On this edition of "Ready Set Grow" an initiative to help small businesses profit in 2026, we talk to Ann Turner. She is a lifelong resident of Philadelphia with over twenty-five years of experience in the cosmetology industry. Ann is the founder and President of Hair Du Jour Salon in Philadelphia, as well as Integrity Hair Care Systems. Ann offers her natural products to her loyal clients in her hair salon as well as to the millions of female consumers of beauty and hair products online.

Dr. Katherine Hempstead is the Senior Policy Adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She works on health care issues, mostly those related to health insurance, costs, and access to care. She joined Dr. Peterson to discuss ways to afford healthcare coverage, and the current open enrollment period closing this Thursday, January 15th.

Adam Mahoney of Capital B News, Published an in-depth piece about the real-world impacts of increased environmental racism in Texas and Louisiana, where refineries are built to process heavy, sulfur-rich crude oil from countries like Venezuela. Black communities along the Gulf Coast may be paying the price when it's time to refine this crude oil.

Dr. Alexis Davis is a Board Certified Family Physician and the founder of Black Joy Soy, a luxury soy candle and wellness brand that celebrates Black Joy and advocates for mental health in the Black community.

Dr. Davis joins the show to talk about her business and her experiences being a vendor at WURD’s Empowerment Experience in 2025.

Future Cain is a social-emotional leadership and workplace wellness expert who is the CEO and Founder of Future of SEL and the host of Healing Our Future videocast. She is an international speaker who has been featured in Forbes and the New York Times.

Future joins the show to talk about what emotional codependency is, how it shows up in different relationships, and how people can go about navigating it.

Dr. Peterson is joined by regular sport contributor to Evening WURDs Renee Washington, a multi-platform national Sports Host and Producer, previous analyst and reporter with ESPN, NBC Sports, Fox Sports, among others. Renee is here to discuss the Philadelphia Eagle's Playoff lost to the San Francisco 49ers.

Here for the Centering American Progress segment of Evening WURDs, Robert Benson, the Associate Director of National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress joins to discuss Trump's latest foreign policy, between everything that’s been happening with Venezuela and his threats to Greenland.

Host Dr. Peterson is joined by award-winning media executive and author, Amy DuBois Barnett made history as the first Black woman to helm a major mainstream magazine in the US, as editor in chief of Teen People. Amy joins Evening WURDs to discuss her fast-paced, debut novel that peeks behind the curtain at the cutthroat world of hip-hop music and the glamorous magazine scene in the late 1990s.

Dr. Timothy Golden is a visiting Professor of Philosophy at Whitman College. For 20 years, he was a criminal defense attorney in Philadelphia and in the federal courts. Tim talks to us about the National Portrait Gallery, which removed a swath of text that mentioned President Donald Trump’s two impeachments and the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection

Rochelle Bilal is the sheriff of the City of Philadelphia. She joins us to weigh in on the death of Renee Good at the hands of ICE.