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Grammy Winner Jermaine Dupri, Actor Chris Mulkey, and Entrepreneur Robin Sims-Allen
This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Grammy-winning producer Jermaine Dupri about Lifetime's The Rap Game, returning for a third season with Queen Latifah. Dupri, the So So Def founder behind decades of hits and discoveries from Kris Kross to Bow Wow and Da Brat, explained that finding talent comes down to genuine interest and really listening, and that the rare misses happen only when an artist is not as gifted as they believe. He described The Rap Game as unlike American Idol or The Voice, a hip-hop show built to educate kids roughly twelve to sixteen while their parents watch alongside them, teaching craft, competitiveness, and the culture itself. Looking ahead, Dupri said this season raises the talent bar and brings in more of his celebrity friends, and he shared his deeper hope for the genre: a return to artists with distinct, individual styles. He pointed out that Tupac and Biggie never sounded alike, and that Jay-Z and Nas each carved their own lane, arguing that today's artists sound too similar to become iconic. The season premieres Friday at 10 p.m. Eastern.
Neil then welcomed veteran character actor Chris Mulkey for a Celebrity Interviews simulcast from the grotto of co-host Greg Hanna. Mulkey, a self-described lover of playing the bad guy, traced his craft from boyhood in Minnesota, where the AWA wrestling circuit and stars like Verne Gagne first awakened his love of drama, through classical theater training to a screen career of memorable heels. He shared the origins of Hank Jennings on Twin Peaks, drawn from a dangerous, charming ex-convict he once knew, and a harrowing on-set moment during Captain Phillips, filmed off Malta, when he instinctively grabbed a stunt performer back from going over a railing fifty feet above the water. He recalled advice from Clint Eastwood that sent him back to Minnesota to write and star in his own films, Loose Ends and Patty Rocks, both Sundance winners, the latter with his late wife Karen Landry. He reflected on Whiplash, whose family scene was the first shot of a film that won three Academy Awards, and named the Robert Duvall western Broken Trail as his favorite villain role. Mulkey previewed a run of new movies, including the 1990s hair-band comedy Rock Bottom with Jake Bongiovi, plus Far Haven, Deadland, and Long Shadows, and said the most important things in life are family and loyalty to friends. Find his music at chrismulkeymusic.com.
The hour closes with a Storehouse Media Group simulcast, hosted by Sherrie, featuring Robin Sims-Allen, founder and CEO of Phoenix Marcus LLC. A tech professional and entrepreneur with 22 years of experience who launched her first company in 2007, Sims-Allen built Phoenix Marcus as an umbrella brand so she would never have to pick a single lane, spanning an organic beauty and franchise venture, a consulting practice, and TotalHER, a women-only platform. She described consulting on process improvement and strategy across industries, from past defense and Amtrak-related work to embedding AI into nearly every current project, and framed her minority- and women-owned firm, based outside Atlanta, around finding problems to solve and working backward from the end goal. TotalHER, she explained, is evolving from a social platform into a future-of-work space for women, letting professionals from fitness and finance to beauty and law build brands and income in one trusted place. Her advice to entrepreneurs was to embrace failure as a lesson, to keep pivoting rather than niching into a corner, to try the exact opposite of your safe bet, and to treat skill-building as ongoing research and development, living by the creed of each one, teach one. TotalHER is live now at totalher.co. Find Jermaine Dupri on The Rap Game and Chris Mulkey's films on Amazon Prime.