Climbing the Charts with Angie Lawless and Brandon Miller Angie Lawless and Brandon Miller

“When you’re in the middle of the battle, to be policy-driven is smart, to be politically-driven is dangerous.”  - Jeremy Faison
Few people have had a closer seat to the important issues, drama, and national and international garnering headlines involving Tennessee politics than Representative Jeremy Faison, Chairman of the Tennessee House Republican Caucus. Representative Faison discusses what drew him into politics and what it’s like to be a leader of a party now enjoying a supermajority. In a Paul Harvey fashion, Faison weighs in with the “rest of the story” on the alleged complaint against him noted in the recent Chancellor Perkins opinion, his now infamous “pantsing” incident, what people fail to understand about Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton and even the recent “whistling” episode involving the high school girls’ Picket County Bobcat Team.  Beyond that, Faison, a libertarian, addresses many of the issues that have been presented during the current legislative session.

“It’s already a presidential race and lots of people are going to come out and vote for the President…however, we know…that about 18% of the people who go into that booth don’t keep going down the ballot… If you’re in the voting booth, don’t stop… Make your vote count all the way down.”  -Megan Barry
In a hotly anticipated interview, Climbing the Charts sits down with former Nashville Mayor Megan Barry. Barry served as Nashville’s seventh mayor and was the first woman ever elected to the office. Barry’s tenure as Music City’s mayor, however, was marked by almost Biblical highs and lows. Megan speaks to her time in the Mayor's Office, and catches us up on what she has been doing since leaving the Mayor’s Office, including her decision to re-enter the political arena as the Democratic challenger for the 7th Congressional District of Tennessee. The incumbent, Congressman Republican Mark Green, announced he would retire, only to rejoin the race a few weeks later. Megan makes a compelling case for why she can win this race, and then tells us how she will do it.
Many astute observers consider Megan Barry to be one of the most charismatic and gifted communicators in the political arena in Tennessee today.
https://www.meganbarryforcongress.com/

“It’s a diverse world. Companies sell products to consumers that are very diverse. Their teams and technical talent should reflect the communities that they sell products to.” – Dr. Isaac Yao Addae
Dr. Isaac Addae is a man with many hats – first-generation Ghanaian American, computer engineer, strategist, business professor, entrepreneur, investor, and author of “Black Boy Fly: Embracing My Ancestry, Blackness, and Purpose in the African Diaspora.”  Isaac also served as the Treasurer for Freddie O’Connell’s mayoral campaign, and now has agreed to wear yet another hat as the “Small and Minority Business Engagement Liaison” for Nashville.
Listen in as Isaac shares how he came to Nashville, why he will always spend a significant amount of time as an educator, how navigating two worlds as a Ghanaian American became his superpower, and why we should all care about diversity, equity, inclusion and justice in the workforce.  Also learn why Isaac’s new role will be one of his biggest challenges yet, and about how some of the plans being put into motion in the Mayor’s Office are likely to move the needle for small and minority-owned businesses.  Isaac also makes a unique, compelling case for how Nashville can adjust the lens that the rest of the world views Nashville through and emerge as an increasingly ascendant tech hub.

“If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime. But if you teach a woman how to fish, she feeds the village for a lifetime. The ripple effect that women entrepreneurs have on communities and the global economy is phenomenal.” — Sherry Deutschmann
 
Climbing the Charts sits down with Sherry Stewart Deutschmann, a serial entrepreneur, a sought-after speaker, a highly coveted board member, and the bestselling author of “Lunch with Lucy: Maximize Profits by Investing in Your People.”  But it is Sherry’s role as the founder of BrainTrust, which is empowering women entrepreneurs so they can 10X their companies and change the world, that is now changing the business landscape in Music City and beyond.
 

Former Mayor Karl Dean was known to ask, rhetorically and always in good humor, what Nashville would be without music (answer: Birmingham), but he could have substituted “the Ingrams” for music and arrived at the same punchline. 
There are few beloved things in Music City without fingerprints, known and unknown, that in some way trace back or connect to the Ingram family.  While Martha Ingram was the driving force behind, among many other things, the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, her son John, who now serves as Chairman of Ingram Industries, is the driving force behind one of Music City’s latest loves: Major League Soccer in the form of Nashville SC!  The story of how John and his carefully assembled team brought MLS to Music City has been told before, but never quite like this.  
A favorite part of the conversation with John involves his telling of why the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby has always spoken to him, "it's all about possibilities."  When John sees the green light, "that's where [he's] headed."  And, we think that's where Nashville is headed, as well.

In the 1950s, Frank Sinatra famously proclaimed Jack Daniel’s the “nectar of the gods.”  Sales doubled, the warehouses emptied, and Mr. Daniel’s “nectar” was on allocation for the next twenty-five years. 
In 2013, a state law in Tennessee established a legal definition of “Tennessee Whiskey” for the first time, better known as the “Lincoln County Process.”  While a few whiskey nerds followed the arcane legal and political developments that paved the way for official “Tennessee Whiskey,” on November 4, 2015 the worlds of music and Tennessee whiskey would again collide when Justin Timberlake made a surprise appearance to join Chris Stapleton on-stage for the 2015 CMA awards.  While Tennessee Whiskey was originally written by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove in 1981 and made famous by George Jones in 1983, the Stapleton-Timberlake collab equated to a sonic boom in the worlds of music and brown liquor, bringing a new level of national and international attention to Tennessee’s favorite spirit that was now a “category” all its own.  It almost goes without saying that sales of Stapleton’s debut studio album, “Traveller,” produced with Dave Cobb, would also explode, winning numerous awards and ultimately becoming the top selling country album of the 2010s. 
The story of Tennessee Whiskey is complicated, and fascinating.  Join us for this very special episode of Climbing the Charts as John Brittle, real estate guru and founder of The Whiskey House, a 501(c)(3), and Heath Clark, a recovering healthcare attorney turned whiskey entrepreneur and founder of H Clark Distillery, tell us the incredible true story of how Tennessee went from almost 1,000 distilleries before Prohibition, to having just TWO distilleries until Prichard’s opened in 1997, to now having almost 50 distilleries with almost 30 that are now part of the officially designated “Tennessee Whiskey Trail.” 
There are few better at turning phrases or crafting tall-tales than these guests (e.g., “I can have a one-night stand with a bottle of wine, but with a bottle of whiskey, I can have a long-term relationship.” — John G. Brittle).  We promise, whether you are a whiskey novice or aficionado, you will learn a lot and laugh even more through this episode, and you’ll also have a true appreciation for the fact that all bourbon is whiskey, but that not even all Tennessee whiskey is “Tennessee Whiskey” . . . . with the exception of Prichard’s!