Some stories don't die.

They wait.

At 19 years old, Rodney Phillips began writing a novel about conflict — about how a single disagreement can fracture trust, unravel loyalty, and ignite consequences no one can control. Then life happened. Career. Coaching. Fatherhood. Leadership. And the manuscript — handwritten in notebooks and on furniture store layaway cards — sat untouched in a filing cabinet for 37 years.

Until one quiet weekend in an empty nest, he opened the drawer.

In this powerful episode of Spirit Talk Show: Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups, Rodney shares the journey behind Dissension: A Disagreement That Leads to Discord — a gripping cartel thriller set in Miami that explores loyalty, betrayal, ambition, communication breakdown, and the fragile line between order and chaos.

We explore:

Rodney reads the prologue of Dissension, and we dive into the emotional core of a story that spans decades — both on the page and in the writer's life.

This episode isn't just about publishing a novel.

It's about reopening a drawer.

Dissension is currently ranked #9 on Goodreads under Spy Thriller.

Learn more about Rodney Phillips and his work at:

Because sometimes the storm you wrote at 19…

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

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Most of what runs your life is not part of you. You would not recognize it if it bumped into you in the street. Underneath the version of you that picks out a t-shirt in the morning and answers emails and makes small talk — there is another you. A quieter one. An older one. The one who learned very early what was safe and what was not. What love looked like. What you were worth. Whether you had to keep your guard up just in case.

That version of you does not ask permission. It just runs. And it has been running for decades.

Craig Meriwether has spent sixteen years walking carefully, patiently, and with extraordinary skill into that underneath place. He has done it with veterans carrying things no human being should have to carry. With cancer patients. With children, athletes, entrepreneurs, and ordinary tired people who finally said enough. Tonight he did some of it with us, live, on air.

This episode is different from most. Craig does not just talk about the work — he teaches it. You will hear two live techniques designed to reset the nervous system, ease anxiety, and begin to rewrite the subconscious story that has been running quietly beneath everything you do. Bring a quiet room. Bring an open hour. Bring yourself.

We also go deep into past life regression, the brain as antenna rather than storage house, and what a seventy-year-old woman discovered in three sessions that she had been carrying since she was twelve months old, standing in her crib.

Craig is the creator of Depression 180, the Mind Mastery Blueprint, and the Life Transformation Kit. He is a featured author in the New York Times bestselling anthology Pearls of Wisdom alongside Jack Canfield and Marci Shimoff, and has interviewed some of the most compelling voices in consciousness and healing.

Find Craig and his work at https://craigmeriwether.com

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What does it teach you when a city rises from nothing… and then vanishes on purpose?

Doyle is joined by guest co-hosts Howie and Russ for a wide-ranging conversation with Sarah Marshall, author of Playa Dust in My Soul, a novel that drops you into Burning Man through seven distinct characters and a fully lived, 360-degree view of the Playa.

Sarah unpacks the deeper philosophy beneath the spectacle: radical self-reliance, the gift economy, participation without an audience, and how impermanence reshapes identity. We talk community and chosen family, what it means to “export” your most authentic self into everyday life, and why so many people return to the Playa year after year.

Sarah also reads an excerpt from the opening of her book, grounding us in dust, freedom, discipline, and the strange tenderness of starting over. Then we close with a question that lingers: if all the roles and identities fell away tomorrow, who would remain in the dust?

Learn more about Sarah and Playa Dust in My Soul at: playaadustinmysoul.com

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

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In this deeply moving episode of Spirit Talk Show, Doyle sits down with Devorah Brinckerhoff for a powerful conversation about grief, trauma, creativity, and the quiet courage it takes to face the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide.

Devorah shares how her work with Soul Portraits was born not from theory, but from survival—through loss, family rupture, profound betrayal, and the long process of reclaiming identity after trauma. What emerged was a creative healing practice that helps people transform letters, photographs, journals, and other personal artifacts into visual expressions of truth, memory, and becoming.

Together, Doyle and Devorah explore what it means to carry pain in the body, why traditional talking sometimes is not enough, how objects can hold emotional energy, and why healing is not about erasing the past but transforming our relationship to it. They also talk about shame, self-worth, grief, inner wisdom, and the surprising power of making something with your own hands when words no longer reach deep enough.

This is a conversation about the stories we carry, the identities we outgrow, and the possibility of meeting ourselves with more compassion than judgment.

A soulful, vulnerable, and unforgettable episode for anyone who has ever wondered whether broken pieces can still become something beautiful.

Learn more about Devorah Brinckerhoff and Soul Portraits:

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

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Mike Balaban didn't set out to be a historian. He was a closeted Wall Street banker who drove across America in 1978 with a dog-eared copy of the Bob Dameron guide, a yellow legal pad, and a camera — stopping at every gay bar between New York and San Diego, writing reviews in the margins of his own life. He took photos he thought no one else would ever want. He kept diary entries that could have cost him everything. He put it all in a box.

Decades later, he opened that box. And what he found was all of us.

In this episode, Mike talks about what it cost to survive in a world that was actively trying to erase you, the summer in San Diego that taught him how to be gay, a bartender named Beau who became his home and then his grief, and why the real LGBTQ history isn't just Stonewall and Harvey Milk — it's the man at the edge of the parade, shaking, camera raised, hoping nobody from the office walks by.

We also talk about his upcoming book The Accidental Gay Historian, his community archive at BAMMER.co, and why he believes that if you don't write your own history, you get written out of it.

He told me he was just keeping things for himself. I don't believe him.

Find Mike at BAMMER.co and @bamer47 on Instagram and YouTube. His podcast is Bama and Me.

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

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He spent four years at the Air Force Academy. Twenty years flying fighter aircraft. Fifteen years at NORAD, the command responsible for watching the skies over all of North America. Thirty-nine years of vigilance, discipline, and mission. And when the uniform finally came off, the silence was deafening.

So Terrence Rotering sat down and wrote 5,000 pages in two years.

Eleven books. A trilogy of trilogies plus two. An epic saga called The Chronicles of Trinith that braids together fantasy, science fiction, and spiritual warfare into a single unified world — one that keeps expanding with every book he finishes. He has been compared to Tolkien for foundational mythos, to C.S. Lewis for moral imagination, to Asimov and Herbert for the scale of his science fiction. That is heavy company. But what makes Terrence's work different from anyone he is compared to is something he calls unfencing the fiction. He does not believe the spiritual war in his books stays politely inside the covers. He believes it walks out into the living world and finds you.

In this episode, Terrence talks about what nearly four decades of military service does to a person's sense of purpose, what it felt like when that purpose suddenly went quiet, the God-winks that convinced him this story was bigger than he planned, and the one word he carries into every morning: SMILE. Service. Mission. Intentionality. Legacy. Eternity.

He also makes one thing clear that Frodo had a ring and Harry had a wand. You have something else entirely. And it may be more than enough.

Find Terrence at chroniclesoftrinian.com.

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

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In this extended episode of Spirit Talk Show, Doyle sits down with award-winning author Gerald Everett Jones for a wide-ranging conversation about writing, publishing, Hollywood, history, and what success really means for a working storyteller.

Gerald reflects on his journey from nonfiction and technical writing to fiction, screenwriting, and historical novels, sharing hard-won insight into the realities of traditional publishing, self-publishing, book promotion, and the often painful gap between creating a story and watching the industry reshape it.

The conversation also explores Gerald’s upcoming novel Jonathan’s Journal, a work of historical fiction inspired by a real World War I diary and expanded into a deeper story of memory, geopolitics, loss, and human connection. Along the way, Doyle and Gerald dive into film adaptations, streaming culture, the power of long-form storytelling, and why legacy may matter more than fame.

This is an episode about craft, survival, reinvention, and the long game of creative work.

Learn more about Gerald Everett Jones and his books:

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

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He was in the pub with Rowan Atkinson when John Cleese called. He watched Rick Mayal and Adrian Edmondson do their very first television appearance. He stood at the back of an empty auditorium the night Stefan Grappelli made a seasoned guitarist stop mid-conversation just to watch. He was there for so much of it — the golden age of British comedy, the writers' rooms, the charity stages, the moments that became television history.

And then, decades later, he sat down alone one night to play a role-playing game with twenty-four strangers across the world. And thought: what would it really be like to actually be this guy?

That question became a novel. Then a series. Then four books.

Richard Sparks has had two full creative lives, and he is not finished with either of them. In this conversation, he talks about what it meant to write for some of the most iconic voices in British comedy, what the room was really like when Rowan Atkinson switched on, the night he watched Robin Williams hold thirty people in physical pain from laughing, and why the most important thing he ever did for his career was quit the safe job he hated two weeks after signing on for another year.

He also reads live from his New Rock series — a chapter so quietly constructed that it gives you the answer to everything in chapter nine, and you don't realize what you've been handed until much later.

His advice to every young writer listening: learn the melody before you give anyone the riff. And never try to write like somebody else. It took him decades to prove that with his own work. He's still proving it.

Find Richard at richardsparks.com and the New Rock series wherever books are sold.

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

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Every season begins with a spark.

For the Season 7 premiere of Spirit Talk Show: Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups, Doyle welcomes a guest who feels perfectly at home in the world of imagination, storytelling, and the power of the human voice.

Scott Miller, host of the acclaimed Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, joins the show for a lively and unforgettable conversation about vintage science fiction, the golden age of radio storytelling, and the magic of bringing written stories to life through voice and performance.

Scott has spent years narrating classic science fiction stories from the public domain, preserving imaginative works that might otherwise be forgotten. His passion for storytelling shines through in every performance — and in this episode, that passion becomes something truly electric.

Instead of simply talking about storytelling, Doyle and Scott dive into it together.

Throughout the episode, they perform live sci-fi radio plays—switching voices, narrating dramatic scenes, and recreating the spirit of old-time radio theater. It’s playful, immersive, and a reminder of how powerful storytelling can be when people simply sit down and let their imagination run.

Along the way, Scott shares the remarkable journey that led him to podcasting, the lessons he’s learned about persistence and creativity, and why he believes the most important thing in life is simply this: keep doing the things you love.

It’s the perfect way to begin Season 7—with laughter, stories, imagination, and a celebration of the voices that keep great stories alive.

Explore Scott’s work at:

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After we aired our Season 6 tribute to Evelyn Dorothy Parker, something stayed with me. Not just her story, but the voices of the people she made.

This bonus companion episode is something I have never done before on this show. What you are about to hear is the memorial gathering held for Evelyn by the people who loved her — her sons, her colleagues from the Krasnow Lab at Stanford, the young researchers she took into her home, the daughter-in-law she welcomed in a moment of grief with nothing but warmth, and a son she gave up at birth who found his way back to her front door thirty years later with a bunch of flowers and no idea what to do with his hands.

They called her the lab mom. They said her house was a warm hug. They talked about the frogs she did not actually want anymore but kept collecting because people needed her to be the kind of woman who loved frogs. One man flew in from Ireland as a clueless graduate student and left twelve years later knowing how to live.

If the first episode told you who Evelyn was, this one shows you what she built. And what she built was people.

You will hear them here, in their own words, stumbling gently through the kinds of sentences that only come out right when they are true.

To hear the original tribute episode first, search Spirit Talk Show for S6-EP26: A Life of Kindness and Quiet Brilliance.

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