It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Here’s a stupid question. Is 40% a lot? The answer, of course, is “Yes it is.” For example, if you order a pizza that has 8 slices, and you throw 40% of the pizza in the trash, you’ll only have 4.8 slices to eat. Why would you do that? You wouldn’t throw out 40% of a perfectly good pizza. That you paid for. Right? That would be a ridiculous waste of food and mone...

On a recent show , we talked about Successful Exits with the founders of Turbosquid, Levelset, and Lucid. A successful exit is when your business is doing so well that someone buys it off you. In 2021 the founders of Turbosquid, Levelset and Lucid sold their New Orleans companies for $75m, $500m, and $1.1b dollars, respectively. As impressive as that is, it’s not the full story about all the...

For better or worse, New Orleans economy is dependent on tourism. As we’ve discussed previously on this show, critics say a tourist-dependent economy traps people in low-paid jobs. Tourism boosters say without the revenue generated by tourists we’d all be paying way more in taxes and our cost of living would be through the roof. Whichever of these positions you subscribe to, undeniably...

If you want to know the answer to a question, all you have to do is ask Alexa, Siri, or Google. If your question happens to be, “What is the capital of Latvia?” or something else pretty straightforward, Siri, Alexa, or Google will do just fine. But if you’re looking for information that’s more complex, or if you have to be absolutely certain that what you’re...

At some point, most of us encounter a life-altering medical condition. Either our own or someone around us. When you come face-to-face with Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, HIV, cancer, or any of the serious conditions the human body can fall victim to, it’s not uncommon to find yourself asking, “Why haven’t they found a cure for this yet?” And to hope that somebody, somewher...

According to the most recent statistics, under 400,000 people live in Orleans Parish. In a regular year, around 19 million people come to visit us. These tourists spend a total of close to $10B. This reportedly contributes a massive 40% of the city’s annual tax revenue. Is having a tourist-dependent economy good for us? Or bad for us? Well, that depends who you ask. Many peopl...

We hear a lot about mindfulness these days. Mindfulness is, basically, not taking things for granted but instead being consciously aware of what is going on in the present moment. It’s unlikely that serious practitioners of mindfulness have a protocol for walking into a bar. But, hey, this is New Orleans.  When you walk into a bar you might unconsciously be asking yourself, “What...

If you’re under 25 you might not be familiar with the term “disruption.” Disruption was the buzzword that drove most of the tech-boom in the early 2000’s. “Disruption” is a euphemism. It’s a combination of revolution and destruction. For example, streaming music platforms “disrupted” the recorded music industry. Uber “disrupted&rdquo...

When Louisiana native and New Orleans resident James Carville was working on Bill Clinton’s campaign for president, he famously scribbled a note and pinned it to the wall. The note read, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The implication being, that no matter what people say they care about, if they don’t have enough money, nothing else matters. Here in New Orleans, for...

A couple of decades ago, New Orleans’ business landscape was bleak. The economic decline that began with the oil bust of the 1970’s was followed by political corruption, poor education, and high crime rates. By the time we got to the 1990’s, the continually diminishing range of career opportunities here had led to a mass exodus of 25–35-year-olds. In 2002, a small group of enterprising New Orleani...

In the early 20th Century, an entrepreneur by the name of Martha Matilda Harper had a hairdressing salon where she taught women her method of cutting hair and sold hair care products she made herself. The salon did so well she got other women to open another location where they replicated her first salon. That was so successful she did it a third time, and after a few years Martha had started up 5...

Mardi Gras celebrations started in New Orleans in the 1730’s. The first Jazz Fest was 1970. Today, we commonly use the term “Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest” to talk about two events of equal importance. It says something about the significance of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that in a handful of decades it’s grown from a small gathering of a few hundred mu...

In our market-driven economy, we have an innate belief that price and value are connected. The more valuable something is, the more it costs. But strangely, it doesn’t always work that way. Take sodium for example. Sodium is vital to our very survival as human beings. It’s essential for nerve and muscle function, and it plays a role in the body’s control of blood pressu...

The beginning of anything is the hardest part. The first day of school. Your first week in a new job. Or the first 12 months of a new business. According to the Small Business Association, 20% of new businesses fail in their first year. About 50% fail in the first 5 years. And after 10 years, only around 30% of businesses are still going. Of that 30%, about one quarter have what is called a &ldquo...

Every single automobile manufacturer in the world is moving toward EV’s - electric vehicles. Some car companies have stopped developing internal combustion engines altogether. Others have set target dates for when they expect to be switched over to delivering only EV’s. What this means is, eventually every car and truck on the road is going to run on batteries. Currently, the...

If you’ve ever had a sports injury, put your back out, or had some sort of aggravating pain that never seemed to go away, you may have gone to a chiropractor. Or an acupuncturist. Or, if you really couldn’t get to the bottom of exactly what’s wrong with you, you might have tried alternative medicine in the form of traditional Chinese herbs. You might also assume, becaus...

There are around 4 million people in Louisiana. One million of us have downloaded the same app onto our phones. That app is LA Wallet . You probably have LA Wallet on your phone. If you don’t, it holds a digital version of your driver’s license, your hunting and fishing licenses, and if you’re vaccinated against Covid 19, LA Wallet also holds your proof of vaccination....

One of the first things you learn about the history of New Orleans is that the city was founded and settled by waves of people from both France and Spain. The relationship between these two European nations on the banks of the Mississippi was anything but simple and clear-cut. For one telling example, the architecture of New Orleans’ French Quarter is actually Spanish. The governance of...

We frequently hear about a growing economic polarization in the United States. Although it’s hard to know exactly how wealth is distributed, because it’s not always easy to measure accurately, the commonly held belief is that, currently, 1% of the wealthiest people in the country have 40% of the wealth. In an ideal world, we’d all be as rich as Jeff Bezos. But we know that’...

When people talk about the US economy, they often point out that around 98% of our workforce is made up of small business. And that’s true. According to the Small Business Association, “small” is defined primarily as a business that has fewer than 500 employees. Well, not all small businesses are created equal. There are workplaces that have substantially fewer than 500...

If you ask anyone involved in food preparation, “What’s the most important piece of equipment in your kitchen?” they’ll give you the same answer. Whether it’s a Japanese sushi chef slicing a single sliver of sashimi, or a French sous chef concocting complex cuisine, every person in a kitchen will tell you, the most important tool they possess is their knife. Not just...

If you’re like most people you’ve got a bunch of apps on your phone. Some of them you use every day. Others you have to think about for a moment to try and remember what they do. There are currently around three and a half million apps available for download to Android users worldwide. And over two million apps for folks with Apple devices. So that’s a total of somewher...

Sometimes living in New Orleans can make you want to tear your hair out. You can barely drive around the city for more than 10 minutes without hitting at least one suspension-threatening pothole. It only has to rain hard for 30 minutes and streets are flooding. At least once a year we’re hit with a “Boil Water Advisory.” And the power goes out with alarming frequency because our...

For the last 20 or so years we’ve been living through a technology revolution. When we talk about the pioneers behind this revolution, we usually refer to the creators of phones, software, e-commerce, or a combination of all three. For example, an app that summons a car to pick you up. Or an app that creates a playlist of your favorite music. Some of these tech advances are so integrated int...

When successful people talk about how they got to be in the position they’re in, a good number of them credit luck or circumstances. These folks typically mention a series of fortuitous events that conspired to push them in one direction or another. Then there are the other, more rare, stories. The ones where a person has a definite vision of what they want to accomplish. And the determinati...