It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

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...

As a society, we’re generally focused on achievement. We celebrate when a person gets into college. And we celebrate when they graduate. In between, when it comes to winning monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily battles - like structuring your day to attend classes and study for tests; and how to budget to afford tuition, books, transportation, food, and rent – well, we typically leave people to figure that out on their ...

There’s a difference between an unintentional and an intentional experience.

For example, you could be wandering down Oak Street at night and unintentionally hear music coming out of The Maple Leaf. It might sound great, but it sounds a whole lot better if you intentionally go into the club and stand in front of the stage.

Likewise with heat and humidity. Living in New Orleans you no doubt gain some benefit from unintentional...

People who own or run factories and refineries love to complain about how onerous it is to comply with the rules and regulations laid out by OSHA – the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. On the other hand, these same businesses brag about their safety record to attract and retain good employees.

A local New Orleans company, American Safety, combines both of these elements in its day-to-day business: it con...

If you’ve got a high school kid in public school in New Orleans and your kid is interested in pursuing anything in the arts – like music, dance, theater, film, even creative writing – you find out pretty quickly, the school doesn’t have a budget for that.

To put on a play, publish a newspaper, learn dance, or most other musical and artistic pursuits, the funds required generally come from fundraisers, or par...