Hi, I'm Jay Billips, and welcome to my show.
Today's show features my interview with musician John Redman.
Before we hear from John, we'll do our segments What Am I Reading and Tech U.
After John's interview, we'll do the last segment called Explain Yourself.
First, a little bit about creativity. We all have it, but we don't all believe that we do.
Remember, it's not the end product, it's the process.
If you don't feel it, you just need to exercise it a little bit.
The next time you are asked a question or face a problem,
think about the question or the problem a little bit more before you answer.
For example, what is one and one? Most people are equipped to jump to the answer of two.
But is it one and one of what? If I said it's one finger and one finger,
this is 11, this is a plus sign, that's a T, that's a shaka, that's a piece.
So the answer one and one can be a lot of different things.
So once you start looking at things from a different perspective,
the answers can change quite a bit.
So next time you're faced with a problem, just think a little bit more about the problem.
And now, what am I reading? I'm reading Who Owns the Ice House.
Who Owns the Ice House is eight life lessons from an unlikely entrepreneur written by
Clifton Talbert. The story is about Clifton's Uncle Cleave, who was a black man in the 1950s
in Mississippi during segregation. Uncle Cleave was an entrepreneur. In all that that he was
surrounded by, he somehow managed to have his own business and be very successful.
The book focuses on eight life lessons. Choice, opportunity, action, knowledge, wealth, brand,
community, and persistence. Clifton learned these lessons from his Uncle Cleave by working with him
on a day-to-day basis, basically beating an apprentice and learning how his Uncle Cleave
ran his business. The book takes stories from back in the 1950s and applies them to current day
and problems that we may face and issues that we may encounter. A thing that struck me about this
was the value of internship or the value of apprenticeship. If you have someone who's willing
to teach you, take the opportunity to learn. What you learn, you may not earn a lot of money at that
time, but it is a priceless experience that will last you for your entire life. So check out this
book if you have any inclination of being an entrepreneur or you just want to do things better
in your life. Very good life lessons and you can see someone who had all these things stacked up
against them were still able to be successful. Next is TechU. Six minutes had a piece a couple
years ago called Technological Unemployment. The story takes a look at how technology is taking
away jobs with robots, automation, and software. However, the rate that jobs are being created
is far less than it had been in the past. They focus on a couple different stories. One is Amazon's
warehouse. Now they don't say Amazon, but I know it's Amazon because I had a couple students who
had worked there. So they have this robot called Kiva, a cute little orange robot. What this robot
does, it takes the job of people who used to go out into the warehouse, pull the items that were
ordered and brought them to someone who was packing. Baxter is a friendly robot which they call a
co-worker. If you see Baxter in your workplace, you may be a little concerned. He's a co-worker,
all right, but he's learning your job. Baxter is a low-cost robot who can come into a work site,
learn the manual labor that the workforce is doing at that moment, and replace them for much
less cost. Baxter does not need vacation. Baxter does not need breaks. Baxter can work 24-7.
So why am I sharing this with you? One, if you see this type of thing happening in your workplace,
you need to figure out how you are prepared. What is your game plan? You have a plan for
education. Do you have a plan for college? You don't need to go to college. There's lots of
education, some for free on the internet. One of my favorites is lynda.com. It's not free,
it's about $25 a month, but you can learn just about anything that you need. So for example,
these robots are coming into your workplace. What kind of jobs may become available?
Maintenance, programming, robot repair, lots of different things, but you can get your start.
My point is, when you see things like this happening, don't bury your head in the sand. Things are
changing. We cannot stop technology. We cannot slow down that pace. Smarter software is coming,
smarter robots are coming, and what you need to do is consistently prepare yourself. So I don't
present this video as something to scare you with, but I want you to be aware. It's all about
awareness and about keeping yourself prepared so you can provide for your families in the future.
So don't bury your head in the sand. Be aware and be prepared.
Now it's time for my interview with musician John Redmond. John Redmond is the President of
Reaching Records. He discussions his passion for music and his upcoming project. Listen closely
to discover John's creative process. He is truly out there doing something.
My name is John Redmond. I am President of Reaching Records, ReachingRecords.com,
and I have been President of this wonderful music recording label for about 22, 23 years,
started back in 1994, 95. This new project that I'm working on is the most exciting project
I've done in the last 20 years. It's called Kids Love Jesus II, and it features
different children's choirs all throughout the United States of America. They're all coming
together for one purpose, and that's to proclaim their love for Jesus Christ. My very first album
I did as a self-debut album, as John Redmond You Made the Difference, and that was when I was only
19 years old, and that's where everything started. I formed this record label right in my grandmother's
living room. I actually got so much joy out of actually recording other people, and so I decided
to have a purpose or mission for my music, and it was to actually create music as a type of
community-unity venture, but for the purpose of humanitarianisms. I would put together projects,
compilation projects that actually incorporated both independent artists, national recording artists,
and put them all on one project so we could actually go on and sell this project for the purpose
of recouping some money for different humanitarian purposes, like AIDS Foundation and cancer research.
My love of music came from, according to my mother, Cynthia Redmond, it came from when I was
about three years old, and she said that every time she would turn on the radio dial, she said I would
go running to a piece of furniture, and some music would start playing, and I'd start playing that
piece of furniture like I was playing the piano, and she said, okay, Lord, I get it. That boy wants
to play. My primary music lies in gospel and Christian music. I grew up in the church, so that's
honestly, that's my comfort food. That's my comfort music. That's all I know. Any hymn that you would
name, I bet you I could play it or sing it or sing all the different verses because that's all I
really knew. That's all I grew up with, and my mother was a pianist, and so she was my first
piano teacher who taught me, and I think the very first song that I played next to her when I was
five years old, sitting on a piano bench next to her with one finger was Jesus loves me. On the
Kids Love Jesus 2 project, we actually got children from all over the United States of America, but
what we had to do was we wanted to get some kids that we weren't totally acquainted with, like a
genre or whatever, so we wanted to reach out to a local conservatory, a local music school here in
Colorado Springs, and we found one. It was called Colorado Springs Conservatory, and so we ran a
Does Anybody Love Me audition to get those kids excited about the project. The turnout was incredible.
Didn't know we had so many talented children, and what I did was when I heard the first child
to audition the week prior to the actual actual auditions, I said there's no way I'm going to
actually make this choice on my own, so I got a whole bunch of a group of my friends who are in
the community who are professionals to come out every night. I think we went through from Monday
through Thursday, and to help me judge these wonderful children on their version of Does
Anybody Love Me, and out of those 15 kids I think it was, we could only come up with one name to do
the solo for Does Anybody Love Me, all about unity in the community, and that's what this whole
audition, this whole process actually became about. And so everybody came together and honestly
this is definitely a labor of love. Actually who's helping me produce this record is none other than
I call him my dad, is Thomas Dawson Jr., who is the music director for the Commodores. I can tell
you that this project is the most exciting project I've ever done in 20 years to the point I can't
even sleep at night. And it's just a beautiful thing to have a partner in crime to actually
produce something that's going to be so life-changing for so many people. I want to have a series of
kids love Jesus 2 projects, and that's going to be like my theme. I just love working with kids.
I want this thing to actually turn into a global type of project where we're actually even translating
this album into different languages for children. I also have a radio talk show called Matters of
the Heart, and I'm actually enjoying that so much, just interviewing so many different people and
gleaning so much from their knowledge and their testimonies that I'd actually want to take that
a step further from radio to television. You can follow me on the web at www.reachingrecords.com,
always posting new things there. Also if you want to follow the movement for the Kids Love Jesus 2,
we have our own website there as well, kidslovejesus2too.com. And then if you just want to shoot me
an email, it's John Redmond, J-O-H-N-R-E-D-M-O-N at MSN.com, or you can just pick up the phone and
call me or text me on my cell number. It's 404-993-2597.
Where'd you glean from John's interview? What's his creative process? At first glance,
you might say his creativity is music. John uses his music to help people and bring community
together. That's his creative process. The last segment is Explain Yourself.
If you remember from the show Intro, I was going to have this segment called
What's Your Excuses? So I had a story all picked out. It was John Young who's a little person
who runs multiple marathons and he just finished an Iron Man. But after reading his blog,
it changed my perspective and changed my mind. This is what John Young wrote that gave me pause.
I would like to ask a favor. Please stop posting what your excuse means with a person who has a
visible disability doing some athletic feat. It sends so many mixed messages. The main one being,
if you're able-bodied and not exercising, you should be because this amazing person is.
Instead of asking yourself, why aren't I doing something? Ask the athlete, why do you do what
you do? John says that you will find out that it is more likely the same reason that anybody
else competes. And that is for the satisfaction of being better today than he or she was yesterday.
There are lots and lots of What's Your Excuses memes all over the internet.
Sometimes I feel that the memes can trivialize some great achievements.
Instead of doing this segment, What's Your Excuses, I'm just going to focus on the interviews.
And the focus of the interview is asking the question exactly as John suggests.
Why is it you do what you do? And that I hope will help inspire and motivate you to go out and do
something. So I'm going to leave it right there. Thank you for tuning in and I'll see you next week.
Thank you. Cheers.
