Actress Kim Fields, Detective-Turned-Filmmaker Mitch Credle, and AI Office Hours with Pat Riley

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actress Kim Fields, beloved for The Facts of Life and Living Single, about her book and career. Fields, a Steelers fan who competed on Dancing with the Stars alongside Antonio Brown, reflected on nine years, from age nine to eighteen, growing up on The Facts of Life, and on the mentors who shaped her, from co-star Nancy McKeon to Norman Lear, Dick Clark, and Ruby Dee. She credited her longevity to learning her craft, doing theater, and deliberately building backup skills in directing, writing, and producing so that if one hat wasn't working she could put on another, rather than fade into a has-been at eighteen. She also named contemporaries like Nicole Ari Parker and Blair Underwood as peers who sharpen one another, iron sharpening iron. Fields lit up about Living Single finally streaming on Hulu and the flood of fan response, saying she loves how much the fans love the show. Reflecting on a journey from a single-parent home in Harlem to a lasting career, she framed the book less as a look-at-me than a look at all God has done, and encouraged listeners that rock bottom is never the end. Find her book and coffee line, including the Blessed Blend and a binge-watching Binge Blend, at KimFields.com.

Neil then welcomed retired DC homicide detective turned author and filmmaker Mitch Credle for a Criminally Good with Jen and Sherrie simulcast, presented by Storehouse Media Group. Credle spent 29 years with DC's Metropolitan Police, some 23 of them in homicide, and traced his path to the veteran detectives he idolized, part Miami Vice, part real-life heroes, before turning to writing and film. His novels Stranger in the Streets and Damaged Roots blend real cases and characters into fiction, and his five films, including the documentaries A Detective Story and 12 Years in Hell on Tubi and Informant on Prime, grew from a passion to tell DC's disappearing history through the people who lived it. He described how the leadership of running a homicide scene, where the detective is effectively in charge of everyone present, translated to directing, and recounted difficult cases including the Banita Jacks tragedy and the Colonel Brooks Tavern killing, where a childhood friend was among the victims and he refused to face the family until arrests were made nine months later. He explained why he casts real families and community members and flags graphic content on screen rather than sugarcoat it, wanting to honor victims and preserve a version of DC that is rapidly vanishing, and praised up-and-coming actors like Mark Scheiss and Michael Anderson from Informant. He previewed a serial-killer script and a new film, Brooklyn, promising untold details of the Colonel Brooks investigation. Find him as Mitch Credle across social media.

The hour closes with an AI Office Hours simulcast, where Neil and co-host Pat Riley debated where artificial intelligence is really headed. Neil shared an epiphany that he had been pouring too much time into automation loops that produced data he never used, and both argued that AI's true value is as a productivity multiplier and tool that makes a person sharper, not an autonomous replacement for human judgment. Neil described using AI conversationally as a kind of financial assistant to organize revenue, invoices, and time tracking, while stressing that it still needs a human driving it on a tight leash. They voiced skepticism about the hype around fully automated one-person AI businesses, warned against quitting a job to chase it, and predicted a reckoning for those who over-automate at the expense of their own skills, while agreeing the smart move is to use AI to become better than anyone not using it. Find Kim Fields at KimFields.com and Mitch Credle's films on Tubi and Prime.