Barrett Hobbs

00:00Are you one of those people who's always on the hunt for the next restaurant location? You open any sweet deals on retail space that may come your way? Why not be proactive and have the market experts out there working for you? The retail team, Atlee and Associates, led by Miller Chandler and Megan Glazier, is your go-to for all things commercial real estate in Middle Tennessee. They're located downtown in the heart of it all, in the Batman building. Miller is a Tennessee native, so you know he knows the neighborhoods and demographics. Megan is a California transplant who brings fresh perspective as she fully embraces the Music City culture. They use the best prop tech like Placer AI and Esri to analyze the data, while also leveraging their own industry knowledge and relationships to find and negotiate a killer deal for you. If you're one of those people and you'd like to get a hold of them, their office number is 615-751-2340. Or better yet, you can call them directly to get your conversation started on your next restaurant location. You can reach Miller Chandler at 615-473-2452 or Megan Glazier at 760-846-6193. That is the retail team, Atlee and Associates.

01:16Give them a call today. You can also visit them at TheRetailTeam.com. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now, here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll and I am your host. We are powered by the amazing people over at Gordon Food Service. We got a big episode for you today folks. We have got Barrett Hobbs. He is the CEO of the Cumberland Hospitality Group, I believe it is. He is the owner of Scoreboards, the Nashville Palace, Doc Holidays, Bootleggers and he has two restaurants in Orange Beach, Alabama, including the Barometer. He talks about all of those today and so much more. This was a marathon interview, one hour and 40 minutes and it's all good. The whole thing is great. We had an initial agenda of what we wanted to talk about, what I wanted to talk about. We didn't chat. Me and Barrett didn't chat beforehand and we talked about none of it. We just started talking and an hour and 40 minutes later, here we go. You'll learn his story but then you also in this episode are going to learn a lot about what's actually going on downtown. From a guy who owns bars downtown, from a guy who's on the CVC board, a guy who works with the downtown partnership, works with the mayor, works with city council. So there's a lot of interesting conversations here.

03:08A lot of this is what's really going on and that's what I keep trying to get to the bottom of and I think this episode is a really good one. We've got a lot of announcements and things to talk about today. First off, we had our NARA Connect. It was on Tuesday. It was at Shotgun Willie's. I want to give a big shout out to Bill Lavillette for being an absolutely amazing host. We had so much fun. We had about 50 restaurants come and lots of hugs, lots of people connecting. We gave away some dunks. We gave away some concert tickets. So if you were not able to make it, you were missed. A big shout out to Pliny Crane Marketing. They were there taking pictures of restaurant owners on the bowl at Shotgun Willie's. You'll probably see some of those photos if you start following us on the socials at Nashville Restaurant Radio or at NARA Nashville. Big thank you to Andy Herrera from Wild THC. You know, it's so fun having him come to these events because he's great. It's non-alcoholic. He brought the CBD and the THC products, but he's so knowledgeable.

04:25So if you're somebody who is curious about how these drinks work and what they are, he can tell he is so incredibly knowledgeable and the way that he explains it is so down to earth and it makes so much sense. Andy Herrera with Wild, W-Y-L-D-T-H-C. The guy is awesome. Big thank you to Cisco who is our presenting sponsor for the event. Braden and Steve and Mario and all the guys that showed up. I asked Cisco, I said, do you guys want a table? And they said, no, we just want to support you, man. We just want to be there. And I'm getting that from a lot of different people and it feels really good. So big thank you to Cisco for showing up and supporting what we're doing here at NARA. And finally, Harding House Brewing. Nate showed up and was pouring beer, tasting beer. People were having a blast. Big thank you to my friend Melina who was manning the front door and of course Vince for being my partner in crime through all of this. We had a blast. So don't feel bad if you missed it. A lot of people texted, hey, we missed it. We do a NARA Connect event every single week. Did you know that? We are all about community here at Nashville Restaurant Radio and anybody who's in this community, we want to connect with you. So if you're a new vendor that you want to learn more about NARA, if you want to just hang, we want to start a club. So Friday mornings at 8 a.m. Yes, I know. Friday mornings at 8 a.m. We want to get this thing going before anybody has to go to work.

05:52Before anything goes down, you can get up early and come hiking with us. We are hiking on the White Trail, which is the trail that has the steps at Percy Warner, but we do not go in at the steps. We're going to be meeting at the very first parking space you can get to at the Deep Well entrance. Okay, so it's right off Highway 100. You can Google it. You can go into Waze and type in Deep Well entrance to Percy Warner. You go in there and we're going to be in the first place you can park on the left. That's where you're going to see us. We typically wait until about 8-10 before we take off. So if you're in a couple minutes late, that's cool. Or you can send us a message and let us know you're on your way. But this is open to anybody. Anybody that wants to come hiking with us. It's an hour and a half hike. Really, it's about three miles. It's really mild. It's not crazy, but we're getting outside and we're just connecting. So we're looking for restaurant owners, restaurant people, vendors, anybody who wants to get to know other people while doing something fun and healthy. We are doing that every Friday at 8 a.m. Check back with us if there's any issues. If there's rain or the weather's really bad, we'll probably postpone it, but we will be posting what we're doing on the NARA Nashville Instagram page.

07:05Probably on our stories. Go check that out. So NARA hike every Friday. I will also say that we have got our next big NARA Connect event set up and ready to go. The NARA Connect independent restaurant show sponsored by no one. This is the show of the year. You are going to want to be there. We're going to have over 30 vendors. This is not a food show. We are going to have people that do really cool things like remove the humidity in your walk-in cooler so that you can save electricity and your food lasts longer. Brand new technology that is out. We've been working with our four cooler solutions. This is one of the greatest companies, guys. I am so excited to be partnering with them and working with them. This is going to say that everybody in the whole city is going to do this. So we're going to have commercials. We're going to have more. We're going to bring them on because this is one of the coolest technologies that I've seen that will actively save you money and make your food last longer and taste better. It's really inexpensive and it's a no-brainer, but all these people will have different alcohol brands. We'll have all the food brands. We'll have everybody there under one roof, one big happy family, and it's going to be a big restaurant party. It's going to be at Fat Bottom Brewery on September the 1st. They have a huge private room in the beer garden. We're praying for nice weather.

08:34We're going to have a huge party. It's going to be in the afternoon so you can come after your shift and before your shift. Good, good, good things happening. I will tell you this coming Monday night, I will be speaking at the American Culinary Federation meeting. It's going to be at Nashville State. I think it starts at six. Look back. Go to middletenneseshefs.org and find that out, but if you want to come, I'd love to meet you. If you want to hear me talk about NARA, why we're doing NARA, and what that's all about, I'll be speaking at that show. I will also be at the Music City Food and Wine Festival Saturday night. They're going to do chef demos. I'm going to be helping MC that, and you may just see me all around the Music City Food and Wine Festival. I would love to see you and say hi. If you see me walking by, it's hard to miss me. I'm a giant. Please stop and say hi. Tell me you hate the podcast, you love the podcast, or if you're a restaurant owner and you want to learn more about NARA, let's talk. We have a huge giving kitchen event on April the 28th. It's going to be at the putting zone. It starts at two o'clock, and it's going to go until six o'clock. We're going to do a tournament from two to four, from four to five. We're going to have a big presentation, lots of fun stuff. We're going to have a raffle. There's a 160 foot putting challenge. This is open to anybody who works in a restaurant. The vendors are inviting restaurants to play with them. There's going to be lots of prizes. We're going to open putting from five to six. If you want to come hang out and you want to test out this new putting place, it's going to be free for an hour. We'd love to have as many restaurant people there as possible. If you're a leader and you want to learn more about giving kitchen and you want to come have a good time with a bunch of other restaurant people, April 28th from two to six at the putting zone on Sidco Drive. It's going to be an awesome, awesome time. I will be there. I would love to meet you. We'll have a NARA table.

10:23Lots of great things happening. I know you guys want to get into this episode with Barrett Hobbs, and I want to get into it too. You guys are going to love this one. We had a great conversation. Stay tuned after the interview for my Gordon Food Service final thought. I'm excited to put this one out there. Some really good stuff going on here today. You are listening to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Super excited today to welcome in Barrett Hobbs. Barrett, are you the CEO, President, Cumberland Hospitality Group? Yeah, that's kind of the title. I just feel like I'm a fellow worker with a bunch of my teammates trying to make a living in this crazy industry. So I don't really hang my hat on titles and things like that. But yeah, at the end of the day, I got to make payroll. So I guess the title comes with that. It's a thing. Tell us all of the actual bars, bars slash restaurants that you represent that you own as Cumberland Hospitality. Well, it's been kind of a growing, it's kind of ebbs and flows. Some years we've got more, some years we've got less. My family started in the late 60s in the hotel business, and we had some restaurants inside the hotels back in those days. Of course, I wasn't born. But then I came around 1973. And four years later, my grandfather started the Nashville Palace in the fall of 77 across from the Opry. And we maintained that for years. And then there was a period of time that the brand went dormant. And then I brought it back. So the old Nashville Palace used to be where like Canny Fork Fish Camp is, right? And then you brought it back and it's a few doors down. Yeah, it's a few doors down. And actually, Steve Smith that owns Tootsies met with my grandfather and thought that he would take a run at the Opry land area and thought it

12:30would be as easy as Broadway. And it's not. It's different. It's certainly at that time with the park closing, we had shifted to, you know, almost into no man's land out there. So it was a bad time. Obviously, Steve knows what he's doing. They had some partnership issues. And then Jesse, who owns Roberts, who's a great friend of ours, Jesse Lee, Jesse Lee Jones. Yep, he felt like that the traditional music would make it better there than the Broadway, you know, whatever that music is now. And, and, and so Jesse made a run at it for a couple of years. And you just got to understand Music Valley to make a living out there, you've got to have the history, you've got to understand the local vibe of that area, folks that don't want to go downtown, but still want food and a music experience. And so I made a run at it. So it's still in the umbrella of the Hobbs family now.

13:31And honestly, this year will be our best year in next year will be our 50th year of the palace. So to have number 49 to be the most successful year in the history of the brand, I'm pretty proud of that. So we've got the Nashville Palace. As I kind of worked around that as a kid, in 1996, we opened up the scoreboard bar and grill, me and my dad and a gentleman named Leroy Thompson, who was my dad's childhood friend. So us three went into it. And then we bought Leroy out and then me and my dad did it together until he passed away. It'll be five years in June. So now it's just me. And from the scoreboard, around 2010, an old friend of mine named Buddy Messer came to me and they were struggling with some souvenir stores down on Broadway. And the street was changing from old school selling t shirts to the beginnings of you know, kind of the honky tonk explosion. So we bought souvenirs from him for years. So I had a great relationship. And he goes, man, I've got a couple of buildings down here. We're struggling, we need to rebrand these things. So one of his sons came up with the title of Whiskey Bent Saloon. And I went down and we started construction on the Sunday of the flood in 2010. So I think that was May 1st. No, it was May 10th, 10th and 11th. I think it was around that time. You would think I would have that embedded. We literally got our wood package to build the bar on that Monday of the rain. And Broadway was starting to flood, had the trucks pull up, we put all the wood on the inside. I knew this was going to be a bad

15:32situation to try to get codes or anybody to approve a building permit. So to be honest, we put brown paper over all the windows and we started building without a permit. And we opened up, pulled the trigger of CMA Fest of that year. So less than 50, 60 days. Now Whiskey Bent Saloon, that's the one right next to the Hilton's back. Whiskey Bent is 306 Broadway, so on the same side of the street as Tootsie's, but down the street. There's three of them that have opened up down there and took the name Whiskey. You got Whiskey Row, you got Whiskey something else. I can't even remember the third one. You were the original Whiskey. Yeah, and we were in an area that everybody thought we were nuts. They're like, you're on the dead street. There was hard rock on my side of the street and that was it. There was no one else. You know, empty buildings, one-hour Photoshop, just nothing. And then Burt Matthews still had his Matthews Construction Company was two doors down from me. And then Boot Country was beside us. So that was really the only life.

16:45I know exactly where you are now. I don't spend a lot of time on Broadway. Now it's O Reds. Everybody knows where O Reds is. We're two doors towards Tootsie's from there. And that was a great run. We started Whiskey in 2010, literally 40 days of construction and opened the door. And the rest is history there. And across the street, there was an old disco bar that had kind of been ran down and it was called, it'll come to me, Bell Bottoms or something like that. I can't, I don't think that's it, but I can't remember. It's been too many years ago. So I had an idea to do Moonshine was starting to just barely percolate as a new thing. So I said, well, hell, there's an opportunity. Let's go get it. So we went over and I came up with the name, certainly not original, but Bootlegger seemed to be a natural name for a moonshine bar. So when we worked on Bootlegger's and got it off the ground, and then the same group, the Messer family were struggling with, again, kind of the shift in Nashville, they had the Charlie Daniels Museum and a souvenir shop right beside Hard Rock. And there was just a shift. They weren't doing anything wrong. It's just the folks coming to Nashville weren't interested in a museum at that time. They wanted what Broadway was becoming. They wanted to booze and live music. Yep, they did. So we took that lease and I wanted to bring the original bar for Broadway. The first bar to really ever be down there of any substance was the Silver Dollar Saloon. And that is in the original building of Hard Rock where their souvenir store is. That old building out on the corner was the Silver Dollar Saloon. And then oddly enough, I found out later that where Bootlegger's is,

18:46it's not the original building. But there was a bar there called the Bloody Bucket. And when you work the riverboat systems that came down the Kermlin River, the way the road looks now, it didn't look like that then. There was a slant starting at Third Avenue that went slowly down to the river because pulling the wood and the lumber and trees out of the river, they used horse-drawn wagons and just drove them up the mud ramp. So you couldn't have it real steep. So it was a slow grade. And there was a pecking order on the boats. And if you were a captain or another, I don't really remember the classification, but let's say the top two on brass on a boat could go into Silver Dollar. But if you weren't the top two, you had to go in the Bloody Bucket. They had a cast iron tub, if you will, outside the door where the red clay, when you washed your boots off, it looked like a bucket of blood outside of the saloon. It was where they washed their mud off. So that's where the Bloody Bucket came from. So we made a run at Silver Dollar and it was successful. Second Avenue was kind of at a transitional period as it has done for years and years. When you go through that level of history where you've researched the Bloody Bucket and the Silver Dollar saloon and you bring something like that back, do people get that lineage? Do people show up there and go, wow, this is kind of a, they brought back this Nashville history. I think Tom Morales has done a really good job of bringing, keeping, preserving history at Nashville and telling the story about it. Do people get all of the backstory of any of this stuff?

20:36I'm not as talented as Tom, who's a great friend of mine. And Tommy has a unique ability to tell a story through a business. I'm probably more and he's got a few years on me, not a lot, but a few. So I've always been on the wheel of building revenue. And Tom had those extra years where now, if I probably did bootleggers, I would be able to tell that story better to our customers. I was just a young guy trying to get as many flags on Broadway, trying to catch the train. You were in the right time, I think, to get in there. Yeah. And then we took one more that I still have. And it's beside it and maybe one of the more popular five-star dive bars anywhere in the country, and it's Dock Holidays. So Docks is kind of catching lightning in a bottle. So at one point, I had four operating down there. And we had some challenges at Silver Dollar structurally, and the partners didn't want to invest long term in it. So we sold that lease, Whiskey Bent. Now I've licensed that back to the original Messer family that my 15-year lease ran out and things are just too expensive.

21:58I didn't really want to work for the government and a landlord. And they felt like they could do it without me. So they said, let's just work out an exit strategy. So we licensed the Whiskey Bent name to that property. So we got out of Silver Dollar. So now downtown, I've got bootleggers and docks, Nashville Palace, scoreboard. And then about a year and a half ago, I had an opportunity in Orange Beach, Alabama to take over one of the biggest tiki bars I've ever been to right on the coast. And Orange Beach is really similar to Nashville. It's hooked in spirits and food and love for live music. So it was kind of a natural. So I took that over and it's been tremendously successful. And we've quadrupled the sales of the property operators that were there before us. And then an opportunity opened up beside it to do a little bit of a nicer restaurant and bar. And it's called The Barometer, which me and my partner, one of my partners, Mark Smith, came up with years ago, maybe, maybe 20 years ago, we were drinking beer on Old Hickory Lake. And he said, man, one day I'd like to do a bar, you know, on the coast somewhere on an island. And he had the idea of the barometer and kind of emphasize bar and then bar of the barometer. And we never did anything.

23:26And when the opportunity happened, he was, he had helped open up one of the nicest restaurants and bars anywhere in the Gulf, anywhere in the United States. And it's called Coastal, a beautiful $30 million restaurant and bar right on the Gulf. My friend John McGinnis that owns the Floribama franchise, they developed it. And he reached out and I introduced him to Mark and he went down there for about five years. And this opportunity happened. So I reached out to Mark and I said, well, if you want to do it, I got it. So now we have a barometer in the Tiki and Raw bar in Orange Beach. So the Tiki and Raw bar or the biggest Tiki bar you'd seen, that big Tiki bar, you said you've increased revenue four times, profitability. How'd you do that? I mean, does it just take somebody coming in and investing in it? Like what specific changes did you make that turned that place into such a success? It's the same thing that I did at Whiskey Bent when we opened there. No one had cocktail servers on Broadway. He went to the bar to get your drink.

24:37My grandfather who, you know, certainly mentored me through my life and my dad. Who is John A? That's my grandfather. Your grandfather is John A. My dad was Ronnie and then I have two uncles that are in the industry with us, Joe and Johnny. So my granddad had four sons and Mike was the oldest, then Joe, then my dad, and then Johnny. And we all kind of, two of my uncles worked in construction and then Johnny and my dad and myself worked more in the tourism and hospitality side. Now I'm the only one in the hospitality side out of the whole family. The cocktail servers. Yeah, that's what it was. Sorry, I didn't mean to deviate there. They used to say, and it's simple, you know, and I think our industry is really simple when you drill it down. If somebody wants to sit on their couch and go get their own drink, they won't come to your bar. So when Whiskey Bent got opened, I made it two things. I wanted the cleanest bathrooms on Broadway because at the time there were some great operators, but everybody's bathroom sucked. And I was like, if the girls like our bathrooms, they'll come down to the dead end of the street or they'll visit with us and then go visit other places. And I called it the boomerang effect. They're going to come back for the bathrooms. And if they didn't have to leave their bar stool or lose their spot at the stage to go get a drink, we were crowded. Broadway was crowded. Nobody wanted to leave. So it actually increased sales and it improved customer service.

26:23So that's what we did at the coast. I said, let's clean the bathrooms up and let's increase customer service. We had a menu that was too large for the kitchen facility. So the number one complaint was cook times. So we reduced and we got a lot of heat. You know, we lost, you'd have thought when I cut out fried mozzarella cheese sticks that I, you know, shot somebody's dog. It was like, really? You're mad about that. You don't like the ahi tuna we're serving. You're mad because we took away the fried cheese. Well, the frost station was small. So we had to say, what do we have to fry? We have to fry fish. We have to fry shrimp. We have to fry french fries. We don't have to have fried cheese right now. We'll expand the kitchen down the road and we'll bring the local favorite back. People, people don't understand kitchen layout. People don't understand the year you took away that. They think that's you being a mean person and not liking that dish and you, but like there's actual reasons why. What do you think the biggest misconception people have that come dine at a place is? What do people not understand? Profitability. Yeah. Profitability and that it's all fun, that we just get to eat and drink all day at work. You know, that's the, the, I think those are the two biggest, they have no idea. You know, right now in Nashville, the big thing with the property tax, what the average citizen doesn't understand is where the sales of the hospitality industry go in Nashville, Tennessee, everybody is tied to it.

28:02And everybody's like, well, no, I work in insurance. And so what do you have a kid? Yeah. Where's your kid go? In the name of public school. And I'm like, okay, here's how you're connected. 85% of the school funding comes from liquor by the drink tax. So when we slow down selling Budweiser or Jack Daniels, in essence, the school budgets are getting cut. And people don't know that. People don't know at the state level when they're in the rural counties or outside of Nashville. And they're like, oh, well, that's Nashville. You know, we don't have to worry about Nashville. Nashville funds them. If you take not, we have 96 counties. If you take 95 counties in the state of Tennessee and add together the liquor by the drink tax, Nashville still surpasses all of them added together. Wow. That's a staggering statistic. So take 95 and they don't surpass one. And then the constitution mandates that 75 to 80% of that, I forget the exact number, has to go to the school systems out of the whole state. People don't understand that liquor by the drink. They saw your drinks are high. They don't know that the first 25% goes to the state. So if you sell a drink for $10, the first $2 and 50 cents, we're in charge of collecting it. We don't get to charge the state anything for handling their money. We have to pay an accountant, we have to pay a CPA, we got to pay a manager to count the money. So in essence, we're, we're basically a tax collector for the city and the state. And rarely do they even say thank you. You know, they generally find a way to chip away and charge you more the 750 that's left, they want to make us work extra hard to keep any of that 750 without saying thank you for the first 250. So we have an unsilient partner. Well, I want to also say that it's not 750. I mean, you, you charge $10, you're

30:09paying 250 in taxes, but the actual cost of the product itself comes out of that 750. And then you have overhead, you're looking at 60% in prime costs that you're paying for labor. Just the building, everything's I mean, what you're actually making out of that 750, dwindles down to a buck. 75 cents. Maybe, maybe, maybe now. And so they're paying $10 drink, they're going once $10 drink, look, I'm making 75 cents, I got to sell a shit ton of drinks to make that stack up. And I think the number one threat to that 750 is I'm going to make some industry man when I say this, but I'll just say it. It's the truth is lawyers. The billboards that are lining our city or every television show that you watch, you've got a lawyer on there saying, oh, did you slip and fall? Did you have a big truck hit you? Morgan and Morgan, Morgan and Morgan on a billboard with, you know, it's not your fault. Yeah. Yeah. Or he's got his face in front of George Washington and it's making the money rain. What people don't realize is those costs are now almost, you know, it's growing to the point now to where it's not going to be profitable to sell liquor. That's about where we're, we're getting to between all of the things that are chipping away.

31:40And it's not just in our industry. It's at, you know, the reason people's homeowners are high aren't because of their, their turning in claims. It's because when somebody falls in a hole in your yard on trick or treat and name any of these, these ambulance chasing lawyers, they're going to sue the homeowner because you had to go for dig a hole in your yard. And now you're getting sued for $200,000 from a parent that twisted their ankle, you know, in your front yard, all that shit, all these crazy lawsuits, they never go to court. They get settled, you know, and I'll give you an example. When I share this, people go, you got to be kidding me. A few years ago, we got caught in a lawsuit second or third time at scoreboard in my life. This young lady decided to come to the scoreboard on Sunday afternoon. She had two white claws, about two o'clock in the afternoon, maybe three o'clock, hangs around, has something to eat, leaves, gets on a shuttle that takes her back down to kind of DeMumbrian in that run and drops her off. She ends up down at Broadway. You can track her with her visa, drink some down at Broadway, ends back up at DeMumbrian. And then at 21st Avenue or division, I'm sorry, later on, and I'll leave all the other bar's names out. But there was a lot of us tied up in this lawsuit. So she's at my place at two or three o'clock in the afternoon, has two white claws, and I can't remember, say fried pickles. At 3am the next day has an accident and runs over a guy that was drunk that came across the street and not in a crosswalk. And she obviously was drunk at that point, hits him. He's put in the hospital. Eventually he does pass away, but he was there for about a year. Horrible situation for everybody involved.

33:41It sounds terrible. Yeah, it was bad. What a bad decisions that sounds like were happening. Yep. And who gets sued? I do. I get sued the same as the last bar that served somebody that, I mean, I got sued for an accident that happened the next calendar day. So what happens? You get sued. They sue me personally for a couple million, sue the bar for a couple of million, sue my management company for a million that has nothing to do with it. I don't personally have anything to do with it other than I own the damn place. I didn't serve the drink the day before, but I personally get sued. So we shake through all that and it comes down to that particular lawsuit with the scoreboard. And the insurance company's like, well, we're not going to go to trial. We're afraid that we'll lose and it would pay a lot more. I was like, what 12 people are going to say? You're liable for this. Yeah. It's like the law says I have to be negligent. There's no way I was negligent in this, you know, no way at all. And they're like, no, we're not going to do it. We're going to get at risk.

34:50So they settle it for a couple hundred thousand dollars, drop me, and then they flag you as a business. So when I try to go out and get liquor liability insurance after that, every company says, Hey, have you been in a lawsuit in the last five years? Yes, they immediately won't write you. So then it forces you to go into a high risk liquor liability group that for me was going to be $150,000 a year to have insurance. Good God. You know, and, and now the problem with this for all locations, no, hell, it's just one bar. Wow. You know, the problem is in 1996, we probably had 20 insurance companies that we could get insurance from. Now we've got three. You know, they've all, you can just kind of call it the Walmart effect. You know, they just monopolize and buy up and buy up and buy up to where you only have, you know, hell, it's like buying beef in the restaurant. When I started, there was all kinds of beef companies. Now there's about three. You don't like the broadliner has one.

35:55Yeah, you know, so it's the same thing. So this insurance thing is anybody that's listening to this that thinks, okay, I want to get into this industry. The easiest part of it is finding a location, paying your rent, and even staffing is easier than managing the cost that you have no control over. And staffing is a hell of an issue. So for me to say these things are more challenging than staffing is quite a statement. All those things, you can't control it anymore. Nothing is set up now because of lawyers and insurance and the government for small businesses to thrive. What do we need to do? I mean, how do we fix that? I think it's going to take the answer. I think it's going to take three levels of focus. I think the federal government is going to have to look at what states can do to affect frivolous lawsuits. And I'm not smart enough to say how much the feds can help. Certainly each state have different levels. So I think the state certainly can do some things. And the city of Nashville at this point has got to decide that we're a priority. We have not been a priority for, I don't know, eight years. What do you mean? What do you mean by that? Why would you feel like Nashville is not a priority? A simple thing would be to look at the council votes and the mayor's office over the last several administrations and find one bill that was passed, that was positive for small business. We'll be looking for a while. Well, I think that we've prioritized growth and these massive companies coming to town. Look at Nashville Yards and Amazon and Oracle and all of these gigantic companies that we've courted to be here on the backs

37:57of small business. Yeah, you can pretty, the argument can be made that the better four to five block area around Broadway was literally built on the backs of eight honky tonk and restaurant owners. You know, you got Jack Cawthorn, Tommy Morales, you know, the Sandersons for sure, who were one of the original Steve Smith, you know, I'm kind of in the middle. Hey, I'm Matthew Clements with Robbins Insurance Agency. You know, before I got into insurance, I worked in the hospitality space, so I do understand firsthand how tough it can be to keep things running smoothly. Now I love to help business owners like you protect what you've built, whether it's a restaurant, bar, hotel, catering operation. I know the risks you're up against and how to cover them properly. This isn't a one size fits all coverage. I'm going to help you find a policy that actually fits your operation, your staff and your budget. So you can focus on serving guests, not stressing about what ifs. It's an ever changing market. Anything could go wrong. If you want to work with someone who knows hospitality from the insides and out, reach out to me, call my cell phone 863-409-9372 or go to robbinsins.com.

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41:08If you're looking for wholesale cleaning products like dish machines in Nashville, Tennessee, they have you covered. Listen guys, this is way more than a dish machine and chemical company. They do not make you sign a contract. They earn your business every single week and let me tell you, I will personally vouch for Jason Ellis and his entire team over at Super Source. If you want a dish machine and chemical company like this, give them a call 770-337-1143 and if you are a member of the Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance, make sure you tell them that you get the special NARA pricing. Those guys got started. I was already in the business. You know, I didn't go to Broadway until 2010, but that's 15, 16 years ago. So I've been around a little bit. Those guys and ladies, Layla, Jessie, the people- Layla the best. She's one of my best friends and I think one of the best people that has helped build Nashville. I agree. And you know, there's a lot of folks that don't have nice things to say about Steve Smith. A lot of people have bad things to say about me. A lot of the Honky Tonk owners, when certain areas of town don't have something, they look to who has it and we've had success, but it wasn't given to us. When the Sandersons and Steve went into Tootsies together years and years ago, no one saw this. They put, you know, so to speak, their balls on the table and said, we're going to roll the dice.

42:52We're going to borrow money. We're going to mortgage something. I don't know exactly what they did. They scraped together their money and they put it out there and they've done it right. They took risk. 100%. They put it all on the table. And they were very welcoming to me. Jack Cawthorn, Steve Smith, Brendan Ruble and Brad Sanderson, Betsy Williams, Ansley Williams, Gene Gilbert, all those folks that had properties on Broadway, either owned them or were in business, were so nice to me in 2010. And I think they saw me as the young kid on the block that would work. And I tried to make them proud and I never put something down there that I felt like was against the brand. What is the brand? It's a good question. I feel like Nashville's brand is friendly hospitality and great storytelling through musicians. Can I rephrase that question?

44:01In 2010, what was the brand? What I just described. In 2026, what is the brand? It's diluted. I've lived long enough now in this industry to see when Opulent theme park closed and we had to rebrand the city. Kind of similar. It's not exactly apples and apples, but it's not apples and oranges right now. We're rebranding right now. I don't know that we've got anyone steering the rudder to an agreed upon brand anymore. Colin Reed, the chairman of Ryman, I believe that's his title. He's a great friend of mine and been a good mentor to me and shares 50,000 foot corporate level thoughts and strategies with just a simple guy like me trying to sell beer and I'm forever grateful to him for treating me as an equal when we're certainly not. I think Colin, certainly Dean Ivey at the CVC, she's been here long enough. She was here when Opulent closed and saw that transition that Butch led. Butch did a really good job of saying, here's where we are. I'm going to get us there. And if you got in his way, ran you over. And that was his style. Either get on board or get the fuck out of the way. That's it. And some people like that style and some people don't.

45:36I think it's hard to argue. Sure, did he make a mistake here? Did he make a mistake there? But the overwhelming result has been tremendous success almost unparalleled in the country. We need people to step up now and rebrand us and say, you know, if we don't have that spot like Butch laid out for us and grab 20 or 30 people in the city. And that's really all it was. There's probably 20 or 30 of them that made this happen. And then all the Johnny come lately is the high risers and the developers and everybody bitching that our music's too loud and Broadway's too tacky. Well, we weren't too tacky when you decided to stick a Four Seasons up beside us. Now Four Seasons wants to bitch because our music's too loud. I never understood that. Yeah, don't build here. I remember Soul Shine was on Division Street. We had Winners, Losers, all these different bars on Division Street. And they started building these high rises around it.

46:44The Adalisha and I don't even know all the other ones. But then they started complaining that there's too loud. I'm like, you moved next to a live venue spot. And they got up to stop them. They didn't close it and do the whole thing. Like if you're moving next to Broadway or you're building a hotel next to Broadway, that's what Broadway is. And it baffles me that people complain about that. Yeah, I think our city caused a little bit of this. You know, I think the codes department probably should have saw that collision coming. It wasn't that hard to see. And said, hey, maybe we need to make sure that high rises within a certain radius of Broadway are built like they are beside an airport. You know, we've got a beautiful new hotel at Nashville Airport now. And when you're sitting inside there, you can't hear the planes. That's how the Four Seasons should have been built. And I'm just picking on Four Seasons. There's a host of people down there now that don't want what built the popularity to exist. There's certainly a feeling between stakeholders on Broadway that no one wants us there anymore.

48:03What's your take on transportation? It I've got a mixed feeling on that. I think it's critical to offer something besides what we were offering. Just roll into a bar and hear the music and go to the next one. People want to get outside. That's why there's rooftops. That's why there's beach chairs. You know, Broadway is our beach. You know, that's a great way to put it. You know, so people want to interact. I've always said for years and years that Broadway is its own character. It's alive. And if you don't feed something that's alive, it's going to die. And I have for years have said that we shouldn't be so cocky to think that Broadway can't be like Daytona Beach or Panama City Beach or Chicago. You know, there's lots of examples of very popular entertainment areas that weren't nurtured and weren't protected and they died. Or they let them repeat, rinse and repeat. You know, Panama City is a great example.

49:19When I grew up, that's where we went in the 80s. And they slowly but surely every store was an airbrush store. And then every store became a rental place for mopeds. You know, there wasn't an airbrush store. And then when the airbrush went out of style, those businesses, there wasn't anything that could generate that kind of money. So you can't rent them. So the buildings became vacant. And then you get the broken window effect. And that's Panama City's really never came out of that, you know, to where it was such a beacon of a destination in the 80s. It's doing you know, it still has a hell of a lot of people going to it. Don't get me wrong. But I think the folks that I know in the industry down there were like, we'd rather have a little more families, you know, a better balance than just spring break every night. That's what Destin has. Yeah. And you know, I think I think my friends that are in the industry on 38 would say that they've done a bad job of controlling growth. You know, you can't get around down there now. And now you're starting to bicycle. Yeah, not many adults want to go drink beer and eat dinner and ride around in 90 degrees on a bicycle. You know, they want to be able to get an Uber or, you know, walk or do something else without getting run over. So, you know, there's a lot of examples of where other places didn't control it. And that's what happened here with entertainment vehicles. We pushed, you know, it's one that got by Butch, you know, I was like, Butch, we got a problem.

50:59We need to address this. It's the Wild West. If we don't control it, it's going to get away from us. And my friend Megan was our mayor at that point. Megan Berry. Yeah. And you know, she had some issues. And so her administration kind of ended and then we were in flux for a while. And then when John Cooper got in, it had kind of already blown up at that point, and he couldn't put the genie back in the bottle. So the state stepped in when the city tried to really come down too hard and try to put everybody out of business. And my argument was they're here now, let's regulate it, let's tax it just like they do us. And, you know, try to treat it like medallions was my idea. Like New York City cabs used to be very valuable. You said there's 100 medallions, you guys bid on it and let the dust settle. Yeah, I agree with that. It got to a point where there's just hundreds of them everywhere. And it was just, I mean, people out here would complain, I hate those things. And I'm like, people are having a blast on them. But I mean, if there's so many that it makes sense. Yeah, that was the argument I pushed back on, on trying to run them out of business.

52:17You know, people out here in Williamson County that go down four times a year to a Preds game and want to bitch about it. You know, well, you know, sorry for your four times. You know, Williamson County isn't exactly generating the LBD taxes that we are down there. But they sure like to come to our party. You know, and then complain about your party bitch about the party, just stay out here. You know, if you don't like it. You know, when you look at that, that segment a few years ago, it generated about $165 million a year. Wow. So somebody likes it. That's what I would say. Well, you see the people on, you know, if you're just, I'm one of those people who goes to Preds games or concerts. And that's the reason why I don't drink alcohol. So it's just not like my scene. I'm a domesticated guy. I'm just, I'm not like, we got to work on you. This is how I used to be. I used to like, you know, go do that stuff. But, um, I, you watch these people and I used to drive Uber back a little way. I had a heart condition. I had heart surgery and I said, I'm gonna pay it off. I wanted to do it because I wanted to see what it was like driving the people around. I love Nashville. I loved telling the story of where people should really go.

53:40Instead of just sitting in a car going, where do you want to go? Like, I know the city. I know everything about it. I used to drive people to the Parthenon, like just because you got to see it while you're here. You're not going to charge me like, no, you just got to see Nashville. And I loved it. Um, but every time it like it would rain and people would ask, what do they do with the people in the, the, the buses and stuff when it rains, I go, oh, it's like gasoline on the fire. I mean, like when there's a bunch of Bachelorettes on it and it starts raining that, that's it. They're having the time of their life on those things. And I see them and I go, I don't care. Good for them. Have a blast. But when there's 150 of them in a night, it's just, it's a lot of saturation. Yeah. And you know, and it got out of hand and I certainly was respectful and still am of, of businesses that have normal office hours. And it's distracting. If you spend $70 million on an office complex with glass windows and everybody's in a conference room and then right outside the window, you know, they're playing, you know, Shania Twain and half-necked and you're trying to have a mediation with some lawyers I can get, you know, certainly that it's distracting and that wasn't helpful. I think where the city made a mistake is not addressing the fact that the genie was out of the bottle. They put all their energy in killing it.

55:08And what they should have done in my opinion was say, let's limit it, let's contain it, let's regulate it and give them enough oxygen to make a good living and contribute to the tax base, but not at the jeopardy of other people. Just a simple route would have fixed it. And you know, we had dozens and dozens of conversations on, you know, maybe we say they can't run Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. They can only run after five. They got to be done by 10. Try some things like that. Sure. They didn't really go down that path. They went down. Let's just extinguish them. And I'm just as an American business owner, the government, whether it's the city, the state or the feds shouldn't be in the business of restricting someone to put them out of business. I agree. If they wanted to say, we're not going to let any more, everybody that's in business that has a business license, insurance and a website show up at the Music City Convention Center and we're going to give you a medallion. We're not giving any more out. And here are the new rules. And as these medallions go out of business because maybe the rules have changed, then you just say, OK, now we're down to 50. And this is our number and that's a healthy number to have. And, you know, it is what it is.

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58:39That's C-H-A-R-P-I-E-R-S dot com and they have pictures of all of the bread that they can have for you and contact information. Go check them out Sharpieres Bakery. Well you know what I love about talking to you is not that you're complaining. You're stating facts and then you're stating what you actually did to try and help fix the situation. There's so many people just complain or they blame or they just throw these I don't like them. You looked at it in a logical sense. Looked at it from all different standpoints. Went to the right people and stated your case and I love it. Thank you for what you're doing to help the city. Well and I don't want to take credit for it as much as I might have been the one that was comfortable enough politically and in my own business scale I guess to where I would speak up. I wasn't worried that I was going to make somebody mad because generally the leadership were my friends. So it's like talking to you. You know I could just say hey you know this is what I'm hearing and I was you know in a position over the the Merchants Association. So a lot of that time my job if you will or my volunteer position was to represent 40 restaurants and bars. So sometimes I was the megaphone but it was somebody else's idea. You know whether it was Brenda or Betsy or Jack or whoever. Brian Taylor and they would say hey man here's an idea and I would take all the good ideas and I would present them. So they weren't all buried ideas by any means. I was just the guy that was comfortable enough to say you know here's an alternative. But that's leadership man. That's that's leadership. Or dummy being I don't know which. You know you made a statement earlier you said that people

01:00:40you talked about Butch and you said he made some mistakes here or there and I'm like I think that people have to recognize that at this level people are going to make how do we know what works everybody makes mistakes. This is this is the world we live in and I don't think that we give any grace to people to see some of the great things they're doing and to say hey that wasn't that was an error. People like Butch learn from those things. Real leaders are out there with it all on the table making mistakes all the time. That's how you grow and I love that. I love people that make mistakes because that means you're out there trying. If you don't if you don't you know there's an old restaurateur guy that you know was a generation or two ahead of me Dave Wattell. Oh yeah I knew Dave and his son. And I know Dave well and you know he had a saying that you're not going to hit a home run if you don't swing the bat. Don't worry about the strikeouts you know or something like that. I'm paraphrasing but you know he would say that and it's like kind of like Butch you know in the city and in Carl Dean's administration you know and I'll tell you somebody that I feel like doesn't get near the accolades for having an opportunity like I do to try to solve a problem that we may have. A lot of cities would love to have our problems. You know I have to remind people of that. You know hey this traffic sucks. You know what does it look like downtown Chicago right now? You know not a lot of traffic jams. So be cautious about what you bitch about because I can remember when Broadway because I can remember when Broadway you could run a tank down the road and you wouldn't hit anyone you know and that wasn't too many years ago. So you know when Butch was doing this and and the mayor's offices were all of it was built on the back of one guy really and a couple of guys

01:02:44Dave Cooley and Mayor Bredesen at the time. Dave was the chief of staff I think that was his title he was his right-hand man whatever the title was and when the tornado went through Broadway the city had a decision to make. Are we going to let what's there rebuild? Are we going to pivot? And they condemned the buildings rightfully so and that's what spurred it. When Mayor Bredesen decided to put the Bridgestone building where it is now people have an amnesia about what happened then. He was on an island almost by himself wanting to put it down there. My family was one that was adamantly opposed to putting it in downtown you know some of it selfishly because Opryland was still rolling so we didn't want to create two entertainment areas when you only had five or six million people visiting town you knew you were you're going to make it and then Opryland closed so it kind of fixed that but every city in America was putting their arenas on the outskirts of the urban core and Mayor Bredesen at the time said we're going to go the opposite and everybody you know he got beat up for it he was right you know people rename roads around here pretty regular now you know and Phil would never want to name a road after him but why Fifth Avenue isn't named Phil Bredesen way it baffles me because without his administration and the business acumen that he had Broadway's mowed down there's a bunch of bullshit buildings down there and there's no honky-tonks there's no four seasons all of that was built Carl Dean's group did a really good job of building on the back of that maybe let the cart go a little bit on some of this big stuff you know maybe we could have you know putting on our hindsight 2020

01:04:48glasses you know maybe we should have tightened up a little bit or put some sunsets into some deals or they just wouldn't last forever but Bredesen really did a lot that he's kind of faded into the background and always like to give credit where credit's due he's a very nice guy too as a regular one of my restaurants and he's always just the kindest I guess and you meet people in a restaurant they're always very nice but I've always really enjoyed talking with him anytime I've got to spend time with Mayor Bredesen yeah Broadway would not be here if it wasn't for him and Cooley and in that group that he trusted and then you know I'll go right back to it Brenda Sanderson and Steve Smith you know they rolled the dice with Jeff Rippey Steve and them did on Rippey's on the corner who would have ever thought that corner would have done I mean I think they had the idea it would work you're going across from an arena that isn't magical but damn it's it's going on 26 years now and it's kicking ass still I think people think this happened overnight and it didn't I mean I've been here since 88 and when I was in 95 96 97 I mean Tom Morales with Dancing in the District and Tom Katz and everything he did around that and then we used to go cruise 2nd Avenue that was the the spot oh yeah I think and I've said this on the show many times I think that the biggest turnaround for that downtown area was the Hard Rock Cafe because there really wasn't any reason to go downtown if you're a family of any kind of course you have the spaghetti factory and things but like right when that Hard Rock went in all of a sudden it was like Nashville was on the map like I think what it did is it gave it validity it gave it yeah but it yeah then then we got a planet Hollywood that went in with that big that put us national and then that put it then all of a sudden it was like hey you can go downtown again and that brought people from the suburbs

01:06:54to downtown and then I think that spurred up going hey we have other people coming down here now and that's when gift shops and maybe that was big and then I think Tootsies and there was the Bluegrass Inn at the time and Roberts and BR 549 then all of a sudden there was a BR 549 was as instrumental and and I was I was just talking with uh either Tennessee leadership or Nashville leadership they had me and Tommy and Brenda and Ruble and Brad and several of us there to talk to them about the old days me kind of in the middle and then had some new folks you know that where we're at now and it hit me at the time touching on what you're saying it was a series of unplanned dominoes almost if Opryland theme park doesn't close downtown doesn't get the focus if the tornado didn't hit Broadway and rip it to hell the opportunity to rebuild rippies and those buildings down through there that were the old strip joints that doesn't happen if Dave Wattell doesn't invest in Mayor Bulls on Second Avenue and you don't have Mulligans and you don't have Tommy Morales talk about somebody that put his neck on the line holy shit there was no economic reason to do dancing in the district and think it was going to be successful the best thing that ever happened in Nashville it should have buried him financially underground and it didn't and then you've got Roberts that had BR 549 playing all at the same time and you had this magic potion and you had Steve and Ruble and Brenda and them doing what they were doing so and back then everybody was on the same team now it doesn't feel like the city's on our team interesting it doesn't it doesn't feel the same and that's not a shot at Freddie you know Mayor O'Connell right now or the current

01:08:56council it's not a shot at anybody individually and I almost feel like the magic that made it all happen back then the little bitty things the building blocks that one thing led to another led to another and then you get plenty Hollywood without Bridgestone and the Preds and the Titans Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock don't come here now when there's a NASCAR cafe yeah I mean that was another big national thing the NASCAR cafe which is now Aldean's but then it was Cadillac Ranch Tequila Cowboy and then yeah I mean there's a lot of different things down there yeah but all those little things stacked on top of each other I think that's where we're now on the reverse it's all these little things that the the puzzle got put together back then certainly not by accident but maybe by haps hapistance a little bit and a little luck you know it's gonna have a little luck and you had administrations in office at the time that were business people they were financially successful they had made payroll they had built companies or managed companies and they unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit of people like me and and all the people I've mentioned throughout this broadcast and they turned us loose and they got the hell out of the way now we feel more as stakeholders down there when we sit around and talk and this has happened a lot in the last six months where we get together and just sit have a drink it's not fun anymore Bill Miller said it the other day and Layla were sitting there and Bill and I had had a conversation before we sat down and he was like man it's just didn't fun that the fun's leaving and we sat and then an hour later we're all sitting there and Layla goes this just isn't fucking fun anymore guys and I was like damn Bill just said that and Jesse had said it two weeks before and

01:10:58and there's this sense that the puzzle's getting unwound you know the pieces are getting pulled out it's a it's a city that takes a priority and puts a bike lane that's dedicated for bikes in an area that should be a valet for a hotel or a restaurant those are the priorities that the city have decided over the last three to five years that that's a priority and they don't care necessarily about that that business can't get a beer delivery it's more important to have a dedicated bike lane in the middle of downtown where for the most part nobody rides a damn bike anyways and if they do they should just assimilate in traffic it shouldn't be we aren't going to let a hotel have a valet because we need a dedicated bike lane for five bikes a day that's going to piss off a lot of people if they hear this that you know I work with in the downtown bubble there's a lot of them that are just bikes or the end all be all because that'll solve the traffic congestion I'm just not a believer of that I don't think that a business person is going to hop on a bike in their suit and ride to work every day you know or a bartender you're in the industry how many bartenders are going to get on a bike at three o'clock in the morning with their cash tips and ride out of broadway to go to German town on a bike I don't know I mean no one yeah I'm not it's nuts and it's uphill we have seasons I mean it's cold I mean it's 30 degrees outside I mean 100 degrees outside there's four months out of the year where that would be enjoyable and I have an e-bike that I ride all over here yeah but it's an electric bike and I'll go my haircut and I'll ride my e-bike over there but it's less than a mile and I use no but it's only when it's nice outside which is you can count on how many hands well and you've got the bubble you know where years and years ago a lot of downtown workers lived in downtown or in close

01:13:03proximity over in east Nashville you know places like that as the real estate has exploded those people have been pushed out the way out so how the hell are they going to get down there they're not going to ride a bike they need to be able to drive a car you know we don't have a train that runs worth the shit was what Kerry was saying that you know instead of adding lanes we added bike lanes and now that you know you get to the buddy killing circle and it's traffic all the way down music row and they could have added they put a bike lane in there and you now they spend 13 million dollars or so in that buddy killing circle area and totally screwed it up totally screwed it it's the dumbest design of anything i've seen in our you know 12th avenue is a close second to being who the hell designed this thing and they probably spent 20 million dollars on 12th avenue for for five bikes you know it's like we spend Carl Dean was fantastic how many hundreds of millions of dollars have we spent at this point buying and developing greenways got a wonderful greenway system for bikes i'm not saying there's not an area in downtown that you couldn't run a bike lane maybe at riverfront park to connect every road down there and tie it back to the greenway and over to the east Nashville i'm okay with bikes i'm fine with it but that's not a solute it's not a re a sane solution to our traffic issues what would you do i mean is it a thing the mayor to say hey i fucked up my bad can we fix it i think i mean is that something that like a mayor could even say or does he admitting defeat and he doesn't get re-elected because he spent 13 million dollars and that didn't work is this where i i said mistakes are okay i think if if the mayor walked up to a podium tomorrow and said hey i made some mistakes this i thought this was going to be great and it's wrong and it wasn't for local businesses and i've done the wrong thing and we're going to fix it without that was that what you want him to say

01:15:05what would you want the mayor to do yeah and i'm a friend of freddy's you know he was a council he was a council member downtown and i was over the merchants for those years and we work great and we're still buddies and laugh and talk now um i don't know the answer to personally what i like to see anytime somebody makes a mistake including myself i think it's better to own it and and pivot don't just lay there in the mistake so whether it's mayoral connell or my managers you know i think that's a good that's a good um it's a good way to be in in business and in anything else but i do think that he understands there's been some serious issues with indot he didn't create indot he inherited indot that was the former for people that don't know that used to be public works and then they took everything in the city that was in and around public works and created this behemoth agency called indot that handles everything from lanes and of traffic traffic lights potholes if you need to close the road because you're building a building that's who you go through i feel like the department's too big um personally but they didn't ask me now i i will say i think he's done like this year we had the ice storms and you had and now i don't i'm not getting into the politics behind that but i've noticed in his administration when it snows they proactively get out and they do the streets like the streets have been very passable yes i've noticed that like in previous administrations it's been why can't we get out and and and get the streets cleaned off because it's three or four days and like next day they are on it now are there still potholes yes did nes cut budgets that now trees are falling on lines yes i think he took a real proactive approach to uh making sure that we do and that's one aspect that i think he's done a good job at i think that i would agree with that um i think that's a good example of something where

01:17:10if you've got a finite blinders almost we're going to deal with removing ice they've done a good job i think where endod is spread so thin across so many segments that touch so many businesses that that's where they get lost is it's not that one singular thing that stands out five days out of the year it's the other 360 that we're stumping our toe i will give the mayor huge kudos on making a leadership change at endot the removal of diana alicorn um i think will give the agency a better chance at prioritizing what's affecting most nashvillians you know most nashvillians that i talked to weren't concerned that we didn't have enough dedicated bike lanes they weren't concerned about speed bumps in neighborhoods that they didn't ask for they didn't ask for lebanon road to have um their street speed limits reduced to a ridiculously low amount it seemed like the agency got into areas that there wasn't anybody dealing with there wasn't a problem and so they kind of got lost in the weeds over there and hopefully uh the gentleman that's the interim director right now he's a fantastic guy been around philip uh his name and he's the current uh interim director of endod and uh he's been in the agency and in nashville for decades so he kind of gets nashville guys we are talking today about cooler control solutions ccs this is what i was talking about at the beginning of the show they are a company that installs a system that reduces the humidity in your walk-in cooler this helps restaurants improve food quality extend shelf life and reduced waste by controlling humidity and ethylene gas inside walk-in coolers so this is really amazing if you're having a

01:19:13problem with your lettuces your food not lasting long you get that browning the tip burn this will reduce that it actually saves energy cost because it removes the humidity inside of your walk-in cooler which means it actually cools colder one of the really great applications we're talking to barrett hobbs and bars is it will help keep your beer coolers five degrees colder and it cools it a lot faster so if there's a cooler that you're opening a whole bunch this will keep it colder longer this is really really amazing it's a simple no disruption solution it installs in minutes there's no staff training required and works in the background look guys this delivers fast measurable roi with operators seeing improvements in quality efficiency and operating costs this is a no-brainer uh this is brand new to the area i'm so excited i'm going to bring pete rodriguez on the show to explain more about it if you want to learn more about ccs cooler control solutions give him a call six one five five six seven three zero one four very excited to be partnering with c and b linen if you know me it's my number one topic of conversation is linen companies and how shady linen companies can be i have just discussed it with how the business practices work in this industry which is why i was so excited when i found c and b linen they're at a waynesboro tennessee and they don't charge any fees so the linen price that you have whatever that first linen price is that's your price and so you may say well every year they must raise the price on this seven-year contract right no because they don't do any contracts there's no gas fees there's no clean green service fees there's no replacement cost there's nothing the only price you pay is the price that you pay for the actual product i know it's too good to be true no

01:21:15contracts they do formats uh they'll make custom formats for you they do fresh linens cleaning supplies and guys i just did a tour of their facility and it is immaculate it is state of the art uh i'm going to post pictures on my instagram you can go find them and you can see how absolutely gorgeous this is to the point that they even wash and sanitize every one of their used laundry carts it's just absolutely amazing if you're looking for a linen company you can trust who wants to earn your business every single week go back and listen to our episode with jason cruise the owner of cmb linen hear it from his straight from his mouth exactly what they do or you give them a call at nine three one seven two two seventy six sixteen or you can dm me at brandon still on instagram for my exclusive pricing through the nashville area restaurant alliance super excited today to introduce you to twine graphics yes in-house screen printing and embroidery for brands events in organizations they handle everything from small runs to national scale production all in house their facility is in downtown franklin i have had the pleasure of meeting brandon and john over there and they are absolutely invested in making sure you have the absolute best shirts if you have merch if you have hats if you want stickers they do screen printing embroidery uh they also do promo gear mugs key chains lanyards oh my we can put your logo on just about anything reach out to them to see all the options you're looking for they do digital printing signs so many options with twine graphics they are local and they absolutely care about making it right and doing a fantastic job go visit them at twine graphics that's t w i n e graphics.com you know we've been talking for an hour and i um i had a whole slew of questions

01:23:20you want to rapid fire me no okay i am absolutely loving this conversation i had no idea where it would go today yeah i didn't know i didn't know where it would go i had a you know you've built one of my questions you built one of the most successful bar groups in nashville what's something people think they understand about the business but they're completely wrong about i didn't know where to go yeah but i have absolutely thoroughly enjoyed every part of this and i'm i'm if if what how's your time look i'm okay you're okay yeah i'm good hell yeah i want to keep keep rolling and edit me out man there's not going to be any editing there's i don't edit these i just if there's something you want me to take out i'll take it out but i don't i don't do that we just had carrie on the show you referenced you listened to a clip on that and kind of brought you to the show so property taxes is a major conversation with a lot of people you've got a couple places downtown uh after the episode with carrie i do i do something called the gordon food service final thought okay at the end of each episode where i kind of surmised the episode and i'll do that for this episode as well kind of what my overall thoughts are for the episode but in that episode i said we're hearing a lot about property taxes going up and that businesses are going to close that this is something and and it it is a real thing the assessor coming in and triple net leases and if you're already really tight but you just told me you're gonna have one of the best years you ever had at the nashville palace i don't know how that translates to the rest of your businesses is i said there's a new nashville 20 years ago this was a handshake town i felt like if i looked you in the eye and i said hey i'm gonna do this for you and i shook your hand my word is my bond all the people that you sit around with all the people you referenced before the jesse lee's and the the bill miller all the people that you're drinking with talking about

01:25:20this ain't fun anymore right um i think it used to be smaller and i think we have so much influence from other cities and we have so many chains coming into town and there's so much big business and private equity money that the new nashville isn't a handshake town it's a contract town and it's a fuck you town and that's mine and you know i think one of the questions i had a restaurant owner asked me the day is look the guy that owns acme just made 40 million on this building or whatever the assessment was right maybe is it just greed how come he can't step in and help that to preserve acme from being there and it's like carrie's take was what that's it's his business he signed a triple net lease that's the way that it works and i think the new nashville isn't as friendly i think the new nashville is more of a we're a big city now and i used to love the fact that you could go to a professional hockey game and you'd go to an nfl game but i would see 50 people at that game that i knew right and it doesn't happen as much anymore it's all you know i used to go to preds games and there were standing ovations during intermissions because the the fans were there these were nashvillians in 1998 who went to the games when there was 2000 people there and now it's all corporations that bought up all the season tickets and they're just sending clients in and the games are not as fun as they used to be and i think that it's a microcosm for what you're talking about going to preds games are still fun and i have a good time with it but it's not the same as it used to be no it's just saturated and it's become i go to nashville sc games because it is great that that is like where the fans have gone to is the nashville c i guess i say all of this to say i feel like there's a new nashville and instead of complaining about what nashville was or isn't anymore what do we need to do to either a own the fact that

01:27:28this is nashville or b how do we take it back how do we how do we bring back that handshake deal these are my friends he said he's going to do it his word is his bond vendors that actually care about working with small businesses is it possible i think so it starts with leadership you know it's going to have to come you know whether you voted for mayor o'connell or you didn't he's our mayor whether you voted for governor lee or you didn't he's our governor and it's really going to take um now as governor lee transitions out and we'll have a new governor um there's going to have to be a working relationship and i will give mayor o'connell credit and speaker sexton credit um the relationship between the city and the state was at at all time historical low when freddy came into office as bad as it could get it's not perfect by a long stretch it will never be perfect um but they have both um i'm proud of both of them for trying to find areas of of cooperation to move nashville forward and for it to continue to be successful they both have done a very good job with that being said we're going to need more we've got it's the simple answer to me is that atmosphere has to be a priority from leadership out of city hall it it starts and ends with them you know butch was a force of his own dina does a fantastic job to your point back then butch had a 10 block area that he really had to concentrate on now it's almost county to edge of the county to the edge of the county why it's out there there's a whole host

01:29:30of reasons of why the entertainment has spread out so i don't think it's possible for the cvc to whip that atmosphere like they used to what does the cvc do and i know dina has been with them for a long time and now she's running the thing but like yeah what did she inherit like what what does she do every day for the city because they're not what they do and what they were designed to do are two different things um and the primary function of that department or that entity not a department that entity is to sell the city they're out there to say come to nashville don't go to chicago you know or don't go to san antonio come to nashville they're our sales group that's what their primary job is now when butch was there he kind of had to wear multiple hats he was not only selling to the vacationer to come here and go to the grand old opry and go do some other things enjoy the live music he was selling events bring your nfl draft to nashville things like that so you know i think if you had dina sitting here and you probably had but sitting here they would say man we'd like to just sell the city but part of that was during our growth was making sure the city was safe it was clean the customers that came here enjoyed their experience and so they would get drug into you know block to block political battles that really they weren't set up to be a part of thankfully they got in the fight because they swing a big stick and we needed them and we needed them to stand shoulder to shoulder with us to say we're a tourism hospitality based town and we're going to make sure that they're protected but they can only do so much so back to your answer to your question the council

01:31:33of the city of nashville has got to change their priorities and know that whatever their priorities are they're funded by tourism they're not funded by anything else they're not funded by bike lanes they're not funded by parks they're not funded by schools they're not funded by neighborhoods they're funded by tourism and there's this anti-tourism or anti-downtown mentality not all of them but enough of them to where everything we do in downtown take lprs for instance right now you know it's a big thing it is absolutely ridiculous the argument that the council puts forward of why we shouldn't have lprs lpr license plate readers oh you know in and around downtown every county around davidson county arrest our criminals because they break the law here then they steal a car and they drive to wilson county try to steal shit there and their license plate readers catch them and then they bring our criminals back listen i feel like this is the duality of our city if you're on the council who do you represent your constituents supposed to right and the constituents don't care about downtown because i live in donelson i don't live in donelson but if i live in donelson i want to care about my council member caring about donelson and then if i'm in green hills if i'm wherever hendersonville i want my council person caring about me and making my life every day better but the economic engine is those seven blocks yeah that brings everything in so it's a there's this duality of well we don't want to care about that and we cannot like that because that gets all the attention but we want the attention to be in east nashville because that's where our

01:33:35local restaurants are but if we don't have broadway then we don't have the tax funds we don't have the funds to pay for the 85 percent of the schools and all of these things so where do you focus your energy because i think if you're a council member and this is where i would say local elections matter way more way more than anything and so few people vote in these local elections and who you're electing under council really affects your daily life i think everybody complains about the president or they complain about the governor but like really your council's the ones who are making the decisions on your life block to block battles are fought by your local elections and you're 100 right at the lack of understanding how everything's tied together is critical and then not voting is horrible even if you don't vote for who i want you to vote for we cannot agree on that candidate but go punch the button somebody died for you to be able to punch the button the least you can do is get off your ass and go punch the button 100 educate yourself as much as you can and think just think for yourself don't listen to the ads and what you touched on a second ago if you live in donelson or belview and you want sewers you want better street lights you want your your street sweepers to keep your road clean you want more police officer faster fire trucks whatever it is better schools whatever your particular priority is we don't have an income tax in the state of tennessee that would get that would push down to the city and i'm glad we don't i don't want one but you've only got two choices it's either off of sales tax and liquor by the drink tax or it's property tax hotel tax hotel tax consumer taxes you know throw all those in there so you've got a choice as you sit in your recliner in donelson or belview or jolten or madison east

01:35:40nashville wherever you are and you're listening to this either plan on your property tax doubling in the next 10 years or you better support tourism and consumer based taxes and you need to tell your council people whatever you do don't let downtown go down because if downtown goes down everybody else is and then educate yourself on the city budget it's boring nobody wants to do it but when almost 80 percent of your budget already goes to the schools and then you got to pay for fire and police police and those kind of things infrastructure infrastructure pension all that comes out of that last quarter that the schools don't get so there's not a lot left you know out of that last quarter so you better make sure broadway's got as many girls down there woohoo girls you either need woohoo girls on broadway or your property taxes are going to go up can't have it both ways you know but it's got to be a priority that the mayor's office has got to stand up in front of the council and tell the council we have to keep downtown clean and safe we've got to pass regulatory changes to help a chef that wants to come to nashville that may be in three other cities and this is their fourth location we've got to get aggressive about making sure that they have valet that's affordable the average listener is not going to know in dots regulations and rules where if you want a valet forty thousand dollars a year for a restaurant you know some of them are that high it's like why would you put a restaurant in downtown or if you're going to build a hotel they don't want you to have a valet because they want uber parking or a dedicated bike lane nobody's going to build a damn hotel in downtown nashville without a valet we got a lot of hotels it's priorities it's just are we going to go back to we want to be number one in hospitality

01:37:48we used to be ranked as one of the nicest cities in america we're not anymore no no no part of it's kind of what you said you know you got hedge funds coming in opening up bars and restaurants and things and you've lost that local touch and that's fine i'm not anti big business hell i'm pro all business but you can't you can't have people like carrie bringle not be able to get food delivered to his truck to his restaurant because end dot screwed up the roads you can't have a person like carrie bringle or barrett hobs or name the next the goldbergs you know anybody that's out there you can't expect us to keep trying to put authentic nashville properties in if you're constantly chipping away at us well i think what you're you're going to start seeing is a lot of these people now you guys you just named some of the biggest people in town i'm talking about the sean lions of the world the naima walker fierce with germantown pub and germantown cafe park cafe all these local restaurants that are the reason why so many people they celebrate birthdays they they create the culture of this city they're going away we just i just had nick gendry on from pelican and pig and he announced that he was closing the pelican and pig after eight years now that's not a 40-year restaurant but i mean that's a local restaurant the one that eater nashville restaurant of the year in 2019 that just can't make it here's you a number 245 beer licenses were turned in from april 1st back to october 1st in davidson county turned in as if we don't need them anymore 241 business 245 240 from october 1st to april 1st do you know how many of those were locally owned and operated no but i would have to think 70 80 percent so 70 80 percent of those i guess which is you know 175 180

01:39:51restaurants that are locally on an operator they're going away and what's coming in what's replacing those which i think is what the mayor said look if tom if you want to close acme close it somebody else will come in and buy that building and pay those taxes eventually they won't the mayor's wrong but the mayor's wrong on that but because somebody will come in and pay that no because you know and and i think freddie would probably like and i don't mean that disrespectfully to call him freddie hell i've just known him forever you know i think freddie would probably like to rephrase that and i don't take his words with the microphone in his face i know the man and i know he doesn't want tommy morales not in business and i know that i agree and and but he's the boss and he said it so you got to own the words good example to you brought up earlier be a hell of a good time for freddie to take all of the mayor and the city employees and go eat at tommy's and say hey man this kind of came out wrong and eat a little crow on it let's let's work together i think that would be a nice thing to see happen they're both my friends so i would like to see that i don't know that that'll happen i'm not an advisor to freddie not going to listen to me on it but i would like to see that but where i know he's wrong is roi is your return on investment i don't care is somebody smarter than tommy morales in downtown nashville to run a property no but it's a lost leader to have your location in nashville to say that you have that acme spot and somebody with more money than they know what to do with wants that as their own personal you know you look at these people these billionaires that have right like canes yeah canes is a great example i just i just want to have a spot there so i can tell people i'm downtown nashville somebody will buy that spot right at the corner of first avenue and broadway across from the hard rock i want my name on that yeah and i'm willing to pay whatever

01:41:55it is to get it and i think that's where he was right because if tommy went away tomorrow short somebody's gonna take that building well maybe let's let's look at that so right now there's between six and nine properties for sale on broadway guess how many have had an offer in the last eight months one really and it was a 40 percent haircut they had 80 million tied up in it they got offered 35 34 million dollars somewhere in that neighborhood so it's not as hot as i was thinking i just remember like shaughnocky's sitting there for yeah i bet 10 years smith outbid me on that one yep yep i screwed up there and this is where i was saying it took a long time to build broadway is that shaughnocky's was empty for how many years do you know how many years it was i remember some of it was tied up because of the estate when the man gentleman and the wife got attacked and one of them got murdered oh i think the wife was the one that murdered was murdered and the husband was injured to where he couldn't um he was bedridden if i remember i might be a little off but his estate was overseas and there wasn't an executor so there was some bullshit for a couple years with that but to your point it took a while for it to come back and then steve did fantastic with it he did i mean that that hunky-tonk central is a it's a pillar it's right there i mean you were talking the location it was the catalyst used to you called fifth to fourth on broadway the golden block you know that was far and away the highest tax collecting area in the southeast per square foot wow and then third to fourth is now and hunky-tonk central was central and joe fields john fields with the redevelopment of nascar cafe i feel like whiskey bench certainly played in that oh reds coming in third to fourth now is far and away the number one tax collector down there um you know um and it's it's because of a bunch of great operators

01:44:00with that being said if if if anybody could go into acme right now why aren't they buying these other properties now acme's got a great location but if you really look at foot traffic and you follow cellular phone data it's not the number one location it's not so this is huge the other ones you know take john bon jovi's property why is nobody buying that great spot tons of cell phones because it doesn't make sense with the math that's where the assessor's office is screwed up mathematically did they do it correctly yes on the assessments of the property areas down there but two things can be correct at the same time one can she by law have followed the formula correctly yes at the same time the formula can be fucked up and that's what we've got you know you can take bankers that will go down there and won't loan anywhere near the money on those properties that they say it's worth so earlier you brought up the acme building and the folks that own that they got a 40 million dollar increase in value you know okay nobody's going to pay them for it but they're getting taxed no it's it's unrealized taxes they're taxing them in advance so what i always want to ask our our elected officials let's take that one eventually the bubble is going to burst and then they'll reassess it and it's going to go from let's say it's at 60 million now in 10 years it'll probably be back in the 30s you know it's it's even with see i think with the new stadium and the east bank development i think it's going to bring i think we're still going to continue to grow and i think with i think the east bank will with all the east bank well i think that that first avenue is kind of the end i don't know i just feel like going to bring more people to town how they're going to get over there it's fair let's just play this out okay they're going to uber the roads can't do it walking bridge okay it's february and it's 38 degrees

01:46:04and raining who's walking you're going to see the bachelors walking across that thing i think what you'll see is development out dickerson road north first you're going to see that pie if you lay down a slice of pizza going towards dickerson road in braley parkway and that's the crust the point is coming down to like where the juvenile court center is yeah okay you follow me region exactly where if you take 50 million dollars you can buy a half a mile of dickerson road you take 50 million dollars you can buy 6 000 square feet on broadway where are you going with your money if your leadership team is not on the same page and you are constantly having these long meetings and you're not getting traction this is your opportunity today i'm talking about the entrepreneurial operating system eos yes it is based around the book by gino wickman and traction we use it at our restaurants they use it at frothy monkey they use it at edley's barbecue they use it at carrington row germantown cafe park cafe lots of restaurants are using it because it helps and let me tell you today justin cook is a great facilitator justin helps business owners and their leadership teams implement the entrepreneurial operating system which is a set of simple practical tools disciplines to help you get better at three things vision traction and to be healthy vision is getting you and your leadership team 100 on the same page with who you are where you're going and how you're going to get there traction is helping your leaders become more disciplined and accountable to execute on the right things that will make your vision become reality because a lot of times you're doing a lot of stuff but not the right stuff healthy is helping your leaders become a healthy functional cohesive leadership team because unfortunately leaders don't function well as a team if you start with the leaders the rest of the organization will follow and you'll get to a point to where your entire team is crystal clear on vision everywhere

01:48:05you look people are executing the things that make your vision come true and it's a great healthy fun place to work if that resonates with you you can email justin right now at justin.cook at eosworldwide.com or you can call him 615-336-7133 to see if eos is a right fit for you he will come down and do an initial kind of introduction and ask you a bunch of questions it is totally free definitely call justin today diggers and rhodes sound pretty appealing at this point i'm not saying that i'm not bullish still on broadway but you know if the city and the state and i've been championing this and i'm nuts and there's probably a great reason they hadn't done it but i was sitting i was sitting at disney world several years ago and i called mayor cooper and i said hey man let's see he goes hey what's going on i said not much i said i'm sitting here at disney world and my family's on this ride and i'm gonna send you a video so i sent in the video of the overhead gondolas that are now connecting all of disney world's parks and i'm kind of a nerd about business i like digging into numbers disney world almost called a moppy land disney world moves at that time around 155 000 people a day moving them around buses boats overhead that's like six times downtown nashville on any given day you know of workers it's like 20 something thousand people working down there so six times that they're moving them all throughout the day those guys are the smartest in the world at moving people around they're getting away from buses they're getting away from trains they're getting away from all that and they're going overhead and running it solar one it's a ride and an attraction in itself two you don't have to hire bus drivers to drive it three it's economically pretty easy to maintain

01:50:08you got steel cables and some concrete poles it's going to hang around a while so my pitch to mayor cooper was we need to have a landing port at the music city convention center one at the courthouse and one big one over at east nashville and run them overhead like a gondola like they move people around at disney or in the mountains you go to beaver creek you're not getting in a car and riding around tell your ride yeah you're gonna tell your ride you get another thing you get on it the whole you don't get out of your car you get to tell your ride and you just it's a gondola it takes you over the mountain into the downtown and you just ride a gondola everywhere that's it that's ours that's that to me is the only way that the connectivity of east nashville and the east bank development and broadway co-exists successfully long term is to connect them now you're going to hear people say well we go who's the bus group you know mta for us old timers we go is going to run dedicated buses oh man everybody's fired up about riding a bus i love me some buses man ain't nothing better than getting on a bus and ride around and sit and trap i'm not going to ride it 30 minutes one way to change to come back another direction well if it's regular bus every day is one thing they keep though but like if you're traveling drunk people back and forth on a bus or convention vomit just the stuff that yeah yeah so they're going to say well we're going to do that and we're going to build a new walking bridge and we're going to have water taxis and i'm like okay great you're moving 15 000 people with that we got to move 80 000 water taxis you know you know that's a good idea it's fun you know it's a neat little thing but damn most of them are only going to hold 30 or 40 people we got to move tens of thousands of people you're going to have to have the invasion of normandy

01:52:12of boats to move people we don't even have fuel at riverfront park you know we don't have docks we don't have shit so that's just such a pipe dream to me that i would love to see it but it doesn't fix the problem so then you've got the east side and you're like okay the real estate's cheaper you can flex over there a little bit you don't have buildings you know built right beside you no alleys for trash you know nowhere to put your trash over on the broadway side all that can be fixed with development over there and you don't have the restrictions why wouldn't it develop over there and then and when it does develop which it will what are those people going to go the other way to get to broadway our bridges are jammed up now look at a titans gang okay now they have no parking pretty much for the new stadium so where are all those people going to park i don't know they're smarter than me they'll figure it out yeah maybe you know so if you've got an entertainment area and a corporate environment like with oracle going over there in the next 10 years it's feasible 10 12 billion dollars will get pumped over there you know through the next decade or so let's just say it matches downtown nashville on a saturday night over there most this is interesting fact from my friend tom turner downtown partnership he uses this i'll screw it up a little bit but on any saturday night just about in downtown nashville broadway's the third biggest city wow there's 135 40 000 people running around so let's take 130 140 000 people which is very feasible put them over there on the east bank now you got a quarter million people down there we're gonna walk you know someone's got to

01:54:13figure this shit out we got bike lanes yeah we better have some bikes built for 10 and they better be e-bikes tandem e-bikes yeah and you could just start renting uh the pedal taverns yeah we need to deploy all you know and and again it's it's i hate to be the the naysayer or say you know these are negative things these are positive things if they're addressed they'll be positive if not it's going to be a negative customer experience i like the gondola idea i think it's genius i think then you could always add on idea is now you just go right over the bridge and you go i think that's just and it would look really cool too on our sky like just oh yeah charge people five bucks let them get a beer right over you know if you're a conventioneer and you're going from the stadium you know i sit on the board for the convention center we've already got conventions that are contracted dual where they're going to be at the stadium and they're at the convention center you know that's already in the works and so we know it's coming how we gonna move them we're gonna let women in high hills walk to the new stadium oh no we're gonna put them on a bus we got these uh waymos what's it what's it called waymos waymos yeah hell i hope waymos continue to come on so they're they're all right my wife sent me a video the other day of a waymo going the wrong way down a street and it was like all the traffic was and it was just sitting there like oh yeah yeah they're getting the shit kicked out of them right now but what we're doing sucks and then you know i got interviewed yesterday with channel two about it and they're like hey do the bar owners downtown are they worried about these waymos and i said what the hell are you talking about and they're like well there's some videos of them you know stuck in the middle of broadway and i said okay take the waymos out you know they didn't use that anyway yeah so the human being's gonna do it what the hell's the difference i said at least when waymos driving down broadway versus me

01:56:19you know i'm gonna get distracted by the pretty women the neons the noise hey when did this bar open this one's closing i'm looking at all this shit and much more highly likely to hit somebody wandering out that isn't supposed to be wandering than a car being driven by smart software hell they're gonna screw up who cares we gotta do something the locals won't come back now you give me a waymo that's gonna pick somebody up in east nashville to come over to docks to drink that's a viable option okay what's not a viable option is for somebody to live in east nashville drive their car over and pay sixty dollars to park and then come into docks we've killed our local business because of the high price parking nobody wants to come down anymore so it's like okay if waymo will help bring locals back down i'm all for it if it's putting hot air balloons that'll get locals back to downtown nashville fire the hot air balloons up i'll be the first one to ride it barrett hobbs this has been incredible well i probably talk too much you talk the perfect amount you know a lot of times i do a lot of interviews for people i just want people to learn about them but i think that there's more conversation right now about what's happening in nashville and to be able to speak to somebody who's in the know who's in the downtown scene and on the board for the cvc and actually making shit happen is really refreshing and it's fantastic and i appreciate your candor everything that we've talked like i said i had not one of these things was part of a script of what we could talk about i had sometimes the funnest part of doing this podcast is i don't do a lot of preparation because i don't yeah i want to let it go wherever it goes and i don't always if i have a script i

01:58:24don't i'm not in the moment and i feel like this whole conversation today is going to resonate with a lot of people it's going to open a lot of people's eyes to what's going like i think there's a there's a narrative that people start to believe when they see a headline they're supposed to grab their attention and if somebody sat through an hour and 40 minutes of this i think they know a lot more about your perspective as a as a business owner downtown and what's really going on with this city and thank you for that well i appreciate you keeping a focus on on our industry we need everybody in the city to pay attention for a little bit like i said it's about being a priority i certainly don't have all the answers and i've certainly got my own perspective that's not always right by any means but i'm always willing to sit around the table and learn from other people somebody's probably got a hell of a lot better idea than the gondola idea well why are we keeping it a secret we got a problem coming let's fix it and i'm always bullish about nashville i'm blessed to have been born and raised here and uh and i look forward to many more years i didn't even get into like your family's farm and music valley and and starting like i could do the whole questioning that i had i still want to do that episode well come out to music valley go remote sometime on music valley is a whole history of nashville and i was a season take a hold of opry land there you go my mom would drop me off and i would spend do i diddy city and all this i mean i was the wall bash cannonball baby i was a opry land kid i remember when we got the big what was that thing called the new roller coaster uh screaming delta demon no no no it was uh gosh what was it was the one that was over the clock yes chaos chaos chaos when we got chaos was like the new chaos came and it went around and it was this whole was dark in there and i remember very rarely ever worked but do what diddy city was great the whole opry land and i

02:00:30love that nate uh bargetti is going to be doing nateland yeah and i think i think we need a theme park we definitely need i don't know that economically a theme park will ever come back but i think that again goes back to the priorities of our leaders do we want nashville to have options for families if we do we need to do something different than we're doing if we don't then we'll just keep doing what we're doing you know nothing wrong with that yeah we we know we got a whole lot of problems we talked about today that shitload of shitty cities would love to have our issues so i'm just glad to be a spoke on the wheel as we go through it well thank you very much for joining us today and uh we've got to do this again i will i do have a way to do remotes to come out to the palace i will come out i know so i gotta tell you um our friends over at black sheep tequila yeah they they were sponsoring a songwriter night over at the palace yeah and they invited me one night to say hey will you just come and hang out and i said right yeah i'm in you know let's let's go so i brought steven who owns uh greenhouse gorilla merbole okay and we went out there and there's the you walk into the palace there's a there's a bar to the right which is where the songwriter night was happening okay and i was in there and i was like well what's what's down the hallway here and there was like a bouncer and i and i walked up to that so hey can i just peek my head in here i want to see what's going on and they were doing line dancing classes yeah lessons lessons but then they were so they was like they do the lesson and then they would do the song and the dance yeah and i was like like floor jaw on the floor like this actually happens because i'm not a line dancer right 47 year old dude with kids and so i paid the cover and i go we're gonna go play some pool and hang out good non-alcoholic beer for me it was really happy but man i sat in there for about two hours i sorry black sheep tequila do

02:02:33your songwriter night yeah i was mesmerized at the people doing the line dancing and how they got into it oh lord it was and there was a woman dancing who was one of our servers at one of at our restaurant she what are you guys doing here i was like i didn't know that you did line dancing and she spent and she was out there she tried to get us on the floor and i was like no and i called my wife and i was like i think we should go like we don't do we've been there for 25 years right i go i think it'd be fun for us to learn this together and she goes she goes fuck no it's her work no and i said but it'd be something that we would do together and she's like fuck not not no yeah fuck no i'm not doing that but i thought that i loved my experience at the nashville palace well i appreciate that it was so it was such a good vibe in there yeah and we're really lucky um we do they do one night of salsa dancing a lot of couples do that they've got the we're doing a lot now with youth where they have dedicated times for high school kids that obviously aren't on friday and saturday nights where the girls can come in and boys can come in and learn and it's in a safe environment and the parents really dig it you know there's no alcohol being served it's it's designed for them because kids don't have anywhere to go anymore you know they're stuck on their damn phones there's no malls there's no arcades you know all that's evaporated so we've kind of found the next generation of kids that really enjoy hanging out and not doing it through you know snapchat it was like rocket town i think was the option but like yeah i found kids today don't like listen to music either they're out there they're coming back music was my they're they're coming back internet yeah well and i found connection well come back out bring her don't tell her what's going on and just bring her out for a steak dinner and some live music and we'll

02:04:34sneak her back there i will definitely definitely take you up on that well i enjoyed the chat man i gotta go sell some beer it's been a pleasure thank you barrett all right buddy thank you again to barrett hobbs for joining us here on the podcast that was a fun conversation i you know in these kind of things i feel like i agree with him on so many of the aspects of which he was speaking but he was speaking about his world and what he's doing and it's at a high level i mean it's a high level he's dealing with a lot of uh of the the keys to the city so to speak keys to the state tax revenue all of these things are are really a big deal and so it's time for the gordon food service final thought and my final thought today after this conversation is really about perspective nashville is full of different people living very different realities and barrett is looking at the city through the lens of a business owner someone responsible for jobs payroll and growth of course he wants decisions made that support that but for a lot of people in this city downtown isn't their world they're thinking about their schools their roads their neighborhoods and things that affect their day-to-day life and the truth is both sides are right what i took from this conversation is this it can't become an us versus them situation if nashville is going to keep growing in a healthy way it has to be about balance between downtown and the neighborhoods between business and community because when you zoom out we all need each other the people building the economy and the people living in the city it only works if both perspectives are understood and that my friends is what makes real community thank you guys for listening today we hope that you guys are being safe out there love you guys bye