It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

This is a show about business. Not a place you’d typically turn to for dating advice. But on this edition of Out to Lunch we’re talking about the business of dating, love, and marriage. For past generations – your parents or grandparents - charting a life course seemed to be a lot simpler. Especially for a woman. You graduated from high school, you got married to your high school sweetheart or a g...

Paris. London. Rome. Baton Rouge. Yes, your next piece of stylish designer clothing might come from right here. South Louisiana is known for food and music and other artistic and creative cultural expressions so perhaps it’s surprising that we’re not known for our clothing designers. With so much inspiration to draw from, meet the crestive forces behind two local clothing lines.  Dave Duncan is co...

The bulk of Louiaisna's population, living in cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans, probably don’t think much about it, but farming is a significant sector of the state’s economy. Nearly one-third of the state’s land is farmland! There are 27,400 farms in Louisiana, though it’s a rapidly changing and challenging way to make a living. Even given the obstacles though, there is opportunity for a n...

We live at an interesting nexus today, where so much of our economy is focused on building processes and systems that enable us to exist in the virtual world while at the same time we continue to build and develop the physical world in which we also exist. Maybe one day, one of those worlds will overtake the other. For now though, we seem to have one foot in each world and pass between them multip...

As our economy and society have become more complex, we’ve started to rely on big data, data driven solutions and AI analytics to describe what we do, what we buy, and where we choose to invest. Where does all this data and information come from? And how can these analytics really help us and our businesses do better? Rachel Verron is founder and CEO of Ruby Research , a Baton Rouge based company...

As we’ve all heard, America is aging and the numbers are pretty startling. People 65 and older represented just 16% of the population in 2019. By 2040, they’ll make up nearly one fourth of all Americans, and those numbers are expected to continue to climb. Part of the reason people are living longer is because of new technologies and innovations in the healthcare sector that are enabling providers...

It’s no secret that Baton Rouge and the surrounding parishes are home to some of the largest petrochemical plants in the world. We’re also a hub of activity when it comes to climate and resilience because of our sinking coastline and rising seas in an era of climate change. The intersection of these vast and important fields create some interesting opportunities for companies that also are based h...

Louisiana continues to rank behind almost every other state in the country in terms of its educational outcomes across the board – from Pre-K through post secondary. But buried under those bad stats, are some bright spots – success stories of programs and schools that are finding ways to prepare students and train them for the jobs of the future. On this episode of Out to Lunch, meet two of the le...

It can be threatening if not downright scary sometimes to consider the extent to which apps and Artificial Intelligence now run our lives. But it’s also exciting to think about all the ways that this technology can be used to cure diseases or build sophisticated satellite systems or even do simple things - like helping us do the laundry! Or training a new employee on how to do their job. AI Laundr...

Real estate is something that touches all of us. Even if we don’t own our own home, we have to rent which means the economic forces that impact buyers, sellers and investors impact all of us. COVID was a major disrupter of all segments of the real estate market. And the post-COVID era is no less unprecedented. Which makes every day at the office an interesting one for those who work in the real es...

We focus a lot in our society today on those who make their living in front of the camera, whether acting or influencing or prognosticating on important things. But those who shoot those images and videos have equally interesting stories to tell,  and businesses they have built doing it. They also have a unique perspective that comes from looking into that two-dimension view-finder that informs th...

While the men and women who serve in the military make untold sacrifices to serve their country, when they come home they face a unique set of challenges – especially when it comes tt starting a business. According to the most recent statistics, in the United States today, fewer than six percent of all businesses are owned by military veterans. And of those roughly 338-thousand veteran-owned busin...

One of our favorite Out to Lunch shows, for many reasons, was a 2019 episode  called High on Mushrooms that brought together two interesting, unlikely guests, whose worlds could not have been more different. Paul Charbonnet, a drone pilot and the owner of Atmosphere Drones , which shoots all sort of aerial scenes for movies, TV and a variety of users; and Cyrus Lester, co-owner of Mushroom Maggies...

If you’ve ever dreamed about writing or dabbled in writing then you’ve probably engaged in that fantasy where Terry Gross or Oprah is interviewing you about your brilliant new best seller or memoir or thriller or screen play. For most of us that's just a day dream. But a rare handful of local writers are actually authors of books with titles published by legitimate publishers. How does this happen...

We’re inundated with bad news and dire predictions about the sate of our nation and our world and, here in south Louisiana, the condition of environment, which is ever more vulnerable to climate change and global warming. Our unhealthy lifestyles are also a problem: we spend too much time in front of screens - now under the control of artificial intelligence - and we eat the wrong foods full of pr...

DIY. We all know what that means. Do It Yourself. It’s usually applied to home improvement projects. Like, “Why pay a professional to tile your bathroom when you can DIY.” Well, whether or not you can tile your bathroom as well as a tile layer is debatable, but there’s one thing that a number of people, at some point decide they just have to DIY - and that’s life. Especially work life. You can sta...

Most of us spend our days at work, whether that’s at the office or in this new post-covid world, in some sort of hybrid, virtual, workspace. But whatever it is you're doing, it’s probably pretty serious and grownup. But, imagine if you spent your work day doing something totally fun and goofy! The kind of thing most people do at parties or on vacation. Stephanie Morace is owner of Balloonatics of...

If you’re like a lot of people, you may never have completely gotten your head around crypto currency or believed that it is a viable and inevitable replacement for traditional bullion-based U.S. dollars. When the crypto market cratered in the summer of 2022, you might have felt a little bit vindicated and assumed that the whole thing was over. A flash in the pan, just like you’ve been saying all...

There are so many things we take for granted we don’t even much think about them: they’re part of our daily life so we may not even really pay them much attention. For example, a billboard we pass on the side of the road, or the bar of soap we pick up to wash our hands. What separates creative entrepreneurs from the rest of us is the ability to take those everyday things and come up with a way to...

Since the beginning of time, we have turned to nature to find plants and roots and fungi to calm us or pep us up, help us perform better, or take us out of our bodies and minds to some other dimension. It’s an age old tradition that continues to the present day and has given us foods, beverages, remedies, supplements and, drugs around which entire industries have been built. Randy Mire makes his l...

Baton Rouge may be no Silicon Valley, heck it may not not even be the "Silicon Bayou" that we were hyped in the early 2000s by the tech park and economic development folks. That said, there are nonetheless some amazingly impressive companies here that are creating tech products and performing IT services in ways that are not being done anywhere else. These are not attention-grabbing cool startups...

The lemonade stand has become a sort of iconic institution in the American narrative: the kid on the side of the road peddling lemonade from a pitcher. A way to make a little extra change and stave of summer boredom while also picking up a thing or two about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. But the lemonade stand can be so much more. Not only a teaching tool but a way to help young people wit...

Louisiana continues to rank behind almost every other state in the country in terms of its educational outcomes across the board – from Pre-K through post secondary. But buried under those bad stats, are some bright spots – success stories of programs and schools that are finding ways to prepare students and train them for the jobs of the future. On this episode of Out to Lunch, meet two of the le...

We often lump "tourism and hospitality" together because they seem to go together, but like other conjunctive categories like "sales and marketing" or "chicken and waffles,"  "tourism and hospitality" is a vast umbrella under which there are a plethora of specialties. within these sub-groups, entrepreneurs have created businesses providing services in a multitude of innovative ways. Take, for exam...

Anyone who’s been around Baton Rouge for a while has noticed the amazing transformation of its downtown over the past 30 years. it's a transformation that has come in large part from the planning and leadership of the Downtown Development District . In that time, the capital city has also seen growth and transformation in its hospitality and tourism sector, which is largely, though not exclusively...