It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Here’s a real-world business problem for you: Employers in New Orleans say they can’t find enough people with skills in technology. Colleges in New Orleans say they don’t offer more classes in technology because there aren’t enough kids coming out of high school with an education in what they call STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math. High schools say the...

On Out to Lunch we invite people to have lunch and talk about their business. Our general rule of thumb is, we don’t invite them to come back a second time, unless something has materially changed in their business . Well, the Covid-19 pandemic has certainly expanded our list of potential return guests on Out to Lunch. In the past 12 months almost everybody’s business has been affected...

For all kinds of businesses, the financial impact of the Covid 19 Pandemic has been profound. At the beginning of 2020, you might have had a thriving business. Midway through the year, with everybody confined to their homes and unemployment at historically high levels, you might have been wondering what your future would look like if your business failed. But, what if you had a business where fail...

There was a long, dark era in American business where nobody in a boardroom had any use for morality. Tobacco companies knowingly gave us cancer. Manufacturers didn’t care what kind of waste they pumped into the environment. And, as long as they were making money, food producers were unconcerned about what they put in our bodies. Those days are thankfully behind us. Today there are for-profi...

If you live in New Orleans, you know how this goes. You’re out one night, having a few drinks, when someone says, “You know what would be a great idea…” In the morning – or maybe later in the week when you go to do the laundry - you find the napkin in your pocket with this great idea sketched out on it. What do you do then? Do you put the clothes in the laundry...

These days it’s hard to read the news, or even have a conversation with members of your own family, without being confronted by the many things that separate us. But there is one basic thing we all have in common. We all have a body. Now, that might sound so obvious as to be hardly worth pointing out. But the fact is, if we don’t take care of our body, and stay fit and healthy, ev...

For a long time, the word “alternative” has meant “substitute”. For example, you can drink soy milk as an alternative to regular milk. Somewhere along the line we also started using the word “alternative” to mean something that exists alongside something else that is more mainstream. Alternative music is a sort of artsy parallel to pop and rock. Alternative...

If you’ve been to college, you’ll know that although colleges are ostensibly places where students get an education, the teaching staff do not spend a majority of their day teaching. What, exactly, you might wonder, do college professors do all day? Well, one thing they do is research. And sometimes that research can turn into more than just an article in an academic journal. Many...

All of us are looking for happiness. Some of us believe we’ll achieve it when we get something - like a new job. Partly, it’s human nature to think like this. It gives us hope. But it’s also a kind of jealousy. To some extent we all want what we haven’t got. For example, have you ever noticed when you meet someone new and find out what they do, you find yourself thinki...

If you’re like most people, once a month or so you take a look at your credit-card statement and your bills. If you’re paying out more each month than your income, you have trouble sleeping at night. Then you hear about people who are celebrities in our society because of the amount of money they make with their earth-shattering businesses - like Amazon, Tesla, Uber, and Spotify. Amazo...

If you have a business, you need to be online. It doesn’t matter what your business is. Even if you’re a hairdresser or a plumber or a manicurist and none of your revenue comes directly from e-commerce, your clients are still going to expect to find information about you online. And if you’re looking for new clients, no matter how much you might think Facebook, TikTok, Insta...

In business, we go to great pains to treat men and women equally. But when it comes to pain itself, men and women are not always equal. That’s why Sara Reardon opened  NOLA Pelvic Health . When we talk about healthcare, we’re usually thinking about one of two scenarios: getting treatment for everyday treatable ailments like Covid or flu. Or catastrophic illness, like cancer.&...

As much as we love New Orleans, we all agree there is room for improvement in all kinds of areas. The two issues that rise to the top of most lists of things that concern New Orleanians are education and crime. We have an evolving public education system that continues to attempt to claw its way up toward the national average. We have, at various times, been the murder capital of the cou...

People come to Louisiana looking for everything from Alligators to Zydeco. The two things they are usually not looking for are high tech superstars and women duck hunters. That’s exactly who Peter’s guests on Out to Lunch are looking for. Bill Ellison and his venture capital organization  Innovation Catalyst  invest in new high-tech companies. Some of them turn out...

Often when we use the term "gut feeling" we're referring to a premonition of something bad about to happen. This episode of Out to Lunch is exactly the opposite. We're looking back at that gut feeling we had BC (Before Corona) when our health and housing issues were a little different. Staring at the beginning - you’ve probably heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At the foundation of...

It’s probably human nature to believe that, over time, things get better. We tend to have faith that we’re on a path of progress. And that when we make a conscious change, it’s for the better. But, experience tells us that, as a society, when we make changes, we don’t always make wise choices. Things that can seem like a good idea at the time, can, in hindsight, turn o...

Technology touches almost every aspect our lives. Our phones and the applications on them - from Google Maps to Uber and Apple Pay - are integral parts of almost everything we do. Because this integration is so useful, and universal, it can feel like it’s been this way forever. But the first iPhone was only released in June 2007.  Initially, the pioneers of tech were in Northern Ca...

There’s a saying in French that, roughly translated, says, “The more things change the more they stay the same.” Generally, in business, that’s pretty true. Trends come and go. Markets go up and down. And cycles tend to keep coming around. Maybe in the long arc of history, this fatalistic philosophy will hold true for the New Orleans economy. But for right now the Coronavir...

The pandemic has taken a toll on a lot of businesses. Among the most visibly crippled in New Orleans have been restaurants, bars, live music venues, and most aspects of tourism. Less visible but also hard hit, have been media outlets that rely on advertising. Print media was already struggling before the pandemic hit. A few weeks ago on Out to Lunch, our guest was the publisher of The Advocat...

When the pandemic came along, it derailed a lot of plans. Businesses had to shut down with no notice. Some have re-opened. Some are struggling to re-open. Others have been unable to continue and have gone out of business. Peter Ricchiuti's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch are both in a strange, gray area. They both have unorthodox businesses. They both have millions of dollars of invest...

Over the course of the pandemic we’ve all learned something about ourselves, and about other people. Well, we’ve probably learned a bunch of things actually, but one of them is that apparently we all have two sets of clothes. One set are the clothes we wear when we go out, so that we look presentable. The other set are clothes that we wear at home, where apparently it doesn’t mat...

If you went to the grocery store during the earlier days of the pandemic, you’ll remember there were long shelves of empty space.  The first thing that went was toilet paper. I’m not sure if any economist, sociologist, or psychologist has fully explained that. Then it was flour, and yeast. Because, for some unaccountable reason, everybody stuck at home started baking bread. T...

You might be listening to Out to Lunch from anywhere in the world, on your podcast app. Or you might be listening on radio, on WWNO in New Orleans. What difference does it make how you listen to this, or any other show? It doesn’t make a difference to you. But it does make a difference if you own a radio station. You see, radio survives on advertising, which is targeted at a local audience....

It’s not surprising that the advent of a rampant, contagious, deadly virus is changing the way we live. What perhaps is surprising, is the speed with which we’ve adapted to our new way of life. And the way we’ve put technology to work for us. One of the most surprising of these changes has been the almost overnight embrace of telemedicine. If you haven’t already e...

You might not have thought about it, but surviving the coffee and nut butter business in a pandemic turns out to be a pretty accurate bellwether of what's going on in the economy. Coffee and Nut Butter, Round 1 In the second week of March of this year, 2020, I sat down at a table at Commander’s Palace for what I thought was going to be a regular Out to Lunch show. It turned out to be a great...