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NeverEnding Story's Tami Stronach, plus Mina Valentine, AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, Grace Lynx Jenkins, and Ryan Aguas of Reignstorm Group
This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with actress and dancer Tami Stronach, who at ten played the Childlike Empress in Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 classic The NeverEnding Story and has since come full circle to family entertainment. Stronach walked Neil through an audition process that ran from San Francisco to Los Angeles to a final nerve-wracking callback at Bavaria Studios in Germany, where she learned she had the role the next day. She recalled reading Michael Ende's novel as a ten-year-old to prepare, the long days on a set she loved, and crediting Petersen above all for helping her fully believe in each scene. Though her screen time was brief, her character became one of the film's most remembered, and Stronach reflected on how the experience left her with a lifelong soft spot for fantasy, which she believes lets us digest hard truths from a safer, more open place. She explained the family decision to step away from celebrity as a child, in part because the scripts that followed did not speak to her and some carried violence or nudity she wanted no part of at eleven, choosing dance instead, studying at SUNY Purchase, running her own company for two decades, and later teaching at Marymount Manhattan College. Having her daughter Maya pulled everything together into Paper Canoe Company, the family entertainment venture she now runs with her husband, complete with puppetry that echoes the film. She is also returning to the screen in the meta indie film Ultra Low, in which the cast plays themselves, and is choreographing a video for the company's album. After years out of the spotlight, she is embracing fans again at Comic Cons.
The hour continued with a simulcast of The Mina Valentine Show, where the historical romance author, recovering from recent surgery, shared her gratitude to readers and her eagerness to get back to writing. She described plotting a new storyline from her hospital bed, the painstaking historical research behind her London-set novels, and the days when a story simply pours out. Her books are available at MinaValentin.com, with autographed copies on request.
Neil then turned to two conversations about artificial intelligence. In AI Office Hours with co-host Pat Riley, the two argued that AI's real power lies in making a person superhuman as an assistant and brainstorming partner rather than replacing employees through autonomous agents, comparing the current wave of one-person "AI businesses" to hype that will not sustain itself, and cautioning against quitting a job to chase it without a real brand or product. That theme carried into a visit with bestselling author Grace Lynx Jenkins, who ran her own thriller through AI tools for analysis and found the feedback, strengths in character-driven, psychological suspense and a note to work on pacing, matched her instincts, alongside a comparison to bestselling novelist Dean Koontz. Both agreed AI should sharpen an artist's work, never create it, and that creativity remains human. Find her at gracelynksjenkins.com.
The program closes with a Reignstorm Radio Show simulcast featuring co-host Ryan Aguas on his role at Reignstorm Group, the financial firm founded by his father. Aguas explained how his MBA and media background drew him in as director of network development, bringing brand-building to a financial world he says underuses it, and walked through the firm's approach to tax-saving and wealth-building strategies, from a student-loan payoff method to the case for saving and planning young. He stressed the value of talking to advisors, accountants, and business owners rather than navigating a tax code of tens of thousands of pages alone. Reach him at reignstormmediagroup.com. Find Tami Stronach's work through Paper Canoe Company, Mina Valentine at MinaValentin.com, and Grace Lynx Jenkins at gracelynksjenkins.com.