It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

There are cose to 3 milllion apps available today – nearly 3 times as many as there were a decade ago – and they are designed to do everything imaginable, whether it’s helping us buy a house, track a hurricane, rent a car or remember to breathe. In other words, there is nothing that cannot be digitized and commodified with the right software and a creative entrepreneur. One of the popular fields o...

When is the last time you heard someone say, “I love email?” I would bet, probably never. Every day it seems like we’re swamped with more spam. And when we do actually rely on email for something important, well, you know how that goes. You send someone an email and ask them three questions. They reply to one. You reply with a comment about their reply and re-ask your other two questions. They rep...

The complexity of healthcare today and all the western advances that go with it – from AI generated diagnoses to online scheduling platforms to cold, impersonal clinical settings – has a lot of people – and their four-legged friends - looking for alternative, more holistic, wellness-centered approaches to healing and feeling better.  Stephanie's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch are are exper...

Ask anyone in Louisiana, or any other state, and they’ll tell you that two of the greatest problems today facing the average American are access to affordable housing and access to quality affordable healthcare. Despite billions in federal funding and policies intended to help, the need continues to grow. On this episode of Out to Lunch, Stephanie talks with two local entrepreneurs who are taking...

For most of the 35-thousand years or so that humans have roamed the Earth, we were able to represent what we see and hear through art and music. But we were not able to capture images and sounds and replicate them until - in the grand scheme of things - relatively recently when the inventions of the industrial revolution brought us rudimentary photography and phonographic recordings. Imagine how t...

For more than half a century, American educators and policymakers have been grappling with a problem that just keeps getting worse: A lot of American children don’t learn how to read, at least not very well, and despite new programs and curricula, the literacy gap keeps growing. In Louisiana, the problem is particularly acute – studies show that more than a quarter of our population has a low lite...

Despite what statistics show about fewer people getting married and more people getting divorced, Americans spent more than $50B on weddings last year, and the numbers continue to grow. Venues, food, liquor, music, gowns, flowers, cake, photographer – and that’s not counting bachelor and bachelorette parties or what’s involved if the big day is a destination wedding in another state or country. Ca...

For as long as humans and pre-human ancestors have been on the planet -- roughly 2.6 million years or so, we have been eating meat. In fact, recent studies have suggested that had it not been for our carnivorous consumption, humans would not have evolved the way that we did. Over the millennia our tastes have changed but not our love of meat. These days consumers - who spent more than $122B in 202...

If you subscribe to an online news service, you’re used to getting notifications about news stories the algorithm thinks might impact you. In Southeast Louisiana, you’ll pretty regularly see variations on the headline, “Sea Level Rise Threatens Coastline” or “Louisiana Loses a Football Field of Wetlands Per Hour.” If you’re like most people, you keep scrolling. Or, maybe you read the article, shak...

Arts and music are essential elements of any real community. They unite us, bring out the human spirit and remind us of the incredible gifts and talents and good things we can do when we let our creativity fly. Baton Rouge isn’t particularly known as a high brow kinda place as far as the arts are concerned but there are plenty of hidden gems, and you don’t have to scratch the surface hard to find...

Louisiana ranks last in a lot of lists but one area where the state is pretty close to the top is in the number of lawyers per capita. That’s right, Louisiana is 11th among the 50 states in terms of the number of attorneys in the state. While that means you won’t have trouble finding someone should you need to file a lawsuit or negotiate a contract or divorce your spouse – it’s probably a safe bet...

Baton Rouge often gets a bad rap for being a belt and suspenders kind of town, where people eat in chain restaurants and go to movie theaters and don’t do the kind of interesting, unique things – be they related to food, music or festivals – that are so characteristic of some fo sthe state’s other big cities. But its’ simply not true! And bright young entrepreenuers are taking risks to dispel thos...

Safety in the workplace may not be the kind of thing most people think about, but if you work for a company with more than a handful of employees -- and particularly an industrial or construction company that involves heavy machinery or dangerous chemicals -- safety is paramount to what you do every day and is top of mind of important people in your organization. In fact, it's so important, there...

In March of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic reached alarming levels of spread - more than our health care system was able to handle - so public health officials ordered state and local governments to shut things down. Aand our lives were forever changed. It's strange now to think back on those weeks; how we adapted and coped, and what we learned about ourselves, our businesses and institutions and our...

Much as we love to tout our fun loving lifestyle in south Louisiana, we have some of the worst health outcomes in the country – including the highest rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, and infant mortality. On this edition of Out to Lunch, Jim Engster sits in for Stephanie and is joined by two lunch guests who both head up institutions in Baton Rouge’s growing Health District. Beyond providin...

Sometime around 100,000 years ago, what we think of as modern humans started wearing clothes. In the centuries since, the outfits and accessories we people have come up with have evolved from utilitarian garments to elaborate expressions of our culture and creativity. Clothes and accessories are fun, fanciful and define who we are. Baton Rouge entrepreneurs are building successful businesses that...

Technology has opened doors in so many industries and enabled us to do so many things we couldn’t even imagine in the past. At the same time, we’ve made things more complicated for ourselves, creating systems that don’t always talk to each other and languages we don’t understand. On this edition of Out to Lunch, two lunch guests who are helping break through the clutter, with products and services...

Healthcare is big business, and it’s only getting bigger. In 2021, healthcare expenditures topped $4B in the U.S. By 2028, that figure is expected to reach $6.2B. Within this growing and rapidly changing sector, nurses play an outsized role. They comprise the largest component of the healthcare workforce, they're the primary providers of hospital patient care and they deliver most of the nation’s...

Despite the ease and convenience of online shopping, which enables us to procure almost anything we want from anywhere in the world in short order, there’s still something wonderful about buying clothes, apparel, decorations for the home or, really anything for that matter, from a store that we know and love and a brand we have come to trust. Baton Rouge - which likes to call itself "a big small t...

I’m sure you’re familiar with the saying, “Beauty is only skin deep.” It’s meant to be a reminder – and a reassurance – that there’s more to a human being than appearance. While that’s true, our appearance is vitally important to us. You only have to spend 5 minutes on social media to reaffirm that’s as true today as it ever has been. Our appearance used to be a kind of genetic lottery. Not so muc...

Downtown Baton Rouge has come a long way over the past two decades, thanks to a lot of careful planning, tireless advocacy, public and private investment, and a commitment from a lot of small businesses to set up shop in the capital city’s historic center. Stephanie's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch Baton Rouge are are two of those small business owners and have unique insights into what it...

Real estate development is one of those high stakes businesses where, most of the time, people with a stomach for taking risks, and a lot of money – or at least access to a lot of money-- put together really ambitious plans for a piece of land, convince others to back them and then build apartments or shopping centers or new office buildings and sell them at a profit, not including the hefty devel...

If you turn on the news any time, any day, you’re bombarded with stories about climate change and natural disasters, political strife and polarization, and the world poverty that is driving unrest and a migrant crisis. Any one of these issues - not to mention the local problems at home - is too great for any of us to solve. And yet, some of us feel so compelled to do something. But what? Dawn Brow...

As Louisiana tries to grow its workforce we hear a lot about the energy industry, healthcare, and the food and hospitality sectors for which the state is so well known. Today we’re visiting with two guests who are creating opportunities in two other areas – tech startups and film acting - helping budding entrepreneurs and aspiring actors create companies and film careers. It might not sound like t...

For more than a decade now, we’ve been talking about the changes brought about by e-commerce and how fewer and fewer of us are venturing out to malls and shops and opting instead of the convenience of e-retail platforms. As this brave new world of online shopping continues to evolve, we’re seeing an ever-growing and fascinating landscape of entrepreneurs who are using pieces and parts of the new t...