playing Diveroli. His own book, Shark in the Housing Pool, has been optioned for the screen several times over roughly seven years without yet becoming a movie, a grind Cox takes in stride, noting that only a handful of optioned projects ever get made and that he is happy with where things stand. He offered a candid critique of the true-crime convention circuit for sidelining actual reformed offenders while welcoming him only as a journalist, and, drawing on the long odds he has watched other authors face, cautioned anyone banking on a single Hollywood deal to build something else in the meantime. Now channeling that same hustle into growing his shows across new platforms, he encouraged listeners to check out Inside True Crime.

The hour closes with a Jesus and Ugly Jody simulcast, hosted with Sherrie, where recurring guest Jody Corbett led a reflection on blessings. Corbett walked through several kinds, material provision, relationships, and health, and pointed especially to what he called unrealized blessings, the disappointments that only reveal themselves as gifts in hindsight, a point Neil and Sherrie echoed with their own stories of doors that closed before better ones opened. He opened by asking simply what a blessing is, and pressed on where blessings come from. Anchoring the talk in Jeremiah 29:11, he noted that God's plans are meant not only to prosper but to protect, and reminded listeners that even everyday gifts like a healthy body, rest, and the breath of each morning are easy to overlook. He then turned to the temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4 to argue that not everything that looks like a blessing is one, since some are distractions meant to pull us off course, and that our free will shapes which doors we let God open. Find Scott Valentine at redcoraluniverse.com and Matthew B. Cox on Inside True Crime.

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a conversation with actor Mika Abdalla about her role in the coming-of-age film Snack Shack, streaming on Paramount. Abdalla, whose breakout came on the Netflix series Project MC2 after an early start in commercials and an American Girl movie, described Snack Shack, directed by Adam Rehmeier and loosely based on his own childhood, as a warm throwback to the coming-of-age movies of the 1980s and 1990s. Centered on two young best friends running a poolside snack stand over one eventful summer, the film casts Abdalla as the girl who moves to town and shakes things up. To prepare, the director flew the cast in early to live their characters' lives around town, soaking up the era's cars, fashion, and music, and she reflected on the bittersweet, temporary closeness of friendships formed on location and on set. With the industry ramping back up after a slow stretch, she said she is excited to find her next project. Find her on Instagram at Mika Abdalla.

Neil's team then aired a Storehouse Media Group simulcast, with Neil away, featuring mortgage expert Phil Gantz, the driving force behind Next Wave Mortgage, on helping first-time buyers, especially younger people daunted by home prices. Gantz's guidance was to get your financial house in order first, steering clear of late payments and building savings, then to explore the down payment assistance programs that can bridge the gap, some carrying credit-score minimums around 640. He explained that lenders run applications through automated underwriting from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that the depth and history of one's credit can matter as much as the raw score, so an established borrower with a modest number may fare better than a newcomer with a higher one. His bottom line, offered as professional perspective rather than personalized advice, was that there is no perfect moment and real value in starting sooner.

The hour closes with a Criminally Good with Sherrie and Jen simulcast, presented by Storehouse Media Group, welcoming retired Washington State Trooper Carlos Rodriguez, author of The Ugly Underneath. Rodriguez spent roughly eight years on the state's Missing and Exploited Children Task Force before retiring in 2020, and his book confronts the emotional toll of investigating crimes against children rather than the cases themselves. He spoke about compartmentalization as a survival skill for first responders, from officers to ER staff, and about its hidden cost when those mental boxes are never reopened and processed, quietly straining health and family life. After relocating to San Diego, where he now works for a school district, he lost his old support structure, sought therapy, and, at his counselor's encouragement, began writing to help others. He framed the book as a lifeline for those doing this difficult protective work and their families, a way to tell spouses and children that a loved one's distance was never their fault, and to help fellow first responders know they are not alone. He made the case for accurate language, explaining why he favors the term child sexual abuse material over one he believes minimizes the reality, and acknowledged how easily people shut down when the subject comes up, arguing that the topic has to be discussed, in a measured way, if society is going to confront it and support both the investigators and the survivors who need help to heal. Writing about two hours a day for roughly a year, he shaped those sessions into the book, and he closed by honoring the many people who step away from their own families to protect other people's children, urging listeners to support that mission. He also noted his former task force accepts public donations through the Washington State Patrol website. The Ugly Underneath is available online, and you can find Mika Abdalla's Snack Shack on Paramount.

Bestselling Novelist Don Winslow, Reset Medical's Corey, Filmmaker Michael Tove, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with New York Times bestselling crime novelist Don Winslow, joined by co-host Lefty, about his 26th book, City in Ruins. Winslow traced his lifelong pull toward writing to a book-loving home, a career-Navy father and a librarian mother, and a sister who is herself a novelist many times over. He spoke about the strange intimacy of spending more time with people who do not exist than those who do, the thrill and feedback of meeting readers on tour, and his gratitude that everything he owns he owes to them. He was candid that for years agents and editors insisted he would never make the list and simply would not print enough copies, until his breakout about the Mexican drug cartels arrived the day before El Chapo escaped from prison and everything changed. City in Ruins completes the Danny Ryan trilogy, following its longshoreman-turned-fugitive protagonist to a new life as a Las Vegas casino magnate. Winslow, a self-described overnight success in his fifties, treats writing as a five-day-a-week job and urged aspiring authors to never give up and to take ownership of marketing themselves rather than leaning on a publisher. City in Ruins is at Amazon and independent bookstores.

Neil then hosted a Reset Medical and Wellness Center podcast simulcast with Corey, a nurse who has been with the Strongsville clinic almost since it opened. She described a practice that treats patients like family, many of the staff having gone through treatment themselves, and walked through the clinic's neurosympathetic reset, a procedure Dr. Lauer's team uses to calm an overactive fight-or-flight response tied to stress, anxiety, and trauma. Corey shared that she was initially the skeptic, then watched patients arrive flat and withdrawn and return the next day transformed, and eventually underwent the reset herself after years of insomnia and pandemic-era stress on the job. She reported sleeping better and, more meaningfully, shifting from merely powering through tasks to being present with her family, recounting that others noticed her old self returning. She framed the results as her own and her patients' lived experience.

The hour continued with a Celebrity Interviews simulcast from the grotto welcoming North Carolina filmmaker Michael Tove about his award-winning short Yard Sale-ing. Tove traced a storyteller's path from O. Henry, Rod Serling, and Hitchcock-style twist endings, through a cattle-call role on the feature film The Handmaid's Tale that hooked him, to fifteen years of screenwriting training and friendships with industry veterans, among them director Tom Logan, who directed the short. He described Yard Sale-ing, an idea he first sketched decades ago, as a Hitchcockian tale of opposites, an effervescent optimist certain she will strike treasure at a yard sale and her reluctant, dryly sarcastic husband, whose outing takes an unexpected turn. Logan's casting drew Eric and Eliza Roberts along with leads Georgia Van Cuylenburg and Liam Bradford, and Tove praised the on-set chemistry and collaboration. Watch it free at emeraldoakproductions.com.

The program closes with a GildaGram simulcast where Dr. Gilda Carle weighed in on biohacker Bryan Johnson, who has poured a fortune into defying aging and now concedes he may have gone too far, linking an autoimmune condition to his own regimen. Carle's takeaway was blunt: there is no fountain of youth and no quick fix, and the wiser aim is to grow wiser as we age. Find Don Winslow's City in Ruins in bookstores and Michael Tove's Yard Sale-ing at emeraldoakproductions.com.

Snack Shack's Mika Abdalla, Author Robert Wolf on The Mike Vilardi Show, and Former Congressman Jason Altmire

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a conversation with actor Mika Abdalla about her role in the coming-of-age film Snack Shack, streaming on Paramount. Abdalla traced a career that began almost by accident, with an open casting call for a parenting magazine at her dentist's office when she was five or six, an only child whose mother wanted to draw her out of her shyness. That led to commercials, an American Girl movie at eleven, and her breakout on Project MC². She described Snack Shack, directed by Adam Rehmeier and loosely based on his own childhood, as a warm throwback to 1980s and 1990s coming-of-age movies, centered on two young best friends running a poolside snack stand over the summer, with Abdalla playing the girl who moves to town and shakes things up. To prepare, the director flew the cast in early to live their characters' lives around town, swimming at the pool and soaking up the era's cars, fashion, and music. She reflected on the bittersweet, temporary closeness of people met on location and on set, and said she is excited to find her next project now that the industry is ramping back up. Find her on Instagram at Mika Abdalla.

Neil then joined a Mike Vilardi Show simulcast welcoming author Robert Wolf, whose book Not a Real Enemy tells the true story of his family's survival through Nazi Germany and the communism that followed, drawn from his father's fight for freedom. Wolf spoke about his parents having endured totalitarianism at its most extreme and about his own belief in engaging across cultures, communities, and faiths rather than dividing into us and them, recalling friendships that cross religious lines. The wide-ranging conversation also moved into current events and a debate over socialism, communism, immigration, and public safety, with the hosts and guest offering their own strong political opinions. Not a Real Enemy is available from booksellers.

The hour closes with a segment co-hosted by author and publisher Paul Hollis featuring former Pennsylvania Congressman Jason Altmire, now a national association CEO, adjunct professor, and author. Altmire reflected on life after Congress, having left office at 44 determined not to let his career peak in his 40s, and on how the public's perception of the institution has soured in the years since. He discussed his book Dead Center, which examines the causes of political polarization, draws on academic research into how partisans think, and weaves in his own experience as a centrist in a divided Congress. Altmire argued that most Americans sit closer to the center than the political class does, citing Pew research that roughly a third identify at the extremes, evenly split left and right, and warning that because those voters dominate primaries and campaign giving, closed primary systems reward candidates who speak to the edges. He said he regrets that his 2017 forecast of worsening division has proven right. Find Jason Altmire's Dead Center wherever books are sold.

Family Ties' Scott Valentine, the FMCSA's Cicely Waters, Tam R. Luc, Joel Berg of Hunger Free America, plus Wounded Sisters and GildaGram

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Love Is podcast simulcast, co-hosted by Kim Sorrelle, welcoming actor Scott Valentine, remembered as Nick Moore on Family Ties. Valentine spoke candidly about resilience, recounting how being run over by a truck left him paralyzed and told he would never walk again, and how he refused to accept that verdict. He framed life's setbacks as manure you clean off before climbing back on the horse, insisting that when someone treats you like dirt it defines them, not you. He credited his good fortune on Family Ties working with Michael J. Fox, Michael Gross, Meredith Baxter, Justine Bateman, and creator Gary David Goldberg, and traced his path from Hollywood through banking to entrepreneurship. Most of the conversation centered on Red Coral Universe, the ad-supported streaming platform he built with partner Larry Meistrich to give independent content makers a real voice and a fair share of the profits, splitting revenue from dollar one with no ingestion, onboarding, or carriage fees. With roughly 10,000 licensed titles and an open-door policy for creators, the goal, he said, is a universe that serves both viewer and maker. Find it at redcoraluniverse.com.

Neil then welcomed Cicely Waters, FMCSA Director of Communications and a ten-year Air Force veteran, to spotlight the Freedom Haulers initiative connecting veterans to trucking careers. She explained that military service instills the safety, professionalism, leadership, and comfort with complex equipment the industry prizes, and that the mission need not end when the uniform comes off. She detailed the Even Exchange program, now active in 27 states with nine more committed, which lets qualifying service members waive the CDL knowledge and skills tests, and the CMVOST grant, which funds scholarships covering CDL training for veterans and their families. With driving jobs often reaching six figures and GI Bill benefits applicable, she urged transitioning members to explore the options at freedomhaulers.dot.gov.

The hour continued with a Storehouse Media Group simulcast featuring Tam R. Luc, founder of Women Who Bossed Up. A longtime entrepreneur with a commercial real estate and marketing background, Luc built her company to help women who have hustled their way into a bind, where every function runs through them, redesign and systematize their businesses to grow past that choke hold. She traced the arc from her book A Woman's Side Hustle and her Women Who Boss Up author collections to hands-on work with service, real estate, and medical business owners, and shared that she designed her own life to be location-independent, now running a high-revenue business from Malaysia. Find her at WomenWhoBossUp.com.

Neil next spoke with Joel Berg, founder and CEO of the nonpartisan Hunger Free America, which connects people to SNAP, school meals, and WIC, runs the USDA National Hunger Hotline, and advocates on policy. Berg argued that hunger persists because of low wages and a thin safety net, noting that before the government stopped collecting the data, USDA counted 48 million Americans who could not always afford enough food, most of them working people rather than the homeless. The segment became a frank exchange on solutions, with Berg contending that stronger safety-net policy and higher wages are the answer and Neil making the case for a viable third party. Learn more at hungerfreeamerica.org.

The program closes with two simulcasts. On Wounded Sisters, bestselling author Mary Shearer Eckert, marking her 30th wedding anniversary, discussed her novel about a retreat where broken pastors' wives find healing, forgiveness, and faith. On GildaGram, Dr. Gilda Carle examined online cruelty, using Ariana Grande's decision to step back to argue that anonymous

Billy Baldwin of Hit the Floor, Dr. Pam Mullarkey Robbins, The Walking Dead's David Morrissey, and Xzibit

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor Billy Baldwin about his guest-starring turn on VH1's Hit the Floor. Baldwin, reflecting on the rowdy, rambunctious upbringing that shaped the famous Baldwin brothers, described the series as a scripted soap opera set inside a professional basketball franchise, the fictional Los Angeles Devils, full of behind-the-scenes drama among players, wives, cheerleaders, and a front office locked in a power struggle. He plays Everett, a billionaire pulling strings behind the scenes, and likened the dynamic to the real-life Lakers tug-of-war between Jeanie Buss and Phil Jackson. Baldwin praised showrunner James LaRosa and co-star Dean Cain, marveled at the caliber of the dancers, and joked that playing a master of the universe required no research given the billionaires strolling his Montecito neighborhood. He noted he is producing and starring in his third Hallmark Channel film and had just wrapped a movie in Italy with Michael Madsen. Hit the Floor airs at 10 p.m. Eastern.

Neil then welcomed Dr. Pam Mullarkey Robbins, author of What's So Funny About Dementia?, a counselor and psychologist and four-time caregiver who explained how humor became her survival tool during her mother's Alzheimer's journey, always laughing with the person and never at them. She walked through prevention, the protein BDNF and the habits that support it, diet, exercise, rest, lower stress, and socialization, and named early warning signs like repeated questions and unexplained car damage. Because a caregiver who collapses cannot care for anyone, her counseling starts with the caregiver. Her second book, The Brighter Side of Dementia, collects a hundred reader-submitted stories.

Neil then spoke with acclaimed British actor David Morrissey, unforgettable as the Governor on The Walking Dead, about the Starz and BBC thriller The Missing. Morrissey said he treasures the friendships and the visceral response to a character audiences love to hate, then turned to the new season's story of a soldier whose daughter, abducted as a child, walks back into the family's life eleven years later. Told across two timelines, the series follows not the search for a missing child but the harder aftermath of her return, as a delighted father and a suspicious mother are driven apart and a tenacious French detective, Julien Baptiste, played by Tchéky Karyo, reopens the case. Morrissey, who stars opposite Keeley Hawes, reflected on the guilt and grief such a homecoming stirs and the truth that you must be careful what you wish for. He also invited listeners to his Boogaloo Radio music show.

The hour closes with a Total Education segment featuring recording artist, television host, and entrepreneur Xzibit. A recording artist since his 1996 debut who went on to work with Dr. Dre, Eminem, and Snoop Dogg and to host Pimp My Ride, Xzibit explained why, as the first millionaire in his family, he chose ownership over mere endorsement, becoming a partner in the Bonita Platinum tequila brand rather than simply lending his name. He detailed a market-by-market rollout built on events and local brand ambassadors, his goal of taking the brand everywhere, and a charitable streak that spans a breast-cancer campaign and homes he has helped build for wounded warriors near San Antonio. He also previewed continued touring behind his album Napalm. Find Billy Baldwin's work on VH1, David Morrissey in The Missing on Starz, and Xzibit's Bonita Platinum tequila as it expands.