Myleene Klass | 30 Minute Cut | From Pop to Purpose, Motherhood, Music, and Making Change

11:49Myleene Klass:Real respect came through, right?

11:51John Reynolds:Yes and no. There was a time where we were all going to watch a VHS.

11:57Myleene Klass:Showing our age.

11:59John Reynolds:We were going to watch a Vizio. oh by the way I have to add the reason my dad had put me on a ship is he was trying to keep me away from boys and here's the best bit from you'll appreciate the entrepreneurial side of this they were testing a line so it's like you know when wi-fi was still coming in and so you know the satellites they were just testing this line along the mediterranean so I'm like my god you've literally put me on a live transmitter so instead of taking me away from the boys you've put me in the position where I could literally ring the boys all day long and it can be logged as testing the line that's that's what I figured out yeah um that's the side I remember we were watching this VHS and um my my my dad wasn't there he was doing something on the bridge and um somebody said do you think we should start the video do you think Oscar's gonna kick off and I'm sinking because that's my dad and I didn't want to say anything so I'm sort of hiding behind the beanbags and they're like no just start it just start it just you know he's going to come in he's going to say this and this and this and i'm like oh my god that happened to go at my dad and it was such an interesting perspective because my dad my dad came in and he stopped he stopped the movie and he was like you know there's people not here we start this together like it was one of those it was a ted talk yeah yeah galvanizing the team and somebody caught me and saw me and then they were like oh she's gonna go and sort of grass us up and i just thought even though my dad's made himself really unpopular starting and restarting you know stopping the movie and restarting the movie i really admired that he came on board and said right no we don't leave anybody out restart again some people walked out because they didn't watch the start of it and i was just as a teenager mortified and i now think of my own daughters who would equally be so but i thought you know what there's sometimes there's just no prizes for being a leader no so you just have to do what you think is right and it's weird this is just a weird memory to have because it wasn't like a massive deal through the through the awareness you've done

13:59Myleene Klass:and so we talked earlier but also that piece uh where the world is now joined up through social media do you feel like that's changing or do you still put the tribal parts where kids are isolated

14:08John Reynolds:for being different it's interesting because you know you're a white cis male you're gonna have a very different view on the world we might go to the same place but we will see things very differently yes um and you know to have a filipino mother and to realize the strengths that she brings and how brave it must have been for her to get on a plane save up the ticket she came with the wind rush um generation but you know so much has been concentrated on the west indies and and um not so much on what the filipino community had to do they just kind of just felt that that that Filipinos are just sort of omnipresent.

14:46John Reynolds:They've just always been in the NHS. If you pulled out the Filipino community from the NHS, it would collapse. It is just known. It's a fact. And what breaks my heart now, because if you look at what that community does and how they work, I can't even stress to you, they don't even work shifts, they sleep shifts. They now, in order to be able to still continue to support their families, because the structure of the world, as we know, isn't fair, but in order to support their families they now will share not even just rooms but beds and share the shift of the bed share the shift of the room share the shift of the workload like i wish people would understand that because there's still so much racism in the um in the health care system in the service people don't always want to be treated by filipinos or the community that that isn't what they deem their own even if it means saving their life I've seen it firsthand not only because my mum worked in the NHS and I was brought up by that community I've graduated recently with St John Ambulance I work tirelessly with Tommies in women's health care for women with miscarriage and I'm in and out of hospitals as much as I am in and out of parliament now and these stories are prolific and they're every Friday night in triage and it's down to all of us to still keep making sure that you lift people up and you recognize what they are and who they are i cannot tell you how important it is to be an ally we can't do it for ourselves we can't just do it alone and so to say that things have changed it's a nice thing to believe but i'm going to tell you now they haven't much rather than with the truth they are just better hidden and the asian community in particular the Southeast Asian community, the East Asian community, they have been taught not to rock the boat.

16:38John Reynolds:I'll probably get in trouble for doing this now. I'm rocking. This is seen as rocking the boat. You know, just don't make a fuss.

16:44Myleene Klass:You're championing people and raising awareness.

16:45John Reynolds:Well, I know what I needed. They say you become the adult that your child self needed. Yes. And I needed somebody to say, that's not okay. Or she doesn't have a voice. My school report said when I was seven years old, which has gone down very well in my family now, if Marlene's name wasn't in the register, we wouldn't know she was in the class. I was so frightened of speaking.

17:08Myleene Klass:To then go through your own journey with miscarriage, to then call out the fact that the system's failing so many women and broken. There is no system.

17:18John Reynolds:In order to say there's a system that's failing, that would imply there's a system. There is nothing. There is if I told you that miscarriage in women's health care anything to do with fertility health care It is the last Place where there is no data collected. So I know where you bought your shoes. I know Yeah, where you like to eat? I know the ratings you've probably given it because everything all of this information is garnered and we're taught to be careful with our data Um, and yet there's zero data that babies have lost their lives i can only estimate that it's 20 000 per month and an estimate is very dangerous because it tells you when you know the means so they're probably more so the fact that we have not bothered to count these women so we keep telling them they're so important your voice is important we hear you well prove it and i say this every day that i'm in parliament well if you really care about us count us count our voices and count our dead babies and they have changed So if it's that bad, what can you do?

18:22Myleene Klass:Because you're a change maker. You are.

18:24John Reynolds:Working on it. Yes.

18:25Myleene Klass:What's the first thing that you change? Because there's probably a lot of interest from people watching and listening and feeling that. But what can you try and bring in?

18:33John Reynolds:Listen, the chances are that in this room here where there's two women, it's 50%. So I can tell you now, and I definitely know for myself that it's me right now, that I'm definitely that 50 % of the women who represent miscarriage. You know, you walk into any room, you can just divide it in half. They'll either have had a miscarriage or have some experience of it. So my auntie who kept the secret for 50 years, my sister, my best friend, all the community around me. There are so many of us who've kept this taboo, this deep, dark secret of miscarriage. Because let's be honest, who wants to talk about dead babies?

19:06John Reynolds:It's a horrible, deep, dark, heartbreaking subject. And that's the reason we have to talk about it, because we're not being catered for. the change comes under something called the graded model of care that i'm helping to roll out which is actually and i talked to the king kaplunk there's a good name drop but i talked to the king about this well look that was my moment to speak to him so i could have actually have said you know

19:29Myleene Klass:massive respect love what you've done with the play your moments i did yeah i grabbed it and you

19:34John Reynolds:earned the place to be there well i you know he said you know so you know tell me where you are at the moment on this path and i told him i said you wouldn't wait for three consecutive heart attacks before you expected to receive medical intervention and yet that's what you expect for women at the moment you have to have three consecutive miscarriages before you get any kind of help um it's a postcode lottery so if you miscarry let's say at the moment in scotland not over the weekend because that's when the epus early pregnancy units are closed and if you miscarry in the night they're closed by five it's a postcode lottery you could be sent to triage then you have to somebody some poor nurse has to decide is a woman losing her baby more important or less important than the man having a heart attack and the drunken guy that's had his nose broken it's not fair that woman doesn't belong in triage she belongs with an epu she belongs with someone who can give her the care and recognize the care she needs and also there's no speciality care because you can go to your gp they don't know that eight and a half thousand people can have something that is called progesterone, which means we can save eight and a half thousand babies per year.

20:39John Reynolds:They might be eligible for it. There's just loads of nuances. It's not as black and white as if we give them this, they'll get their baby because every woman's different. And the third part is data collection. How can we help X amount of women when we don't know how many women there are? And the knock-on effect of that is huge because economically, these women can't come into work. Their partners can't come into work. We've only just now changed legislation so you don't have to sign off sick you can actually say i'm grieving a death it's a bereavement but until only three weeks ago four weeks ago did you influence that yeah absolutely so it'll by 2027 it will be um uh across all workforces it'll be mandatory this is work far bigger than you right i mean this is going to outlive me which is what it should do and i'm hoping it'll get to the point where my daughters and my son well you know it could well happen to him the chances are out of three it will happen to two of them so you know i hope that they'll say god you remember mum used to go on about such and such at the dinner table it's so good that you

21:44Myleene Klass:know it doesn't even happen anymore yeah they won't know it now but that is that's legacy work

21:49John Reynolds:that is well may they in the nicest possible way never know it maybe i'm hoping i can still beat them to the finishing line so by the time they're having their own children there'll be even more

22:00Myleene Klass:changes there are so many things you've done that in any one way um could be described as successful and you didn't answer that question earlier actually when i brought up the role model piece on this occasion i'm going to call you successful i'd love to know what your definition of success

22:15John Reynolds:is oh my definition has changed so before um when i was that girl growing up in norfolk i thought would be buying my mum a dishwasher i was like i make it to those lofty heights i'm going to buy a dishwasher um and as i've grown up um you know my name when people say oh you can get yourself you know a table at any restaurant and you know how's fame changed you and all of these things i've realized the power of a name you can get so much more than a restaurant i've been able to get my friends you know a foothold into the housing market get my another friend the ivf she needed because she'd run out of money for her child and to um now see that child growing up um to be able to help my cousin retrain from his job in fashion to become a horticulturist to you know be able to pay for you know family members operations it's like if you actually look at what you can do with your success if you can bring everybody else up with you I mentioned this before but it can be really lonely when people say it's lonely at the top um it can be really lonely and I learned this in here so when you've finally got what my daughter's called adult money you've got a little bit of expendable cash and you've got no one to share it with because you're on tour we were playing Wembley we were traveling around and my friends were all in uni at the time and you know they were still budgeting with their their student loans and all sorts and i just realized that actually i trust my community i trust the people around me and i lift them up and they lift me up they've supported me through you know some of the darkest hours and it wasn't about money and it wasn't about access the things i could get myself it was things i couldn't do for myself you know and they supported me through that so it was about building a community and I think if you know when they say you come into the world with nothing you leave with nothing and when we're seeing what the world is shaped by and who it's shaped by at the moment and it really just shows you that you know people who do good things with money it's incredible those who don't do great things with money it can it can you know be the devil's work but I I think success has been having that community around me um and having my children having my family there's if i've got my children i don't need anything else so many things you could have

24:38Myleene Klass:said right but it all became about how you can help other people and i love the loneliness piece as well there are why do you want to be the best it's like and not share it with anyone as well right you know your private jet that you sit on and you go and sit on the island on your own i don't have an island or a private jet i'm not one of them no no no sorry i'm amplifying but you get my point like extreme money which is it can be associated with success and it's like well actually you're happy because you're spending it on your own or with potentially people that are in any way not your kind of people and that community piece that you just described i bet that's um you've created that and you probably got quite because of that resilience piece as well you probably got quite uh strong boundaries around it i've learned the hard way of course

25:19John Reynolds:and it's often money is of a huge player in how people have taken advantage of me

25:28Myleene Klass:huge and i read somewhere about the hearsay journey which was such a rocket ship success story but with so many people that were just one way or another pulling getting handouts and getting paid and then in the day you know you weren't actually getting paid to be the artist if you

25:44John Reynolds:like part of a group i think it's just about knowing what your rights are look i'm a i'm a visiting lecturer at the academy the royal academy of music and i go in and um my first lesson with them actually is not workshopping their pieces as much as I love getting to that point and doing the masterclasses with them. I actually talk business because as women particularly, we have not been raised with the language of finance. You know, I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to ask for that. You know, as of the 29th of November, we work for free. So if you're saying things have changed, they haven't changed enough until we have equality.

26:21John Reynolds:And so we're all over that line until your daughters are not working for free as of the 29th of November and they are valued you know and shown that value from a financial perspective that's that's the only time things can change so I think to have that financial literacy I go in and I talk about business I talk about what PRS is and how to get your money from a global perspective if you've played on this album they play it in Germany or what what should you be charging I love that the boys go into the old boys clubs and they're like i got this much money so everyone immediately knows what their worth is and they don't undercut because they're like okay i can match that or somebody will give me a little bit over that but as women we we don't have that luxury we just don't have that because we've never had the foothold in the first place um historically as as the homemakers traditionally uh to be able to have that kind of finance to hand now this is the first generation that's been able to change that and get their bank accounts and to um be able to um to to you know to be able to work and have their children which by the way is really hard that brings his own struggles and guilt and everything else which the guys don't seem to to have um i mean you're getting both barrels here but you're just the guy and and and we have

27:39Myleene Klass:the conversation i have a wife who's absolutely you know rightly so big fan of yours so that role model piece, which is where you sit in my family, talked about, and information that you shared and shared into my sort of girls growing up, if you like. You can't be what you can't see. So what you're really saying is, you know, and so that actually, you know, sort of proves my point. You are a role model. You are actively being someone that's visible, that's putting out intelligent information, business-led information that wasn't there before. And that's really important.

28:11John Reynolds:But if you say to a girl now, and I make sure, and I make sure musicians get what they're owed. You know, you don't have to be astronomical with it. You know, it's just get what you're worth, get what you're owed. Don't think that exposure is going to pay your bills and that somebody can, you know, I'm going to give you this exposure. I can't eat exposure. I can't pay my mortgage with exposure. You know, you have to get what your worth is. And I just think that I've seen so many mediocre people who have asked for, you know, an exorbitant amount of cash and got in it because you know god loves a trier whereas i've seen so many particularly women because it's sort of how we're we're sort of trained up it's sort of in our psyche who will say oh no i couldn't possibly do that oh i haven't got the training for that like you know it's it's such a just a different mentality so i learned the self-worth piece isn't well i learned in order to be able to to do business at these tables i learned from how these guys operate yeah i can do that if you can say you can do it i can do it too i could if you can do it i can definitely do it and it's that you know it sort of rubs off on you nearly out of time

29:19Myleene Klass:but i know how busy you are so i want to thank you for making time to come and film me today no i think um i think what you're doing is i think it's remarkable because to be able to say

29:30John Reynolds:the words miscarriage or champion women in business like i said it comes from allies because we can't do it ourselves and i think that in a world that just you know feels quite lost to so many rightly so at the moment there's also so much positivity yeah that's where it breaks through

29:46Myleene Klass:and that's why i can keep showing that to my kids your example setting and your uh just just who you are and where you're going is so inspirational i wanted to say that to you because that's me already with the perception of looking forward to this conversation, then absolutely having that experience with you now, but knowing that you're so important to so many people. Thank you, Mylene. I've loved this conversation.

30:11John Reynolds:Thank you so much. I mean, my teens would not agree, but thanks. They'd be like, oh, another TED talk.

30:17Myleene Klass:Our teens don't agree with us at all, right?

30:19John Reynolds:That means we're doing a good job.

30:20Myleene Klass:Yeah, we must do this again.

30:21John Reynolds:That's good, definitely.

30:23Myleene Klass:Thank you, Mylene.

30:24John Reynolds:Thank you.