Freddie O' Connell

00:00Welcome 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. And we are going to be joined in this episode with our co-host Caroline Galzin. We are powered by Gordon Food Service. Today is a tough intro, not going to lie. We are talking with city council member Freddie O'Connell and he's also running for mayor. So mayoral candidate, Freddie O'Connell. And we scheduled this interview a few weeks ago and we knew it was coming this past Tuesday.

01:06We actually had three interviews scheduled for Tuesday and we only recorded this one. Just didn't feel up to doing anything else. And I honestly, I was fully prepared for Freddie to be able to make it to this interview based upon the circumstances from the day before. But he showed up. He showed up and we get right into it. This is so raw for all of us, all the parties involved here. I mean, it was less than 24 hours after the horrific events of the previous day. At the Covenant School, after barely sleeping on it one time, we jumped into like an hour long discussion. And yes, we discussed the guns and children's safety. I mean, that's one of the first, we just jumped right in. But we discussed a lot of other things too. We felt like it was important to address the immediate topic.

02:10But we also want to learn a little bit more about the candidate and some of his policies. So we did that. And I hope the interview offers you some insight into our thoughts and the topics of just who Freddie O'Connell is. And by the way, I really like this guy. I mean, I really, really enjoyed this conversation. I just was so impressed. I mean, he's just a great guy. I loved it and I can't wait to share it with you right now. I will say that if you are out there right now and you're upset, the thing that you can do that I want to encourage you to do the most is to vote. If you're upset by things that you've seen or what you've seen your politicians saying or their action or inaction, find out some of the policies and procedures of the candidates out there and do your research and ask the questions. I feel like we're in the middle of that with these interviews of me learning exactly what people stand for.

03:13I feel like the city of Nashville is kind of under attack from the state. And the best way for you to exact change is to get up when the polls open and go cast your vote. I think that's the most important thing. Whichever way you vote, just go and vote. I will say today's episode is not going to have any commercials. This is going to be a commercial free episode. It's going to be brought to you by all of our sponsors. I want to say a special thank you to Gordon Food Service, Southern Health Insurance, SuperSource, Sharpies Bakery, Robin's Insurance, Pop Menu, Course in Fire and Security, and What Chefs Want. I'm going to take the money from this interview today, and I'm going to put it towards the GoFundMe's for the victims of the Covenant School shooting. And I'm going to send up thoughts and prayers with it because those are very, very important to have right now. If you're wondering out there, I read an article as a blog by Joe Dubin at bigjoeonthego.com where he basically is an amazingly well written piece that says, talk to somebody, go talk to someone.

04:29As men out there, we are conditioned to not be vulnerable and we have to not feel pain. We are supposed to be the strong ones for everybody. And I know there's a lot of men out there who feel the same way I do and are questioning a lot of things and we're trying to be strong for everybody. But guys, it's okay not to be okay. It really is. And it's okay to call somebody and talk to somebody. And if you are okay, it's okay to proactively call people and just check on them. Check on your friends. We need to stand together and it's okay, again, not to be okay. So I'm not going to go any further with this. I'm sure we'll talk about it plenty in the upcoming episodes, but just want to tell you guys that I love you and I love the city that we live in and I can't wait to bring you this interview right now with Freddie O'Connell. Super excited today to welcome in Freddie O'Connell.

05:31He 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 going to come out on Monday, but today is the day after a horrific school shooting here in Nashville. What were you doing? Walk me through your day yesterday because I saw your tweets. Tell me about your day yesterday and what it looked like. One of the most surreal and just kind of emotionally wrenching days that I have ever experienced, honestly, because I think this is what's maybe even the most startling part of all. 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.

06:40And 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 look like a country in decline if you go based on life expectancy. And so I was thinking about this. I was thinking how great would it be if we could build a Nashville where we are moving against trend, right? Where 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. Correct. 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, you know, crossing what we know are very dangerous streets, we can do things here on the ground that let people live longer.

07:47And so then I went straight from that to waking up and meeting a couple members of my team for what I thought was going to 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. A member of our team, our communications director, a guy named Alex Appel, 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.

08:53It'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. 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. And 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.

09:54And that whole idea of a reunification center, 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? The other way that the day was so tragic was while we have had gun violence in this 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. I mean this is a first for Nashville and unfortunately we join too many other communities that have had to contend with this.

10:54I 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. Go right down the hill. I mean literally less than a mile away from the actual school and we were 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 so sad. I don't really remember exactly what it was. I could look it up but I'm in a meeting with our leaders and I also run Maribol Restaurant. I was at Maribol. We had our GM and our chef in the meeting and I pull up a thing that said three children are dead. I lost it. I have a nine-year-old son and a seven-year-old son and one of their good friends who they do playdates 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 and I go, guys stop. But I need to pray right now for the families.

11:56I can't fathom what is going on right now because I left the meeting. I go, guys I can't do this anymore. I can't talk about P&Ls and numbers right now. I got to go and I just went straight to the Greenhouse Grill. So 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 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.

12:57And I sort of said to the team like we are on pause until further notice. And the only thing we're going to 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. Yeah, we did a line up last night. We did all the servers line 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 going to be for this community. I mean, these are people. And then, you know, I got service on that. You know, Catherine Kuhn seats here every Wednesday and she loves Diet Coke. He 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, well, thoughts and prayers like I'm standing in front of the restaurant, looking at helicopters flying around going, holy shit, this is, this is it's literally in our backyard.

14:09It is. It's so devastating. Obviously when we see this anywhere around the country that it happens, but there is something that, 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? Well, 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 for, 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. Oh yeah. Right. And so that's happening too. And it's, 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, and there, and then you find the news and it's just like, Oh my God.

15:21Yeah. My wife texts us. 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's like, I, I'm, she was, I'm shook and like, I don't know what to do. And I'm, and you fight back tears, just talking about it right now. I mean, 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. I think the question comes to you now as a mayoral candidate, what do we do? I mean, I, that's the, 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're 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.

16:23Right. And I have, I think for me, is just a practice of responding to anything. And again, I've, I've maybe you don't want to 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, 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, 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.

17:31And 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. Our 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.

18:33I'm going to tell you, if someone steals a gun from your car, they're not intending to use that for safe and legal purposes. Right. And 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, you know, 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.

19:34I don't want them focused on, you know, 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. So again, but those are two bills that are on the table right now. We can choose one or both or neither. And, you know, 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 a BT 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 know, you'll get into an argument about would this have prevented the shooting yesterday.

20:37Fundamentally, again, come back to that original premise. I want to reduce gun violence in Nashville across the board. I want to reduce violent crime across the board. Apt'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 of 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 I don't know. I mean, I'm not asking. Yeah. I mean, what role does a mayor have in making those things?

21:40It 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. It seems that our values as a city are on a completely different plane than the values of the supermajority in our state legislature. Right. 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 got to go rogue. We're going to do our own thing. We're never going to meet in the middle here. Yeah. So let's bridge these two questions. So on the 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.

22:45Right. We know that all of Mayors Barry, Briley and Cooper had some influence on policing strategies and policing policy. Mayor Cooper convened this policing policy task force. Right. And they came up with some recommendations to try to make sure. Right. You want to you want to get the right balance. You want to keep a lid on on both sides of the like where people getting shot and killed come in. Right. You want to 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. Right. That's also bad. So you want to 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, you know, personnel at that 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 this this approach to targeted policing and figured out how we can reduce violent crime.

23:53Similarly, I think, you know, 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, you know, a lot of my friends are actually thinking about leaving right now. And I said, I in the past six months, I mean, really since last summer, I've had an uptick. And it's 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.

24:56Right. 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 and to do that in fellowship with friends was I mean, it was truly it was a cathartic therapeutic process. But that 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. The mayor has tremendous power to set spending priorities. The state's interference, notwithstanding, 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 the 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 dollars in the Barnes Fund.

26:02We 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, this 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 Nashvilleans instead of focusing so much of that energy on making this a destination city. I love that Nashville is a great place to visit. I don't want to disrupt that, but we're going to lose so much of our potential and we're going to lose so many people if we don't start making our soul investment. We're going to 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.

27:02I 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. We 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.

28:02It's traffic management. It's, you know, 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 going to 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. That became the Let's Move Nashville plan that, unfortunately, as Mayor Berry's administration did not complete, that also collapsed. It 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.

29:04But 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 Hillsboro, 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. It 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. If 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.

30:06Nashville SC's first season last year at Geotis Park, and 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. 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 going to walk over. Well, you're walking down Craig Head 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. We had three years to get ready for this. And as mayor, I want to 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.

31:13I 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. A lot of people coming here in their 20s in particular 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, more possible for people, so that I look at transit policy and affordable housing policy as right next to each other. I don't disagree at all, and I do know that these are huge issues for our industry in particular because 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.

32:15And 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. What can we do? The rents are so out of control here. Like most of the things that we work on, there's not just some simple silver bullet. I've started talking more about you load the shotgun with silver tip shells and hope that the scatter effect has some impact. We did a couple of important things while I've been in office. We create an incentive grant program that still exists, and 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 going to mean that your price points, no matter where you are in the county, are much higher than they were when I was a child growing up here.

33:35But in order to develop any kind of product in the market that might allow people an entry point below market, and it's hard to say what that is, 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 going to be different than somebody who's maybe 10 years deep or a manager or whatever, the market is not going to be looking at somebody earning $15 an hour and saying, yes, you will get a 1,500 square foot home for $100,000 in Nashville right now. That's not a thing that the market is going to 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 going to 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.

34:36We've got a program now called Payment in Lue of Taxes. I'm delighted that that program just produced a project that is going to create the first deeply affordable 100 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 going to be an office of housing, and that's something I intend to create. I certainly want to 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.

35:45Well, 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. Right. 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. Oh, 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 that is a lease that no longer exists in my current management company, and I live in a two-bedroom. If I were to move into a studio in my building, I would be paying more. More rent, right? Than what I'm paying right now for my two-bedroom. Is that wild? It is wild. Yeah, go ahead. It's 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.

36:49They're coming anyway, but we're giving them all the, and let's take that money and put it into supplementing these contractors coming and 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 want to be dealing with the problems of growth rather than the problems of decline, but 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.

37:51It'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 meat 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 is going to go up there. And well, that was part of what made that community. That's what part of it brings the people together, 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 owned their property and they did okay. 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 or their space.

38:57Right. 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. And 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 parties 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 going to 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.

40:04And 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. That's a good thing until and unless the state steps in and tries to partially defund the convention center. So, you know, we're constantly having to, you know, we're playing defense over here. And I guess I would say on the strategy of offense, I want to change our, you know, 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.

41:04Now, I know over the years I've heard some of our peers in the industry, particularly small business owners in neighborhoods outside of downtown, expressed 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. So 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. I have her cell number. I got to. We'll put it in the show. She's she's she's. But I figure that out.

42:04Hold on. So it's interesting because I worked 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 Fourth of July and Independence Day celebrations and then New Year's Eve. Right. And, you know, 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, you know, P90X and a beach body thing or whatever. Right. Like and and, you know, 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 the Convention Center has maybe taken a little bit of pressure off of that. But, you know, 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, you know, I'll just say it this way.

43:17I 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. Which 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 is reopened after the tornado. You know, 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 have clustered for whatever reason.

44:23And 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 want to keep things in balance and you want to keep things tolerable. Yeah. You know, I guess I think a good example of, you know, 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, you know, I go to New Orleans a couple of times a year. It's my favorite city. New Orleans is wonderful. You know, there's the Bourbon Street Tourist. Right. And then there's the Dining and Culture Tourist. And, you know, somebody who's going for Cajun food and streetcars.

45:24Yeah. Can we lean into that a little more? Hey, 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. And 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 CBC and the city, that we focus our energies on bringing people to town that we would all be happy to welcome here.

46:37A good neighbor of a tourist. Right. Yes. Dina Ivy. Dina Ivy. Yes. I think that's who's going to be running it. I don't know if it's been announced. I think that's who it is. Dina Ivy. Dina. D-A-N-N-A. Dina. So there you go. You 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, I think, but I think it. I think we needed to talk about it. I think you can't, I think we can't gloss over it. It is. It's going to shape. We're going to be responding to this for a while. And we had this interview on the books well before this happened. And I mean, just happens 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.

47:39What, 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. You know, I mean, it's, it's, it's a simple concept. Keep people alive. But public policy saves lives. Yeah. At least it can tell me about yourself. Like where, where are you from originally? Are you originally a Nashvillian? You said you went to school and you came back. You're you have a girlfriend. You've got kids. Like what's your story? Tell us more about yourself. Yeah. So I'm a native Nashvillian. I went to elementary school just down the street too, at Aiken elementary. I'm, 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. I went to grassland and my kids go to grassland. So, and, 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.

48:42Then, 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, because what the Army Corps of Engineers does is manage the interior waterways. And so he was a ranger out on lakes out in Hendersonville. And, you know, he had a, it was interesting because 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, in historic Richland West End, we had a cattle chute parked in our driveway, right? Because 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.

49:50Okay. I mean, it is literally a place where you funnel them in. A chute with a 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 if you're on the farm side, that probably does happen too. But 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, you know, because 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, 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 going to make our farm animal noises now.

51:11If 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, I mean, they, 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. Nice. 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.

52:14Oh, 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 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 back end 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 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, so she came back here.

53:21We 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. 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, but there's a level of service there.

54:30What thing do you think growing up with a mother's teacher, what did you learn from her? What is the thing, if you were to say, what did your mom teach you? What part of you comes from your mom? I'm going to 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 going to do anything else. My brother and I weren't going to even play with the presents until we wrote thank you notes to the people who gave them to us. So real gratitude. 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.

55:35I 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.

56:40That is what they are there to do. I feel like my life has actually been structured more to be a series of happy accidents, you know? It's not, like, and I've got a friend. I mean, he was, from a young age, he would, like, 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 wanted. And, you know, 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.

57:44I 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. Like, he's been looking at glaciology from Canada all the way down into, you know, 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'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.

58:49She 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. That'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.

59:57Now, 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? Being 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. 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.

01:01:00Whitney and I, even with her as a medical student earning no income and me being barely like into my career, we could buy a house then in Salem towns, right? It'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 Kraft, 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, 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.

01:02:03My 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. I love this guy. I was sitting here talking to him. 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.

01:03:04Decades 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 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. But 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 going to listen to it first. So he listens to it, and he says, you got me.

01:04:04I'm going to 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, you know, sadly, Johnny Cash dies a few years later. My dad is in the Old Tower Records right on West End. There 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. 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.

01:05:10So 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? You've probably got a million questions. 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. I'm going to play hardball a little bit. 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 and our conversation today, I believe that you're someone who would agree with that statement. Yeah, absolutely. 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.

01:06:11And 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, you know, from the standpoint of what I can offer, I'm going to try to be here for everybody in our community. 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 ideally educated white men as our mayor. What would you say to critics 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?

01:07:23I 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. He 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.

01:08:23I do not come from that background. I come from a, you know, 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.

01:09:27So 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 going to do our final... 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 want to say to the Nashville community.

01:10:32It's completely up to you. But I'm going to change this a little bit, and I'm going to say your final thought is, why should I vote for you? Because 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. Appreciate it.