Freddie O' Connell

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01:04They're also known here at Nashville Restaurant Radio for protecting some of Music City's best restaurants. Look, when it comes to insuring your restaurant or bar, you don't wanna leave the job to some strip mall insurance agency with no background in hospitality and expertise in the local market. You need someone who knows the industry, who understands your business, who will create a policy that protects your physical space and protects you and your staff too. Y'all, Matthew Clements is that guy. He's the agent at Robins Insurance for the hospitality industry. With extensive industry experience himself, Matthew has the knowledge to create a policy that'll protect you and your business no matter what comes your way. Visit Robins' website at robinsins.com. That's R-O-B-I-N-S, I-N-S.com to get in touch with him or reach out to Matthew directly at 863-409-9372. Protection you can trust. That's Robins. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City.

02:11Now 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 Gordon Food Service and we're gonna be joined with Caroline Galzin in just a second. We are playing today a repeat episode. This is two part. One is because I'm really busy opening a restaurant and we haven't been able to find the extra time to do an interview. I'm sorry for the people who have reached out and I'm backlogged on interviews. I know we're gonna get to everybody. We're gonna get in, we're gonna do these interviews, but I'm just slammed right now. The other thing is, really wanted to play this episode.

03:15This is one from a couple months ago. This is an interview with Freddie O'Connell. Freddie O'Connell is a mayoral candidate. He's in the runoff right now with Alice Rowley. And this episode we recorded the day after the Covenant shootings. It was very emotional episode. I don't think we had any idea. I mean, we were literally the day after the Covenant school shootings and he came in and he was amazing and he was such a kind voice and he cared and we walked through the issue. And after this shit show that was a special session that we just had, I thought it was apropos to play this episode because we talk about, it's just so real. There's just these, it's the day after the shootings and I just, it was so scary. The whole thing was really, really scary. Nobody knew what to do. And I wanted to know what he would do if he was mayor.

04:16And here we are, he's actually the guy who I think is gonna be mayor. I think he's going to be the one. So early voting is happening now. The actual election is coming up in a couple weeks. And I'm gonna encourage you to go out and vote. These are the things I think we all saw what local politicians can do. The other day, just ending a special session, silencing members of the House. It's just a lot of frustration. I don't think that people's voice were heard and I think that it was just a select few people who wanted to do what they wanted to do. It was very frustrating for me personally, if you wanna know where I feel on this whole thing. I think Freddie addresses some of this stuff and it was a really good interview. And if you're looking for somebody to vote for, if you're contemplating who you're gonna vote for, hopefully this will help. I thought this was a good week. If you're gonna do a replay, very timely, let's go with Freddie O'Connell.

05:19That's what we got today. So hopefully if you haven't heard this yet, you can hear it and enjoy it and learn a little about this candidate. I do wanna tell you that we are getting ready for fantasy football season. Fantasy football season is upon us and we have a Nashville Restaurant Radio League. I'm also going to announce to you, we're gonna start doing a new show that's gonna be a fantasy football show. What that's gonna be is we are raising money for the Giving Kitchen and here's how it works. We have 10 players in the league. I'm gonna tell you the 10 players. We have Max Goldberg from Strategic Hospitality. We have Tandy Wilson, who is the owner and chef over at City House. We have Hal Holdenbaich from Loughlin Table. We have Alyssa Gingeri, who's the chef and partner over at Buttermilk Ranch. Let's see, who else do we have in this league? We have this guy, I don't know if you guys have heard of him. His name is Pat Martin. He's gonna be in the league.

06:23That's five, there's five more. Brian Baxter, he's the chef over at the Catbird Seat. Alex Ballou, he just won Hell's Kitchen season 21. Mr. Tony Galzin, who's gonna be my other co-host. So I've got Caroline Galzin on this show, then we're gonna have Tony Galzin on the other show. He's gonna be the other one. Naima Walker-Fierce, she is the chef, or she's the owner of the Germantown Pub over there in Germantown. Best wings in the world, by the way. She's just an amazing human being. And finally, last but not least, Brian Lee Weaver from Butcher and Bee and Red-Headed Stranger. But we're gonna be raising money for the Giving Kitchen. So I'm looking for sponsors. If you wanna sponsor this Friday show where we talk fantasy football, hit me up. If you are a restaurant, one of my things is we do not ask restaurants for money. I never want anything from a restaurant. And if I come out to eat in your restaurant, don't pay for anything, I want to support you.

07:25It's a very nice gesture, but please let me pay for my meal. And this is the time where we are asking restaurants. We're asking restaurants for anything you can possibly do. We're gonna have links up at the start of the season where you can just click a button and you can donate. You can pick a chef or restaurant owner who you would like to donate to and then you can donate to them. There's gonna be a chef who raises the most money and then there's gonna be a winner of the league and I'd like to do a dinner at the end of it where if you donate money, you're gonna be entered into a raffle. We're gonna be drawing names to come to that dinner for free. So it's gonna be a lot of fun and we're excited to have you be part of that. So yeah, so fantasy football, we're gonna start the show next week, hopefully, as we're opening the new restaurant. And we're gonna be talking about our teams and matchups and hopefully we'll have some of those chefs on the show and we can talk to them about what they're doing and how they're doing it and why they're doing it drafting their teams, but also a nice little catch up with what their lives have been like.

08:30And yeah, very, very good stuff. So with all of that being said, I would love to tell you a little bit about The Giving Kitchen. If you guys don't know about The Giving Kitchen, this is a nonprofit that helps restaurant workers. This is the most important thing. If you know about The Giving Kitchen, we need you to tell as many people as you can about The Giving Kitchen. They are here to help support you in times of crisis. So let's say you break your ankle and you can't work. If you can't work, you can't pay your bills, right? So they're not gonna pay your medical bills for you, but they'll come in and help you pay your rent. They'll help you pay your electric bill. They'll help you buy food so that you can live while you're not working. They are really amazing. If you get diagnosed with a disease or you have anything at all, The Giving Kitchen is here to help you. If you're a manager, if you're an owner and you have people like that working for you right now, go visit thegivingkitchen.org and from there you can submit, you can request people to get help and they want to help you.

09:38So think about right now, if you have somebody who works for you, who's hurt and they can't work and they're struggling and they need help, give them a call right now, stop listening to this and say, hey, have you checked out The Giving Kitchen yet? Go to thegivingkitchen.org and see if you can get assistance because they are here to help restaurant workers and this is nationwide. So if you're a restaurant and you'd like to donate, we would love for you to donate. Our goal is to raise $10,000. If we can raise $10,000, that pays for a lot of people to get the support they need right here in Nashville. You remember we had the Tennessee Action for Hospitality, which Marsha Masula and Caroline worked in, that was really to protect us. We recognize that there's a vulnerability during the pandemic that, hey, look, what are we gonna do if all this goes down again? That's what The Giving Kitchen's here to do. We've taken the Tennessee Action for Hospitality, folded it into The Giving Kitchen and now The Giving Kitchen covers everybody in Nashville. So it's just an amazing organization.

10:39If you wanna learn more, we had an episode with Jen Heidinger Kendrick and she is the co-founder and I wanna say executive director. She's the one who runs the thing. We had her on the show, she explained it all. Please go back, find the episode with Jen Heidinger Kendrick and listen to it if you wanna learn more. But we are so excited to partner with them to do this Fan's Football League. So let's have some fun, let's talk some football and let's get into this episode right now. We're gonna be talking with Freddie O'Connell and this is a replay from a couple months ago. ["Fan's Football League Theme"] Super excited today to welcome in Freddie O'Connell. Freddie O'Connell is a council member for District 19 as well as a mayoral candidate. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. I'm excited to be here. So glad to have you, Freddie. Thanks for joining us today. I think that we have to jump right in. Let's do it. I don't know any other way to start this episode but to say like yesterday and this is gonna come out on Monday but today is the day after a horrific school shooting here in Nashville.

11:50What were you doing? Walk me through your day yesterday cause I saw your tweets, I saw you, but like tell me about your day yesterday and what it looked like. One of the most surreal and you know, just kind of emotionally wrenching days that I've ever experienced honestly because I think this is what's maybe even the most startling part of all is, you know, I woke up and literally one of the first things I see in the news is actually this presentation of where the United States is in life expectancy among major countries in the world and every other modern country is living longer. Their people are generally thriving. The United States kind of hit its peak a few years ago and ever since we have been plummeting. I mean, we'd look like a country in decline if you go based on life expectancy and so I was thinking about this and I was thinking how great would it be if we could build a Nashville where we are moving against trend, right?

12:52Where people choosing to be in Nashville thrive because we've got the right mix of policies, economic development, all of the things that a great city should have so that even if the rest of the country is still going down, Nashville is living longer. We are doing the things that make us thrive which is what we can focus on. I can't focus on what they're doing in Oklahoma City. I can focus on what we're doing here in Nashville. If I can keep someone from dying of exposure in a cold winter, if I can build a safer intersection to keep a pedestrian from dying, crossing what we know are very dangerous streets, we can do things here on the ground that let people live longer and so then I went straight from that to waking up and meeting a couple of members of my team for what I thought was gonna be an exciting day, turning in our nominating petitions to qualify to be on the ballot as a mayoral candidate and it wasn't but a few minutes after I got home from doing that that the news broke partly for our team and this was again just adding to the surreal nature of the day.

14:04A member of our team, our communications director, a guy named Alex Apple, his mom has taught and worked at the school for a long time at the Covenant School and he knew something was wrong because he was hearing directly from campus and suddenly you realize something was very, very wrong and after that I was just talking to him today actually before I came over and I likened it to that, I felt like yesterday, the rest of the day from there was like being in a dream where you feel like you want to run faster than you can. And you're stuck, it's like nothing is moving right, the time feels all skewed and it was terrifying because I realized how many connections I had to the school. I remembered that a friend who's also a constituent is there and he was the first person I called and fortunately he picked up and I heard his voice and I knew he was at least alive and that was the other crazy part, right, because the very first time I was saying to Whitney, my girlfriend and partner, that somebody was okay, she was like, they might not be okay, right?

15:15And so then it's like, okay, yeah, I guess I probably just need to stay alive. Then I talked to another friend who had two kids at the school and had confirmed that one was alive and not the other and so it was a mad scramble to figure out if her daughter was okay. I talked to another friend who had two kids at the school, his brother who's one of my brother's best friends from back in the day happened to be in town and it was just like waiting to hear from them when they had reunited, right? And that whole idea of a reunification center, terrifying, it's just terrifying and so there was that chaos of are the people that I am connected to, can we learn information about their families through the other connections we have to the school and are the people in my life that I know at the school, are they okay? And that was, I think it was such a, the other way that the day was so tragic was while we have had gun violence in the city, while we have had plenty of challenging moments from the flood, the tornado, the bombing on Second Avenue, while we've had various types of civil unrest and other things we've dealt with, we have not dealt with a mass shooting in a school before as a city.

16:35I mean, this is a first for Nashville and unfortunately we join too many other communities that have had to contend with this. I was sitting in a meeting yesterday and I got a text from there and so I'm the director of operations for the Green Hills Grill. So I'm directly down the hill, I mean, literally less than a mile away from the actual school and there's so, I mean, we're a community restaurant, I mean, so many members of our community dine there on a regular basis and I get a message from the owner of a restaurant, he says, hey, there's an active shooter situation at the Covenant School and I just replied to him and I'm like, oh, like, so sad, or I don't really remember exactly what it was, I can look it up, but I'm in a meeting with our leaders and I also run Mary Bull Restaurant, I was at Mary Bull, we had our GM and our chef in the meeting and I pull up a thing that said three children are dead and I lost it and I just, I have a nine-year-old son and a seven-year-old son and one of their good friends who they do play dates with is a third grader at that school, then I get a message that from what I hear, two third graders are dead and I pull, I go, guys, stop, like we, but I need to pray right now for the families, I can't fathom what is going on right now and I just, I left the meeting, I go, guys, I can't do this anymore, I can't, I can't talk about P&Ls and numbers right now, I gotta go and I just went straight to the Greenhouse Grill.

17:56So that's what we did yesterday, right, because we have just an incredible team working with me right now and, you know, after hearing from Alex, I was like, okay, guys, this is it, today, there is no campaign, today we go find anybody you know, go look after them. Put your arms around them. Right, if they've got a connection to the school, go figure that out, Alex was, you know, he was there, I said, your role today is to go be a son. Right, and that's it, like, just go do that and also he's a father, I was like, go be a, go do those things, go do the family things, you're a son, you are a partner, you are a dad, go do that, go respond to the world with love and I sort of said to the team, like, we are on pause until further notice and the only thing we're gonna do is, if you have high quality information to share about what people can do to be supportive, if there are resources that you can cover, sure, but that's it, like, right now it is like, go be in the places you need to be to be okay.

19:08Yeah, we did a lineup last night, we did all the servers lined up for the shift and it was at the grill last night, 445, I pulled the entire team in and I said, guys, tonight's not about food, it's not about servers, it's not about money, tonight is about this community and us being here for them, I don't care anything else, we are just gonna be for this community, I mean, these are people and then, you know, I got servers and I'm going that, you know, Catherine Coons eats here every Wednesday and she loves Diet Coke with the lime and she was a regular, you know, Ron, who works every shift and he's heartbroken and it's just like, man, this isn't something in some other city that we're reading about, thinking, wow, thoughts and prayers, like, I'm standing in front of the restaurant looking at helicopters flying around going, holy shit, this is literally in our backyard. It is, it's so devastating, obviously when we see this anywhere around the country that it happens but there is something that is hard to describe the feeling of when it happens in a familiar place, when, you know, I live in this neighborhood right down the street from the person who committed this crime, it's just, you know, how many times have I driven by that house or possibly interacted in the community with this person, you know?

20:25Well, and same thing with Catherine, right? I mean, I started to hear people, again, a part of the school community that I had, I guess I had never even, I mean, you know, why would you, I didn't even, it didn't occur to me until yesterday how many people I personally know with connections to that school, right? And so that's happening too and it just feels so local and connected and personal and so there was a moment where a friend was like, I'm worried that the head of school might have been shot and killed because ordinarily she would be communicating right now and I realized, oh, they are talking about Catherine and then you find the news and it's just like, oh my God. Yeah, my wife texted, I was at a Grassland Moms Thrive meeting a few months ago and Catherine was the speaker and I got to talk to her and she was so amazing and gifted and wise and I just, talking to her was amazing. She was like, I'm, she was, I'm shooken, like I don't know what to do and I'm, any fight back tears just talking about it right now and it's still so fresh and I think that we can talk about what our experience is that day and it's very real and very raw.

21:39I think the question comes to you now as a mayoral candidate, what do we do? That's the question, like what do I do? What can we do? What can you do? What can our leaders do? Because to me it seems like we do nothing. And we just, and I know that's not the answer but like what are we actually doing and what can we do? So I was very intentional about yesterday. Yesterday to me was the only things that we do are acts of kindness and love, right? And I have, I think for me is just a practice of responding to anything and again, I've, maybe, you don't wanna be in a position where I guess you have a skillset of responding to crisis but that's for better or for worse. I've had to watch a tornado pass from within blocks of my house and wreck people's homes and pick up the broken belongings of their lives and you know, in many cases be displaced and in this case it's again, it's like the trauma and the grief and so I have always felt like not, in the heat of a moment like that, I would much rather just be focused on the kindness and the support that any human can offer to one another and sleep on it and then see where you are and now we're in the period where I feel like it's not only okay but appropriate to talk about action, right, and that it's not about a statement because a statement doesn't help but for instance, right now the General Assembly is considering two bills.

23:30Our state legislature has two bills in front of them. One of them is good and one of them I think is less good. The good one is one that helps us on the ground here in Nashville because with the state's choice to step away from gun policies that literally show over and over again that they reduce gun violence including permit and open carry, the state has moved in directions where you don't need a permit and you can't open carry. These are not good if you're trying to reduce gun violence but what the state is considering right now is a bill that is basically a secure storage bill. If you keep a weapon in your car and you fail to secure it, this bill would create a penalty for that. Well, one of the epidemics that is underway in Nashville and you can watch this steady terrible trend over the past years is guns stolen from cars right here in Nashville. I'm gonna tell you, if someone steals a gun from your car, they're not intending to use that for safe and legal purposes, right?

24:31And so if you can make it so that gun owners are coerced into being more responsible about the way they store their weapons, especially in their vehicles, that's a step in the right direction. So I would love to see the General Assembly consider this bill. If you care about that, reach out to your state legislator, you can go to capital.tn.gov and take that action. That's a simple one. The other one I'm less fond of and I mean, it's a tough part about the disagreement about how we respond to these things. This one is the armed teachers bill. And I don't love the idea of turning our classrooms into places where a first responder is a new responsibility of teachers. That's not what teachers are trained to do. I want the teachers who teach my two daughters focused on managing their classrooms and teaching the students, right? Creating wonderful learning opportunities. I don't want them focused on going to the gun range every so often and practicing their sharp shooting skills. That speaks to other systemic failures that we ought to address.

25:32So again, but those are two bills that are on the table right now. We can choose one or both or neither. And if we go forward and the state does the right thing, I hope they will do the secure storage bill and I hope they will pass on the armed teachers bill. But those are things right now on the ground that if either one of them were to pass the session, they would have an impact on Nashville. I think the other thing I've looked a lot at, because I mean, you have to be aware of what the policy options are and policy environment is to figure out how you can make progress. There's this guy, and I don't actually know how to pronounce his last name. It might be Apt, but it's ABT, a guy named Thomas Apt, wrote this book called Bleeding Out based on a lot of research he had done. And it's fundamentally, this is not something that you could, I mean, you'll get into an argument about would this have prevented the shooting yesterday. Fundamentally, again, come back to that original premise. I wanna reduce gun violence in Nashville across the board. I wanna reduce violent crime across the board.

26:35Apt's book is basically about practical steps that any city can take that has almost no fiscal impact. It's mostly about strategies for policing and community engagement that really focus on what we already know about where crimes occur and who has committed them. It's basically a more focused approach to fighting crime and reducing violence. And I think if Nashville took steps in that direction sooner rather than later, we would watch this uptick that we've seen in violent crime over the past couple years, really, since we emerged from COVID, start to bend back down to where we got to a few years ago, which was absolutely historic lows. What role does the mayor have in doing that? I mean, I don't know, I mean, I'm not asking. Yeah. What role does a mayor have in making those things? Because it seems like the state just kind of does whatever it wants and we have to deal with the aftermath. Yeah, we had Sharon Heard in here a few weeks ago and kind of posed the same question to her.

27:39It seems that our values as a city are on a completely different plane than the values of the super majority in our state legislature. However, it seems that those policies are increasingly affecting our way of life here in Nashville. What can our mayor do to either work with the state to help align our values? Or does Nashville just say, hey, we gotta go rogue, we're gonna do our own thing, we're never gonna meet in the middle here? Yeah, so let's bridge these two questions. So on the matter of policing, the mayor has the power to appoint a chief of police. I have high confidence in Chief Drake. I think he is the right man for the job. But I am interested in doing what all mayors do and say, let's talk about your strategy going forward. We know that all of mayors Barry, Briley, and Cooper had some influence on policing strategies and policing policy.

28:43Mayor Cooper convened this policing policy task force and they came up with some recommendations to try to make sure you wanna get the right balance. You want to keep a lid on both sides of where people getting shot and killed come in. You wanna keep a lid on the violent crime and incidents like yesterday. You also don't, it's not good for a community that's having a high number of officer-involved shootings. That's also bad. So you wanna keep both of those numbers as low as possible and there's policy in that. So mayors can have quite a bit of influence over personnel at that kind of level of leadership but also can influence the policy that those personnel are. It's a partnership, right? And I'd love to have a partnership with Chief Drake that dove into this approach to targeted policing and figured out how we can reduce violent crime. Similarly, I think this was maybe one of the most interesting moments in running for mayor so far is a few weeks ago, I was with a friend and kind of talking about the real, I mean what you're describing is a policy assault that we are under from the state legislature and if it is spiteful and just hey, because we can and mean and all of that and he was saying, a lot of my friends are actually thinking about leaving right now.

30:11And I said, in the past six months, I mean really since last summer, I've had an uptick and it's all age ranges, right? It's my friends who are in their 20s but also lifelong Nashvilleans who are looking at it and for the first time thinking about not only do I belong here but do I even want to be here in this environment? And I said to him, I said, I need them all to stay, right? Like for me, just even selfishly on a personal level, the thing that brought me back to Nashville after college was my friends, right? And the people of Nashville continue to be the part, like last night I was at a vigil at Belmont United Methodist just down the road and half of the reason to be there was for the hugs that everyone needed, right? And that was, and to do that in fellowship with friends was, I mean it was truly, it was a cathartic therapeutic process but that helped reinforce to me that so many of the reasons I am running for mayor amount to an expression of saying, I want you to stay.

31:24The mayor has tremendous power to set spending priorities, the state's interference not withstanding. We can build the transit system that we know we need to keep particularly people in the hospitality, retail and restaurant sector able to afford to live in this city. We can commit upfront to the level of funding it takes to actually create more affordable housing to the tune of investing in $30 million in the Barnes Fund. We could have used our CARES Act and American Rescue Plan Act money and I hope that we use our Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act money. I mean, there's a period of about five years here where we will have more federal opportunities than we have seen previously or might ever see again in my lifetime and we have to build the city of our future and some of that money is coming straight to Nashville and the mayor is the person who directs that spending. So we can build a better city focused on the priorities and needs of Nashvillians instead of focusing so much of that energy on making this a destination city.

32:29I love that Nashville is a great place to visit and I don't wanna disrupt that but we're gonna lose so much of our potential and we're gonna lose so many people if we don't start making our soul investment. We're gonna lose a part of that if we don't make our investment choices from the mayor's office on the people who live here. I'd love to talk a little bit more about transportation. I know that that's a big issue for you and your campaign and I would say that's a big issue for us in the restaurant industry as well. When we hire a new person, one of the first questions we ask is, how do you get to work every day? Do you have reliable transportation? More often than not, the answer is that they don't have reliable transportation and now we do our best to work with people and try and help people out with that but what do you envision as a transportation plan for Nashville? Yeah, I guess the good news here is we've got two really important things that we don't have to go out and the day I'm elected, we get to start on day one implementing this.

33:32We don't have to do another expensive study. We don't have to do a year of research. We don't have to do some more planning. We've got two things. Mayor Cooper did take us through the exercise of creating a transportation plan. That is still a worthwhile document and it's the whole thing. It's not just transit, it's roadways, it's traffic management, it's state of good repair stuff, it's simple infrastructure things. It's a great template for ways that we could use the infrastructure investment and jobs act money that we're gonna get along with any potential state support that would come in from Governor Lee's otherwise misguided transportation plan but then we also have this critically important set of steps we can take on transit itself. I came to council from the Nashville MTA Board of Directors. Now we go public transit as our local transit system. In 2017, they delivered a letter to Mayor Berry that contained a really important set of steps that we could have and probably should have taken as a prelude to a bigger conversation about dedicated funding.

34:38That became the Let's Move Nashville plan that unfortunately as Mayor Berry's administration did not complete, that also collapsed and went to referendum. I'm here to tell you you could almost hear the trust and whoosh out of the room when Mayor Berry's administration did not continue but many of the ideas in that were popular but in that prelude to it, we've got a three year program of investments we could make that fit within our existing capital and operating capacity as a city that would build more community transit centers like the one we just completed at Hillsborough, like the one we just broke ground on on Clarksville Highway that we have the capacity to add one out in Southeast Nashville at the Hickory Hollow site. On the East Bank, no matter what happens there, there's room for one there. We already have land for one that the convention center owns that is right Southeast of the convention center that would be a great node to connect to the airport someday with either bus rapid transit or light rail and then we start connecting those dots so that people using transit in Nashville don't have to go downtown all the time.

35:43If you're in Southeast Nashville and you're trying to get to Green Hills, you can get there. Another great case study is soccer. I couldn't believe this. We knew we had three years to plan for this moment. Nashville SC's first season last year at Geotis Park we arrived at opening day, we weren't running buses on game days. If we were running them on weekdays, we weren't running them late enough for people to get home. I had people arrive at Nashville SC games, reach out to me and say, can we charter an MTA bus to get to the stadium? Because people would be happy to use transit to get there because you don't have to fool with parking. You don't have to get in all that. It's a pain. And then worse, and I put this in the scope of a transportation plan. On the last home game of the season, I was at a friend's house in Melrose and we were gonna walk over. Well, you're walking down Craighead and for part of that walk you're taking your life in your hands because we didn't even build sidewalks into the closest residential neighborhoods to the new soccer stadium.

36:44We had three years to get ready for this. And as mayor, I wanna make sure we're making those kinds of strategic decisions that let employees have easier access to parts of the city that we know there are good jobs in, that we know there are great opportunities in our hospitality sector for. I had another friend who was talking to somebody at the 21C about how much trouble they're having. And part of it is because they have arrived new to Nashville. They didn't, like a lot of people coming here in their 20s in particular were like me in my 20s when I didn't have a car. Why didn't I have a car? I had paid off all my undergraduate loans from college and it was very expensive to go get a car. How expensive is it in Nashville? It's about $8,000 a year. You know how I know that? Because when I didn't have a car, that's how much money I saved. You know what I did with the money I saved? I bought a house. Transit literally bought my house. I want that option to be more affordable for more possible for people. So that, I mean, I look at transit policy and affordable housing policy is right next to each other. I don't disagree at all.

37:46And I do know that these are huge issues for our industry in particular, because you know, you're right, that affordable housing piece does go side by side with the transit because it's now becoming increasingly that so many restaurant employees are having to move further and further away from the places where they work. And even further and further away is getting less affordable. I'd love to talk a little bit more about that affordable housing piece of the puzzle and how we can, what can we do? The rents are so out of control here. So it's like most of the things that we work on, there's not just some simple silver bullet, right? I've started talking more about like, you load the shotgun with silver tip shells and hope that the scatter effect has some impact. So we did a couple of important things while I've been in office. We create an incentive grant program that still exists.

38:46And for developers that know how to access it, they can. One of the challenges is on the development side to build affordable housing, right? To build housing that, let's just say it this way, Nashville's market has been very successful. And that's one of the reasons why market rate housing is pretty expensive right now because we have attracted better jobs. Our real estate market has responded to that. And so the process of buying a traditional single family home is gonna mean that your price points, no matter where you are in the county, are much higher than they were when I was a child, right? Growing up here. But in order to develop any kind of product in the market that might allow people an entry point below market, right? And it's hard to say what that is, right? If you're in the restaurant industry and you are offering everything from both front of house and back of house roles and the wage structures are different and entry level is gonna be different than somebody who's maybe 10 years deep or a manager or whatever, the market is not gonna be looking at somebody earning $15 an hour and saying, yes, you will get a 1500 square foot home for $100,000 in Nashville right now.

40:01That's not a thing that the market is gonna do. If you've got a developer who's coming in to say, we can offer things that are targeted at the spectrum of income, they're gonna need support somehow in the financing model for what they're trying to build because it's fundamentally based on the cost of construction and eventually coming into the market. And so you either need incentives like what we've already created. We've got a program now called Payment in Lue of Taxes. I'm delighted that that program just produced a project that is gonna create the first deeply affordable a hundred units of affordable housing in downtown Nashville for the first time in 15 years right off of Charlotte, a major transit corridor. But the work that we worked on this term, I started off trying to create an office of housing and homelessness. Well, there was kind of a negotiation with the mayor's office and we moved a lot of housing staff over to the planning department. I still think someday there is gonna be an office of housing and that's something I intend to create.

41:03I certainly wanna see they're working on a unified plan right now, that division is. We did create an office of homeless services and eventually I want those two offices to be working closely together because on the spectrum of affordable housing is making sure that people who lose access to their homes through things like natural disasters or bombings or floods or whatever, aren't suddenly then unable to attain housing again, especially if we had a rent, like an income-based project in Germantown that got obliterated by the tornado. Well, those were people who had been in their homes for a long time. A lot of the musicians are in the music industry and they were able to qualify for that because of their position in the market and then their home was destroyed. I knew quite a few restaurant workers who lived in that building as well for being there with us. And honestly, I only know what happened to a handful of them. I don't know what happened to all the folks in that building and my guess is they had a harder time finding an opportunity that close to town at that level of rent. Absolutely, I actually live in an apartment in this neighborhood that I've lived in for eight years and we are somewhat rent controlled because of the lease that we signed eight years ago is a lease that no longer exists in my current management company.

42:15And I live in a two-bedroom. If I were to move into a studio in my building, I would be paying more than what I'm paying right now for my two-bedroom. Is that wild? It is wild. Yeah, go ahead. And it always never made sense to me why we're giving all these big companies, and this is, I think, what you started off with. We're giving all these big companies these tax incentives and we want you to come and build hotels in our area. They're coming anyway, but we're giving them all the, let's take that money and put it into supplementing these contractors going to build housing that people can afford to take care of our community versus let's take care of the corporate giant who's coming to town so we can get more people on Broadway. Because the hotels won't have workers. Well, and this is already a conversation. There's nowhere for them to live. I was sitting in a CBC strategic planning meeting a few years ago and already they were talking about the tension between wage structure and affordability on the housing side of things. And so this is, there's a, you know, for every city, right? You wanna be dealing with the problems of growth rather than the problems of decline.

43:18But if we don't address this particular problem of growth, the other side of that curve is going back into a place where if we can't do this, so many of the things that we've enjoyed about the diversity that has existed in our economy, that we've had this amazing creative class and watched a lot of homegrown restaurants emerge in Nashville. It's not even just on the housing side. If we don't have, I mean, this is like what we've watched with the decline of our independent music venues or, you know, classic meet and threes, for instance, right? Like we have to have affordable space too for restaurants to even exist. And restaurants are so important in the culture of what we do, they're kind of what built this town. And I like it with Arnold's, I mean, Arnold's, how important Arnold's was this community just standing in line, seeing your neighbors saying hi, introducing yourself to people from celebrities to construction workers, to people just standing in line, just, hey, nice to meet you, man. Like that's lost now because that's gone, the big building's gonna go up there.

44:18And well, that was part of what made that community. That's what part of it brings the people together are our locally owned and operated restaurants. I feel a little less bad. I mean, this is the interesting thing is that in all of these, there is a story behind it. In the Arnold's case, they own their property and they found, they did okay. I mean, that was a choice they got to make. There are a lot of other local favorites though that exist in scenarios where they don't have a lot of say over their space, right? I knew the guys who ran Flight, for instance, just across the street. I used to work at Flight. Flight was amazing. It's a great spot and great guys. Yep, so that was, I mean, and what happened was they sort of wound up having their lease bought out because the folks wanted to redevelop the property. They didn't own it. And so it's kind of like, well, you could tough it out in adversarial terms under that lease or you could go ahead and take the offer and walk away, but they weren't in control of their fate, really.

45:19And that's the kind of story that also continues to play out in Nashville. And so I see those things as linked, right? There is the housing strategy and there is a lot that a mayor can do there. You can direct the, it's again, it's about the spending priorities and how you allocate things. If we knew coming out of the mayor's budget every year for a series of years in a row, that we were gonna put $30 million into the Barnes Housing Trust Fund, one of the most important vehicles we've developed for creating and retaining affordable housing in Nashville, that makes a dent in the need that we know is out there. And we know that from the Affordable Housing Task Force report that came out just a few years ago. Well, until very recently, and on the one hand, I think we didn't do enough from the mayor's side of things to invest in that upfront and council did a lot of work there. I will give the mayor some credit though, to your point, he did look at surpluses coming out of the convention center and we partnered with him as a council to redirect some of that surplus into affordable housing funding.

46:21That's a good thing until and unless the state steps in and tries to partially defund the convention center. We're constantly having to, we're playing defense over here. And I guess I would say on the strategy of offense, I wanna change the coaching model. Yeah. So earlier you mentioned that you were in a CBC meeting and I believe recently the news came out that Butch is stepping down as the director. Now, I know over the years, I've heard some of our peers in the industry, particularly small business owners in neighborhoods outside of downtown express some frustration with the CBC and their marketing. What do you see as kind of the future direction of the CBC under you as mayor? Yeah, so this is also interesting because I think the CBC now has carved out an identity that is pretty wholly independent of Metro.

47:21So like so many things, you have to figure out what kind of partnership you can forge. I have not met new leadership at the CBC yet. Has someone been named? Yeah, I think so. And I have not spent time with her. I know a lot of the staff there. Do you know who it is, Brennan? I do and her name is, it's not Heather, it's... I should have this. I should have, I have her cell number. I gotta... We'll put it in the show though. She's fantastic though. She's, yeah, I'm gonna figure that out, hold on. So it's interesting because I worked pretty closely with Butch just because so much of the CBC activity of consequence occurred in District 19. So they would work with me on their two signature events every year, the 4th of July and Independence Day celebrations and then New Year's Eve, right? And I feel like putting Nashville on the map for homegrown events is actually pretty cool. I used to get a lot of people frustrated that we would close Broadway at the snap of a finger for things like P90X and a beach body thing or whatever.

48:30And I'm not as convinced that just closing off the city to local access for things that maybe don't have as much to do with who we are as a city is a great idea. I do think the availability of the convention center has maybe taken a little bit of pressure off of that. But I think going forward, it's also a real challenge because one thing I also have observed and had to do a lot of work on as our destination economy has really increased through the years is Nashville's neighborhoods don't want a lot of, I'll just say it this way. I think most people are happy to have people come into the neighborhoods for their restaurants. They probably don't want them out on the patio or the rooftop next door when the restaurant bar closes. And so there's this really tricky balance of how do you have the CBC support the idea of visitors and conventioneering and support local restaurants even outside of downtown without overwhelming neighborhoods with unwanted tourism activity, right?

49:37Which usually takes the form of over eager bachelors and bachelorettes. Because it's like when I first got to Salem town 16 years ago, just right by Germantown, Germantown was already becoming notable for its restaurants. I mean, City House, Rolf and Daughters, Germantown Cafe, which we're glad has reopened after the tornado. You had St. Stephen there and a couple of other things. You've got Taylor over there now. I mean, Germantown has always had, it's been one of the anchors of where great restaurants have clustered for whatever reason. And I think Germantown residents have been really happy about that. But then as you started to see the residential patterns on the periphery of Germantown change with a lot more apartments and then seeing a lot more short term rental activity in the area, suddenly having people in the patio at 3 a.m. was less appealing. And so there's just an evolution that occurs there that you've got, I mean, it's like so many things. You wanna keep things in balance and you wanna keep things tolerable.

50:40I guess I think a good example of maybe attracting a different kind of tourist. It seems that so many efforts are directed at the Bachelorette of it all. I'm ready to pull the Bachelorette flag down and say, hey, what if we focused on attracting families to visit Nashville? Or I go to New Orleans a couple of times a year. It's my favorite city. New Orleans is wonderful, isn't it? There's the Bourbon Street Tourist. And then there's the Dining and Culture Tourist. And is there a way for us to- Somebody who's going for Cajun food and streetcars. Yeah, can we lean into that a little more? Hey, get into the neighborhoods for dining. I absolutely think we can is to celebrate the, yeah, almost like the cultural tourism. So there was a guy, you all probably both are familiar with Richard Florida, who kind of became really associated with the idea of the creative class in the first place. Well, he came to a recent Nashville Downtown Partnership meeting, and he used a phrase that Nashville needs to be on the watch for, I think, which is blotto tourism, right?

51:44And that's basically where people are just coming to get as drunk as they possibly can. And yeah, there might be music, but they're not actually here for the music. They're here for the party. And if the party is constantly out of control, then we're kind of doing it wrong, right? Like I've heard from a disappointing number of people about not wanting to take their families downtown. Why? Because you're going to hear or see something completely inappropriate on a party bus, right? And so to your point, I, my hope is that as we turn a corner in leadership for the CVC and the city, that we focus our energies on bringing people to town that we would all be happy to welcome here. A good neighbor of a tourist, right? Yes, Dina Ivy, Dina Ivy. I think that's who's gonna be running it. I don't know if it's been announced. I think that's who it is, is Dina Ivy. Dina, D-A-N-N-A, Dina. So there you go.

52:44You know, Freddie, I want to change the topic conversation. Do you mind? No, please. I think that we started this interview off. On a bit of a downer. Yeah, I mean, it was, but I think it, I think we needed to talk about it. I think you can't, you can't gloss over it. It is, it's gonna shape, we're gonna be responding to this for a while. For a while. And I mean, we had this interview on the books well before this happened. And I mean, just to happen, it's like, oh shit, tomorrow we get to sit and talk to somebody running from here. I've got a lot of questions. I want to know what their thoughts are. So thank you for addressing some of that. And I hate to talk about it, but one of the things that I want to talk about is you. And let's introduce you and who you are and your background, where you came up. What gives you this need to serve the community and just that mindset of what can I do to help this city grow? And I love the idea of keep more people alive. It's a simple concept, keep more people alive, but.

53:45Public policy saves lives. Yeah, I mean. Or at least it can. Tell me about yourself. Like where are you from originally? Are you originally in Nashvilleian? You said you went to school and you came back. You have a girlfriend, you've got kids. What's your story? Tell us more about yourself. Yeah, so I'm a native Nashvilleian. I went to elementary school just down the street too at Aiken Elementary. I've been excited to raise two second generation Aiken Eagles, which is kind of a neat thing to be able to do. I have a second generation Grassland Eagles. There you go. I went to Grassland and my kids go to Grassland. So, and you know this, right? I mean, there is just something. When we knew we might have the opportunity to send one or both girls to Aiken, there is just sort of a soft spot in my heart for it as an alum. Then, so I grew up, my mom was a teacher for 40 years. She just retired a few years ago. My dad was a career federal employee. He worked on the USDA side for the kind of first half of his career and then finished his career over at the US Army Corps and was a ranger out on the, I mean, cause what the Army Corps of Engineers does is manage the interior waterways.

54:55And so he was a ranger out on lakes out in Hendersonville and you know, he had a, it was interesting cause a lot of his career he wound up spending in various parts of Middle Tennessee frequently moving around outdoors, right? I mean, it was interactions with agricultural life and wildlife and every now and then as a kid I got to experience some of that. So I, you know, like for a lot of my childhood and in historic Richland West End, we had a cattle chute parked in our driveway, right? Cause he was out working with cows around Middle Tennessee. What is a cattle chute? It's where you move the cows through this area and actually temporarily enclose them so they can be tested for diseases like brucellosis. Okay. I mean, it is literally a place where you funnel them in. A chute with a C. Yeah, C. Not like a turkey chute. That's what I was like, what the hell? Is that like where you harvest them? Like, what is that? Yeah, I mean. Probably that too? Yeah, I guess in like, if you're on the farm side that probably does happen too.

55:57But no, this was for how you test cows for diseases that the USDA was concerned about back in the day. In fact, that was my dad sort of worked himself out of that division in USDA because they successfully eradicated brucellosis which was a scourge of Tennessee cattle herds back then. So it was an interesting way to experience, you know Nashville being a part of Tennessee. And I think it's probably why I've always also had a soft spot in my heart for things like the State Fair. And, you know, cause we used to go out to the fairgrounds when Fair Park was still there. And I always loved to go in the expo halls and see all the, I mean, you know, now as a parent in a, I'll just say, I guess far more urban and cosmopolitan Nashville than the one I grew up in. I felt like I had a direct family and personal connection to the books we read about cows and chickens. And, you know, hey, we're all gonna make our farm animal noises now.

57:00If you read those and you've never been to a farm, it hits a little different, right? And so, I mean, I love being still in Tennessee in the sense that our girls both get to experience some of that. My aunt who lived in town with my mom, as sisters, they grew up in Dixon, Tennessee, but then moved into Nashville. And that's where they both finished growing up and where I grew up. And then my aunt had always wanted to have enough land to have a couple of horses on. So she got a little farm out in Fairview when she mostly retired. And so the girls kind of get to go out and experience that too. So, you know, but then I went to, my mom ended her teaching career where she began it after a stint in Metro Schools in the middle of the 80s. I grew up going to Overton High School for basketball and football games to watch them as a spectator. But by the time I was in seventh grade, she had gotten the opportunity to go teach French, which was the language that she loves the most over at MBA. And so my brother and I got to go to MBA.

58:02Oh, nice. By virtue of her being on faculty there. It was a great educational experience. And then that was something that was always important to my mom that she had gotten from her dad, which was the value and importance of education. So she always went out of her way to make sure that my brother and I had whatever educational opportunities we wanted to pursue. So that meant we both wound up wanting to go to college, got the opportunity to go to college. The deal I made with my parents, you know, in juggling the offer of a full ride at a more regional university at University of Alabama Huntsville, or going to Brown where it was not a full ride, was they would help with tuition on the front end and I'd pick up the student loans on the backend if I wanted to do that. So I did my own cost benefit analysis of that and chose to go to Brown. That's where Whitney and I met. And then, you know, we kind of moved back here. Whitney was actually here for a little bit, had started a graduate program in psychology out in Arkansas, but decided she wanted to pursue her childhood dream of being a physician.

59:08So she came back here, we lived, she knew she needed to get some pre-med credits, she left for a little while to get those. And that's in many ways where my origin story of getting involved in community advocacy started. Years ago in high school, I was doing soup kitchens and I think that's probably where some of my interest in policies around homelessness started because we had a very active service club that I was a big part of. And so I would regularly throughout high school do soup kitchens and then also tutoring at the Boys and Girls Club, which- Look at this guy. You know. Stop it, man, look at you. You know, and I don't know, I think some of that had a little bit to do with being at a school where you are surrounded by just an excess of privilege. And that was not my background, right? Well, tell me, I wanted to interrupt you earlier. I didn't want to, but with a mom who's a teacher and teachers are some of the most special people in the world, in my opinion, to take children that don't want to learn and teach them to learn.

01:00:16But like, there's a level of service there. What thing do you think growing up with a mother teacher, what did you learn from her? Like, what is the thing if you were to say, what did your mom teach you? What part of you comes from your mom? And I'm gonna ask you the same thing about your dad. So from my mom, a couple things. The importance and value of a thank you note. It was every Christmas or birthday, we weren't gonna do anything else. My brother and I weren't gonna even play with the presents until we wrote thank you notes to the people who gave them to us, right? So real gratitude. It's, and I hated it at first, but then I realized, well, wait a second, this is an opportunity to tell family who have sent stuff in from afar that we don't get to see very much, anything about what's going on in my life. So it's not just gratitude, it's also relationships and communication. At some level, there's a, you know, I mean, when I get back to my desk, I mean, that's, so much of this campaign is reflective in the sense that people offer an incredible amount of generosity.

01:01:24I mean, like, I am not underwriting this campaign out of our household finances. This is an endeavor where, I've never had to do anything quite like this, where it's like, there's some part of every day where I'm fundraiser in chief, but then at home at night, when I'm kind of off the trail, the thing that I'm doing is writing notes to people to say thank you for all the many opportunities and expressions of generosity they've had. So that's a key part of it. As a teacher, this was also an interesting lesson. I mean, this is a calling for her, right? Some people have that. I've known some people in my life, and really, I'm not sure I could tell you that what I'm doing right now in either my public life or professional life is a calling in the way that I think it was for my mom, right? Like, she was called to teach. I have known some people in communities of faith that you can just tell. They are called to be a pastor, a rabbi, you know, an imam, that is what they are there to do.

01:02:33I feel like my life has actually been structured more to be a series of happy accidents. You know, it's not, and I've got a friend. I mean, he was from a young age. He lived up the road on Nolensville from the Aquatic Critter, and just in high school, there were two things that you could look into his life and see he was a great photographer way before any of us even knew how to hold a camera, and then he always wanted to work in something related to fish, and so he went on to become an evolutionary biologist and now is like director of the Royal Ontario Fisheries. I mean, it's, and that's one of those things where all along you could see it, right? I mean, from the time he was in high school, it was like, this was his thing. It was what he knew he was, he's been down to the Amazon. He's had a piranha take a chunk out of his finger before. I mean, he's got some amazing stories from work in the field. I mean, it's really kind of incredible, and every time he comes back to town, we go explore creeks in Middle Tennessee, which is amazing adventure, and I'm so grateful I get to take my daughters with me so often to experience that, and so they've gotten to see field scientists.

01:03:47Like, he's been looking at glaciology from Canada all the way down into Tennessee, which is one of the most biodiverse states in the country, and so you learn a lot from people who have a calling. Wow, like, I don't know what half the stuff you just said was. I didn't know glaciology was a thing, but I'm, I've had the opportunity to have my two daughters, like one of them found a turtle shell that they collected as a specimen, and they're going to like look at where it is and the way glaciers moved across North America, you know? Wow. But then another thing that I learned from her, I think, as a teacher is, well, one, it's a calling, but it's a craft. I mean, she focused on it, and she was a master in the classroom, and it's so funny, because as a teacher, she will be the first to tell you she is not a tutor. She begrudgingly tutored one of my friends who wound up first dating and then marrying a French mathematician, and my mom did not want to be a tutor. She loves the classroom, and that is what she loves.

01:04:50That's the way she likes to teach. So that's an interesting thing, too, is the ways in which it is a craft and how she prepares it. Third thing I learned is a thing that she is now, you know, we're multiple generations deep in our family and doing, which is the value of education. You know, I took full advantage of it at Aiken, K through six. I really loved being a student. I'm so excited that my daughters are getting great opportunities within metro schools where there is plenty of excellence available, and we want to make sure great seats are available in every classroom for every student, because education is still such a powerful tool to build the future that anybody might want for themselves. And I'm very fortunate that she passed that on to me, so that even without generational wealth in hand, my brother and I have the capacity to go, in many ways, create the lives we want for ourselves, because the value that my mom placed on education in our lives. Now, the fourth thing you learn is a harder lesson. Teachers are not compensated the way that they deserve to be, and that's true in both public and private schools, right?

01:05:54Being a career teacher, like some other careers, right? As a professional, you'll be lucky to retire someday. And that's, when my mom was starting out, she and my dad, coming back to an earlier point, as a middle class couple, or a working class couple, really, back then, they could still manage to buy a house in what became a very nice neighborhood in Nashville. It's harder to do that now. I think of somebody, like if I knew somebody right now today who was in their first five years of teaching, either in private schools or in public schools, and they were married to somebody who was starting with, let's say, a USDA office here in Nashville, it'd be a pretty tricky proposition to buy a house anywhere close to where my parents bought it. It'd be pretty tricky for us coming fast forwarding 16 years ago. Whitney and I, even with her as a medical student earning no income and me being barely into my career, we could buy a house then in Salem towns, right?

01:07:02It'd be really tricky now, and so we have to keep those kinds of things in mind. But you could see, because it's an exhausting profession, it does have elements in love and hate, but you can also see a fifth element, which is a little more, even if the compensation part is the unfortunate part of the career of teaching, the uplifting thing about it is she forged lifelong relationships, and this is sort of craft, and it's sort of who she is as a person with so many of her students, and she loved the peripheral elements of teaching as much as anything. She loved being an advisor to students and helping them with their choices about their own future, whether it was education or professional or just in some ways life coaching, right? I mean, teachers have the power, and I think about it for myself, high school all the way through college. My favorite teachers were the ones who had a far more outside of the classroom, well-rounded outlook that were talking to me about other things that were bigger and really important decisions to make.

01:08:06I love this guy. I was sitting here talking to him, like we're at almost an hour right now, and I want to be respectful of your time. How much time do you need to get out of here? Are you ready to go? I am supposed to, coming back to the events of yesterday, I'm supposed to go down to a rally to talk about those bills down at Legislative Plaza. I do want to give at least, from the principle of equal time and media, I do want to come back to my dad. So, my dad was, all right, so his career was what it was. He was a federal employee for the majority of it. He's also a songwriter, and my dad is kind of the definition of don't ever give up on your dream. Decades ago, he once gave a song to Johnny Cash. I mean, he was, as a hobbyist, he would every now and then find those moments a hustle or opportunity, and so he had a demo he had made himself. You know, in our den at the house, he had a reel-to-reel and a microphone, and he plays harmonica, and every now and then he'd meet up with a session guy and put together a demo.

01:09:17But decades ago, he hands this tape to Johnny Cash, because he had written a song for Johnny Cash. Decades go by. Somehow, and I still don't know the full part of this story, he winds up with my brother's band backing him playing a collection of his songs in a show with John Carter Cash, Johnny Cash's son over at the Old Suttler out in Melrose, right? Okay, so they play the show, and he's like, you know what? Years ago, I gave your dad a song, and John Carter says, I'm gonna listen to it first. So he listens to it and he says, you got me. I'm gonna play this for my dad. So the way John Carter told the story later, he takes the tape to his dad, and he says, I know this song. I love this song. I lost this tape years ago. So apparently Johnny Cash remembered the song. Well, that was the last anybody heard of it. So then, sadly, Johnny Cash dies a few years later. My dad is in the old Tower Records right on West End.

01:10:20There is this four-disc collection called Unearthed of posthumous releases. And he picks it up, and in Tower Records, he's standing there and he goes, that's my song. Wow. Johnny Cash had gone back into the cabin off the lake in Hendersonville, basically right where my dad was a ranger for a while, and taken Rick Rubin with him in there and recorded this cut, and the song is A Singer of Songs. And so this guy who meets a girl from Dixon, Tennessee, out at Washington University in St. Louis, comes back to Nashville with her, starts songwriting, gets one of the last cuts ever recorded by Johnny Cash. So kids, don't ever give up on your dreams. That is an incredible story. That's incredible. Caroline, before we get going, is there anything else you want? I know you've probably got a million questions. I do. We've kind of dominated the conversation over here. We'll just do a second episode in a few weeks. I'm just so grateful for your time today, truly. Thank you so much for meeting with us. If I may, I do have a bit of a difficult question that I would like to ask you.

01:11:26I'm gonna play hardball a little bit. Do it. That's okay. So something that we talk a lot about in various episodes on this show is representation and why it matters. And I think that based on what I know about you in our conversation today, I believe that you're someone who would agree with that statement. Yeah, absolutely. And I've had some interesting conversations through the years in representing District 19, because when I moved into Salemtown, not only was it a majority minority working class neighborhood, District 19 itself was a majority minority part of the city. And so I had a really tough and frank conversation with my predecessor in this office, Erica Gilmore, who was a black woman. And I said, I don't want this to be too heavy a lift, but I do feel like from the standpoint of what I can offer, I'm going to try to be here for everybody in our community. And I think that still stands, but it doesn't discount the idea of representation. Yeah, and I think you kind of partially answered my question there, but obviously Nashville, with the exception of Mayor Barry, has a long history of ivy league educated white men as our mayor.

01:12:37What would you say to critics who said, who would say that it's time for a change? So one thing that's interesting about that trajectory is we don't have a lot of them who have grown up in Nashville. I actually think having a local perspective with some of the institutional history, but also the community history who knows, you know, it is something to have understood what it was like to go to Opryland or even to Fair Park, or to have known all of the restaurants that we've lost to think about the ways in which, you know, I still go to Elliston Place today and our daughters go there too and they love it, right? I mean, it's the fact that some of these things don't have to be lost, they can evolve. I mean, we certainly, they grew up and I grew up going to the original pancake pantry down the road, but now there's a new pancake pantry right in downtown Nashville and we've been there too. I think being able to connect those dots of the through line of Nashville's history, including the challenging moments of it and the history that is in my own neighborhood now in Salemtown where I've lived for 16 years, where we have a neighbor who couldn't even go to the neighborhood school because we hadn't integrated yet.

01:13:45He had to walk all the way down toward Jefferson Street like a mile away to get to the Elliott School. We have another neighbor who went to Fair School in the neighborhood and they're both still my neighbors and they're the kinds of neighbors who are not going to leave the neighborhood and I love the fact that we can all exist in the same community together. You know, other than that, I would say too, a lot of the people that we have elected have tended to come from a background of independent wealth. I do not come from that background. I come from a, again, working class transitioning to barely middle class background and I think it is very important to have had a diversity of experience where yes, I've worked retail, I've worked for a minimum wage job. In fact, I had my first raise in a minimum wage job erased by an increase in the federal minimum wage, right? I mean, I think having also the experience of really using our public services including transit, the way, I mean, again, the way that I became a homeowner and started the journey into middle class was by relying on the availability of public services that I desperately want to improve for more people and then there is the fact that I've had the opportunity to represent an incredibly diverse part of the city that includes Fisk University, includes TSU's Avon Williams campus, has the local branch of the NAACP headquartered there and has the most significant acreage of public housing.

01:15:15So I wouldn't say that my identity as a white man is really, it hasn't prevented me from experiencing the whole of Nashville as a community and if you look at the team we've built, my campaign manager is a woman, our interns hail from Fisk University, Vanderbilt University and Belmont and reflect the entire Nashville community at this point. So that's what I hope to do in the mayor's office. It's how I hope to have an outlook on the city and how Metro responds to, again, a history of not particularly looking to diversify its own ranks among the departments and I think we've got a lot of opportunity to have the very best of Metro reflect the very best of Nashville. Well said. I'm gonna do our final thing is the Gordon food service final thought. We finish every show, we let the guests take us out with a final thought, whatever they wanna say to the Nashville community, it's completely up to you, but I'm gonna change this a little bit and I'm gonna say your final thought is, why should I vote for you?

01:16:27Because I want you to stay. That's it. There you go. Final thought from Freddie O'Connell, mayoral candidate, city council member, district 19. Thank you so much for your time today. Well, thank you for this opportunity. I mean, honestly, after the darkness of yesterday, having a place to just come talk for a minute has been really great. So thanks for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here and you're welcome back anytime. Thank you so much. Thank you, Freddie. Thank you, Freddie. Appreciate it. Okay, there it is. Freddie O'Connell, thanks again for joining us back in the day and hope you learned something there. Hope that was something that was helpful for you when you go vote from who you want to vote for. I did that episode commercial free. I wanted, again, for you just to listen through the whole thing with no commercials. Just really, again, get into it. Do wanna say thank you to our amazing sponsors though, Gordon Food Service, Sharpies Bakery, Corson Fire and Security.

01:17:30These guys have been amazing. Super Source, Jason Ellis over there. Jason Ellis is in. Super Source is on board as a sponsor for the Fantasy Football League. Cannot wait to keep talking about him. Mentioned to him, hey look, we're raising money for the Giving Kitchen. He's always down to give back. This guy really is truly, truly amazing. If you guys need dish, machine, chemicals, anything, Super Source, that is your way to go. Thank you guys for listening today and hopefully I'll have a restaurant open next time we come and talk to you. Chagos, Belmont, Cantina. We're rocking and rolling hopefully some point next week. Hope you have a wonderful Labor Day weekend and enjoy the rest of it. Thanks guys, hope you're being safe out there. Love ya, bye.