It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

There was a time in the U.S. - not all that long ago - when all of us fell into one of very few homogeneous groups. You were either an employer or employee - there was no such thing as a “gig economy worker” or “startup entrepreneur”. Very few people were openly members of any of the categories L, G, B, T or Q. And nobody referred to themselves as “neuro-divergent.”   If you go back to your own me...

If you made a drinking game out of “New Orleans Clichés” and had to do a shot every time someone said, “New Orleans is famous for its food,” by lunchtime you’d be more drunk than a tourist on Bourbon Street wearing Mardi Gras beads in August. If you live in New Orleans, you can be justifiably proud of our cuisine. But there are only so many poboys, muffalettas, and plates of red beans and rice you...

Typically, a “fish story” is a tall tale about “the one that got away.” It’s usually told by a person relaying details about a peaceful day spent fishing on placid waters when the most exciting thing that happened was a fish that could have been dinner swam away. Like so many things, it’s different in Louisiana. Here, fish stories include hurricanes. Salt water intrusion. Fishing camps being flood...

In 1996, then first lady Hillary Clinton popularized the saying, “It Takes A Village” when she published a book with that title. The original saying, “It takes a village to raise a child,” is variously attributed to African and Indigenous American societies. Wherever it came from, its meaning is widely accepted. And that is, the knowledge and skills a child needs to become a well-rounded, successf...

It’s impossible to imagine having a business these days that isn’t plugged into the internet. Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar business – like a plumber, a lawyer, or you have a retail store – the first thing a new client does before they do business with you is check you out online. You know that’s true because you do it yourself. We all do. And if the person we’re checking out has an unimpressi...

Most workplaces have a place to go when you’re not working. A lunchroom. Cafeteria. Or maybe a space with an espresso machine and a ping pong table. These non-work spaces are also places where unplanned but valuable work conversations happen. Social science has a term for these kinds of unintended incidents. They’re called “latent functions.” Latent functions exist on a grand scale at our public l...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “curiosity” as “a strange fact.” On today’s show we take a look at two business curiosities. The first is - The greater your need for money, the harder it is to borrow it. In 2022, Elon Musk, then the richest man in the world, had no problem borrowing 13 billion dollars to fund the purchase of Twitter, a company that had been losing money for most of its exi...

The Americans With Disabilities Act became law in 1990. It prohibits discrimination based on any kind of impairment, and mandates provision of access to public places for people in wheelchairs. You may have noticed that over the past few years the city of New Orleans has been updating sidewalks to provide wheelchair access at intersections, so people in a wheelchair can do something as simple as c...

All of us occasionally grapple with the existential human question, “Why am I here?” In those moments, to ascribe some sort of relevance to our presence on earth, we might aggrandize the importance of our occupation.  For example, try this. Wherever you are right now, pick a random object. Now make an argument for why it’s the most vital element of human society. If you’re in a room, you could pic...

In September 2022, Apple announced the release of the iPhone 14. Since the creation of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has been responsible for almost every major innovation in cellular communication. Patents notwithstanding, these innovations almost always find their way onto other operating systems. So, what starts out on the iPhone ends up on every phone. Apple’s iPhone 14 innovation is the addition...

People who come to New Orleans as visitors often spend most of their time in the French Quarter and pack their stay with excessive indulgence. They start drinking way earlier in the day than they do at home. They stay out way later at night than they do at home. And they eat meal after meal of New Orleans’ specialty dishes, laden with cream, butter, and fried everything. If you talk to any of thes...

In New Orleans, we’re big on tradition. We believe that doing things the same way they’ve been done for generations keeps us connected to our history and maintains the grandness of the city that our forebears created. But there’s a difference between tradition and habit. That difference can be knowledge.  For example, in the 1950’s if you, your parents, and grandparents all smoked cigarettes, you...

If you have a business that depends on sales, you can try and sell everything to everybody, like Walmart.  But seeing there’s almost no way on earth you can compete with Walmart, you need to come up with a more niche approach. Having a unique product and finding people who need it is the pathway to success. Supply and demand. Simple enough, right? Well, it might have been, when that meant opening...

When we’re confronted with a challenging task, we reassure ourselves it’s probably achievable by saying, “Well, it’s not brain surgery.” We say this because every single thing created by humans – from the sewer system to satellites - ultimately came from the human brain. And yet how the brain works remains among the most vexing and mysterious elements of our existence. Of course, not all humans ar...

We’re all too familiar with horrific news stories about school shootings, teenage drug overdoses, and social-media-driven teen suicide. But these aren’t actually the country’s biggest causes of childhood death. The leading cause of death in children aged 1-14, after vehicle crashes, is drowning. Although we’re deeply divided about how best to solve the issues of adolescent gun violence and drug ab...

If you spend any time working with colleagues on Zoom , or other video platforms, you know there is one main goal all these products are trying to achieve: Real-time collaboration. You’re sitting at your desk, or kitchen table, and your colleagues are scattered around the country, or the world. But the conversation, the screen, and the whiteboard you’re sharing is meant to create the sense that yo...

There are a few famous families in New Orleans. The Nevilles. The Mannings. The Marsalis family. The Batistes. The Brennans. I could name more, and you can probably think of others too. Like mine, your list of names is likely going to be families of sports figures, musicians or restaurateurs. There are also families of business people here in New Orleans. Families that are every bit as dynastic as...

There’s a good chance you haven’t won the lottery. But you can probably imagine what you’d feel like if you did, because you’ve experienced a version of that kind of financial good news at some point. Maybe when you’ve gotten a bonus at work. Or when the IRS says you overpaid your taxes and sends you a refund. Everybody likes free money. For the most part, that’s why we invest in the stock market....

Most of us measure our health inversely - by how infrequently we have to see a doctor. If we never have to go to the doctor, we must be super-healthy. But, if our only contact with the healthcare system is when something is wrong with us, can we really call that healthcare? Isn’t it really ill-health care? That’s the perspective that has led a recent generation of practitioners in the healthcare i...

If you live in New Orleans you can go for weeks, months, even years, without having any connection to what goes on across the causeway, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Mandeville, Covington, Madisonville, Hammond – they’re just names of places that get hammered when the weather forecast gets it wrong and storms go north of New Orleans. Ponchatoula sounds interesting. You’ve thought about...

Throughout history there are commonly periods of societal narcissism, in which we believe our own era is the most extreme example of whatever condition we’re considering. For example, in the 1950’s, Americans regarded the automobile as the absolute apex of human engineering, even though some thousands of years before, humans had managed to build the pyramids. Since the invention of fiction, we’ve...

Even before the Covid pandemic transformed office workers into a nation of folks who sit at their dining table 3 days a week in dress shirt and yoga pants, we’ve been taking our laptops to coffee shops and hanging out there for hours, working. Today, the coffee shop is cemented permanently into our mix of alternative office spaces. Wherever you go in the United States, you see a particular breed o...

“Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don’t.” If you don’t know, or don’t remember, where that comes from, it was a 1970’s Hershey’s marketing campaign . The concept was to sell two candy bars with one ad. One candy bar was Almond Joy – made with almonds – which you ate when you felt like a nut - and the other was Mounds, which was made with coconut – which you ate when you didn’t. Despite...

Everybody likes to make money. The accumulation of wealth is so ingrained into our American way of life that wealth is synonymous with success. And for good reason. In our society, the more money you have the better access you have to pretty much everything – from healthcare to art. For some people, there are pathways to making huge amounts of money. But for most of us, there’s not. For most of us...

Whatever you believe is the cause of our changing climate, we seem to be living through an era of historically more storms, and more severe storms. Even if you only moved here recently, most of us in Louisiana have now lived through a major hurricane, or had one narrowly miss us. You’re no doubt all too familiar with the hurricane season ritual ahead of a storm heading in our direction. It starts...