Sam Neill, James Meuer, Dr. Robert E. Marx, and Dr. Arun Garg

Neil opened the Total Celebrity segment with a re-aired call from Australia (9:30 PM local time) with Jurassic Park's Sam Neill on the New Zealand feature Hunt for the Wilderpeople from Boy and What We Do in the Shadows director Taika Waititi, then in select theaters. Sam played Hec, the grumpy old geezer paired against Julian Dennison's Ricky, a hip-hop-raised Māori foster kid who lands with Sam's isolated New Zealand couple as his last resort before tragedy strikes and the two end up on the run in the bush. Sam described the film as unsellable to genre (technically a comedy, but the emotional payoff is a warmth he had never gotten back on any of his previous credits), pointed to the Flight of the Conchords lineage that Taika comes out of, flagged its 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, and the audience awards it kept collecting festival to festival. His wine label Two Paddocks is at TwoPaddocks.com and he is at @TwoPaddocks on Twitter; the film lives at #WilderPeople and Facebook.com/ForTheWilderPeople.

Neil then welcomed retired first responder James Meuer, brought in by Books to Life Marketing, for his memoir Damaged: A First Responder's Experiences with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. James defined PTSD as a normal response to abnormal situations (a brain-based amygdala injury, not a physical wound), walked Neil through his own symptom cluster (unexplained explosions of anger over a dropped spoon, sleep loss, nightmares that replay calls, the "deer in the headlights" freeze his wife learned to recognize, hypervigilance he still cannot switch off in restaurants or in his own shop, and the pain-medication and alcohol addictions that followed a broken back and four or five broken hands from punching walls), the coping stack that finally worked for him (a PTSD service dog from Texas, part Great Dane part Dutch Shepherd; woodworking as therapy in his garage shop; music from Evanescence to Meghan Trainor to the Backstreet Boys at bedtime; and a fourth marriage to a wife who found him the dog), and the pivotal 1988 pediatric call that stayed with him through the rest of a 1986-2011 career until he found the little girl's memorial page in 2018, left a note as the paramedic who was there that day, and two weeks later heard from her mother, who sat down with him and released him from decades of guilt. His through-line: asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, and no first responder is 10 feet tall and bulletproof. Pick up Damaged on Amazon or email him at [email protected].

Neil closed with the Dr. Robert E. Marx Show simulcast, on which oral and maxillofacial surgeon Dr. Marx welcomed his former University of Miami chief of dentistry and dental implantology, Dr. Arun Garg, DMD, founder and president of Implant Seminars and the International Dental Implant Association out of Aventura, Florida, for a full consumer-facing walkthrough of dental implants in 2026. Dr. Garg traced the discipline's arc from a few thousand specialists two decades ago to more than 100,000 general dentists offering implants today, warned that the pendulum has swung to marketing-driven, promotion-heavy offices where the patient must ask sharper questions (how many cases like mine, what training on this load protocol, do you have a hygienist and a real maintenance recall, how long has your team been here), and walked Neil through the full price ladder (from a $1,000 upper or lower denture through a snap-in overdenture on two-to-four implants, up through the $17,000-30,000 per arch screw-in prosthesis, and finally to eight individual implants with three-tooth bridges at roughly 20-30 percent more, which most closely mimics natural teeth). He and Dr. Marx flagged screw fatigue on the tiny watch-size retention screws (take the whole prosthesis out every two years to clean and re-screw rather than waiting for a break),