Weathering Life | Guest: James Spann | Ep 13

[Music] welcome to Ricky Bobby University we've had a great time doing this podcast it will be the last podcast of 2020 so while we take a two-week break be a great time for you to go back and maybe watch or listen to Rick and Bubba University episodes that you missed you can find those a couple of ways one go to our YouTube channel and you'll see the play list click on the play list you'll see all the reckon bubble universities if you are gonna be driving and you just want to be you just want to listen just go to wherever you get podcast and look for Rick and Bubba University today we we go back to our Rick and Bubba profiles we've been doing this show for 25 years and today Bubba we profile James Pam James Spann has been with us for a while Rick he is very well known meteorologist in weather circles we have him on the show from time to time if you listen to our flagship station you hear him each and every day and he's also meteorologist the chief meteorologist from one of our local TV stations but he does such a lot more than just that so we're glad to have you on today James welcome it is my honor always to be in association with you two fine gentlemen so let's talk some reeking Bubba history because we've been doing that a little bit with the with the new podcast celebrating our 25th year we've known you you know for for quite a while but Rick how I used to watch James when I was a mere child really yeah he's been on a long time on local TV so first of all let's give James a round of applause if you can see him for aging much better than we so so James how did our paths cross do you remember you know my first memories of you guys it's doing the the Friday night football show on the radio that warmed my heart I will never forget that show that was the greatest you know I've been working nights I've been doing television weather for 41 years and so I guess this was in sometime in the 80s and you guys who do the football scores and the concession stand of the week and all that and it was on a you know local station so that's the first time I really got connected with you to guys in the radio but I think I met Bubba with ham radio with a ham fast yeah our magical event a long time ago no and it may have been at one of the weather classes James that you came over to our home County and held and you know Rick I went through storm spotter class I know my shelf cloud yeah if I remember James you and Bubba invited me to a ham fest but I was booked that day I had to eat a can of rusty nails listen does it go no I'm telling you I could have odd Cass talking about ham radio alone I'd say we can take this thing right down the tubes but Rick's head would explode we lose it we'll do that one Rick sick one day so but I remember that you were talking about what you were talking about and Rickon above a history and some of you may not know this it was called Rick and Bubba's pigskin roundup and Bob and I would do a show in the early a of hours then we would sometimes go home sometimes we did remotes or whatever up until that time and it really was the way that we've approached radio you know we can be a little irreverent about the industry and so we did a high school football scoreboard show that made fun of high school football scoreboard shows and as you can tell and I don't know what this says for James apparently you had our same sick sense of humor that's great it was the greatest thing ever I mean I just wish we had that show back it might it kicked off my weekend every Friday night during the high school football season you guys were funny I mean you're right it made fun of these serious sports guys trying to do these things you know but it was great I just have to laugh they were a lot of fun considering they were 20 hour days but you know I don't think we could have survived doing that much longer but James let's talk about your career a little bit kind of set the stage because we're we're going to have people watching this who has have watched you and heard you on the show for many many years we're also gonna have people who have never heard of you before so let's set the stage a little bit about your career and whether and how you you got to the point you're at today well my I did not really think I would be able to do this for a living when I was in high school nobody and I mean nobody told me this was a viable career option meteorology so my first major in college was Electrical Engineering but when I was going through high school in college I worked at a radio station in Tuscaloosa Alabama playing rock and roll music on the radio I think we have a few features of those days yeah we've seen it and so I got a call from the local TV station in Tuscaloosa they had a little CBS affiliate and they asked me if I'd be willing to come out there and do weather and some other things but they were gonna pay me like you know hundred ninety dollars a week to come out there and work and do weather and some other stuff and I'm thinking you mean you're gonna pay me to do this which is what I love and as I started to do that I realized this could be a viable career option so I would wind up changing majors and I finished in meteorology in the program at Mississippi State University and I've been doing this for 41 years I have been mostly in the deep south I did spend some time in Texas back in the 80s I worked for channel 4 KDFW which at the time was the CBS channel so I had been through tornadoes heat waves droughts hurricanes floods you name it it's been a wild ride but a great ride and now it's different you know and that a lot of folks don't get weather from radio or television they get it on their phones so it's kind of morphed into a 24 hour a day 7 day a week job but I've not slept much since 1973 so it doesn't bother me so James you still though you do your weather own a lot of just radio stations right every day you're syndicated in your weather forecast too right right I'm on about 24 radio stations around the country and still my court job it's still doing television weather for the ABC affiliate in in Birmingham but we do a lot of other things we've been doing a show called weather brains for 13 years which is a podcast kind of like this we were podcasting before people even knew what that was and that's attracted weather weenies and dweebs and nerds and dorks all over the world to gather around every Monday night to listen to that so we kind of expanded our reach over the years but I to this day I can't believe they pay me to do what I love to do so I cannot wait to go to work every day you know most people my age they gripe about working and they can't wait to retire I'm just the opposite I'm just getting started this fantastic well you you talked about this so if you listen knowing that you have syndicated weather updates that are via radio and of course the radio stuff is all over the road but a lot of it is used in the in the we early hours of the day but yet you know that you know most every day unless you're on vacation which is very rare you also are going to be doing TV local weather which is going to give you you know a five six and ten sometimes are definitely a six in ten that ten is the one I'm focusing in there those two worlds it's almost like it's almost like your workday consists of two different workdays you're supposed to do one or the other so tell the audience because I'm interested and that's the kind of stuff we're going to do on the podcast with this long-form conversation what is your game plan to get the appropriate amount of sleep how do you do it well you know here's the one thing about life the greatest equalizer in life is time everybody watching this and listening to this we are all equalized by time we have 24 hours in a day the richest woman the richest man in the world cannot buy a millisecond and to me that's my biggest challenge but what we do in that 24 hours it determines who we are I can look at anybody schedule and really quickly determine your priorities in life your relationship to God if you're a believer your relationship with your family and I've been struggling with this for a long time and and obviously to do things that are priority in life you sometimes have to go without sleep and it's not really healthy I'm sleeping about three hours a night during the week and that's not good I'm only 24 years old this is what you look like but I do better on the weekend but you know most people think you know all those TV weather guys they're working eight minutes a day you know I see them on TV at four o'clock five o'clock six o'clock and ten o'clock and if you get out a stopwatch they give you about two minutes and those newscasters you know these clowns work eight hours a day they sit around all day and eat and pick their nose or whatever but that is just a fraction of what we do for me the morning shift and I do the morning shift home thank goodness which is nice but I'm working between 4:30 and 8 o'clock every morning doing radio doing Ric and Bubba doing television I'm on television in the morning at my home office writing blog post producing technical weather videos that are posted to YouTube in the digital platforms and and then during the day I speak in schools every day some people got me interested in weather when I was a kid they got me interested in science and the least I can do is return the favor and do that for kids today so I'm in 1 to 2 schools every day I prefer to do 1st 2nd 3rd 4th grade 3rd graders think I'm funny those are my people I mean middle school and high school kids I love them but they get a little weird but after I do that I go to work and work the TV shift and do the same thing you're doing radio and all these external things and and then on top of all that all that fellas now you've got this 800-pound monster known as the tweeter and the face bag and the gram social media and it never stops never ever ever in so I deal with that and again I'm not griping i-it's a great way for us to get information especially during active weather with photographs and video that are crucial to what we do on television but it we can reach your audience any time and they can engage with us and I answer questions and in it's fun it's just can be tiring so you just learn to live without sleep and again I've got a family you know we my wife and I we've been married for 38 years we've raised two boys and you know that that comes first and so it's a challenge but time management is the biggest challenge I face James let me ask you this because you said you sleep so little are you one of these people that can get by with that are you some kind of physical freak in that way or are you sleepy all the time do you feel it does it hurt well I feel like I feel like I'm cheating the system the deal with me so you sleep 3 hours a night and that's not healthy by the way I would not advise and for anybody to do this but for me I'm a nap guy I can take a five-minute nap a 10-minute nap I come out of there I'm good to go and that's what makes the difference if I don't have the opportunity to grab at 5 10 minute nap during the day a time or two that I'm hosed I really that night but normally I'll catch that little 510 minute nap in my office and I feel great and the other thing that's helped is that I thought I was dying three years ago physically I felt horrible I was physically exhausted I was overweight I felt bad so there's a gym right across the street from the TV station and our son had trained there when he played baseball and everything and I learned that they had some programs for regular goobers like me and so I went over there and signed up and and I've been over there for three years and that is dramatically turned my life around I'm doing a lot of con under the weight stuff at the pure CrossFit but I'm like yesterday we were running 300 yards and you're getting in you do burpees you went 300 yards that's changed my life so that has really helped my energy level for a few years on that late news at 10 11 o'clock at night you know my mouth was moving my brain was shut down but now I'm fully energized so the power naps extra size and adjusting the diet a little bit that's made all the difference in the world you mentioned actually worked out with your son yesterday we but we both found the same place and I can give the same testimony it has helped me tremendously and but you mentioned your boys and certainly their their young adults now but during the time when they were small so they they certainly are your you know your wife and your children you know it's God your wife your children then your work but your work does as you just laid out consumes a lot of time how did you make it work as and others people listening to this and watching this going alright I'm a husband I'm a dad all of us struggle with how we level out what we do for a living which we need to be good providers it may also be like what we get to do and you do something that you love and feel called to but how did you balance giving your wife what she needs giving your sons what they need and giving your you know vocation what it deserves as well all I can say is thank goodness we didn't have social media during those days our the last son graduated in 2015 and you know we didn't have that so yeah I was doing TV and I was doing radio and I was doing the school talks but not having that social media monster on your back 24 hours a day seven days a week that gave me the freedom to do what I needed to do to be there for them when they needed me and I don't have any regrets I look back on that and and again for example you know between the six and the ten o'clock news we have a nice break and at 6:30 when the news is over I'd take off the TV suit I'd slip on a coaches uniform I'd drive down to the ballpark and I'd coach a ball game and I did that for years and years and years in you know when there was school events I wouldn't schedule a school program or I'm talking to kids I would go to our kids school and watch them do their program or do their thing so I had the flexibility to make it work but again we didn't have the social media phones stuff that we do now the iPhone came along in 2007 and it was starting to kick in toward the end of our last son's high school time but I now I may tell you what it would be awfully tough but if it were me sometimes you got to put the phone down you've just got to put it down and people that are asking me questions and wanting me to do things I think they're they would be understanding if I just publicly say look I've got two kids got responsibilities I'm gonna need a little time away from this from time to time but thank goodness we didn't have much of that going on when I was raising those two kids and James you mentioned you do some of your stuff from home you're talking to us now from your home studio and you've got that thing set up pretty good you know I have a loving wife because she enabled me to I put a green wall back in my office so you know I can transport myself to the beach if I want to support myself oh yeah or I can transport myself to the TV station where I work back here so anyways that's let me just say the chromakey color it is basically puke green excuse me there's no doesn't fit into home decors so I you know my wife is loving when she enables me to paint my wall in my office back here puke-green James you know this will tell you how long ago I worked in TV we use blue back then yeah I look at when I started we use blue and what happened you know a lot of ladies and some men have blue colors in clothing and their wardrobe and this puke-green most people don't have it nobody has that that's they got a good color that you can't easily confuse yeah the only person you can interview is the Jolly Green Giant or everything else is from James in doing your job as long as you've done it you're so well respected and established now you've had a lot of interns come through who've worked with you and you've had a couple of famous ones and I know one in particular yeah you know I'm proud of all of them and again it goes back to the some people mentored me like my greatest mentor was a man by the name of JB Elliott JB worked for the National Weather Service and he took me under his wing and allowed me to come watch him work and he would teach me these things and I to this day I'm so thankful for JB Elliott and I would like to be a JB Elliott to the next generation so we started an intern program way back in the 90s where college students that are majoring in meteorology these are atmospheric science students not you know radio or TV people these are science people come in in the summer and work with us for a couple of months and we just try and kick start their career and I've had so many great interns over the year it's funny I go to these weather conferences these national weather meetings of either the AMS or the NWA and I just look out over the crowd and you can just see all these former interns which is just fantastic but I think the one you're talking about Bubba is a young lady we had in the summer of 2000 this was 19 years ago she came down from Valparaiso University in Indiana brilliant brilliant academics I mean her crates were just stunning and she was a hard worker a little bit of an introvert which is fine you know really most people on TV are kind of introverts I think but we knew she was going to do just great she came in and the first thing I do when I get the interns I don't take him to a radar facility I don't take them to some science place I take him to a Walmart in a working class part of the city to see how they interact with people because if you can't interact with people in a Walmart they don't look like you that don't live where you they don't think like you think they don't vote like you vote they don't look like you if you can't interact with these people in this Walmart which is a great cross-section then you have no hope of being successful in mass communication on radio or television I remember taking her in at Walmart and boy she aced it that means people were hugging her it was working and so anyway her name is ginger zeig East and we didn't like your last name we thought it sounded like something that should be surgically removed so we we just started calling her ginger Zee and that kind of stuck and she is now ginger Zee the chief meteorologist for ABC News in New York and you see her every morning on Good Morning America and in the evening on World News Tonight so we're very proud of ginger her accomplishments and her family great family two kids and she you talk about no sleep goodness gracious myself oh thanks senator all over the country I see him but she's she also did pretty good dancing to Jane yeah she you know what's what's amazing to me you know she just had a baby right before that I don't know much about the female anatomy but I'm not so sure you need to be doing all that dancing right after you have a baby she did great she actually got hurt toward the end but but she came in second place but yes she's very talented in fact I'm probably gonna see her and her family and next week we're going up there for a few days probably have lunch or dinner with him so James the industry has changed so much for for us and for you but as you mentioned you know there was a time when people waited on you to give them the weather now because of all the social media all the streaming all the the apps everything they want the weather from you all the time every day on the minute and you talked about how that has been an extra strain and you were thankful it wasn't that way when your sons were were small but also let's talk about how your industry and weather has now become a political football that I know I know this is frustrating to you we've talked about it on the show because you know we've kind of lost our way and and once something becomes political it changes everything and and you've watched that evolution and it is not a positive one now it's you can't even talk about weather sometimes I can post a picture of a sunrise or a sunset and they're fighting about Trump I can post a picture of a snow squall in New York City which we had yesterday and they're fighting about climate change I don't know how it's gotten that way is part of is just a simple polarization we have in this country today in these extremists just far far extremists to have taken over and really on both sides on the left and on the right you've got some right-wingers that honestly believe in their heart that the earth is flat and that every day you've got airplanes flying over our country that are spraying chemtrails that are controlling our minds and doing mind control on the other hand you have some left wingers some have become a doomsday cult where they believe the earth is going to end in 12 years and their Savior is a teenager from Europe with autism and I'm thinking wow how did we get to this I mean most people are not even remotely close to these extremists yet those seem to be the people that are in control and that's all you see on television and so everybody's gotten this polar is they're just polarized they hate each other and you can't talk about anything that's related to politics and somehow and I guess it started with Al Gore climate got roped into politics so you know everybody's hunkered down based on their right wing or their left-wing opinions and nobody wants to listen to the truth of the facts I'm a numbers guy I've been a numbers guy all my life and I've been one of these clan I'm the clown in the back of the class it is always raising their hand you know a call on me I've got a question we've lost our ability to do critical thinking in this country yeah that's one of the things I learned in school is critical thinking we've lost it and so it I hate that you can't talk about climate and now you can't even talk about whether there honestly some people that think weather doesn't exist anymore I'm looking at my window it's sunny and it's 45 degrees to some people that's not whether that's climate change you know we have a rainy day it's raining outside that's not whether that's climate change climate exists and whether exists in it sits there days I just my head is gonna eat one day my head's gonna blow up I need duct tape so it won't blow that's how the Flat Earth people like me for you oh my goodness I can't even there's nothing I think or that we haven't been to the moon people well I think what frustrates I mean I know it does bub as well is now we're backtracking to things I thought we were done with it yeah what weren't we settled on the earth being round and weren't we settled on that this we have people that fly around it even today on the International Space Station and we keep going back as if I really sense James and I know I have a feeling you're going to agree I think that human beings are devolving don't know no doubt going backward you know and I it's exposed because of social media you know it used to be I often say Facebook sometimes can be a place of bile and weapons-grade ignorant you just think surely people don't think this they don't believe this but goodness gracious I'm telling you guys it's it's just horrifying where that the chemtrail guys oh man it's just like I give a weakly chemtrail patch a little pilot patch we're if you're a true chemtrail believer I'll just let you have it this week I will put a picture of cirrus clouds up on social media just a beautiful deck of cirrus clouds at 25,000 feet cirrostratus or something up there that you often see in advance of a storm system and the chemtrail people will just brutally come on your Facebook page and they will attack you they say you know you're a liar you're a total liar it's kin trails the United States government's doing it and you know it and you're not telling us go to bla bla bla bla but then they start all this f-bombs and customers just they're hardly mean people I mean they're not even nice about it James I've missed out on some of the chemtrail people I'm glad they've gravitated towards you I think I got every single flat earther but so so tell me what is that what is the deal on the chemtrail what no I'm saying just quickly what what do they thinks going on that we're all missing whenever they see a cirrus cloud deck or a contrail a condensation trail from I don't theme yeah right they believe that the government is using that to either control the weather or controlling our minds in this control this mind control thing is is a seems to be taking more grasp within a lot of these extremists where it's a government plot for mind control and then the weather control guys you know that the weather's never been this way before they've been spraying us for 25 years in buffoon to when they when they weren't spraying us we didn't have this kind of weather with please know the one thing about whether we got climate records going back to 1880 and I you know I could prove or disprove anything you're trying to claim about this is never happened before so just don't even go down there I mean I will eat your eyeballs for breakfast you try that James you mean like it's gonna get hot in the summer and then in the winter it's gonna get cold you mean those kind of crazy things yeah this is crazy crazy stuff it just never happened more than 25 years ago and they weren't spraying us back then well and it's it seems to be not anymore go ahead Pat they're gonna attack all three of us for doing this um chemtrail guys listen to this thing right now and he's getting ready to get on the tweeter the face bag and he's gonna look this up and come after us here he comes on the gram what well but James you here's the thing you know look I'm I'm a good and I come from Calhoun County Alabama there's nothing that makes a dandy yeah there's nothing about me that would be intellectually impressive however when I am able to discern when I hear this statement today is the hottest day on temperature since 1931 or something in the 30s well it's the minute I hear that then I realized this not this is not unprecedented no it has happened to folk before and it's happening again so that's the end of the to me you're not saying something to me today that has never happened it has happened a long time ago it doesn't happen often but it seems to happen and at that moment then I can't really say since they've been spraying us I can't say manmade climate change of any you know that is causing this because you just told me that in a history of our world that this has already happened and then a many many many many many years passed after that and it happened again what why do people not hear that when we say that well again the truth doesn't matter truth doesn't matter to the extremists it is yeah we've been talking about the chemtrail folks now you get into the doomsday cult people yeah where they think the Earth's gonna end in twelve years and maybe nuts and not all are in the doomsday cult but but they're moving in that direction we had a tornado event in the southern United States earlier this week before Christmas very tragic we had some loss of life we had people injured some people lost their homes here right before Christmas but I probably had at least two dozen people across the social media platforms get in touch with me at various degrees of anger saying you know what why aren't you telling people this is caused by man and this shouldn't be happening this time of the year this has never happened before the earth is spiraling toward doom and it's like what's the matter with these people you know November in December that is the tornado season in the southern United States it's always been that way and it always will be that way for decades and decades and decades back to the beginning of weather records we've had these things and now these people want you to get on here and say this is caused by man it's man-made climate change and most of these people don't even live here they have no idea what they're talking about they have no training in weather none whatsoever and it's really frustrating but they're being indoctrinated by what they see on television they sit there and they watch these political hacks all day on the right wing or the left wing channels and that's all they're gonna believe they refuse to look at the truth and that's the disturbing thing is the truth doesn't matter anymore there's so many people they're so indoctrinated into this stuff and in quite frank some of it is at the college level oh yeah and you know goodness gracious I I can show it with facts I can ship here let me show you this xx that happened in 1921 on Christmas Day or this tornado happened in 1933 in November this tornado that killed 23 people in 1989 on November 15th in this place nobody wants to see that that they'll say well that that that wasn't climate change but now it is I'm so I call that I call that the yeah but you with in yeah I call it the yeah but somebody somebody asked you a question you answer it and they go yeah but then I realize well I came to talk to you I answered your question James let's talk a little bit about part of your job that some people would say might be your finest hour and that is when severe weather is happening and you go on live TV for sometimes hours and hours when people are in direct threat from a tornado on the ground in our part of the country talk a little bit about that there's some humor to that but it's it's obviously very important what you're doing you save lives and it does matter you know we have a running joke here locally when we see James and he takes his coat off and you can see his suspenders that means it's got very serious and James is in for the long haul but James talked about that part of your job a little bit because that may be where you're at your very best well that's the number one that's the most important thing we do mitigating loss of life during life-threatening weather and where I live and operate it's mostly due to hurricanes tropical storms severe thunderstorms tornadoes and floods especially tornadoes and so you know for years and years I was throttled you know I was kept in the barn you know whenever we had tornadoes they might let you go on TV for a couple of minutes but get right off because you go to go back to the programming because back in those days there were three or four channels and you know they don't want to make anybody mad and that was just the culture and and I always wanted to do more and I always wanted to do more and I've worked mostly in Alabama worked in Dallas for a while in all this time nobody would let me do my thing but finally finally in 1996 I went to work for a new company and they let the horse out of the barn and they said you go on TV as long as you want to interrupt anything you want to you have full control and that changed everything for me and I think for this market where we are and since then I can look back on so many events and I can tell you that not me but but the communication process and the whole team that's involved the National Weather Service the broadcast meteorologists the emergency managers because of all of this work there are people that are walking around today that otherwise would be dead now understand we've had great failures in and often I talk about this day on April 27 2011 it was a generational type day for us we had 62 tornadoes in my state on that day and on that day 252 people died on my watch that's inexcusable absolutely inexcusable for me for anybody in our weather enterprise and I think that day was our greatest day and it was our worst day and today I will think about that day every day until the day I die in fact I'm in the process of trying to memorize the names of everybody that died that day there's stories I've talked with many of the surviving family members that is very motivating for me for us to do better we know that what we do physical science is not enough we have to integrate social science knowledge of human behavior for us to be successful and we are working hard we have a the biggest challenge I got right now guys it's folks that live in manufactured housing mobile homes trailers most people that are losing their life we had two that died in a trailer this week a precious couple up in Lawrence County Alabama and we we have to come up with some type of new product between a watch and a warning to give them time to get to a safe place and all these things that that's the work that's underway right now and it's good enough it's not going to be solved overnight but we've still got a lot of work to do and that's what motivates me well I was going to ask you that was the thing I was gonna bring it was you know 2011 April 27 for those you that live in other parts of the country around the world they're listening to this and watching this it really felt like one of those apocalyptic end of time things it was just one tornado after another after another they were going into populated areas you could watch it happening on your television it was terrifying and and there was as you said over 260 262 were killed why do you think it could have been better what what are some things that happened that day we know there were some a lot of very good things but where did the system fail since you mentioned yeah that was unacceptable for six months I had nothing to say I needed to go through all of the grieving phases depression and anger and once you got out of that you get to work and let's get under the hood and fix it we learned what happened that day and understand the warnings were excellent the physical science could not have been better and quite frankly it wasn't that hard these were supercell storms with hooks debris balls signatures a third grader could see you know on radar warning people it wasn't that hard but something happened did people not hear the warning did they hear it not do anything so we've learned a lot of the key failures that day and the number one failure was the fact that most people thought they were going to hear a siren an outdoor warning siren and that's what killed more people than anything else you can't hear a siren during a raging storm at you might hear one on it three o'clock in the afternoon but those things have never been good at reaching people inside a building a house a business a school a church and we've got to move past those and if we don't more and more people are gonna die so you know every time we have an event we push people to have a weather radio in your house and on your phone have wireless emergency alerts enable so that's number one number two is the lack of helmet use most people that died on April 27 2011 died from blunt force trauma wounds to the skull region and this is horrible to talk about but in those violent tornadoes and people are often lofted and when they're aloft the shrapnel the debris within the tornado will often give fatal wounds to the skull region and if people would have had a simple bicycle helmet a five dollar bike helmet from a target or a Walmart or if your kids play sports a batting helmet or a motorcycle helmet they'd be alive today and we had a very very poor job of reminding people of that I think we're a lot better today I got so many pictures this week of people wearing helmets which warm my heart and it looks goofy you know it I said this on the air you know putting a bicycle helmet on me it's like putting a cocktail dress on a hog I mean look it's not a good look but this is for adults it's not just for kids it's for adults and the other big thing was our fault blood was on our hands the false alarm ratio is too high there were too many false alarms back in 2011 that the fa r was like 83 83 % of tornado warnings were false and people told us I hear tornado warnings all the time and nothing ever happens and we fixed that the farc down in the 30s now we went back to basic size so that's just three examples of the things that went wrong that day so James I know we're getting toward the end of our time together but I do want to and we talked about it on the on the big show but I want to mention it again today you have just written a book weathering life James Spann you can get it at James Spann book.com it's in paperback ebook in the audio book will be coming soon and let us know James when that is finished just released this week it's an audible duck okay so it's there now so so tell us briefly because we have talked about it before you know that this is going beyond weather certainly some of what we talked about is in there but it also goes back to your life this is the story of your life and so someone who just heard about the book for the first time tell them a little bit about what you hope to accomplish with the book well obviously it's about Alabama weather and culture and geography and if you like whether it's a great read because it documents these historic weather events I've dealt with over the last 41 years blizzards the blizzard of 93 this is all the inside baseball stuff of what happened in these weather offices during these events but I also wanted to just jot down my life story everybody's got a life story everybody has a very important life story mine is not important compared to others but I see a lot of people that struggle and you know I you look at Facebook and it looks like everybody's just just fine and healthy and they got all the money they need and they got no problems in their family and come on I mean let's be real we've all got relays problems we all have financial problems we all have health issues and I like many others I've had a lot of bumps in my life my dad abandoned me and my mom when I was seven and never paid a dime and I became low-income fatherless child and in a very challenging situation in rural South Alabama and I just wanted to document the journey and you know the good decisions the bad decisions and maybe write that as an encouragement that the one thing I think people need more than anything else today is encouragement I'm a Barnabas guy you know but Barnabas is my favorite guy in the Bible I mean this he was the great encourage ER and I want to be that to people today because I you know I'm one of my spiritual gifts is not discernment but I can discern one thing I can walk into the halls of any school look a child in the eyes and I'll tell you if they're hurting and they are everywhere every school and you want to know what's going on in their family to bring them to this point where they're just hurting there's something wrong there's something in too you can see it and so for people that are struggling it's it's it's a good read or a good listen and I just wanted to jot it down because I see so many people struggling so an encouraging thing for people that are struggling and for people that love whether there's a lot of you know there's a closet weather weenie in every household there's always one and we love them because they're the ones that are gonna remind people hey we got a tornado watch or there might be bad weather tomorrow so it was fun to write and appreciate those folks that have gotten a copy it's been great fun to write it well I think one of the things accomplished with the book and certainly the weather part is there but in and I do a lot of men's ministry and it is a fact that you know the insults are are the the asset that a man can be in the home it's there there's nothing you can do about it it's either a blessing or it's something you've got overcome it's a detriment but but for some people that are in situations like you found yourself you can't just tell me that if my dad's not in my life I'm doomed it you know it certainly is an obstacle but it's not an obstacle that can't be overcome and I think you know you look at the numbers James you know them very well the numbers of one parent homes are through the roof now and sadly it's just a mean it's 50/50 for a child to be raised in a home that the father has abandoned are to be raised in a home where the father is there it's not the exception anymore it's it's equal either way so there's so many children that are being raised sadly without their fathers in their lives and I think your book can show them yes it's hurtful yes it matters but it can be overcome yeah I do children's ministry at a large church I lead children's worship I mean my my congregation there between the ages of five and twelve you would dull just weird I don't have a big house I'll take the little house but but we have so many kids that are going through exactly what you just talked about Rick and understand this is not some inner-city problem or some problem in impoverished areas this is everywhere some of the nicest suburbs in these big cities where there's a lot of wealth you do see it where there's poverty you see it with all different types of races it is just across the board every socio-economic class is struggling with this family crisis we have and some of it involves addiction some of it involves some other things but again you can overcome that and you don't have to be bound to your past and I see so many people my age that came from my background they went the way of their father that they were overtaken by alcohol or opioids and they abandon their family and it's this generational curse kind of thing that's got to stop and it can be stopped and again goodness I'm the you know so far from perfect I can't even see it but my marriage has lasted for 39 years my wife and I have a great time we love each other we've raised two kids and you know it can be overcome so I think that's a big part of that as well that just hope and encourage my love to encourage people well the book is called weathering life by James Spann it's available paperback ebook and just released on audible.com and audio version as well James we have enjoyed our time with you I'm so glad you're part of the 25 years of Rick and Bubba just cherish your friendship and thank you for you know Doug not just the way that you do your job but the way that you live your life Mohsen I'm going to be associated with you guys love the show love being with the show and just thanks for what you guys do you guys are a great encouragement to me James spam thanks for being with us and thank you for joining us for today's edition of Rick and Bubba University [Music] you

Channel: Rick & Bubba

Views: 10,401

Rating: 4.8817735 out of 5

Keywords: meteorology, rick and bubba, blaze tv, weather, weather channel, climate change news, james spann, weather forecast, weather channel live, pow ponder on weather, boston snowstorm, motivation, ham radio, greta thunberg, tornado warning, tornado, education, climate, us news, mbgc combo, the weather channel, us weather, news, december forecast, ginger zee, abc news, abc

Id: 8gUaT_07Zmk

Length: 42min 41sec (2561 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 21 2019