It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

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 of a soul, to past lives and karma.

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 companies. Each of these companies ha...

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 venture capital company. The money th...

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 things in New Orleans business that ...

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 question to be fairly confident that most ...

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 on any official list of healthcare p...

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 beauty in depicting decadence and ...

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’s not that simple. And by &l...

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, went ahead and opened their doors wi...

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 he launched a breakfast cereal compa...

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 email. This team building exercise...

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 elegant, environmentally friendly, focu...

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, Chuck, is hard at work, manning Dan...

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 places to eat, and great music to lis...

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 chance doing something that might bring ...

Generally, by the time someone gets invited on a show like this they’ve figured out how to tell the story of their business in a way that makes their journey seem like a steady climb from humble beginnings to current success.

In telling these histories, entrepreneurs will talk generally about setbacks, but they don’t typically elaborate on specific obstacles. Like, for example, this scenario:

Suppose you’re a star...

As human beings, we have many shared experiences. Most of us, one way or another, get a haircut. And most of us appreciate the fleeting beauty of flowers.

You might think those two mundane observations are devoid of any kind of potential entrepreneurial re-invention. After all, whether your mom cuts your hair or you go to a salon, a haircut is, well, a haircut. Right? And whether you pick your own flowers or buy them from a florist...

When you walk into a home, a room, or a business, you typically have a single sensation. A place feels a certain way. That specific reaction is actually the culmination of a whole range of perceptions that include observations about dimensions, light, color, furniture shapes and sizes, painting on the walls, decorative touches, rugs, even scent.

You take most of these cues in at the same time and your decision about how you feel ab...

Fewer than 400,000 people live in Orleans Parish. Every year we  also have around 19 million temporary residents. Also known as “tourists.”

New Orleanians tend to think of these two populations as distinct – even at odds with each other. But in fact, our local economy is entwined with our tourist economy in ways you might not expect.

A great case study is a business called Chateau Sew.

Chateau Sew is a fabric...