September 24, 2024 • 29 mins
Join host Liz Hirsh Naftali on the Capitol Coffee Connection podcast as she sits down with Congressman John Rose from Tennessee's sixth congressional district. In this episode, Congressman Rose shares his unique upbringing on a 234-year-old farm, his career in the tech industry, and his journey into politics. Discover how his background and experiences shape his approach to leadership and governance, and get a glimpse into his personal life, including the influential role of his wife, Chelsea. This episode is a blend of personal anecdotes, political insights, and the importance of heart and humanity in public service.
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Music.
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Hi, I'm Liz Hershnoff-Tolley, and I am the host of the Capital Coffee Connection podcast.
And the purpose of this podcast is to get to know the heart,
the humanity, the home, the hope of our national elected leaders.
And I have had the pleasure of speaking with leaders from both sides of the aisle.
But the one thing that we all have in common is our heart and our humanity.
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And that is what I hope people take away from these podcasts.
Podcasts, and today I am very excited because I am meeting somebody new,
and he is a congressman from Tennessee, John Rose, and he is in his third term.
You are Tennessee's sixth congressional district.
That's right. And so I just want to say welcome, and we're really here to get
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to know who you are, where you come from, and hear your stories.
So thank you for being here. Thank you, you. And thanks for having me. And it's a pleasure.
So I want to talk about your beginning. And I will just share,
I grew up in Los Angeles and I grew up on a small ranch in Studio City.
And it has, it'll be introducing you. But what I wanted to share was that I
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grew up on a small ranch in Studio City.
And one of the things that I loved was watching my father driving the tractor.
We had crops, we had horses, and it was just being in a big city of LA,
but yet we had this ability to be on a small ranch.
And I have most of my fondest memories from growing up there.
And it's my way of introducing you because I know that growing up on a farm
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and being a farmer and the life, and you grew up on a farm that's 230 years old, I understand.
234 this year. 234 this year. So I'd love for you to give us some information
and talk about what it was like to grow up on the farm and what this farm represents. Sure, sure.
So to clarify, and it's a unique thing about my background, is we actually,
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as throughout my childhood, did not live on the farm. We lived in a small town nearby.
And my dad worked for the farm credit system in those days, but continued to
farm. So, we spent our afternoons and our Saturdays and our weekends and our
summer vacations working on the farm.
My grandmother, my grandparents, when I was very young, lived there.
And so, the farm was kind of an inseparable part of my childhood and certainly
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was a passion of my dad's, and it became a passion of mine.
And what were your jobs on the farm? I'm just curious. I mean,
I'm sure there were many.
Sure. My dad did a good job from an early age of involving us.
I'm the youngest of four.
So it was always me and my siblings, my older siblings.
And he had a way of turning work into play.
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So, you know, when we were young enough not to know better, we thought we were playing.
But he was trying to get us to do small chores that, you know,
could be communicated to young children and that we could manage.
So we did various things, counting cows, going out in the pastures,
looking for the cows, counting them.
We painted rooftops and painted gates and painted the sides of barns, those kinds of things.
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We had a problem in those days, kind of an emerging problem with Canadian thistles
that were coming into our pastures.
And of course, you could spray to kill them, but my dad would give us a hoe
or a shovel and send us out in the field to cut thistles.
And one of my earliest really concrete
memories when I started to realize I was working and not playing was
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that I wanted a small motorbike
and my dad was trying to figure out a way you know that I could work to get
that and so he offered to pay me a nickel for every thistle I cut up I've dug
up and you know that it was a $400 mini bike it took a long time to to make
$400 at a nickel per thistle.
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So those were the kinds of things he had us do.
Right. I love that. A lot of thistles for a minibike. Yes.
What was the production from this farm? What did you all get out of it and produce and sell?
Sure. So through the years, lots of things. But in my lifetime,
we primarily were a beef cow-calf operation.
We also operated a grade A dairy. We produced burley tobacco.
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That part of Tennessee is where burley tobacco historically was utilized.
We also produced hay and Kentucky 31 tall fescue seed.
So we combined that seed and produced that and sold it to customers in the area.
And then you continued. I mean, I'm going to go back a little bit to your childhood
afterwards, but just on this issue of the story of farming,
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talk a little bit about as an adult and what your role has been as a farmer
leader in Tennessee, because I know you've had a few different roles and I know you saved a state fair.
So could you talk a little bit about those things? Sure. So,
you know, the farm was very much became a passion.
I was active in FFA and then studied agricultural economics both in college and in graduate school.
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But my goal was to come back to the farm. And so I was looking for a profession
that I could, where I could earn a good living in a small town.
And I needed to be able to buy out my three siblings from the farm operation.
So that was always on my mind. And so that all took me in a little bit different direction.
And so my career has actually been, interestingly, in the information technology space.
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And we can talk more about that. But there came a time when my business was successful.
We ultimately sold it when I was still a fairly young man and I got to turn
my attention back to the family farm.
And then because of that, ended up with an opportunity to serve as Tennessee's
Commissioner of Agriculture for a fairly short period of time.
But that all allowed me to kind of re-engage with my agricultural interests and roots.
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And then later, as you mentioned, I got called upon to chair our Tennessee State
Fair Board at a tumultuous time when the city of Nashville was trying to exit its.
Century plus old role. And so those are the things that I've done in the agricultural space.
Which are beautiful. Thank you. And talk a little bit about your district.
I mean, from the perspective of the people, the people you serve,
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because I do believe so many don't understand.
They think you show up in Washington, you're up there, there's battles.
But I understand one of the most important roles of a congressperson is the
constituents in their communities.
Talk about like some of the stuff that you do, but also who the people are that you represent. Sure.
So probably the best way to approach that is to talk about the demography of
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the districts, the demographic of the district.
So my district is part or all of 19 counties, and that's been true.
We did have a redistricting, so it changed a little bit. So today I represent
part of Davidson County, which is Nashville, Tennessee, about 25.
30 percent of that county, and it comprises 25 percent of the population of my district.
So a small part of one county is a quarter of the district.
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The next over adjoining county, which is kind of a suburban county for Nashville,
Sumner County, is another 25 percent of the population.
So those two counties, 50 percent of the population, the rest of the district
is east of Nashville all the way over into East Tennessee and represents about
half the population of the district in 17 counties.
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And I'm assuming that's rural? That's very rural, yeah. Small towns,
including the town where I live today, Cookville, which is where I grew up and
is a small town, about 40,000 population.
The county has about 80,000. It's a college town, so it is a little bit more,
you know, a little more active life there than in some of those small towns
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across the district. So that's the group of people.
And politically, as you might imagine, the Nashville population is in a different
place politically than the rest of the district.
So in Nashville, Davidson County, the mix is 75% Democratic, 25% Republican.
Everywhere else in the district, it's majority Republican, culminating in the
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far east of the district where in the last election, in the general election, I got 91% of the vote.
So a range of different views, but predominated by that kind of rural,
suburban, small-town America, small-town Tennessee mindset with a heavy importance of agriculture.
Culture. Right. Well, that's who you represent.
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Doesn't matter which side of
the aisle. Those are the people that you are there to serve and to help.
So we've jumped around. Talk a little bit about growing up there,
what it was like just to be a child in those times and what school was like
and what kind of things you were interested in.
Obviously, you worked on the farm, but what was it like just as a young person growing up?
Sure. So again, growing up in a small town, You know, the 70s,
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primarily 70s, very early 80s. I graduated from high school in 1983.
And, you know, as a kid, obviously, you don't necessarily have a full appreciation
for the world around you.
But, you know, some of my earliest memories are of things like the moon landing.
I have a distinct memory of watching the original moon landing on TV.
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And then the Vietnam War and the protests are something that as a child kind
of stood out in my mind as I was growing up and a little bit of the social upheaval of those times.
I can remember as a third grade student, we recited the Lord's Prayer in public
school every day and had a devotional.
But we knew that was changing. You know, there was, I had a teacher who was
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probably putting up a bit of a protest of her own, right?
So, so you were aware of those things, but mostly just, you know,
being a typical kid, enjoying that.
My background was a little different because we lived in a small town.
And so I sort of saw that side of life.
But then my dad was farming, and so we had what oftentimes I saw as a kind of
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a break from being in town and being at home,
the opportunity to be on the farm and get to kind of spread my wings and go
out on your own and learn the lessons of life from watching what happens on a farm.
Yeah, it's a good balance. It seems like a very good balance for a child. It was.
Did you have a teacher, young or later on throughout high school,
college, that is still somebody that you reflect upon who really mentored you or inspired you?
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Several, I would say. Probably the first person who I would say really made
a lasting impression was my major professor in college, a guy named David Nary, Dr. David Nary.
And he was a determined liberal, but a very kind of open perspective on learning and knowledge.
And really, you know, he he was the first person to quote to me the oft quoted,
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I guess, observation that when you're young, if you're not a liberal, you don't have a heart.
And when you're older, if you're not a conservative, you don't have a mind.
He taught in that way all the time, even though, you know, I could know from
the things he said that he was he was a liberal.
He was he had an open perspective on here's the stuff you need to know in life
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and how it would be important to you. is a person probably that I most often,
aside from my parents, I most often think, I wish he was alive so I could call
him and ask him a question.
Talk a little bit now about your career because you're farming beginning and
then you were and you still are involved in the tech world,
which I think is interesting because one of the things I've also learned is
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like all of our leaders, they come from different places.
And the whole idea is that people bring a different perspective to when they
come to Washington, the work.
And if we can do it correctly, that's more important than which side you're
on is actually what you can bring from your prior experience.
So talk about being in the tech world and how that balances with who you are now. Sure.
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You know, the kind of diverse background that I've been gifted to have is is
very useful in being in Congress, probably the place where it has served me the best.
And so having that agricultural background and then trained as a lawyer,
though, I didn't spend very much time.
I'm still a licensed attorney, but I tell everyone I'm a recovering attorney.
Yeah, and so that has served me
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well throughout my career But then there came a point
when I was in law school when a fellow law school student and
I started a business in the IT space was just
a good idea he had and and and we
we pursued that and we're blessed and that was very successful and So I've spent
my whole professional career in the computer technology and training space and
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so that has you know kind of kept me on the the cutting edge of what's happening
in terms of the development of our technology and our industry and our economy.
And so that has served me very well as well. And then I've operated our family
farm since the late 1990s.
And all of those experiences, particularly the business experiences,
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have given me a keen appreciation for how government, frankly,
can be helpful, but probably more often gets in the way of what Americans are
trying to do to create new ideas in the area of entrepreneurship and business
growth and development.
And so that causes me to have a guarded view.
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My own view is that government is not really good at doing anything.
There are some things that we need government to do because we can't entrust
it to the private sector.
But as often as we can figure out a way to get government out of operating what
could could be a business or performing critical functions that could be in the private sector,
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we should do that because it will be done much more efficiently.
Speaking of efficient and what works well, I understand you have a wife that
is very talented, is in her own right, a powerful person and a good leader.
And what I'd love to know is a little bit about, obviously, you're traveling
a lot and you have to go back and forth.
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So how do you balance between being a leader, being a businessman,
and being a husband and a father?
And how does your wife support the work you do? And talk a little bit about who she is.
Sure. Well, there's no question that I'm in Congress today because of Chelsea, my wife.
And, you know, I focused on my career really to a fault as a young man and really did not seriously,
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you know, pursue finding a relationship, finding a wife until I was in well into my 40s.
I wouldn't recommend that, but that's how it worked. And it has worked out well.
I've been blessed in that regard. And so there came a time when I met Chelsea.
She asked me out and I declined, which is another whole story.
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But she is just a remarkable person, mature beyond her years.
She's younger than me, but the most mature woman that I've, aside from my mom,
that I'd say I have had the pleasure of knowing in life.
And so she was important in getting me involved in politics because I was inspired
by her ability to lead and her ability to communicate.
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She has a graduate degree in communications and has a full-time job,
and we have two children.
But as we were starting our family, we were walking down the road at our farm
one day, and I was picking up trash.
And something I did often, and you have to do on a farm, I was complaining about
the lot of the country, the condition of the country.
I was upset in those days, it was 2017, about what was happening in Washington.
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I was complaining about it. We had recently heard that my predecessor that held
my seat in Congress was thinking about running for a different office.
And I was complaining about all these things. And she said, well,
I wish you would either shut up or do something about it.
Good for her. And and I said, well, I support candidates.
I'm involved in these issues. What would you have me do? And she said,
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well, you should run for office.
And that was something that a few times people had asked me about.
But I'd really never seriously contemplated that.
And so in the days ahead, we talked more.
I told her and I still think I'm right about this, that she should run.
She had the good the good wisdom to know that if we were starting a family and
we were going to have young children, that that might not be practical for now,
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for now. Yeah. And you're right.
And so she ultimately convinced me that I should do it. And every day she's
involved in, you know, fashioning the message that we could try to communicate
and giving me advice and counsel. We don't always agree.
She can be pretty fiery about that when she doesn't agree with where we're going
or what we're doing in our office.
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But it's always helpful. And I think my staff would tell you she's got a very
keen insight and a really good political barometer for what people are thinking
and how to communicate. communicate messages to them. And so it has worked well.
Obviously, we have two young sons, six and three years old, and you have to
share those responsibilities.
But clearly, when I'm here and they're there at back home, she carries the brunt
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of that responsibility.
Just as a quick note, I know that your son became very famous because you brought
him with you to Congress.
And did he get the appetite to run for office as well when he was there?
Or he just had a fun day with dad and got to see what you do?
I think a fun day with dad.
He got to eat lots of M&Ms and, you know, was unsupervised by mom for a week
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so that, you know, he was able to spread his wings a little,
as he obviously did on the floor of the house. Yes. Unknown to me.
And so I think he had a good time.
He is a good kid. But like most six-year-olds, you can't really script what
he does, you know. You should not.
I delivered him to he just finished kindergarten.
And so several times this year, I would drop him off at his kindergarten.
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And every day when we'd get to the school, the principal would be standing out
front, opening the door to let kids out of their car or get them off the bus
and make sure they got into the school safely. Mr. Fry.
And Mr. Fry would always have a smile on his face and a very upbeat,
cheerful attitude. And he would say, good morning, guy.
How are you today? And every morning guy would be like, you know,
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like, don't want to talk to the principal that might get you in trouble,
you know, and, and he would march into school.
And, and so I tried all year to get guy, I tried keyword to get guy to say,
good morning, Mr. Fry, how are you this morning?
Never could get him to do it. But then of course you put him on the house floor
and say, they smile at your brother and you see what you get.
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Before we go a little bit further, I just want to go back to your family,
because I understand that you really had a very powerful, influential mom and grandparents.
Could you talk a little bit about what they brought to you? Because,
you know, I always say it takes a village to raise a child. Sure, sure.
Well, my mom was very influential.
She was a teacher trained as a home economist, and she taught home economics
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and before that served as a, they used to call them home demonstration agents.
And she worked in a day when the home agent in Tennessee and elsewhere around
the country had to be single.
So when she got married, she had to quit that job at the sign of the times, I guess.
You know, I didn't know this about her as a young man.
But later, as I got older and we were looking at her high school annuals,
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we saw that her aspiration was to be president of the United States.
And she was valedictorian of her senior class.
And so she was quite accomplished. accomplished we used to chide
her as kids because as i guess it was the
teacher in her if you asked her any question you got
a long answer a very complete answer and so
that we used to have the joke of we would i went once to my dad and asked him
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a you might say a home economics quite related question and he said why are
you asking me you should ask your mom and my answer was i don't want to know
that much about it and and so that was a common theme in our house my mom was the a disciplinarian.
My dad, he disciplined by showing disappointment when you failed to live up to what he wanted to do.
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There was never any corporal punishment from him, but disappointing him became
a powerful motivator, right?
And so that was kind of the world. My grandparents on both sides were,
they were very different.
My mom's dad was active entrepreneur, businessman, did a lot of things.
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And from him, I learned a lot of, I guess, my ambition about business and creating economic activity.
He used to say, I've sold the earth by the board foot, by the pound,
by the ton, by the square foot, and by the acre.
And he spent his whole life kind of as a business promoter and explorer, producer of things.
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My other grandfather was a farmer, a fairly simple farmer, but I learned some
important lessons from him.
Probably the most useful one throughout life is he said, if you ever want something
so bad that you can't walk away from it, you won't get a good deal.
And so you've got to convince yourself that you never want something so bad
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that you can't walk away from it.
And if you have that mindset, you'll get the best deals in life.
That's a good one. And you know, it kind of leads to where I go next, which is advice.
And that's a very interesting and a very, it's a good advice.
And I think it goes to like also, if you really want something,
you have to go fight for it and work hard for it. That's right.
So my next question, which is, what is the best advice you've received,
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the worst advice you've received, which you've started to give us,
but, and also maybe advice you would give to folks?
Well, so then balanced by my father's advice, again, one grandfather very ambitious,
the other hardworking and shrewd, I would say, as a business person.
My dad stressed to us always that a great name is better to be had than great riches.
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And he was a compromiser and somebody who was always trying to look for a way
to bring people together and leave a positive impression with people.
And so I saw him do a lot of things through life that I kind of scratched my
head about and thought you got taken advantage of, you know,
you didn't get the best deal for you or for us as a family.
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And that lesson really stuck, too.
And, you know, and I think there's a balance there. I probably haven't always
pursued the way that he would go because I saw how my grandfathers were able to go.
But I would say that advice, because I think it applies to really all things
in life, is to not get so tracked in on something.
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And this is useful here in Congress, that you think there's only one way and
you're not willing to walk away.
Don't get, you know, recalcitrant about things, because oftentimes there are
there ends up being a better way to get what you want and what is best.
And it's hard to see that sometimes because we get dialed in on something.
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And, you know, obviously you learn that lesson as a kid. I see my kids struggling
with that, you know, making decisions, choosing between one piece of candy or
a different piece of candy.
And as a young person, it's that simple.
And then you see their regret when they make a bad choice.
Right. But that still happens to us. Right. We sometimes think, oh, that's what I want.
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And then, you know, maybe it's a dessert at a restaurant. And then you take
that first bite. You're like, oh, I think I made the wrong choice.
You know, and that's that's really what I see in life is that,
you know, most decisions are not something that you can't work back around if you make them.
So don't don't think that everything has this great deal of finality.
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There are certain things that do right. Choosing a spouse. Right.
And you talked a little bit earlier before we started about storytelling and the importance of that.
I thought that you had some really nice thoughts on that. Would you share? Sure.
So I learned this from my wife, Chelsea, remarkably, because I was,
you know, I probably should have learned this lesson earlier in life.
And I and I had applied the lesson, even though I didn't fully understand it,
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of of the importance of of one's own experiences as a way of communicating ideas
or thoughts or leaving an impression on folks.
And the truth is, there are no better stories than any of us have than our own stories.
And yet, we oftentimes, particularly I see politicians do it,
we want to point to someone else's experience.
We want to quote another learned or scholarly or influential person when maybe
(23:59):
we could make our point better.
Some story about our own experience. And I saw Chelsea as a fairly young person
demonstrate that capacity to do that.
She used to have a story that she would tell in her younger days about selling
fruit at her FFA chapter and the lessons that she learned from that fundraising activity.
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It was a really powerful message and one that, till this day,
I remember because of her personal experience.
And that's true for all of us. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay,
so now we're going to have like rapid questions. Get a little to know about who you are.
And the first question is, what is your favorite sound?
Birds chirping in the morning.
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Favorite color? Blue. Favorite smell?
Strawberries. And who is your biggest cheerleader? My wife. Favorite ice cream flavor? Vanilla.
Vanilla. Okay. And if you had one meal, like it was your favorite meal,
and that was the one meal that you could choose.
We talked about choices, not making a mistake. What would your favorite meal
(25:04):
be? I have a simple palate, so cheeseburger and french fries.
And what kind of music? What is your music that you listen to?
I very much like 70s era pop music.
And do you have time to exercise? Not really. I get a lot of exercise here,
probably as much so as any place I've ever been in my life, just walking on the campus here.
(25:24):
You have a lot to walk. And sports? What is your favorite sport?
Football for watching and in recent years, college football.
I was not an athlete. My dad was not an athlete. And so I never really had that influence as a kid.
And so I, you know, I never developed myself as an athlete.
And so I'm more of a spectator on that one. And do you have a favorite household chore?
(25:50):
Well, my chore at the house is laundry.
And so I find it as kind of a release of when I'm folding laundry,
just not having complicated things to think about.
Although with a wife now and a six-year-old and a three-year-old,
it's becoming increasingly complicated to sort the socks and the shirts because
(26:11):
their sizes are starting to get close together.
And so that can be a challenge. What would you say is your superpower?
I think it's my interest in learning, my curiosity, my intellectual curiosity,
I think is the thing that serves me best. That's a nice one.
And if you and Chelsea could travel anywhere in the world, where would you two go?
(26:33):
She really enjoys traveling, and we're going to England at the end of this week.
But probably, I'm thinking about where we went to Hawaii a few years ago and have enjoyed that.
I'm not, I don't have an active bucket list of places I want to go,
but I do enjoy traveling and seeing the country.
(26:54):
I've been to all of the states now except for Alaska.
So I guess that's maybe if there's a bucket list item would be to get to Alaska. asking.
Okay. So now we're on the last question and I really love all the different answers.
And my question is, what does joy mean to you? What brings you joy?
How do you, if you're joyful, share that joy?
(27:16):
Sure. Well, it's a good question. So I think joy for me is as much so as I can
say, seeing other people happy and knowing that I've made them happy.
Yeah. So the, so the sharing part of it, I think is, is just about smiling.
I had one of my first coworkers when I was practicing law, the receptionist
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at our law firm, you know, I would greet her every day as I came in,
she would greet me and I would smile at her.
And she, after a few months of that, one day she stopped and she said,
you have the best smile, never conserve that smile, use it all the time.
And so, and obviously that was a way of her sharing joy with me.
And so from that, I learned that, you know, there's very nothing more disarming than a good smile.
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Well, on that note, first, I'm smiling. It's really been a pleasure to have
coffee with you and to talk to you and to get to know who you are.
I would say that I look forward to meeting Chelsea also one day.
And just thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. And thank you for your
perspective and for really sharing who you are, your authenticity.
Because I do believe that what we need in our country, in our world,
(28:28):
is to be able to share with each other and have these conversations.
And I've learned your stories and they stay with me. So I want to say thank you very much.
Well, thank you. And I think you're right about bringing people together.
We need to have more conversations like this on Capitol Hill among members of
Congress because it does bring us together.
(28:49):
And when you talk with someone and you learn who they are, it changes your perspective
and very often then leads to a whole different mindset about working together. Thank you. Thank you.
Music.
Hi, it's Liz. Please join me every Tuesday for coffee to talk about heart and
humanity with our elected leaders.
(29:10):
Remember to hit subscribe to get an alert when a new episode is live and for
exclusive content. Ciao.
Music.
(00:10):
Hi, I'm Liz Hershnoff-Tolley, and I am the host of the Capital Coffee Connection podcast.
And the purpose of this podcast is to get to know the heart,
the humanity, the home, the hope of our national elected leaders.
And I have had the pleasure of speaking with leaders from both sides of the aisle.
But the one thing that we all have in common is our heart and our humanity.
(00:31):
And that is what I hope people take away from these podcasts.
Podcasts, and today I am very excited because I am meeting somebody new,
and he is a congressman from Tennessee, John Rose, and he is in his third term.
You are Tennessee's sixth congressional district.
That's right. And so I just want to say welcome, and we're really here to get
(00:53):
to know who you are, where you come from, and hear your stories.
So thank you for being here. Thank you, you. And thanks for having me. And it's a pleasure.
So I want to talk about your beginning. And I will just share,
I grew up in Los Angeles and I grew up on a small ranch in Studio City.
And it has, it'll be introducing you. But what I wanted to share was that I
(01:14):
grew up on a small ranch in Studio City.
And one of the things that I loved was watching my father driving the tractor.
We had crops, we had horses, and it was just being in a big city of LA,
but yet we had this ability to be on a small ranch.
And I have most of my fondest memories from growing up there.
And it's my way of introducing you because I know that growing up on a farm
(01:36):
and being a farmer and the life, and you grew up on a farm that's 230 years old, I understand.
234 this year. 234 this year. So I'd love for you to give us some information
and talk about what it was like to grow up on the farm and what this farm represents. Sure, sure.
So to clarify, and it's a unique thing about my background, is we actually,
(01:57):
as throughout my childhood, did not live on the farm. We lived in a small town nearby.
And my dad worked for the farm credit system in those days, but continued to
farm. So, we spent our afternoons and our Saturdays and our weekends and our
summer vacations working on the farm.
My grandmother, my grandparents, when I was very young, lived there.
And so, the farm was kind of an inseparable part of my childhood and certainly
(02:22):
was a passion of my dad's, and it became a passion of mine.
And what were your jobs on the farm? I'm just curious. I mean,
I'm sure there were many.
Sure. My dad did a good job from an early age of involving us.
I'm the youngest of four.
So it was always me and my siblings, my older siblings.
And he had a way of turning work into play.
(02:43):
So, you know, when we were young enough not to know better, we thought we were playing.
But he was trying to get us to do small chores that, you know,
could be communicated to young children and that we could manage.
So we did various things, counting cows, going out in the pastures,
looking for the cows, counting them.
We painted rooftops and painted gates and painted the sides of barns, those kinds of things.
(03:07):
We had a problem in those days, kind of an emerging problem with Canadian thistles
that were coming into our pastures.
And of course, you could spray to kill them, but my dad would give us a hoe
or a shovel and send us out in the field to cut thistles.
And one of my earliest really concrete
memories when I started to realize I was working and not playing was
(03:27):
that I wanted a small motorbike
and my dad was trying to figure out a way you know that I could work to get
that and so he offered to pay me a nickel for every thistle I cut up I've dug
up and you know that it was a $400 mini bike it took a long time to to make
$400 at a nickel per thistle.
(03:49):
So those were the kinds of things he had us do.
Right. I love that. A lot of thistles for a minibike. Yes.
What was the production from this farm? What did you all get out of it and produce and sell?
Sure. So through the years, lots of things. But in my lifetime,
we primarily were a beef cow-calf operation.
We also operated a grade A dairy. We produced burley tobacco.
(04:10):
That part of Tennessee is where burley tobacco historically was utilized.
We also produced hay and Kentucky 31 tall fescue seed.
So we combined that seed and produced that and sold it to customers in the area.
And then you continued. I mean, I'm going to go back a little bit to your childhood
afterwards, but just on this issue of the story of farming,
(04:31):
talk a little bit about as an adult and what your role has been as a farmer
leader in Tennessee, because I know you've had a few different roles and I know you saved a state fair.
So could you talk a little bit about those things? Sure. So,
you know, the farm was very much became a passion.
I was active in FFA and then studied agricultural economics both in college and in graduate school.
(04:52):
But my goal was to come back to the farm. And so I was looking for a profession
that I could, where I could earn a good living in a small town.
And I needed to be able to buy out my three siblings from the farm operation.
So that was always on my mind. And so that all took me in a little bit different direction.
And so my career has actually been, interestingly, in the information technology space.
(05:14):
And we can talk more about that. But there came a time when my business was successful.
We ultimately sold it when I was still a fairly young man and I got to turn
my attention back to the family farm.
And then because of that, ended up with an opportunity to serve as Tennessee's
Commissioner of Agriculture for a fairly short period of time.
But that all allowed me to kind of re-engage with my agricultural interests and roots.
(05:38):
And then later, as you mentioned, I got called upon to chair our Tennessee State
Fair Board at a tumultuous time when the city of Nashville was trying to exit its.
Century plus old role. And so those are the things that I've done in the agricultural space.
Which are beautiful. Thank you. And talk a little bit about your district.
I mean, from the perspective of the people, the people you serve,
(06:01):
because I do believe so many don't understand.
They think you show up in Washington, you're up there, there's battles.
But I understand one of the most important roles of a congressperson is the
constituents in their communities.
Talk about like some of the stuff that you do, but also who the people are that you represent. Sure.
So probably the best way to approach that is to talk about the demography of
(06:23):
the districts, the demographic of the district.
So my district is part or all of 19 counties, and that's been true.
We did have a redistricting, so it changed a little bit. So today I represent
part of Davidson County, which is Nashville, Tennessee, about 25.
30 percent of that county, and it comprises 25 percent of the population of my district.
So a small part of one county is a quarter of the district.
(06:47):
The next over adjoining county, which is kind of a suburban county for Nashville,
Sumner County, is another 25 percent of the population.
So those two counties, 50 percent of the population, the rest of the district
is east of Nashville all the way over into East Tennessee and represents about
half the population of the district in 17 counties.
(07:09):
And I'm assuming that's rural? That's very rural, yeah. Small towns,
including the town where I live today, Cookville, which is where I grew up and
is a small town, about 40,000 population.
The county has about 80,000. It's a college town, so it is a little bit more,
you know, a little more active life there than in some of those small towns
(07:30):
across the district. So that's the group of people.
And politically, as you might imagine, the Nashville population is in a different
place politically than the rest of the district.
So in Nashville, Davidson County, the mix is 75% Democratic, 25% Republican.
Everywhere else in the district, it's majority Republican, culminating in the
(07:54):
far east of the district where in the last election, in the general election, I got 91% of the vote.
So a range of different views, but predominated by that kind of rural,
suburban, small-town America, small-town Tennessee mindset with a heavy importance of agriculture.
Culture. Right. Well, that's who you represent.
(08:15):
Doesn't matter which side of
the aisle. Those are the people that you are there to serve and to help.
So we've jumped around. Talk a little bit about growing up there,
what it was like just to be a child in those times and what school was like
and what kind of things you were interested in.
Obviously, you worked on the farm, but what was it like just as a young person growing up?
Sure. So again, growing up in a small town, You know, the 70s,
(08:38):
primarily 70s, very early 80s. I graduated from high school in 1983.
And, you know, as a kid, obviously, you don't necessarily have a full appreciation
for the world around you.
But, you know, some of my earliest memories are of things like the moon landing.
I have a distinct memory of watching the original moon landing on TV.
(09:01):
And then the Vietnam War and the protests are something that as a child kind
of stood out in my mind as I was growing up and a little bit of the social upheaval of those times.
I can remember as a third grade student, we recited the Lord's Prayer in public
school every day and had a devotional.
But we knew that was changing. You know, there was, I had a teacher who was
(09:23):
probably putting up a bit of a protest of her own, right?
So, so you were aware of those things, but mostly just, you know,
being a typical kid, enjoying that.
My background was a little different because we lived in a small town.
And so I sort of saw that side of life.
But then my dad was farming, and so we had what oftentimes I saw as a kind of
(09:45):
a break from being in town and being at home,
the opportunity to be on the farm and get to kind of spread my wings and go
out on your own and learn the lessons of life from watching what happens on a farm.
Yeah, it's a good balance. It seems like a very good balance for a child. It was.
Did you have a teacher, young or later on throughout high school,
college, that is still somebody that you reflect upon who really mentored you or inspired you?
(10:09):
Several, I would say. Probably the first person who I would say really made
a lasting impression was my major professor in college, a guy named David Nary, Dr. David Nary.
And he was a determined liberal, but a very kind of open perspective on learning and knowledge.
And really, you know, he he was the first person to quote to me the oft quoted,
(10:32):
I guess, observation that when you're young, if you're not a liberal, you don't have a heart.
And when you're older, if you're not a conservative, you don't have a mind.
He taught in that way all the time, even though, you know, I could know from
the things he said that he was he was a liberal.
He was he had an open perspective on here's the stuff you need to know in life
(10:53):
and how it would be important to you. is a person probably that I most often,
aside from my parents, I most often think, I wish he was alive so I could call
him and ask him a question.
Talk a little bit now about your career because you're farming beginning and
then you were and you still are involved in the tech world,
which I think is interesting because one of the things I've also learned is
(11:15):
like all of our leaders, they come from different places.
And the whole idea is that people bring a different perspective to when they
come to Washington, the work.
And if we can do it correctly, that's more important than which side you're
on is actually what you can bring from your prior experience.
So talk about being in the tech world and how that balances with who you are now. Sure.
(11:37):
You know, the kind of diverse background that I've been gifted to have is is
very useful in being in Congress, probably the place where it has served me the best.
And so having that agricultural background and then trained as a lawyer,
though, I didn't spend very much time.
I'm still a licensed attorney, but I tell everyone I'm a recovering attorney.
Yeah, and so that has served me
(12:00):
well throughout my career But then there came a point
when I was in law school when a fellow law school student and
I started a business in the IT space was just
a good idea he had and and and we
we pursued that and we're blessed and that was very successful and So I've spent
my whole professional career in the computer technology and training space and
(12:20):
so that has you know kind of kept me on the the cutting edge of what's happening
in terms of the development of our technology and our industry and our economy.
And so that has served me very well as well. And then I've operated our family
farm since the late 1990s.
And all of those experiences, particularly the business experiences,
(12:41):
have given me a keen appreciation for how government, frankly,
can be helpful, but probably more often gets in the way of what Americans are
trying to do to create new ideas in the area of entrepreneurship and business
growth and development.
And so that causes me to have a guarded view.
(13:02):
My own view is that government is not really good at doing anything.
There are some things that we need government to do because we can't entrust
it to the private sector.
But as often as we can figure out a way to get government out of operating what
could could be a business or performing critical functions that could be in the private sector,
(13:25):
we should do that because it will be done much more efficiently.
Speaking of efficient and what works well, I understand you have a wife that
is very talented, is in her own right, a powerful person and a good leader.
And what I'd love to know is a little bit about, obviously, you're traveling
a lot and you have to go back and forth.
(13:46):
So how do you balance between being a leader, being a businessman,
and being a husband and a father?
And how does your wife support the work you do? And talk a little bit about who she is.
Sure. Well, there's no question that I'm in Congress today because of Chelsea, my wife.
And, you know, I focused on my career really to a fault as a young man and really did not seriously,
(14:12):
you know, pursue finding a relationship, finding a wife until I was in well into my 40s.
I wouldn't recommend that, but that's how it worked. And it has worked out well.
I've been blessed in that regard. And so there came a time when I met Chelsea.
She asked me out and I declined, which is another whole story.
(14:32):
But she is just a remarkable person, mature beyond her years.
She's younger than me, but the most mature woman that I've, aside from my mom,
that I'd say I have had the pleasure of knowing in life.
And so she was important in getting me involved in politics because I was inspired
by her ability to lead and her ability to communicate.
(14:53):
She has a graduate degree in communications and has a full-time job,
and we have two children.
But as we were starting our family, we were walking down the road at our farm
one day, and I was picking up trash.
And something I did often, and you have to do on a farm, I was complaining about
the lot of the country, the condition of the country.
I was upset in those days, it was 2017, about what was happening in Washington.
(15:17):
I was complaining about it. We had recently heard that my predecessor that held
my seat in Congress was thinking about running for a different office.
And I was complaining about all these things. And she said, well,
I wish you would either shut up or do something about it.
Good for her. And and I said, well, I support candidates.
I'm involved in these issues. What would you have me do? And she said,
(15:37):
well, you should run for office.
And that was something that a few times people had asked me about.
But I'd really never seriously contemplated that.
And so in the days ahead, we talked more.
I told her and I still think I'm right about this, that she should run.
She had the good the good wisdom to know that if we were starting a family and
we were going to have young children, that that might not be practical for now,
(15:59):
for now. Yeah. And you're right.
And so she ultimately convinced me that I should do it. And every day she's
involved in, you know, fashioning the message that we could try to communicate
and giving me advice and counsel. We don't always agree.
She can be pretty fiery about that when she doesn't agree with where we're going
or what we're doing in our office.
(16:20):
But it's always helpful. And I think my staff would tell you she's got a very
keen insight and a really good political barometer for what people are thinking
and how to communicate. communicate messages to them. And so it has worked well.
Obviously, we have two young sons, six and three years old, and you have to
share those responsibilities.
But clearly, when I'm here and they're there at back home, she carries the brunt
(16:43):
of that responsibility.
Just as a quick note, I know that your son became very famous because you brought
him with you to Congress.
And did he get the appetite to run for office as well when he was there?
Or he just had a fun day with dad and got to see what you do?
I think a fun day with dad.
He got to eat lots of M&Ms and, you know, was unsupervised by mom for a week
(17:05):
so that, you know, he was able to spread his wings a little,
as he obviously did on the floor of the house. Yes. Unknown to me.
And so I think he had a good time.
He is a good kid. But like most six-year-olds, you can't really script what
he does, you know. You should not.
I delivered him to he just finished kindergarten.
And so several times this year, I would drop him off at his kindergarten.
(17:29):
And every day when we'd get to the school, the principal would be standing out
front, opening the door to let kids out of their car or get them off the bus
and make sure they got into the school safely. Mr. Fry.
And Mr. Fry would always have a smile on his face and a very upbeat,
cheerful attitude. And he would say, good morning, guy.
How are you today? And every morning guy would be like, you know,
(17:49):
like, don't want to talk to the principal that might get you in trouble,
you know, and, and he would march into school.
And, and so I tried all year to get guy, I tried keyword to get guy to say,
good morning, Mr. Fry, how are you this morning?
Never could get him to do it. But then of course you put him on the house floor
and say, they smile at your brother and you see what you get.
(18:11):
Before we go a little bit further, I just want to go back to your family,
because I understand that you really had a very powerful, influential mom and grandparents.
Could you talk a little bit about what they brought to you? Because,
you know, I always say it takes a village to raise a child. Sure, sure.
Well, my mom was very influential.
She was a teacher trained as a home economist, and she taught home economics
(18:33):
and before that served as a, they used to call them home demonstration agents.
And she worked in a day when the home agent in Tennessee and elsewhere around
the country had to be single.
So when she got married, she had to quit that job at the sign of the times, I guess.
You know, I didn't know this about her as a young man.
But later, as I got older and we were looking at her high school annuals,
(18:54):
we saw that her aspiration was to be president of the United States.
And she was valedictorian of her senior class.
And so she was quite accomplished. accomplished we used to chide
her as kids because as i guess it was the
teacher in her if you asked her any question you got
a long answer a very complete answer and so
that we used to have the joke of we would i went once to my dad and asked him
(19:17):
a you might say a home economics quite related question and he said why are
you asking me you should ask your mom and my answer was i don't want to know
that much about it and and so that was a common theme in our house my mom was the a disciplinarian.
My dad, he disciplined by showing disappointment when you failed to live up to what he wanted to do.
(19:40):
There was never any corporal punishment from him, but disappointing him became
a powerful motivator, right?
And so that was kind of the world. My grandparents on both sides were,
they were very different.
My mom's dad was active entrepreneur, businessman, did a lot of things.
(20:00):
And from him, I learned a lot of, I guess, my ambition about business and creating economic activity.
He used to say, I've sold the earth by the board foot, by the pound,
by the ton, by the square foot, and by the acre.
And he spent his whole life kind of as a business promoter and explorer, producer of things.
(20:21):
My other grandfather was a farmer, a fairly simple farmer, but I learned some
important lessons from him.
Probably the most useful one throughout life is he said, if you ever want something
so bad that you can't walk away from it, you won't get a good deal.
And so you've got to convince yourself that you never want something so bad
(20:41):
that you can't walk away from it.
And if you have that mindset, you'll get the best deals in life.
That's a good one. And you know, it kind of leads to where I go next, which is advice.
And that's a very interesting and a very, it's a good advice.
And I think it goes to like also, if you really want something,
you have to go fight for it and work hard for it. That's right.
So my next question, which is, what is the best advice you've received,
(21:02):
the worst advice you've received, which you've started to give us,
but, and also maybe advice you would give to folks?
Well, so then balanced by my father's advice, again, one grandfather very ambitious,
the other hardworking and shrewd, I would say, as a business person.
My dad stressed to us always that a great name is better to be had than great riches.
(21:26):
And he was a compromiser and somebody who was always trying to look for a way
to bring people together and leave a positive impression with people.
And so I saw him do a lot of things through life that I kind of scratched my
head about and thought you got taken advantage of, you know,
you didn't get the best deal for you or for us as a family.
(21:47):
And that lesson really stuck, too.
And, you know, and I think there's a balance there. I probably haven't always
pursued the way that he would go because I saw how my grandfathers were able to go.
But I would say that advice, because I think it applies to really all things
in life, is to not get so tracked in on something.
(22:09):
And this is useful here in Congress, that you think there's only one way and
you're not willing to walk away.
Don't get, you know, recalcitrant about things, because oftentimes there are
there ends up being a better way to get what you want and what is best.
And it's hard to see that sometimes because we get dialed in on something.
(22:30):
And, you know, obviously you learn that lesson as a kid. I see my kids struggling
with that, you know, making decisions, choosing between one piece of candy or
a different piece of candy.
And as a young person, it's that simple.
And then you see their regret when they make a bad choice.
Right. But that still happens to us. Right. We sometimes think, oh, that's what I want.
(22:50):
And then, you know, maybe it's a dessert at a restaurant. And then you take
that first bite. You're like, oh, I think I made the wrong choice.
You know, and that's that's really what I see in life is that,
you know, most decisions are not something that you can't work back around if you make them.
So don't don't think that everything has this great deal of finality.
(23:11):
There are certain things that do right. Choosing a spouse. Right.
And you talked a little bit earlier before we started about storytelling and the importance of that.
I thought that you had some really nice thoughts on that. Would you share? Sure.
So I learned this from my wife, Chelsea, remarkably, because I was,
you know, I probably should have learned this lesson earlier in life.
And I and I had applied the lesson, even though I didn't fully understand it,
(23:33):
of of the importance of of one's own experiences as a way of communicating ideas
or thoughts or leaving an impression on folks.
And the truth is, there are no better stories than any of us have than our own stories.
And yet, we oftentimes, particularly I see politicians do it,
we want to point to someone else's experience.
We want to quote another learned or scholarly or influential person when maybe
(23:59):
we could make our point better.
Some story about our own experience. And I saw Chelsea as a fairly young person
demonstrate that capacity to do that.
She used to have a story that she would tell in her younger days about selling
fruit at her FFA chapter and the lessons that she learned from that fundraising activity.
(24:21):
It was a really powerful message and one that, till this day,
I remember because of her personal experience.
And that's true for all of us. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay,
so now we're going to have like rapid questions. Get a little to know about who you are.
And the first question is, what is your favorite sound?
Birds chirping in the morning.
(24:43):
Favorite color? Blue. Favorite smell?
Strawberries. And who is your biggest cheerleader? My wife. Favorite ice cream flavor? Vanilla.
Vanilla. Okay. And if you had one meal, like it was your favorite meal,
and that was the one meal that you could choose.
We talked about choices, not making a mistake. What would your favorite meal
(25:04):
be? I have a simple palate, so cheeseburger and french fries.
And what kind of music? What is your music that you listen to?
I very much like 70s era pop music.
And do you have time to exercise? Not really. I get a lot of exercise here,
probably as much so as any place I've ever been in my life, just walking on the campus here.
(25:24):
You have a lot to walk. And sports? What is your favorite sport?
Football for watching and in recent years, college football.
I was not an athlete. My dad was not an athlete. And so I never really had that influence as a kid.
And so I, you know, I never developed myself as an athlete.
And so I'm more of a spectator on that one. And do you have a favorite household chore?
(25:50):
Well, my chore at the house is laundry.
And so I find it as kind of a release of when I'm folding laundry,
just not having complicated things to think about.
Although with a wife now and a six-year-old and a three-year-old,
it's becoming increasingly complicated to sort the socks and the shirts because
(26:11):
their sizes are starting to get close together.
And so that can be a challenge. What would you say is your superpower?
I think it's my interest in learning, my curiosity, my intellectual curiosity,
I think is the thing that serves me best. That's a nice one.
And if you and Chelsea could travel anywhere in the world, where would you two go?
(26:33):
She really enjoys traveling, and we're going to England at the end of this week.
But probably, I'm thinking about where we went to Hawaii a few years ago and have enjoyed that.
I'm not, I don't have an active bucket list of places I want to go,
but I do enjoy traveling and seeing the country.
(26:54):
I've been to all of the states now except for Alaska.
So I guess that's maybe if there's a bucket list item would be to get to Alaska. asking.
Okay. So now we're on the last question and I really love all the different answers.
And my question is, what does joy mean to you? What brings you joy?
How do you, if you're joyful, share that joy?
(27:16):
Sure. Well, it's a good question. So I think joy for me is as much so as I can
say, seeing other people happy and knowing that I've made them happy.
Yeah. So the, so the sharing part of it, I think is, is just about smiling.
I had one of my first coworkers when I was practicing law, the receptionist
(27:39):
at our law firm, you know, I would greet her every day as I came in,
she would greet me and I would smile at her.
And she, after a few months of that, one day she stopped and she said,
you have the best smile, never conserve that smile, use it all the time.
And so, and obviously that was a way of her sharing joy with me.
And so from that, I learned that, you know, there's very nothing more disarming than a good smile.
(28:04):
Well, on that note, first, I'm smiling. It's really been a pleasure to have
coffee with you and to talk to you and to get to know who you are.
I would say that I look forward to meeting Chelsea also one day.
And just thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. And thank you for your
perspective and for really sharing who you are, your authenticity.
Because I do believe that what we need in our country, in our world,
(28:28):
is to be able to share with each other and have these conversations.
And I've learned your stories and they stay with me. So I want to say thank you very much.
Well, thank you. And I think you're right about bringing people together.
We need to have more conversations like this on Capitol Hill among members of
Congress because it does bring us together.
(28:49):
And when you talk with someone and you learn who they are, it changes your perspective
and very often then leads to a whole different mindset about working together. Thank you. Thank you.
Music.
Hi, it's Liz. Please join me every Tuesday for coffee to talk about heart and
humanity with our elected leaders.
(29:10):
Remember to hit subscribe to get an alert when a new episode is live and for
exclusive content. Ciao.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!