Tom Morales

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 for today's Wednesday Rewind. Today we're talking with Thomas Morales, who you undoubtedly know who he is. He's the owner of TomCats, which we go into in depth in this interview. And he's also the owner at The Southern, and Acme Feed and Seed, and a bunch of other things he's got going on. He is one of the most amazing people. I had so much fun talking to him. He told so many stories about movie sets, when he was getting started, how he got started, some of the stories about how he got started in his van that he bought, that he put the number four on so that when he showed his investors, they thought that he had four vans.

01:10And it was just, some of his stories were too good. And I really am enjoying sharing these episodes. Today for our Wednesday nooner, as this is coming out at noon today, we're coming out with an all new Music City roundup coming up soon. And this episode originally aired on May the 20th of 2020, so it's just a couple months after we started this whole thing, and I think you guys are going to love it. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is this show will be aired commercial free. We will not have any ads that play throughout this whole interview. That is Made Possible by Sharpies Bakery, celebrating 35 years here in Nashville. Check them out at sharpies.com, that's C-H-A-R-P-I-E-R-S dot com. If you need fresh baked bread, deliver daily to your restaurant. They've been doing it forever. They are local. We want to support local. They are the best. Complete Health Partners. Complete Health Partners is your choice for offering your staff urgent care accessibility.

02:16We know health insurance, major medical, is very expensive, but Complete Health Partners can absolutely help you out and offer urgent care visits to all of your staff for fractions of the dollar, what you would pay for major medical. Check them out at completehealthpartners.com, or you can go to our website, nashvillerestaurantradio.com, and click the Sponsors tab and go to Complete Health Partners. Our final sponsor to make this completely commercial free is Fo & Bo, F-O-H and B-O-H dot com. The hiring crisis is live and everybody's feeling it right now, but you can go to foandbo.com right now and you can look at the thousands of people that are on there and just start clicking to invite people to come interview with you. It is that easy. If you're looked people, you're scratching your head, what am I going to do? If you just need to hire a server, you can click 45 bucks for the entire month to hire as many servers as you want. Go get those positions filled. Do it on Fo & Bo. It is a locally owned company. It is a woman owned company. They are amazing people. I love working with them and you should too.

03:19FoH and BoH dot com. Go check them out right now. We are going to go now live to an old episode with Tom Morales. Enjoy. So, Tom Morales, thank you so much for joining me today on Nashville Restaurant Radio. Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it and hope to have some fun. Well, I'm anticipating fun. I know you're a super busy guy. To give our listeners a little bit of background, if you don't know who Tom Morales is, I'm going to give you a little bit of a brief history because I feel like if you want to know a ton about Tom and how he began, there's a bunch of YouTube videos and that history is out there. We don't need to recover it again. But you're born and raised in Nashville. You moved away for 15 years. You came back and you ran a catering company at Starwood Amphitheater. You did really well doing that. I was unemployed at Green Hills Y. I'm wondering what I'm going to do. I came back to work for Ray Danner at Shoney's and at the sale maker on West End and I found out really quickly that corporate life was not for me.

04:28It was a death to somebody who wanted to be creative culinary wise and so I was sitting unemployed with a guy you know that was unemployed too because his four-star French restaurant at Julien's had just closed, George Arvelle. Oh yeah. And George looked at me and I looked at him one day in between basketball games and he says, hey, if you get a job first, will you hire me? And I said, well, if you get a job first, will you hire me? So that's kind of how it started and Terry Reed, who's still around town and she's great piano player, she said, hey, you need to go talk to Doc, her boyfriend at the time, Doc Scheermeyer and he's running the backstage at Starwood and they need a caterer. So I made up a card and I'd met Paul Prudone once or twice or three times, like actually cut some chops with him a little bit. He was like a mentor but I asked him one day, I said, Paul, how did you get your name, Kay Paul's? And he says, he pointed to his diminutive wife, very small woman.

05:34She's he says, she is Kay and I am Paul. So that's how I got my name, Kay Paul. So I came up with the name Tom Katz based on that and because your wife is was Kathy. And then so I said, Tom Katz. So I got a card made up and I put Tom Katz on it, went out and talked to Doc Scheermeyer and Steve Moore and they interviewed me and they led me into this little eight by eight room and said, can you make this into a kitchen? Of course, I knew yes, of course. Yeah, I can make this into a kitchen, which was basically a four top burner in a oven. And and we've got a big grill out up underneath the tent. And Tom Katz, we they hired us to be a consultant to design the kitchen and hire staff. And I was smart enough to know that I needed to delay this as long as I could. So I had to be the chef and the staff. So Hank Junior was coming to town on May 1st and I went to Steve, I said, Steve, I don't think we can hire staff and train them in time.

06:37I'll do this for the first season and then we'll go from there. Well, we were there 20 years. Wow. Actually, that no, that launched after the first season. They gave us an award for a significant contribution to the success of the amphitheater, which the director's award. Yeah, the director's award. And I turned that into a direct mail piece and I sent it to the 60 sent out 60 letters. Most of them basically handwritten with a picture of the trophy to video companies that were just starting because country music had just, you know, became aware. Well, Rock and Roll had been doing videos for a while, maybe eight or nine years, and country music was late to the game. But they also realized that they had to, you know, look good. So their diet and we were the only healthy caterer in town. So we started getting video jobs from that letter. I got I sent out 60 got three jobs. Quick story is the first one was a Marty Stewart video with a guy that directed it, Steven Buck, who I'm still friends with.

07:43And he was a legendary A.D., first A.D. assistant director in the movie world. And so that story comes back around. But that's that's where I started at Starwood. You know, I swear I could listen to these stories. I'm sure you've got a million stories of writing the backstage at Starwood back in the day. And for those of you who don't know what Starwood was, Fulton Hickory Boulevard heading east or heading towards like Murphy's Bro, there used to be an amazing amphitheater that all the bands played huge grass area. If you grew up here, you know what Starwood was. It was the most amazing places, 20,000 people, 20,000 people at hell, 20,000 people. Yes, I'm seeing Tom Petty there, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, all the big. Oh, I can remember, you know, well, hell, we were there. Thirty five concerts a year for most of the time we were there. So everybody made it through there from Jimmy Buffett. And the one one concert I'll never forget is there clapped and coming back through there after he had lost his child and he'd always been a hero.

08:46Tears in heaven. Yeah. And I'd been a hero. I mean, he'd been a hero of mine. So I was really taking good, I mean, like extremely good care of him. And his manager came up to me and said, hey, I want you to come up on stage with me. And we stood over behind the soundboard and he took a break and came back and played like a 20 minute segment with this is the first tour after this had happened of acoustic music. And and he that was a song he sang. And I mean, tears were coming out of his eyes as he sang it. And I just remember that as one of the most moving moments of music that I've ever witnessed. But, you know, most of it's a challenge, you know, because with rock and roll, they come in, they're there a day, they're very demanding, and then you don't see them again for a year. So you're not really building a relationship. After the first season, I realized it started with that, you know, I had money in the bank and it was been a great success, but I didn't I didn't have anything on the books. So a little movie came to town and they called me for an interview.

09:51So I went to interview him. And the last question they asked me was, do you have a mobile kitchen? Well, I had never heard those two words together in my life. But I knew the answer. And I said, yes, of course. Yeah. Well, I immediately left and I don't call us. We'll call you as, you know, the typical answer that they give you when you leave or statement. So so I call my sister immediately who lives in L.A. And you got to remember, this is 1987 or 88. And there's no Internet. And so I said, what's a mobile kitchen? She said, well, it's because she worked on movies. She's a set decorator. Leslie said, it's like a Winnebago with a kitchen in it. I said, oh, gosh, I said, send me to L.A. Times so I could look in the classified section. So, you know, she sent me FedEx, which did exist. And I found one in Phoenix, Arizona. And it was anyway. So they called me back and they said, hey, you got the job. We start, I think, like was in August.

10:52And I said, well, I can't block off my summer if you're not going to give me a deposit because I needed the money to buy the mobile kitchen. Yeah, you got to put a you said a third of it down, right? Yeah. So I said, how would they say how much you need? I said, ten thousand dollars. And they said, I thought they were going to laugh me out of the room. That seemed like a lot of money to me. And they said, no problem. Wrote me a check. I got I got on an airplane, got off the airplane. I can say this Morales, but a little Mexican guy meets me and he leads me over to this taco truck. It's Ricky Ricardo's Chili Express. And I'm saying, oh, my God, I bought a taco truck. I had about three and a half days to get back to Nashville driving the thing to figure out what I was going to tell my wife that we just spent our life savings on mobile kitchen. And so anyway, we got Lowe's exterior white paint and painted over the Mexican and the name. And then I had a little guy. I can't remember his first name.

11:52Maybe Frank. I want to say Frank Stallworth. But he was 16 years old. He's an artist. I said, hey, you got to come up with a hip looking cat because we're we've got to paint this. We're going to start next week. So he came up with my logo in about 25 minutes. And it's funny because as our as our reputation grew, our logo was the T-shirt was the most wanted thing. Everybody wanted a Tomcat T-shirt. I can remember Billy Crystal coming up to me humbly on city sleepers saying, can you give me like three or four more of your T-shirts? So it was always a fun thing. But, you know, we started with a little movie and a funny story about the mobile kitchen is I had read the Fred Smith story with about FedEx. Yeah, without him, without an airplane plane, he had a he had software that he used at Eastern Airlines to deliver packages. And and so he rented an airplane, actually, and use that to convince people.

12:53He filmed a TV commercial, a 30 second commercial, and use that to film the commercial, convince people, yeah, convince people that he had a fleet of airplanes. So I put mobile kitchen number three on my truck to convince people that I had three trucks, which eventually I did have. But that's that's brilliant, though. Well, that little movie led to another little movie, which led to another little movie, which led to Prince of Tides, which led to A League of Their Own, which led to Groundhog Day, which led to What About Bob, which, you know, it was just one little movie and the producers move around. So the relationship we built was like, you know, it fractured out. I mean, one, you might have three producers and they'd all go do three different movies. So it was it was quite the time. And I mean, three thousand movies later, we just finished one in Budapest. Wow. We did Terminator last year in Madrid, Spain and Budapest.

13:56And we just finished a Netflix movie right before Covid hit. So and we were supposed to be the Peter Jackson movie that's coming up. But that's on hold, too. So I don't know how that that world is going to reemerge either. I love that story. And I love the aspect of you are talking about running kitchens on movie sets, as you've said, is the NFL of working in kitchens. My food service, there's no doubt your kitchen moves every day, sometimes twice a day. I cooped a bill, which was one of our first big movies, and it moved two and three times a day. I learned never to take a movie that had a car for a name. And because it was it was like, oh, my God. They get a scene and then we move 40 miles down the road and set up again. And if anybody's been around the kitchen set up, it's, you know, with what we do, we're the maitre d, we're the dishwasher, we're the cook, we're we're the, you know, we have to be well read. We have to know if a star comes up.

15:02I can remember Jodie Foster coming up and asking me one day, have you read this book? And I said, oh, yeah, actually, I have. And she was blown away, you know, and then we started talking about it. And and it was that's how you, you know, it is the NFL food service. You have to be well read. You have to know all the culinary buzzwords and you have to know every aspect of how a kitchen runs. Plus, you have to be a mechanic because you're you're dealing with heavy equipment. So there's just a lot more going into it. When you wake up in the morning, you know, where your restaurant is, you're, you know, you're three quarters ahead of the game. Well, I think that it's in the innovation that you had to create. I mean, you've talked about the aspect of how fast you were able to put production in and how you were innovative based upon being an entrepreneur. And the fact that you just did what you thought you had to do and you started putting food out so fast that the producers were going, hey, wait, this guy's saving us a ton of money. And it's now kind of just the way that you operated has now kind of become the industry standard.

16:06Well, we we innovated through ignorance, really. We we did not know how it was done. So we tried to do it the right way. And I was three years into it and a league of their own. And Bobby Greenhut and Joe Hartwick, who's Joe is still head of Fox, the film division, he's about to retire. But they came up to me and said, you're feeding everybody in 15 minutes. And I thought I was in trouble. So to my trouble, no. But what was happening, we had 1500 people. And so every time we got 150 people, we'd set up another two sided buffet. And they were identical. The food on both buffets were the same. So on a league of their own, we would have 10 identical buffets set up. And then they would, you know, come through and boom. But I didn't realize in setting it up that way that the way the union works is the last person to get their food is when their 30 minute break starts. So if you take an hour and a half to feed people, then they start their 30 minute break, so it's a two hour break.

17:09Well, they explained to me that the league of their own was costing them $15,000 an hour to film. So when I was giving them back, well, over an hour a day, then they were saving that $15,000 in production time, which basically meant their lunch was free. So they like that. Yeah, they like that. Now, not every producer appreciates it, but now every caterer in the business is doing the Tomcat's way. So you've talked about doing young guns and just the climate that you've got to work in. I've heard you talk about a Woody Allen movie where it was snowing sideways and just the aspect of putting together food. People are going to eat no matter what the weather's like. Doing that takes grit, determination, wherewithal, all of those things you just described. Sand grit on Hidalgo. We were in the White Sands, New Mexico, and it was blowing 30 miles an hour. And I don't care how tight that tent was. You had grit on your food. It was like, even we would sit there and hold the chafing dishes down with all our force and it still somehow get in there.

18:13But no, I learned it on young guns or cities, I think city slickers. So we were like almost 9,000 feet and the propane didn't burn. There wasn't enough oxygen. Billy Crystal coming up and saying, what are you doing? And I said, stir fry. He said, it looks like slow fry to me. And you brought George Harvell along for that, right? George was my main guy for years. And we got to the point where we were running multiple crews. So we had three or four crews that were always working. And at some point, because of conflicts, we ran as many as eight crews at one time. But that was not smart. And it was crazy because you diluted your core power. You would take some of your good people and put them over here and some of your good people over here and say, have four good people at one spot. So we did that for about a year and then we realized this is just going to drive us all crazy. And so we just started saying no. Well, then you also have to figure that if you're doing that much, you've got to have a bullpen, right?

19:17You've got to have almost a farm team, which I'm going to fast forward a little bit. You've got to you have restaurants in Nashville that you initially really wanted to get going because that's a training ground to get people up to speed, to kind of identify who your next players were, to move into the NFL, so to speak, right? Yeah, we were throwing talent at the movie sets. We wouldn't train anybody. We just, hey, can you cook? Are you a good cook? George and I would taste their food and backstage at Starwood a lot of times say, OK, you're qualified. And the next day they'd be in Tucson, Arizona or wherever we were. And 70 miles down a washboard road. And if you forgot the butter, you were just out of butter. But so we think people with talent at the jobs and then we realized that, you know, people get tired, they want to rest. When you're working 16 hours a day, a lot of days and you go to sleep dirty and you wake up in the morning, take a shower and sleep another two hours and get up at four in the morning or two in the morning, whatever, depending on what the day looked like.

20:26And so and then we wanted to train people. So restaurants were like kind of completing the circle. We would have the ability to train people to our style of cooking and then retire people or arrest people. I mean, that's where George, George ended up at Loveless. And I mean, he he retired there. But before that happened, you know, we started Sapphire in Franklin and we used movie chefs to create that space. And then we sometimes, you know, they stay there six months, say, OK, I'm ready to go out on the road. They made more money on the road, but they had a life when they were running the restaurant. So, yeah, like Bart Pickens is one of those guys, I think, Bart, fantastic guy, you know. And I mean, most of my crew, Jesse Goldstein, who's, you know, food sheriff, Jesse, Jesse wrecked a mobile kitchen twice in two days. And I used to get everybody out of Johnson and Wales and Charleston because Jeannie Jerrick, who just did the movie in Budapest, she's from there.

21:31But they were they the people who went to the culinary schools in the South versus the CIA in New York City or the French Culinary Institute, they already understood hospitality. So that was that was like, you know, we didn't need to teach them the arrogance of the Culinary Institute of America. I'm not saying everybody's arrogant, but there was a certain arrogance that came with it. And, you know, and so but with the Johnson and Wales people, we found people that already understood hospitality and they could cook and a lot of the best chefs weren't culinary trained. I always say, you know, the difference between a cook and a chef is a cook. Can anybody cook a, you know, a medium rare ribeye? But a chef is somebody who can take a bad piece of beef and make it tender as a medium rare ribeye. So so that's the difference. And so, you know, and you're with people 70 days, I mean, you've got to be able to, you know, you're the forest gump or shrimp, you know, think about it.

22:35You got three really meat. You got chicken, beef, pork, and then you got seafood. So, you know, you're chicken, beef, pork, seafood every day. So chicken, beef, pork, chicken, beef, pork. And you couldn't do lamb. And, you know, you couldn't because, you know, the movie people did not want to eat lamb. You could do a lamb chop every now and then. But you're with them 70 days. So you can figure that out. You know, you're going to cook chicken, you know, 20, 30 times and, you know, pork 20 or 30 times. So you really, you know, day 30 or 40, if you're not creative culinary person, it starts to tell on you and people get tired of your food. And if you haven't still run into the buffet on day 40, you know, you've nailed it. And a lot of that just listening to people because, you know, we have a script of menus that we will use for the first two weeks. And I never let anybody vary from those two weeks is as many times as we are. We have eaten smoked prime rib or tuna.

23:38That's day one. I don't care. You know, and then then as you get to know the crew and their eating habits, then you then then we let people vary and do what they wanted to do. And because because you had to trust at some point. I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours on end about movies and just dynamics of how you do, how do you execute all of those things. But I have, I have an agenda today of topics I want to get. I would love and I would love to have you back on. I would love to just tell stories of movies. Did you have a favorite set that you were on that to get the people, the actors, everybody was just awesome that you would share? Well, I think there were a bunch of them. I mean, I always like Billy Crystal because he loved to talk sports and he'd sit with us every day and talk sports. And he didn't really want to talk to Hollywood BS. And so I've always been out West and Western and young guns. It was great being with all the kids. I mean, you think about it. Yeah.

24:38All those guys were just like, yeah, and we skied every weekend together. I mean, I met Julia Roberts. She was dating Kiefer Sutherland and she actually babysat my daughter one night. And I didn't know who she was until after the movie was over. And we went to the theater to see some movie and she says, look, there's Julia. And I said, what do you mean? And she pointed to one of these cardboard cutouts and it was Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. I just spent three months with her and I didn't know that she was an actress. I just thought of her as Julia Kiefer's girlfriend. So there was like times like that. I mean, my cousin Vinnie was a blast because we were all in a dry town living in this, this defunct, it was a brand new subdivision, but the economy had tanked. And so we were living in these big, beautiful homes on this golf course and everybody just got really close together and loved each other. And that's always a good time. I mean, there's never really a bad time. And I think New York City was the most challenging place to work.

25:40And we did all the sex in the cities and the sopranos, but you might be 30 blocks up and your equipment's parked five blocks away and the logistics are just horrible. But what about Bob? And Groundhog Day was a blast. And I'd sneak out with Bill Murray and play golf. He was a bad golfer back then. I understand he's a pretty good golfer now, but because I would be done after lunch and I could sneak off. So he'd say, I got the afternoon off. So let's go play golf. So I'd go play golf. And I played golf with Joe Pesci a lot on my cousin Vinnie for the same reason. What was Joe Pesci just like when you're golfing with Joe Pesci? Was he like gambling? Is he just like? Yeah, he's a big gambler. I mean, I was playing with the guy that was the president of the US Open and Joe Pesci every day and they were playing for $5,000 a hole. And I was playing, I said, I'll gamble with you, but mine is $5 a hole. And they would lose $5,000. I'd lose five. I could handle that. But I can remember Pesci getting so pissed off at me because it was the last hole and there was like five holes rolling on it.

26:45Like they were playing for $25,000. I was playing for $25,000 and I won the hole. And Joe Pesci had, he would have won the hole if I hadn't won it. And he was so pissed off at me. So yeah, but he, he's a funny guy. He's a nice guy. You know, I, I never really ran into anybody that wasn't nice. It was a star. I mean, a lot of times the people around the star are the ones who are, who are the, the tough ones and the gatekeepers. Yeah. They have their hands in the hair of the actor. And if, if you don't give them what they want, then they're going to go back and say, Brad, the caterer sucks or whoever, whoever they have. And so, so you, that was my job. Well, you know, after I got familiar with the business, I would go on sets and find out who the, who the hard characters were going to be and, and, and make sure that they were, you know, their hands were held and taken care of. And then I'd move on. I, you know, I had a family, so it was, it was a, it's a blast. I mean, I was in Budapest at Christmas, so I can't complain.

27:46We went to Easter Island, South America. I've been to New Zealand for Lord of the Rings. So there's been a bunch of good travel. I mean, that's the exciting part now. I don't care who's in the movie. Like I said, I want to do a whole show about that. I would love to just hear stories like that, or maybe we'll, I'd love to hang some time and talk about that, but you have restaurants and I will tell you, first of all, I was eating at merchants one time on the second floor and I looked out and I saw these two kind of like cowboys right off of Broadway that were like art installations. I didn't know what they were, but they were kind of like right there. And, and then I went to a restaurant called Sapphire and I went to this restaurant with a girl for the first date who is now my wife. We have two children and our first date was at Sapphire and on the wall was this big cowboy looking thing and I believe you have one at the Southern also, right? It was funny. We bought, I bought that lot. Ed Stollman bought merchants.

28:50George Grune was where George Grune was. And I, I bought the lot next to George and the building and the lot was the cowboy park and Olin cock was the artist and his wife was at the time was the professor at Vanderbilt. And he said the, the homeless had started breaking them up. They were created for Earth Day in 1991 or 92, maybe even sooner than that, but it doesn't matter. So he, he said, look, you can have them. They can never go back outside and do what you want to do. So I took them in. I put a stored them and then I renovated them and I put two out there at Sapphire. There's one in the Southern right now and there's two at Acme right now, but there were seven or eight of them. Only maybe six of them were, I have one in my office, were able to be saved. But the cowboy park was Earth Day. I always want to say 1992, but it could have been a different year.

29:51We'll go with 92. Yeah, but that was, we were down there. You know, we'd bought that building to put a restaurant in and, you know, about every 99th person was a potential customer in those days. Everything was porn shops and pawn shops. And so we, we, we kind of staggered there, you know, opening the restaurant because we didn't want to open and go under. And we really just didn't want to open up a meeting three. So I really think you should open a Ricky Ricardo's chili place now. I think that's like, you'd need like outside of the Acme, you need to have a food truck. That's Ricky Ricardo's chili that you can serve and like people, what is this? And if they know the story, then they know the story. I think that would just be so fitting. Yeah. I think that that whole time and piece of an era was where I looked at Nashville and I said, wow, this, this is the Ryman was about to be torn down. I said, this is the altar of Nashville, the Ryman auditorium. This can't happen. And so we started an event to bring people back downtown, which was dancing in the district.

30:57Oh, the best. And that was, you know, the thing that we want. We wanted to show downtown Nashville, bring music back to downtown Nashville is what we wanted to do. The music, you know, back when the day when Willie Nelson hung out there and George Jones and every aspiring country music star was on lower broad. I mean, growing up as a kid, I mean, it was like, my dad would load up the car, you know, with boys, 10 kids in our family, seven boys. And that was like, we'd go down there and watch everybody from Appalachia wrapped around the Ryman auditorium. They used to wrap around that thing three or four times to get in for the shows. And it was just so vital as a town and the best guitar. It was like, it was something you could be proud of as a kid. You know, you'd see String Bing Aikman on Johnny Carson. You might cringe a little bit, but you'd see Chet Atkins playing guitar, you know, and you'd like pointed him and say, yeah, I like this.

32:01This is what I want to be. And I had the pleasure of working with Chet on Whitney's history on Chet Atkins Musician Days. I produced that event for him for four years before he passed away. But the dancing in the district, they used it to recruit the Titans. They used it to recruit the Predators. They used it to recruit the Hard Rock Cafe playing at Hollywood. We were the showpiece that showed that Nashville could be viable and that people would come back downtown. I mean, I can remember Bare Naked Ladies and I can remember Soul Asylum, 40,000. I mean, we were so more pure than it was a flooded out concert. I mean, it was like... We started with Clarence Gate, Mount Brown up on Capitol Boulevard and we ended up on Riverfront Park and 10,000 to 15,000 people was an average night for any kind of band. It was a happening. It was fun. There was no other place to be. Now, people that live in Nashville today that weren't around back then, I don't think they understand how cool this was.

33:07It wasn't happening. You saw everybody. You had your clicks. All of your friends were there. That's back in the day when shortly after the Hard Rock opened. No, we were there before the Hard Rock. Was it before the Hard Rock? They had it. We had a special night for Hard Rock Cafe, I think like 1992, and they brought in all the executives from Hard Rock. They came to the concert and next thing you know, they signed up and the Hard Rock was recruited. And then Planet Hollywood was another big one that came in, which they followed. Right after it. Yeah. The Titans sponsored it one year. I almost got Don McLaughlin fired because the big boss didn't like that the NFL was sponsoring anything and matter of fact, it was a tenuous time for Don and for us at that time. But then it turned out it was successful. It was David Clymer, great sports writer. He never wrote a positive thing about the Titans until they sponsored dancing in the district.

34:12I sat down with David and I said, David, look, they're giving back to the community. These people that are coming to dance in the district will never go to a football game. They're like my mother. She said she wouldn't go there if the Pope came. She ended up, I ended up taking her to a game. But that really broke the ice. It showed the Titans in a way that people hadn't experienced them and that they were willing to give back to the community, not just take for the stadium's sake. I think that's kind of where we are at right now in downtown Nashville. Well, and I was going to say you love preservation. I mean, one of the things that you've done all over town is you've preserved some amazing landmarks. I mean, I know that you were Loveless Cafe and I grew up since 1988 eating Loveless Cafe before you went through and remodeled it, which was, I'll be honest with you, initially happened and I felt sad because I enjoyed just the tiny little cafe right by my house. But it was so necessary and it's such an amazing build out.

35:13You did just a fantastic job there. Well, funny. We bought that. I called a friend of mine. I said, hey, y'all got the money. I know how to do it. Over lunch, they decided to put the money in and we started. It was like a December 2nd or 3rd closing date and December 28th. I remember like yesterday it was spitting rain, snow, and it was, I looked around and I'd interviewed everybody. There was nothing there. It was like the ovens didn't work. The rats were running out from underneath it. It was just like, oh my God, what have we done? And I saw this woman and she was walking back and forth. This is the only person I had not talked to. I said, come over and sit with me. And I started talking to her and I said, well, how long you been here? She said, well, I've been here 14 years. And I said, well, what do you do? And she said, well, I make the jams and the jellies. My hair on the back of my neck, the biscuits. Those were the only two things that were authentic when we got there.

36:16Everything else was coming out of a can or it had just gone so far down the tubes. And so I looked at her and I said, well, how much money do you make? She says, well, I make $8.50 an hour. I said, she'd been there 14 years and she made $8.50 an hour. I thought to myself, well, she must just love this. And I said, well, you know what? And I said it right then and there, you're going to be the face of the Loveless Cafe. And she said, well, what's that? And I said, well, she said, I said to her, you'll know when the time comes. The next day, a guy sat on the toilet in the cafe. It fell through the floor and we closed. Six months later, fast forward, Katie Couric came to town with the Today program and she wanted to interview somebody from the Loveless and have the biscuits. We had just reopened and everybody wanted to do that, of course. I mean, who wouldn't want to be on the Today program? So I said, Carol Fay, this is your chance. And everybody step aside.

37:16She's going to go down and do this interview. She went down there and the biscuit lady was born. Carol Fay Ellison with Katie Couric. And the rebranding of the Loveless Cafe happened. And she was on, the next week she was on Martha Stewart, the next week Ellen DeGeneres, the next week Conan O'Brien, the next week Bobby Flay. I mean, it was like she had never been on an airplane and she spent the last, the next two months on an airplane going back and forth to New York City. We crashed our computers. So many people wanted to buy her jams and jellies. We had to do a whole new system. It was just spectacular. To watch her and shine and then lose her eight years later was just a tragedy. I mean, she was one of a kind. I was with her when she died and I can remember her looking at me and it was just, I can see it right now, penetrating, but she was the real deal. And that's what drives me.

38:19What is authentic and real? And that is the secret to success, really. I mean, history lends legitimacy to anything, but to maintain the traditions and the things that, like music. I mean, when I was growing up, Lower Broad was an incubation. It was a discovery platform. It was where every star wanted to be and every record label had an AR person in there wanting to discover the next star. I mean, Alan Jackson, you can name them all. They were discovered right down there, Willie Nelson. So to see it turn into a tourist trap and essentially it's because the small guys can't operate anymore. The rent's too high. The insurance is too high. The things that made it special have been given way to skyscrapers and we've sold our soul in a way to pretend like we're somebody that we're really not. At the core of it, we're still sleepy old little town Nashville.

39:20And the humility that we display when there's a tornado in East Nashville and everybody goes out and helps each other, that's the community that I remember growing up with and that's the community that still exists. But we have some leadership issues right now. I think, you know, we should be helping the little guy. This is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. You posted something on Facebook that detailed a lot of this and I want to get into this. I read it and I immediately started thinking about the Nashville Predators because I'm a Preds fan. I've been going since 1998 and the first playoff game that I got to experience against the Detroit Red Wings was one of the most amazing sporting experiences I've ever been to. The city of Nashville that I feel such incredible pride for. It's everything that you just described that makes Nashville Nashville and when you go to those Preds games, we came out as a collective city and cheered on that team like I've never experienced in my life. And we went to the finals and ticket prices went up 25 percent and I went to a game this year and it was it was quiet and there's a wait for the season tickets.

40:33All those fans that were there that were the ones that had been there on Tuesday night when there was 5,000 people can't afford to go to the games anymore and it was a different atmosphere. It was still great. I mean, the Predators are still great. I love the Predators, but it wasn't that electric feeling that I remember it being to go downtown and experience the game and it kind of makes me sad and I guess like when I kind of read what you were talking about, I kind of went I feel that way. I feel like I want to talk about that more with Tom. So I'm so glad you came on today and we could talk about it. I think the Predators and I'm a big fan too, but I think a lot of times in professional sports when you pay the players, all of a sudden they don't want to dive in front of a puck going 120 miles an hour. I mean, you watch it with pro golfers that they have a big year and there's can be a letdown special players. It never is because they're not playing for money. They're playing because they're just competitive people. But with Nashville, I think we fell in love with ourselves.

41:37I think we always seem to think we need outside validation. Even in the music community, when somebody that lives here tells you you're a great guitar player, it's not the same as Mark Knopfler coming in from London and saying you're a great guitar player or, you know, you really need an incubator here to keep the music alive. And I think lower abroad was that. And I've been since I did that post, people have said, well, what's the solution? What's the solution? Well, I've been thinking a lot about and I might write about it next Sunday, but it is really, I think you have to recognize the authentic pieces of a city and you have to protect them. You know, the Civil War history, the civil rights history, the great universities that we have here. I mean, Meharrian used to graduate 42% of all the Black doctors in the world until, you know, the Ivy League schools started accepting Black students and they cherry picked all the students. So, I mean, there's stories like that people don't know.

42:41The reality of it is, is we have a great city and the elements of it are not being protected right now. When you take a historic building and you can go down to the Metro codes department, get three different permits and then blow up the building in the middle of the night, that should never be blown up. But well, we got the permit to destroy this. We got a permit to destroy this. We got to, oh, and we did it all in the same day. So now we don't have a building. I mean, and then they'll come and bitch at us about, you know, lights on the outside or whatever, you know, that do it right. And that's a collective attitude that developers, you know, I mean, you find a piece of land and you want to build a 30 story building. I think they ought to tax people. This is the thought I've been having. Once you get over a certain height, whether it's 50 feet, 80 feet, every foot that you go up higher should be where you pay the taxes instead of the land, the square foot of the land.

43:43Because, you know, if you've got the Acme and you've got three stories or four stories, whatever you want to look at it as, then okay, you pay your taxes for four stories. But if you've got 90 stories or 80 stories or 60 stories or what we're getting ready to have in this town, hey, they start off so that you can preserve that little spot, the little place that makes the music, you know, the cultural and historic places in town that will never be able to generate the rent income. Taking old church, they're tearing down old churches, buildings all over the town. Give them a reason to stick around and continue to be the incubators of what makes the city great and whether it's music or culture or history, you know, I'm going to think on that one. But it's a shame when, you know, I said a death by a thousand cuts, you know, when they cut down the cherry trees to make way for the NFL draft, which was a joke.

44:44I mean, it was a total joke. Yeah, we got our names on the TV for four days, but I think maybe people watch it the first day and a half, then they pin them up on lower broad and the people who pay the rent every day of the year don't get the benefit of the sales because they have to go through security to get in there. You know, I don't want to get right on a rant, but there is a lot, you know, a low hanging fruit that could be picked and fixed. I mean, synchronize your traffic lights. You've got 30 story buildings emptying out on a two lane road at four o'clock. You got 10 of them now, you know, the reality is we need to slow down, take a year off from building. And if people don't want to take a year off, then they can go to some other city. But until we can get our, I don't want to say it, but SH1T together, we're going to lose eventually. I mean, we're going to be, like I said, its cities can become any city. And we're well on the way to doing that.

45:47And I think it's going to take some strong leadership and the PR. I mean, you know, okay, you know, cut the fireworks from an hour and a half or 45 minutes down to 30 minutes. Who cares? Your eyes are like worn out after about 20 minutes anyway. And put the money into the Fisk Chapel over there that needs a renovation or, you know, prop up some of the landmarks around town that need the help. I am on a rant now, so I'll get off that. If I do that rant, it means nothing. You are somebody who owns businesses in the downtown area. You've put your money where your mouth is. You've taken the just the Acme Feed and Seed building. I mean, what could you do with that building? And you preserved it. You kept the original state of it and then built it into something that's just fantastic that people can enjoy without having to tear it down and rebuild something new. And I mean, you're in the middle of all of this. I mean, your perspective is everything.

46:48I enjoy what you're saying. Thank you. But I'm also, you know, I've tried. We saved the Loveless. We saved the Woolworth building, which was the first sit-ins, first integrated lunch counter in the South. We saved Acme. You know, 408 Broad was crumbling and it's a historic building. But there's a bigger challenge right now. And I think anybody that's in a position of power ought to recognize, especially as we come out of this COVID thing and facing a 32 percent tax hike on property, is that we need to save Nashville. You know, I can't, you know, I could pick a building out and, you know, we're involved in some really fun projects right now and historic buildings. I don't know that they're going to go forward because of the COVID situation. But my point is, as we come out of this, I think everybody sits and looks and thinks about, like my kids, my boys that were in college, they've been here with me now for six months, five months.

47:49And it's just been wonderful having them back home and sharing time that I would have never had with them because they would have gone to college. They would have found a girlfriend. They'd have married a girlfriend. They'd had their own family. But it's like a bonus time. And I think everybody has, you know, revisits memories and, you know, the retrospection that's going on is important. But how we come out of it as a city and how are we going to change things or are we just going to go back to normal? I mean, I read this morning where the environment is like just refreshed from the lack of carbon that's been emitted into the atmosphere. And that's a positive. I mean, you know, there's a lot of positive things that have happened. We hadn't had a school shooting. We, you know, if we had said we had to go to war to win these things, the positive things that have happened, we would have had an outcome that would have been successful. I hate, you know, I mean, for some of the people, it's a death sentence right now.

48:51If they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so there's a balance that has to be struck. But when we come out, the bigger point is, is we all have to say, I'm willing to give this part up of my life so that we as a greater community can emerge with fellowship and a future that suits us all. I really get disappointed in, you know, the mask. That's symbolic, but it's become a political thing. I mean, I don't wear a mask because I want to wear a mask. I wear it because of you or the person that I'm going to cough on. And, you know, if they take offense to that, well, what is that? What is that? You know, just stay six feet away from me. I'm cool without a mask. If you don't get close to me, you know, that's why it is, you know, we've never been in a situation ever where something that you do affects so many other people or don't do, you know, and I think wearing a mask is something that you need to do to respect. It's a sign of respect for other people that you respect their space.

49:53You need to be out. You know, I'm not a big fan of them, but I'm going to wear it. And when I tell you, it takes courage to put it on. Why should I feel like freaky? Because I'm putting a mask on because I'm going into Home Depot, you know, or Kroger. I mean, the frontline people that have to deal with this all day long are the ones who are going to get sick from somebody who doesn't wear a mask or coughs on them or whatever. The reason you wear a mask is it's highly contagious, number one. And, you know, when the food business, you know this. We're a highly regulated industry. I've got a hundred health care score on the wall at Southern when we closed. So, I mean, to get a hundred in our business doing, you know, on average, 1200 people a day, one of the highest-grossing restaurants in America. And still, you know, they show up at lunch when you're busier in hell and they start checking temperatures and all that. So, to incrementally change the way we operate for a COVID environment, yeah, it's a challenge.

50:54But we're trained to do that. We're trained to be, you know, healthy suppliers of meals. That's our business. So, it's not hard for us. But what is hard is when somebody comes in, they've had a couple drinks and they start slobbering on you, telling you, oh, well, you got to wear a mask in here, you know. I'm invincible. I'm 23 years old or whatever, you know, but grandma and grandpa may not be. So, what do you guys do in that situation? Do you have balancers up front? That's the biggest dilemma I'm having right now is the controversy that is created by becoming from a culture of hospitality to where we really actually have to police people. So, you know, it's not going to be easy. That's the most difficult thing. When we talk, you know, our teams internally, the thing they fear the most is not internally, it's externally. The customer, the external customer that comes in, internal customer, we understand it.

51:56We know what we have to do, sanitizing our hands, sanitizing the tables. Every touch point has to be looked at differently. How we greet people may be different. But the essence of who we are is not someone to go to tell somebody, hey, you know, back off a little bit. And so you can't say it, but I can. But if you're somebody who's going downtown, like stop giving the people the front door shit. Stop being that guy. Like this is national mandates. It's not a political statement. It's a safety statement. It's a respect statement for people that are working in the establishment and the other people that are trying to enjoy the establishment. It is very frustrating. That's why we're just taking a wait-see attitude about it right now. I'm hoping that the warm weather that, you know, SARS, the warm weather killed it and everybody expected it to come back in the fall, but it didn't. You know, so we're hoping that, you know, we're watching Texas. Texas is going to tell us when to open and when not to open.

52:59They're kind of like guinea pigs, but it's even there. It's been down, you know, party lines. Forty-seven percent of the people did not choose and restaurants chose not to reopen. Forty-three percent did. Austin, which mirrors Nashville, is still in shutdown. So we're just waiting to see, you know, if cases don't spike. I think we're going to have to come to the reality that we're going to have to protect the elderly, you know, the underlying symptoms that create, you know, bad outcomes. So those people need to be targeted in terms of being protected. Of course. And then the rest of us are going to have to get on with life knowing that even young people die from this, not nearly at the rate that older people or obese people or diabetes or people with underlying conditions do. But I really think people, the restaurant is an emotional experience, just like music.

54:03And we're joined at the hip. And I don't think anything's going to happen in Lower Broad and Nashville until the music comes back and people want to travel and people want to gather. So absent a cure or a vaccine, the only thing that we can do is have mutual respect for each other and, you know, be smart. If you were to speak directly to leadership of our city, what would you tell them right now? I think the mayor is doing a good job. I think Vanderbilt Hospital and Meharry have really stepped up in the leadership role in this community. I think it could have been a much different situation. I'm beginning to give. I don't like leaders that lead with platitudes and, you know, trusting God. Not that I don't trust in God, but I think if you believe in a God that has free will, allows free will, then you're pretty much, you know, he gives you brains and he gives those scientists brains. And we should listen to the scientists with the brains. That's God's gift.

55:05And so I do think that the state with their testing program is really stepped up. And I'm good. I'm excited about that. But I think the federal government, I mean, we're still getting clarification from the PPP loan, the CARE Act that was back in March, March 27th and Friday of last week, we were still getting updates. Today, we got more updates on how you can spend the money. Well, we've had the money in our pockets and we can't even spend it. And then if we spend it the wrong way, it becomes due as a loan that's, you know, when you're talking about a million dollars and you have to pay it back in two years, think about that, you know, that'll sink your ship quicker than taking the money. So, you know, there's just been a total lack of federal government leadership. And even today, I'm sitting here, you know, we just want clarity. We want leadership. Leader, you know, right or wrong, they make a decision and they go.

56:07And let me tell you this. Fifty-four percent of the jobs in America are created by small businesses, people that run businesses like myself across all walks. Sixty-eight percent of new jobs are created by small business. What does Washington do? They live off of Wall Street. What does Wall Street produce? They don't produce anything but paper. So at some point, Amazon is not going to have anybody to sell to. At some point, all these businesses that are traded every day on the stock market, if you don't have money, you can't go buy an Apple phone. The reality of it is this is going to spread up. If they don't fix it on our level, on Main Street, it ain't going to get fixed. It's going to get worse. If you gave people that work in our businesses a thousand dollars, do you think they're going to hold onto it, go put in a 401k? No. Hell no. They're going to spend it.

57:08And it's going to end up in the Wall Street IV towers anyway. And this is one time where government ought to incentivize the spending of money from the ground floor from Main Street up. And if they can't do that, then they don't get it. And, you know, there's reasons why they go in there, you know, not millionaires and they leave multi-millionaires because they can inside trade. They can do everything they want to do. I'm for term limits if you have to. No, I'm like sick of it. You know, they sit there and everything's a political football where, you know, and this is the media too, to a degree, not to a degree, their whole concept is built on creating an emotion in me. So I don't know what I can say on this or not, but it becomes mental masturbation. You go to where you want to be told what you already believe. You go to Fox or you go to MSNBC. No one is challenging what they're saying by reading and sourcing the truth.

58:09So you sit there and you stay in your little bubble of reality. Why do people go get toilet paper? Because it's something they can control. Why do they latch on to conspiracy theories? So they can say, see, it's all against us. You know, we're the victim where I'm like a boot. You know, entrepreneurs, we could pull up our pants and we'd go to work. We start with nothing. We can end with nothing. And that, my friend, is what is wrong with the world. I'm sitting here, you know, they give us money to hire people back. And, you know, well, why would they want to come back? They're making more money than they can sitting at home. Not that I'm against that, you know, I would be too. But it's just the lack of thought that goes into this world sometimes. And it's just like what we're talking about in Nashville. We fell in love with ourselves, came enamored with everybody saying, we're the it city, we're the it city.

59:09Oh, we've got to build another tower, another tower. Oh, we've got 29 cranes here. That's something to be proud about. Well, we have no infrastructure to support it. So hello. And I feel sorry for Cooper because, you know, he's getting left with the bill. I remember Bill Purcell, you know, he was a mayor that built sidewalks because he couldn't afford to build another stadium. Everybody wants a monument to their legacy. And at some point you have to pay the bill. And I feel Cooper hadn't been a mayor long enough to have created this debt. And, you know, the ones of us that were trying to save buildings and save our community were looked at like we're idiots. Well, no, we're just old and have experience. Have you thought about running for office? No, I've thought about running from it. But you've probably been asked that question before, right? Um, many times, but I'm not, you know, well, I think Trump, all my skeletons, I don't think they even mount up to anything anymore, but I had a lot of fun.

01:00:15There's probably a lot of stories out there, but my bigger deal is, is, you know, what I think right now is you can't convince the unconvincible. So when we sit here and bang heads with somebody that doesn't agree with us, even we may be the most well-read, smartest person in the room, but you're not going to make any progress. So the only thing you can do is go to the apathetic and give them a reason to vote. Go to people who don't even register to vote and get them to register to vote. Because there's 70 million people in America that don't vote that have the right to vote. So when you think an election was won with 53 million people, the math is easy. So what can we do? What if, if you're listening out there and you live in Nashville, you said that you put the thing on Facebook and people said, what are the solutions? You said, maybe next Sunday we'll, we'll put something out there. If we were to talk to the people right now of Nashville, what would you say to them to say, Hey Nashville, let's preserve this thing that we are that is special.

01:01:19What can anybody out there was the number one thing you would recommend people start doing today? Well, I would get active in the community. I think everything changes at a local level. I mean, the president really is the president because local people did not vote. And the mayor is the mayor because more people did not vote. Then he won his election by, you know, in terms of people counts. And I'm not that I'm, I'm not, I think he's doing a good job. I'm not criticizing him, but I think getting active in the community is something it takes. It takes one person at a time to change things. I think Nashville, you know, it's just kind of like COVID has really helped the environment when think about it, but it, it has the cruise liners. I've got friends in the Bahamas who say the beaches are as clean as they've ever seen them is because they don't have cruise liners dumping trash into the ocean. And I think with Nashville, you're going to have a situation where growth is going to slow, which may give it the opportunity to catch up with the infrastructure and the needs that, that the city has that are basic and not, not glamorous.

01:02:33And so I think, but, but to tell people, get, get involved. I mean, I can get more involved myself. I started writing a letter to my, my employees and associates in business and everybody started saying, you should share this time. And so I put it on Facebook and public and it's people, people are loving the idea that I'm able to, to write what they're thinking. So I don't think I'm, I'm, I'm really giving any fresh thought or, you know, but I am taking the time to write it down and then people are responding to it. So that's, that's been exciting and it, it's rewarding. You know, sometimes, you know, it's hard to write. I mean, it's, it's like, sometimes I write and I said, man, I don't even want to post this and then sick to your stomach. And it, but it, my people that work with us in our, you know, it's like family, they want to hear it. So you dig deeper and dig deeper and dig deeper. And then you finally write it and then you throw it out there. And I've been overwhelmed. I've cried and the responses I've gotten and from people that I highly respect, you know, that, that have come back into my life and said very nice things. So, so it's uplifting. And I think realistically, when I look at it, cause I know a lot of these people's politics that are commenting and it's across the board.

01:04:00People want the great divide that separates us as a community and as a nation to end. Amen. You know, we, we got to quit fighting the civil war. We got to quit fighting the Vietnam war. We've got to come together and my brother is a Rush Limbaugh Republican and we agree on 98% of the stuff he, he recycles. I said, why do you recycle if you don't believe in global warming? And he said, well, cause it's the right thing to do. And I said, well, that's good enough for me. Okay. You know, so whatever the reason is, is we, we do a lot of things together as a community that are the right thing to do, whether our politics or, or I, you know, I had a friend that almost died recently and he's been sending me conspiracy theories like three a day and I'm sitting there thinking, well, he's better. But it doesn't mean you have to be angry at him and send him back something that's vitriol and just anger. Oh, I know. And then we're the both extremes are, and you know, I, I be honest, you can go on Facebook. I get pissed off sometimes. I said, don't, don't, you know, don't stick your head in the sand. This is real things. People say on video, you know, it's not the deep state changing it. It's real, you know? And so, but you know, in this media world today, everything's short-sighted.

01:05:20It's, you know, it's a new news cycle. And then there, you know, and I'm wondering when they're going to give up the COVID news cycle. It's, it's generated, you know, everybody's at home. They've got to watch TV. You know, I doubt some of the things that are being told to me by scientists. I doubt some of the things that are being said to me. I know a lot of everything political. I just tune out to be honest with you because everybody has an agenda, you know? That's true. And even Nashville, that we suck at communicating the COVID. I mean, I, you know, well, we had 600 cases. We had 300 cases. Give me some information. Is it rising? Is it falling? Where is it happening? Is it all just nursing homes and meatpacking plants? Are people going in restaurants getting sick? We should have information coming out of Franklin right now because they've basically been at a lockdown for three weeks. And they went in there. You see pictures and I won't say where, but they're in there packed at the bar. No one wearing a mask, you know, uh, the employees not wearing masks. They're not doing any of the, the recommended stuff. And, and, and so we shouldn't know something. We should. It's an interesting dynamic when you look at the younger people, because I live two houses down from my parents and they're, you know, they're not like old, but like they're, you know, in that demographic, they say, don't go out and just intermingle amongst people. But I don't know when this thing's going to end. Is it going to be a, is everybody going to have to get it to build the antibodies? Are they going to have a vaccine?

01:06:47And I'm just, I'm still kind of hanging out at the house, trying to doing everything I possibly can to not have bad lungs personally. But I eventually do I have to get it to go back to normal life? And at some point, will they create some way to completely treat it? I don't know. Well, I think they certainly got to do some, you know, the state Tennessee is doing a great job on testing, but we've got to do testing. Then we've got to do social tracing, you know, and once we know what we're up against, then it may be that, Hey, this is, you know, other than it being highly contagious and deadly for people that have underlying conditions, you know, those things are going to need a cure or a vaccine. But until we know that, you know, we're all just guessing. And that's the part that is real frustrating for me. Well, we have been talking for an hour and eight, eight, an hour and eight minutes. And I could probably talk to you just because I love hospitality. And I love running operating restaurants. And I love just the dynamic of what you do downtown, running a restaurant that does the volume that you do at the Southern, the time, the energy, the tension of detail that you put into all of your locations, the care, the passion that you have in preserving Nashville and the level of pride you have in Nashville, your history, what you've done in Nashville. I want to say, thank you from the bottom of my heart, because it's people like you that are helping preserve this town that I love so much. And I feel that sense of pride and that sense of everything that Nashville is. And I just, I read your, I read your post about keeping Nashville, Nashville, and what we can just, just kind of, like you said, putting on paper what a lot of people are thinking. And it was, it kind of brought tears to my eyes because it was a special kind of thing.

01:08:43And I'm so happy that you took the time today to talk to me about that and to tell kind of your story. And I would love to do this again, but talk more about the restaurants and what you're doing and why you do it. And I think that just the perception of who you are, that you did, you were a guy that started running a catering and you had to borrow 10 grand to get your first truck. That it's not just somebody gave you millions of dollars and you just bought restaurants. Like the fact that you came up and you did all of this and you're an entrepreneur, I think is really special. And I just, well, and that's what makes it all easy. Cause Brandon, I started with nothing and you know, I was very happy when I had nothing. And if I go back to nothing, I'll be happy. I may have to turn left and turn right and live a simpler life, but that's, that's, that's okay too. So, but thank you for having me on. And when the restaurants get open, I'd love to come back and talk more. Good. Well, I would love to have you come on and talk more. And thank you for spending the time today and we'll cut it off right there and just say, um, we'll, we'll do it again soon. Thank you. Thank you, Tom.