It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

There’s a reason you’re familiar with Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie A Few Good Men yelling, “You can’t handle the truth!” Partly it’s because of the intensity of Nicholson’s performance, but mostly it’s because it’s a hard-hitting piece of universal reality: A lot of the time we’d rather not know the truth. It can be as bl...

If you’ve lived in New Orleans for any length of time, you know we love to rebuild. We rebuilt the levees. We rebuilt the schools. We rebuilt the Superdome. After every storm, we rebuild thousands of roofs and hundreds of homes. After Hurricane Katrina, a small group of New Orleanians decided that the way they could make a contribution toward saving the city was to help build companies. They...

There are two things we know a lot about in New Orleans: partying and hurricanes. For a long time those weren't unrelated. The hurricane party was a New Orleans institution — you'd ride out the storm with your neighbors, a case of beer, and a sense of invincibility. These days, after Katrina and Ida, hurricanes aren't quite the occasion they used to be. But there's still a connection between...

Although each of us is free to believe whatever we want, when it comes to our personal finances, we tend to operate with a number of shared beliefs. One of these is the belief in the benefit of ownership. For example, it’s better to own your own business than be an employee. Financially, that benefit is not necessarily true. Many startup business owners go for years before they even pay them...

I want to start out today by running through a few notable New Orleans landmarks: The new terminal at Louis Armstrong Airport.  The U.S Custom House. The gold/copper skin on the Superdome. The Civic Theater. The W New Orleans French Quarter Hotel. The Xavier University Dormitories. There are a whole lot more on this list too. If you’re wondering what the link is between all of them, it&...

If you’re under 30, and you have any kind of original, innovative ideas, you might not know that before you were born people like you generally left New Orleans and went to places where forward-thinking was appreciated. Then, in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina had knocked the city to its knees, the river of intellectuals and social activists started to flow in other direction. All kinds of sma...

In the mid 1700’s, a French author, Voltaire, wrote a biting satire that has remained a classic piece of literature ever since. The novel, Candide , is about a student who is continually beset by all kinds of horrific disasters. It’s basically a buddy comedy in which the kid’s super-upbeat tutor keeps encouraging him, by saying, “All is for the best in the best of all possi...

If you think it feels like things are speeding up and change is coming faster than ever, well, you’re right. It took us hundreds of thousands of years to get to a worldwide population of 3 billion. We got there in 1927. From there, it only took about 70 more years – one lifetime – to get to a population of 6 billion. Back at the 3 billion mark, fewer Americans lived in urban area...

In conversations about business, you don’t hear Karl Marx quoted very often. That’s principally because of his enthusiasm for communism, which is kind of the opposite of business… But Marx was an economist back in the mid 1800’s and the reason we still know about him is because he had some insights that are still relevant. Among them is the observation that everything cont...

Things don't always work out like you planned. You know, they just don't. Nobody gets married planning to one day get divorced. But, somehow, around 40% of people who get married for the first time find themselves at some point in that position. For people who get married a second time, 60% of those end in divorce. And if you’re brave enough to try it a third time, your chances of getting di...

People who try and explain the complexity of human existence sometimes talk about “the seen and unseen world.” The seen world is the world of everyday reality in which we live. The theory of the unseen world attempts to explain some events in the real world - like love, happiness, and talent - in terms of the intangible. These explanations might range from suggestions of the existence...

When you’re the CEO or Executive Director of a company, you’re responsible for, well, everything. If the company does well, you’re a genius. If the company does poorly, you’re fired. Typically, the definition of business success is how much money a company makes. And that can be a function of market share. Both of my lunch guests today are executives of major New Orleans co...

Most people start a business for the same reason: to make money. John Roberts started a business to give money away. John and his business partner, Mickal Adler, would certainly like to end up making money at some point – that is the end goal of their company, Boot 64 Ventures .  It’s the word “venture” that’s the key to what’s going on here. Boot 64 is a v...

When we started out making a show about New Orleans business, people – even in the business community – said, “Well that’s great, but what are you going to do after 6 weeks?” That was 2011. We’ve recorded a new episode of Out to Lunch almost every week since then. And we still haven’t run out of guests. In fact, there are so many people doing interesting t...

I have three questions for you. One - What are your parents’ names? You can probably answer that easily. Two - What are your grandparents’ names? You can probably answer that as well. Now here's the third question. What are the names of your great grandparents? Do you know? Off the top of your head… This is not a scientific survey, but I’ve asked enough people this questio...

In almost every conversation about healthcare, we hear the term, “provider.” Typically, we assume a healthcare provider is a doctor. But, if you look at insurance company definitions of health care providers, the term includes almost every branch of medical care - therapists, podiatrists, imaging centers, home-health agencies, hospice, the list goes on. Ironically, the one person not o...

New Orleans has been around for over 300 years. From almost the very beginning, bar rooms have been an integral part of our social life. There are French works of art depicting bar scenes as early as the mid 1800’s. Starting in the 1970’s, photographers like Mike Smith and Lee Crum started celebrating the exteriors of barrooms, along with other street scenes, finding an almost romantic...

Do you ever use the term “brainiac” to describe someone who’s super smart? We use a term like that because we tend to assume that someone is either highly intelligent, or they’re not. In other words, you’re either lucky enough to be born with a high-functioning brain that can get you into Harvard, or not. Well, guess what? Like pretty much everything else on earth, it...

A lot of business success stories contain familiar scenarios. They include a previous spectacular failure; everybody telling an entrepreneur they’re crazy; and an entrepreneur explaining that what might look like an overnight success was anything but. And then there are entrepreneurs like Peter's lunch guests on this edition of Out to Lunch who both had ideas for very different businesses, w...

I was very tempted to go fishing today, and leave this show to the machines. If you have any doubt that AI could do my job and conduct a 30 minute interview with local business people, today’s show is going to remove that doubt. In fact, it won’t take the whole show, you’ll probably be convinced in 5 minutes. Step one: meet Rich Simmerman. We first met Rich a few years ago when h...

If you’ve ever worked in corporate America, you may have had this experience: you’re having a perfectly normal day when you get an email from HR with the subject line, “Team Building.” Now, you might be the most fabulous team player in the company, but do you really want to spend a weekend doing a ropes course with your colleagues? No. You don’t. But wait up. Read the...

There’s a term in psychology that also applies to marketing. It’s called “The Halo Effect.” It refers to how we can make sometimes incorrect assumptions based on a collection of pieces of information. For a business case study let’s take a look at a lighting company that was founded in the UK in 2015, called Tala. Tala designs and sells lighting fixtures that are eleg...

When people talk about the place of AI in the workforce, it’s mostly doom and gloom about how AI is going to take your job. I’ve even sounded the alarm myself about podcasts entirely produced and hosted without the contribution of a single human being. My lunch guests today are coming at AI from a whole different angle. As he sits here eating lunch, Daniel Crowley’s AI employee,...

Lists used to be the stuff of clickbait. Now even venerable outlets like the New York Times regularly publish lists. Including the Times’ list of the 25 best restaurants in New Orleans . Those of us who live here know there are so many good restaurants and so much good music in New Orleans, we could make every episode of Out to Lunch about food and music and never exhaust the list of great p...

Theoretically, we understand the difference between success and happiness. But there’s a big gap between theory and reality. What bridges that gap is often, courage. Suppose you worked hard, have a great job in a competitive field, are well paid and highly regarded, but you’re not really happy…  Would you have the courage to walk away from your success and take a chanc...