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

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 Corey shared that she was initially the skeptic, then watched patients arrive flat and withdrawn and return the next day transformed, and eventually underwent the reset herself after years of insomnia and pandemic-era stress on the job.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.