William McNamara (UFO), AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, and GildaGram.

William McNamara (UFO), AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, and GildaGram.

The Neil Haley TV Show 08-9-26: Actor William McNamara on The Mike Vilardi Show, AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Mike Vilardi Show simulcast, hosted by Mike Vilardi, welcoming veteran actor William McNamara. Known for Copycat, Chasers, Surviving the Game, and Stealing Home across a 35-year career, McNamara returned to talk about his self-made series The Trouble With Billy, ten episodes he wrote, directed, produced, and stars in as a wildly exaggerated version of a fallen 1990s actor, complete with his pit bull and a beat-up car, now streaming on the independent platform Red Coral Universe. He described building it on a shoestring with friends and a cast that includes the late Tom Sizemore, Sally Kirkland, and Billy Baldwin, and how a union pension-and-health dispute stalled distribution for years before he found the show a home, part of a deliberate shift later in his career toward writing and directing his own material rather than waiting on casting calls. The conversation took an unexpected turn into the real-life inspiration behind the show's off-planet premise, as McNamara shared what he describes as genuine close encounters. By his account, around 2004 and 2005 in the small towns of Salt Point and Harriman in New York's Hudson Valley, he had contact with multiple craft, including a silent, triangular object with no visible propulsion that hovered just above the ground and that he says he followed for some 45 minutes, along with an even stranger encounter, in another small Hudson Valley town, that he recounts in vivid, unsettling detail. He framed those experiences, offered as his own testimony, as part of the seed for the show's premise, in which his character believes he was taken off-planet for a decade, and noted he is a frequent guest on the UFO and disclosure circuit. Find the show at thetroublewithbilly.com.

The hour continued with an AI Office Hours simulcast, where Neil and co-host Pat Riley traded notes on their ongoing experiments with artificial intelligence agents and assistants. Riley shared a hard-learned lesson about keeping a close eye on runaway costs when an automated task quietly burns through its budget faster than expected, and the importance of not tinkering with a setup that is already working. He passed along a favorite use case in which someone traveling abroad set an AI agent to repeatedly scan a humane society's website, matching photos and descriptions, until it flagged a listing that turned out to be their lost cat. Neil described his own deep dive into letting an AI assistant take on more and more of his workflow, from booking appointments to lining up sponsorship interest for the NHL Wraparound Podcast to building projects like a children's book, marveling at the productivity while cautioning that it is exhausting and demands a human in the loop. He recounted an agent that hallucinated its own book cover yet still drove a real sale for a client, using it to illustrate both the promise and the pitfalls, and the pair agreed the central challenge now is learning to manage your agents, with a person watching over them, rather than simply turning them loose. Their throughline, echoed by listener comments Neil read on air, was that AI is at its best as a force multiplier for a human who stays in charge, not a hands-off replacement.

The program closes with a GildaGram simulcast where Dr. Gilda Carle unpacked a sensational viral story about a scorned spouse's over-the-top revenge on a cheating partner, using the jaw-dropping tale as a springboard to talk about betrayal, consequences, and the depths of a partner's hurt when trust is broken, and the wiser paths a person might choose instead. Find William McNamara's The Trouble With Billy at thetroublewithbilly.com.