You may have heard people who started up businesses talking about how they found investors. Typically, they’ll say something like, “We pitched our idea and raised X amount.”

It sounds simple. But when you dig a little deeper, delivering a successful pitch to investors is not quite as straightforward as describing your business as “The Uber of dating” or “Air BnB for pets.” Financing a startup requires convincing investors or lenders they’re taking a worthwhile risk.

Crafting this calculated risk into a convincing sales pitch - which can be in the shape of a business plan or a presentation known as a “pitch deck” – is a special skill. And it’s what Camille Terk does at her company, Terk Consulting.

Tey Stiteler came up with her idea for a business after she and her partner bought 4 acres of land near Poplarville, Mississippi.

Tey was looking for a reason to quit her desk-job and work outdoors. With absolutely no background in farming or horticulture, Tey started growing flowers. She grew a lot of flowers. And started meeting other people who grew flowers.

Tey began selling her flowers at markets and pop-ups around New Orleans. Then in 2024 when she went all-in and opened a brick and mortar business on Camp Street. It’s called, The Secret Spot Flowers.

There’s a question I’ve heard interviewers ask people. It’s, “If you could go back in time to when you were starting out, what would you tell your younger self?” I don't ask either Camille or Tey this question but there’s no doubt that if they, and most people, knew what roadblocks and curveballs and just downright weird, unexpected things were going to come up when they started down the path of founding and running a business, they might question their optimism and the wisdom of blind faith.

On the other hand, when things work out, as they have so far for Tey and Camille, the ups and downs become a bunch of great stories.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are countless myths and reports throughout human history of places where spirits come down to earth. Where the intangible meets the material world. In the US, there are few places that better demonstrate this crossroads than New Orleans. 

People have tried to explain how the joy of living here triumphs over everyday things like dysfunction and potholes, with slogans like “The Big Easy,” and “The city that care forgot.”

One of the locations you can witness this triumph of the spirit is the corner of Napoleon Avenue and Tchoupitoulas Street. No, not Rouse’s. Across the street. At Tipitina’s music club.

Keith Spera from the Times Picayune has called Tipitina’s, “a sacred space.” Dr. John called it, “The church of the funky saints.” And Jazz Fest co-founder Quint Davis has referred to it as, “The Vatican of New Orleans music.”

Tipitina’s was founded in 1977 by a bunch of young people who knew nothing about business, music promotion, running a restaurant, a bar, or a radio station – it was the original home of WWOZ. These folks just wanted a place that celebrated New Orleans musicians and gave them a stage to play on - and a guarantee they’d actually get the money that people paid to come see them.

In 2018, history repeated itself when the members of the New Orleans band Galactic bought Tipitina’s.

Musicians are not typically known for their firm grasp of the music business, but the doors are still open and the revenue streams have diversified, including a record business called Tipitina’s Record Club.

Robert Mercurio is the bass player in Galactic, part owner of the legendary Tipitina’s music club, and Co-Founder of Tipitina’s Record Club.

Besides music, there’s another strand of New Orleans where art meets commerce, and where, literally, the rubber meets the road. Motorcycle design and manufacture. It’s a lot less celebrated than our place in the history of music, but if you know a thing or two about motorbikes you’ll know my other lunch guest today, J.T. Nesbitt.

J.T designed and was part of the team that produced motorcycles called The Wraith, the G2 Hellcat and The Magnolia Special, for Confederate Motorcycles, and later an electric bike, The Curtiss One. They’re all elegant works of art and powerful machines.

Today, JT is designing and building a new line of bikes under the banner of his own company, Bienville Studios. Currently he’s building a bike called the Magnolia 4. We find out all about it in this edition of Out to Lunch but for now all you need to know is Jay Leno has one on order.

The Tipitina’s logo with the half-peeled banana is a New Orleans icon. For locals and live music lovers everywhere it’s as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or the Mercedes hood ornament. Nike and Mercedes spend millions of dollars each year to keep their brands in front of people. Tipitina’s brand is spread mostly by people paying them – to buy a T-shirt or baseball cap. The lesson being, when you have a product  people genuinely care about and cherish, it sells itself.

The same philosophy can be applied to the motorbikes coming out of Bienville Studios.

Robert Mercurio and J.T. Nesbitt are both at the helm of very different but equally unique and valuable New Orleans pieces of art and commerce.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In most cities in the US, after you’ve blown it out on New Year’s Eve, if you want another socially approved excuse to party you have to wait a bit. Memorial Day is 5 months away. At best you might be able to get away with Spring Break – that’s about 4 months.

Here in New Orleans, you have less than a week till the next round of society-sanctioned excessive eating, drinking and socializing begins. January 6th is 12th night, the official beginning of Mardi Gras. That’s when the first parades begin. And, traditionally, when bakers start selling king cake.

Since 2019, it’s also opening day of a king cake lover’s paradise: King Cake Hub.

King Cake Hub is Jennifer Samuels’ 2-month a year business. It’s a single location where you can get practically every variety of king cake available in New Orleans. Currently there are 80 of them. They’re baked by 25 different bakers. And the King Cake Hub collection is curated - meaning Jennifer tastes and approves every king cake.

New Orleans - a city on the banks of the Mississippi River - takes its name from Orléans, a city on the banks of the Loire River, in France.

We can argue about who New Orleans’ most famous citizen is – probably Louis Armstrong - but undoubtedly Orléans’ most famous citizen is The Maid of Orleans. Her name was Jeanne d’Arc and she became known to the English-speaking world as Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc’s birthday is January 6th. Which is also, as I mentioned, 12th night, the first night of Mardi Gras. It was that fact, and the feeling that 12th night wasn’t being celebrated with enough inclusive diversity in New Orleans, that led Amy Kirk Duvoisin to found the Joan of Arc Project.

The flagship activity of the Joan of Arc Project is the Joan of Arc Parade, on 12th night. It’s a walking parade set in Joan’s era, the 1400’s, with medieval costumes, music, characters on horseback, and roving entertainers like jugglers and stilt walkers. The paraders have Medieval throws – and king cake.

If you don’t know anything else about New Orleans, you know we’re the home of Mardi Gras – the biggest, rowdiest, annual street party in the country.

If you live in New Orleans, Mardi Gras is more than just a party. It’s more than just a whole lot of parties. It’s part of the fabric of the city – from our culture to our economy. And, like other aspects of culture and economics, it’s not static. It changes. And evolves. These evolutions are mostly the result of innovations that come from the creative minds of New Orleanians, like Jennifer Samuels and Amy Kirk Duvoisin.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 500 salons that were using her methods and selling her hair products. In the process she invented the concept of franchising.

Today you can buy into any number of franchises. Most notable are household names like McDonalds, Ace Hardware, and ReMax. But there are thousands of others, including a franchise called Tap Truck.

Booze

Tap Trucks are kind of like food trucks, except they’re set up like a bar, and sell drinks. Unlike food trucks, Tap Trucks aren’t big boxes on wheels. Each Tap truck is a totally renovated, tricked-out, vintage truck.

The two Tap Trucks in New Orleans are a 1951 GMC Panel Truck, and a 1951 Chevy. The local trucks are affiliated with the restaurant, Central City Bar B Q. And the New Orleans operator of Tap Truck is Lenaye Doussan.

Veggies

It’s funny how things go in cycles. When industrialization came to the US and people moved away from the countryside, they found themselves living on pieces of land that were too small for a cow or a garden. So nearby farmers delivered them milk and vegetables.

Then, when there was a big enough concentration of people living in suburbs and zooming around in cars, nobody wanted to be old-fashioned and have food delivered from a farm. Not when you could drive your station-wagon to a supermarket.

Today we’ve come full circle. We want everything delivered. And local, organic, “farm to table” is the ideal. A company called Top Box Foods is making that ideal a reality in New Orleans.

Connor Deloach is co-founder and Executive Director of Top Box Foods.

Delivery

Delivery just makes sense. Economically and environmentally.

On any given day, instead of 500 of us getting into 500 cars and going out for groceries, a handful of vehicles can deliver that same amount of food to all of those people. And they can deliver food to people who don’t have transportation. Or who live in neighborhoods that don’t have easy access to fresh or locally-sourced produce and groceries.

Although drinking alcohol might not be as essential as eating fruit and vegetables, we’ve come to learn that in our stress-filled lives, entertainment and enjoyment are indeed a vital part of our existence. So, whether we’re talking about Top Box Foods delivering fresh produce and local groceries, or Tap Truck delivering drinks and a good time, delivery just makes sense.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website itsneworleans.com. And that's where you can also find more lunchtime conversation about delivery with the founder of Waitr.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 music fans to attaining the same iconic, and economic, status as the nearly 300-year-old tradition that more than anything else defines New Orleans.  

Jazz Fest attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to New Orleans every year. It reportedly pumps $350m into the local economy. And then there’s the not insignificant amount of money the event itself generates. It’s one of the most successful music festivals in the world. According to publicly available tax records, Jazz Fest’s gross revenue these days is tens of millions of dollars.

The reason Jazz Fest’s finances are public information is because the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is a non-profit event. It’s owned by a small but extraordinarily prolific 501(c)(3) organization called The Jazz and Heritage Foundation.

The Executive Director of the Jazz and Heritage Foundation is Don Marshall.

Jazz Fest is undeniably New Orleans’ music headliner, but we have other music festivals throughout the year. French Quarter Festival is the biggest of the city’s free festivals, and in the recent past the biggest ticketed music festival, after Jazz Fest, has been Voodoo Fest.

Sig Greenbaum was one of the architects of the original Voodoo Fest, and for a couple of its biggest years was its co-director. You might remember Mr. Greenbaum from when he was a radio personality known simply as “Sig” on alternative music station 106.7 The End. If you’re a gamer, you might know Sig as the Head of Live Events for the Los Angeles-based Overwatch League, the e-sports operation he built from the ground up into an international live sports league with more than 50 million players. 

Today, Sig Greenbaum is the owner of his own live events production company called Sigfest Events. And he’s the founder of an event that might become one of the best things that’s happened for a long time to local musicians, called Nola x Nola.

The cultural economy is the life-blood of New Orleans. Without our music, our musicians, and our music festivals - with apologies to Tennessee Williams - we’d just be Cleveland.

There is no argument that the single biggest thing that has ever happened to promote New Orleans music to the world is Jazz Fest. It takes hundreds of people to produce Jazz Fest every year, but ultimately the buck stops at Don Marshall's desk. Don is typically modest and doesn’t often step into the limelight, but once in a while someone needs to tell him how much New Orleans appreciates him.

And we look forward to the future of NOLA x NOLA and to finding out what other productions Sigfest Events has in store for us.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website itsneworleans.com. And you can check out this show about our cultural economy with Andrew Duhon and Musa Alves.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 pressure. 

Most of our sodium comes from eating sodium chloride, better known as salt. We add salt to practically every food item we make. And - maybe because the human body is designed this way to keep us alive - when salt is missing from food, we think it doesn’t taste right. And yet, despite the fact that it’s one of the most valuable substances in our lives, next time you’re at the supermarket take a look at the price of salt. It’s extraordinarily cheap.

Salt is a spice. Like salt, other spices are relatively cheap too. Because spices sell in small quantities and have low profit margins, it’s difficult for a small spice company to survive.

Barkley Rafferty is co-founder of Royal Merchant Trading, a New Orleans spice company whose plan for survival is a brick-and-mortar storefront. A spice store. In the Garden District, in a shopping center called The Rink.

Although the Murray family’s New Orleans’ roots go back to the 1700’s, in those 300 years, nobody in the Murray family made wine. In fact, very few people in New Orleans have ever made wine. After all, grapes don’t grow here.

In 2010 the Murray family bought a vineyard in Sonoma, California. The plan was to use the house on the property as a vacation home, and lease the grapevines to people who know something about making wine. That plan didn’t exactly work out. 300 years of inexperience was quickly dispensed with and today the Murray family make 6 wines. Three cabernets, a Zinfandel, a Chardonnay and a rose – under the distinctly New Orleans label, Flambeaux Winery.

Flambeaux Winery’s wines are sold across the country in every state. And they’ve been recognized in all sorts of important places, including a Best Wine award from the prestigious Food & Wine magazine.

New Orleanian Stephen Murray Jr. still doesn’t refer to himself as a wine-maker, preferring the title “Wine Ambassador.” Stephen claims that while most of his family is on the production side of the business, he’s on the consumption side.

When you start a business there’s no guarantee it’s going to work. The one thing you can guarantee, however, is you’re going to work.

You work long hours, often including nights, weekends, and holidays. And you invariably find yourself having to come up with solutions to a myriad of problems you never knew existed.

That’s why the single most common piece of guidance to people starting a new business is, “Find something to do you really love.” Barkley Rafferty and Stephen Murray are both great examples of the benefits of taking that simple business advice. And although happiness isn’t a line item on a balance sheet, it’s definitely a contributing factor to over-all success.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show on itsneworleans.com by Jill Lafleur.

And while you're making dinner with spices from Royal Trading and sipping on your Flambeaux wine, check out this podcast about the future of charging your cell phone and your EV.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 “successful exit.” A successful exit is when your business is doing so well that someone buys it off you -- for a price that makes all your hard work worth it.

These percentages make it sound like, if you start a business, you have a pretty good chance of a successful exit. Actually, you don’t. When you do the math, your chance of getting from startup to successful exit is 0.075 %. In other words, close to zero. Which makes what happened in New Orleans in 2021 so extraordinary.

In the space of a few months, we saw three stupendous successful exits.

First up was Turbosquid. Turbosquid is an online marketplace for buying and selling 3D images and models that are used in everything from video games to TV commercials. The company was one of the earliest successful tech startups in New Orleans. It was founded in 2000. In 2021, co-founder Matt Wisdom sold Turbosquid to a company called Shutterstock, for $75m.

Next up was Levelset.

Levelset is a software-based company in the construction industry. Basically, it acts as a contractual meeting place for contractors and the many subcontractors on a construction site. 

Levelset’s function is managing all of the financial obligations on a construction project, so that everyone gets paid, and gets paid on time. They secure and facilitate almost $2B in payments every month.

Levelset started life with the name zLien. Scott Wolfe Jr, a local New Orleans real estate attorney, started the company in 2011. In 2021, Scott sold Levelset to a company called Procore - for $500m.

To round out our spectacular 2021, there was Lucid.

Lucid is a New Orleans company that specializes in conducting, compiling, and analyzing consumer research. The company started out life in 2010, as Federated Sample. In 2015 it changed its name to Lucid. And in 2021 Lucid was sold to a Swedish market research firm, called The Cint Group - for $1.1B

The founder and CEO of Lucid is Patrick Comer.

For many years, the New Orleans economy was firmly rooted in the oil and gas industry. When big oil left the city, it seemed like only hospitality and tourism could flourish here. 

Then, a little after the turn of the 21st century, New Orleanians learned a new term: “Tech startup.” We saw technology companies starting up, and growing, with the help of business incubators like Idea Village and Propeller.

At the same time, we were watching Silicon Valley in California. As we witnessed the success of venture-capital-driven tech companies that came out of there, people here in New Orleans started asking, “Where’s our Google or Facebook?”

Well, in business terms, it hasn’t taken long to answer that question. In just 10 years we’ve seen the successful exits of three very impressive local companies that were built here from scratch: Turbosquid, Levelset, and Lucid. And it seems like, rather than having reached what 10 years ago we considered the pinnacle of achievement, we’re realizing that what we’ve actually reached is a new plateau. A new basecamp from which we can continue climbing.

Matt, Scott, and Patrick's incredible achievements are not only an inspiration to other entrepreneurs, they’re providing a foundation to help build the next generation of New Orleans businesses.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website itsneworleans.com. And you can meet a couple of the next generation of entrepreneurs and find out about their tech startup, Bloks, "the Wix of apps" that lets you build your own app.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 most common battery is Lithium-ion. However, like the fossil fuel it’s on the way to replacing, Lithium has to be excavated from the earth. That sets up the obvious issue of supply, which is further complicated by the geo-politics of where exactly on Earth Lithium exists.

An alternative to Lithium is a Sodium-ion battery. Sodium is readily available everywhere and transitioning will be a relatively painless evolution. Companies that currently make Lithium batteries will easily be able to switch over to making Sodium batteries.

But, even if we do switch to sodium, how exactly do we charge all these millions of batteries up? Right now, to fully charge your car battery takes between 30 minutes and a couple of hours. And, unfortunately, there is no other material or element on Earth to make batteries with that would make charging faster.

And that’s why Dr. Michael Naguib invented it. It’s a material he calls Mxene – which is pronounced "maxine."

Mxenes are taking the science world by storm. Scientists around the world are working on developing Mxene technology. Why? Because when a Mxene is employed in the manufacture of a sodium battery, the battery can be fully charged in a matter of minutes.

The significance of this discovery is impossible to overstate. The coming revolution that Mxenes are ushering in is extraordinary. What is equally extraordinary is, Dr. Michael Naguib, the person who discovered Mxenes, is a professor of science and engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Okay, so that’s your battery powered vehicle. What about your house? The good news there is, you don’t have to wait for a revolution. You can get your house off the electric grid. Today. With solar panels.

The main obstacle to actually doing that is cost. Most of us can’t afford to get solar panels installed on our home. That’s where Tom Neyhart comes in. Tom is founder and CEO of a company called PosiGen.

PosiGen focuses specifically on bringing solar power to low and moderate-income families, and communities of color. The company is headquartered in New Orleans, but only about 20% of their business is in Louisiana. Their main markets are Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. They’re also in Florida, Philadelphia, and Mississippi. These are places, unlike Louisiana apparently, where there are government-driven incentives to switch to solar.

Whatever your reasons for listening to Out to Lunch, it's unlikely that you're turning to this show expecting it to reveal planet Earth’s path to the future of energy. Nor would you, in all likelihood, suspect that the path to a fossil-fuel-free, battery-powered-planet runs through Uptown New Orleans.

But, thanks to Michael Naguib's groundbreaking work from his perch at Tulane University, that’s where we are. And Tom Neyhart's dedication to democratizing solar power, while it might not be in quite the same Nobel Prize type stratosphere, is no less vitally important to millions of people who benefit from it. It’s no exaggeration to say this edition of Out to Lunch is a uniquely eye opening and educational conversation over pizza.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website, itsneworleans.com.

And there's more lunch table conversation about "Sun Water and Dirt" here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, because you’re a human being, that these remarks are directed at you. But actually, they're directed at the horses and dogs in the audience.

A horse’s or dog’s medical trajectory is much the same as ours. When traditional Western medicine doesn’t cure what’s wrong with them, they – or we on their behalf - turn to alternative medicine. One of the practitioners of these animal alternatives – Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture and chiropractic - is Dr Michelle Jobert.

Dr. Jobert is the owner of an alternative veterinary medicine practice called The Well Adjusted Pet.

If you’re wondering how you give a horse chiropractic manipulation, we’ll get to exactly how that works in just a minute. Meantime, here’s an animal question that might be closer to home. “Why doesn’t your dog do what you tell her?”

The typical answer to this question is either: (a)My dog is hard-headed and refuses to obey me. Or (b) My dog is stupid. The correct answer, apparently, is neither (a) nor (b). The correct answer is, “The problem is you.”

Ann Becnel has been a dog trainer and the owner of a dog training school called Companion Dogs, since 1990. Ann says her job is not so much training dogs, as teaching a dog’s owner how to train their dog. The lesson here is, even if you want to work with animals because you prefer them to people, you still end up working with people.

There’s no doubt we’re making huge advances in all kinds of fields of human endeavor. A virtual assistant can give us instant answers to almost every question we ask it. A.I. is on the way to learning almost everything humans can do. And we’re seriously investigating building inhabitable cities on other planets.

But with all these advances, we haven’t made much progress on how to communicate with the millions of creatures who share this planet with us. Present company excluded.

Michelle and Ann spend their professional lives communicating with dogs and horses. And, judging by this conversation, their skills at human communication are fairly formidable too. 

Out to Lunch is recorded over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom.  You can find photos from this show on our website, and check out more lunchtime conversation about dogs here. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

To get the app to work, all you have to do is download it from wherever you get apps. You don’t have to upload your licenses or proof of vaccination – that information goes directly to the app from the appropriate departments of the State of Louisiana.

LA Wallet is the biggest digital credential app in the United Sates. And Louisiana – the state that’s usually at the bottom of every list there is - is at the top of this one. We’re the first state in the nation to have a state-approved digital vaccine card, which, by the way, is recognized and valid in every other state.

Calvin Fabre is founder and President of the software company Envoc, and creator of LA Wallet.

Back in the earlier days of what came to be known as “The Digital Revolution,” e-commerce and social media were two totally separate things. You went to one place online to buy stuff. And you went to another place online to post pictures of what you bought.

Those days are long gone. Today e-commerce, social media, and everything else you do online are inextricably linked.

If you have a business, you have an online presence. Even if your business is a brick-and-mortar building that requires people to walk in the door, you can’t rely on a neon sign to achieve that any more. And that’s why an industry of digital marketing agencies has been created.

These agencies put the equivalent of your neon sign online - in a place where your potential customers will see it. However, unlike screwing a neon sign to your building, online marketing is not quite so simple.

Since 2012, a digital marketing agency called Online Optimism has been designing and installing online neon signs for local companies like Hibernia Bank, the Downtown Development District, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Like so many other types of optimism, Online Optimism started out in New Orleans. The agency also has offices in Washington DC and Atlanta.

The Managing Director of Online Optimism here in New Orleans is Sam Olmsted.

One of the main goals you hear people in online marketing talk about, is SEO. Search Engine Optimization. If I have a business, when someone searches online for something I’m selling, if I have good SEO my company comes up first in search. So there’s a greater likelihood a person will click on my business ahead of everyone else.

Back in the day when people used the yellow pages to find a business, businesses tried a similar sort of manipulation by listing themselves as something like “AAAAA carpet cleaning” or “AAAAA jelly beans.” All of the “A’s” in front of their name meant that in the alphabetical listings, they’d be first.

Like the A’s in front of a name, only one company can come up first in a Google search. So, I’m wondering how cost-effective SEO is. Say I’m selling jellybeans online -- if I‘m a small business in New Orleans, for what I can afford to pay an agency like Online Optimism, can I expect you to put enough digital “A’s” in front of my name to get me to the top of Google search ahead of everyone else selling jellybeans online?

On this edition of Out to Lunch, we get SEO explained.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And check out Calvin Fabre's earlier visit to Out to Lunch.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 New Orleans swung from one nation to the other over the years, till eventually we became part of the United States. But the influences of French and LatinX people and culture continue to this very day.

Valeria Ali is co-founder of a local Spanish language news service called Al Dia, which in English translates to “The Daily.” Al Dia texts the latest relevant local and national news to subscribers, in Spanish.

Al Dia is a new project that’s part of a larger Spanish language news operation, called Jambalaya News. Jambalaya is the predominant Spanish language news reporting and translation service in the state – around 30% of all Latinx people in Louisiana subscribe to Jambalaya’s social media news platforms.

Valeria came up with the idea for the text-message-based Al Dia news service and pitched it to a division of Google called Google News Initiative. Google said “yes” and gave Valeria the funds to launch Al Dia in July of 2021.

The French influence came to Louisiana from two different directions. French settlers came to New Orleans from France. And French Acadians, who came to be called “Cajuns,” moved to South West Louisiana from Canada.

The French from France and the Cajuns – who were originally also from France - spoke two different dialects of French. Today, Cajun French and regular French are more different from each other than ever. But here in New Orleans, a company called New Niveau is dedicated to encouraging the regular use of both dialects.

Officially, New Niveau is a digital media agency and production house specializing in content creation, social media management, and live broadcasting. But New Niveau is most passionate about its work in French. They produce around five news stories in French a week, as well as two ongoing video series. One of them is “Le Tac Tac” – in English, “The Popcorn” – a local gossip show – and the other is “Les Nouvelles-Orléans” – which doesn’t require translation - a daily news show.

Both of these French language shows are hosted by co-founder of New Niveau, Sam Craft.

It can be hard to put your finger on exactly what’s so great about New Orleans. You can easily make a list of things that are challenging - from potholes to humidity - but it’s harder to precisely enumerate what it feels like to walk around the French Quarter, ride the streetcar, eat a muffuletta, catch Zulu on Mardi Gras morning, strike up a conversation with a complete stranger in the grocery store, or hear music.

A part of this indescribable spirit is the combination of cultures that built New Orleans. It’s the way people here have always embraced difference, and incorporated it into daily life. It’s how we got jazz. It’s how we got our signature cuisine. And it’s how we’re continuing, to this day, to build our present and future culture.

Valeria Ali and Sam Craft are both working every day to build bridges between people, between lives, and between languages.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this how by Jill Lafleur at our website. And find out more about Louisiana LatinX business in this conversation with ElCentro's Lindsey Navarro. 

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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’s just a fantasy and unless there’s some sort of revolution, we’re always going to have wealthy and less wealthy members of our society.

Which brings me to this question. Have you ever been to Tipitina’s? The Maple Leaf? Jazz Fest? Or Mardi Gras?

I’m sure you’ve noticed that at all of these places it’s hard to tell who’s wealthy and who’s not. Although there are vast differences between socioeconomic groups in New Orleans, we have these unique, regular meeting grounds where our differences are left behind.

There’s a kind of unwritten Law of Human Respect in New Orleans. We understand that wealth and privilege are not always earned, and are not always distributed fairly. And we understand that some of the poorest among us enrich us all with the greatest art.

It’s in this uniquely New Orleans spirit that I want to introduce you to my lunch guests today.

Chuck Morse is the Executive Director of Thrive New Orleans. Thrive is a nonprofit organization that focuses on four programs. “Thrive Housing & Development” provides affordable housing. “Launch NOLA” provides small business training. “Thrive Works” is a job training program that incorporates the Restoration Thrift Store on St Claude Avenue.   And “Thrive 9th Ward,” known as “T9,” is a community center.

Johnny Liss is co-founder of JAM-NOLA.

JAM NOLA is a 5,400 square feet, twelve-room self-described “cultural funhouse” in the Bywater. It’s somewhere between an immersive art experience, an overwhelming, explosive dose of visual New Orleans and Instagram Heaven - with an accompanying soundtrack compiled by George Porter and Tank from Tank and the Bangas.

You may have heard the term, “Bread and Circuses.” It was originally coined as a derogatory description of society - meant to suggest that most people are so focused on their own mundane lives all they care about is survival or distraction.

In New Orleans, we’ve elevated the bread and circus mentality to a coveted way of life. We refer to it here as keeping our priorities in perspective.

Chuck and Johnny represent the two sides of the New Orleans coin, the bread and circus. We all need balance. We need to eat and keep a roof over our heads. And we need to go out and have fun. Thrive New Orleans and JAM NOLA provide the opportunity for both of these poles of our New Orleans existence. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And if you're thinking about building an app for your business, check this out.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 employees - all the way down to two. Or even one.

If you’re talking about a service business, like a plumber or IT support, you can imagine that a single person with a computer, or a couple of people with a van, could run a business. But when you’re talking manufacturing, and sales, it’s a bit more difficult to picture how one or two people alone can pull that off.

But that’s exactly what Peter's lunch guests, Nikki Thompson and Patrick Hernandez, are both doing with their respective businesses.

Patrick Hernandez and his partner Andrew Lohfeld are the only two employees of the company they co-founded, called Roulaison Rum, a rum distillery, on Broad Street in New Orleans.

One of the distillery’s distinguishing features is the kind of still that Patrick and Andrew use to make rum. It’s the oldest and least efficient type of still in the world. But it makes a specialty rum with complex flavors that rum drinkers are buying in 8 states, including New York, New Jersey, Florida and California.

Nikki Thompson’s company, Hood Cream, has 50% fewer employees than Roulaison Rum. At Hood Cream, it’s just Nikki.

Hood Cream manufactures non-dairy, vegan ice cream. You might be thinking, “Non-dairy vegan ice cream is such a niche product, how could it support more than one person?” Well, to put the vegan ice cream market in some sort of context, Baskin Robbins and Ben & Jerry’s both make non-dairy ice cream. And in the past 12 months, Americans spent over $520m on vegan ice cream.

That’s a significant market, and it’s estimated to be growing at 13% a year. At Nikki’s company, sales have grown to a point that will support opening a brick-and-mortar store, and hiring some employees.

Along with noting that “not all small businesses are created equal,” you can also note that imagination, creativity, vision, perseverance, and the ability to sell are not equally distributed among all small business owners. Once in a while, though, on Out to Lunch we meet people who embody these qualities in abundance, and are able to chart their own course.

Folks like this don’t need business consultants to tell them to think outside the box, they live outside the box. 

Nikki Thompson and Patrick Hernandez are both building businesses based on passion and quality. There’s always a market for quality. And there are certain products, like Hood Cream and Roulaison Rum, that passion seems to find its way into, in a way that drives sales.

This edition of Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom in New Orleans. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And catch up with the latest on New Orleans beer and DIY wine company Brewsy.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’ve long known, in the US, that our global economic advantage rests on an educated workforce. To that end, a couple of generations ago, America was virtually alone in providing free, readily available high school education.

As knowledge-based industries have grown, so has the demand for a higher-educated workforce. Today, over 60% of US high school graduates go on to college. That’s almost twice the number of other OECD countries including Japan, Germany, and France.

This has created a segment of the finance industry that loans money to students. Students who then graduate with debt significant enough to prevent them from doing other things, like buying a house. At the same time, we have a housing crisis in the US. According to NPR’s reporting, right now we have a shortfall of up to 7 million houses.

Education, debt-distribution, and the housing shortage might seem like huge, intractable macro-economic issues. But, locally, right here in New Orleans, Aaron Frumin is doing something to correct them.

Aaron is founder and CEO of unCommon Construction. It’s a construction company that builds houses. And it gets a significant portion of its workforce from high schools. High school students spend 100 hours each semester as apprentices, learning all aspects of construction, from swinging a hammer to team leadership.

We first met Aaron back in 2018, when unCommon Construction was just getting rolling. Today, unCommon Construction has filled 500 apprenticeship positions, distributed over half a million dollars in scholarships, and over 80% of kids who graduate from their work-skills program go into the construction industry.

Also back in 2018, we first learned about an atypical property development company, Alembic Community Development. Alembic partners with non-profit organizations, or like-minded for-profits, to develop real estate in typically disadvantaged communities. In other words, they build houses, community and commercial properties, in neighborhoods that are unattractive to most investors.

Starting out in New York, Alembic opened its doors in New Orleans in 2007. In 2008 Mike Grote joined the company as Director of its New Orleans office. It’s a position Mike still holds today.

There are a lot of things in New Orleans that are different from most other cities in the country: Gumbo, Bourbon Street, second-lines, muffulettas, Mardi Gras, the list goes on. But our much-vaunted fun-first lifestyle doesn’t immunize us from the problems that afflict the rest of the country - especially around the issues of affordable housing, and alternatives to debt-laden college education.

While the public image of New Orleans focuses on frivolity, and while Aaron and Mike enjoy Mardi Gras and live music as much as any other New Orleanian, they’re both making significant contributions to solving serious, nationwide problems. We're always happy when Out ot Lunch can shine a light on New Orleanians like Aaron and Mike and businesses like unCommon Construction and Almebic Community Development whose contributions to our city and country are overshadowed by the brighter lights of food and fun.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

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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 “a knife,” but their own particular, favorite brand and type of knife. And many people who take food prep seriously have only one particular person they trust to sharpen their knives.

In New Orleans, that person is very often Jackie Blanchard. Jackie and her partner Brandt are the owners of a business called Coutelier, on Oak Street in Uptown. And they have a second branch in Nashville Tennessee.  

Coutelier is a cutlery shop that specializes in rare, hand-forged Japanese knives. Jackie and Brandt work with over 55 different Japanese knife makers. They also sell a range of other specialist, high quality kitchen tools.

The tradition of knives goes back a long way in Japan. It can be traced back the forging of swords. Similarly, the tradition of fine arts and decorative pieces that beautify the interior of a house can be traced back a long way in Europe. And specifically in France.

As you’re well aware if you live here or have ever visited, when the French settled New Orleans they brought their architects who designed and built grand buildings. But they didn’t stop there. They also brought generations of decorative style to bear on the insides of these homes.

Valerie Legras is continuing that tradition today. Valerie was born and raised in France, and lives in New Orleans. She’s an interior designer who specializes in importing lighting fixtures from select French designers.

Valerie’s company is called Swadoh. In Swadoh’s  showroom on Tchoupitoulas Street in the Warehouse District you’ll find what could pass for a gallery of art installations, but is actually a hand-picked collection of French lamps and lampshades.

New Orleans has gone through a lot of stages in its over three hundred years of existence. We were the home of opera, jazz, and a European food and coffee culture. We had the busiest port and were the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated city in the country.

Then the tide of history turned. We had years of out-immigration. Other cities, like Miami and Dallas, came along and dominated the economies we once controlled. And businesses deserted our downtown.

For the last almost-two-decades we’ve been changing all that. Now we’re seeing New Orleans return with a different, but undeniably resurgent economy. With it we’re seeing the return of specialization and cosmopolitan sophistication that comes with the growth of cities.

Jackie Blanchard and Valerie Legras' successful businesses are both indicators of New Orleans’ economic upswing. Twenty years ago we would have had to visit New York to find a specialist knife store like Coutelier, or a French art lighting showroom like Swadoh. Today the positive direction of the city has given Jackie and Valerie the confidence to build these unique businesses in New Orleans, 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's more conversation about cosmopolitan direction of the New Orleans economy.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 somewhere a little south of 6 million apps.

By comparison, how many websites do you think there are worldwide? There are 1.2 billion. Given that the number of people who use mobile devices worldwide is larger than the number of people who use standard computers, and given that apps run better on mobile devices than websites do, you’d have to wonder why this number isn’t reversed.

The answer is, cost. And skill.

Anybody can get a hold of Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, or a number of other website builders and build their own website. And if you go through a domain registration site like Go Daddy, you can buy a website name and put up a website in almost the same time it takes to fill out your credit card information.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever had an idea for an app and looked into getting it built, you’ll know it’s complicated and expensive.

If you decide to go ahead and spend the money to hire a developer to build an app, it’s a risky investment. You don’t know if it’s going to work. And if it does, you don’t know if you’ll be able to get anyone to find it on an app store. So, you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to recover your investment.

A local app-building company is changing all that. The company is called Bloks. 

Bloks is the brainchild of Reed Stephens and Harry Fox. Reed and Harry met when they were working together at the Lepage Entrepreneurship Center at Tulane University’s business school.

Bloks is an app-building tool that anyone can use. With Bloks you build an app yourself, with modules – the same way you use Wordpress or Wix to build a website. And if your app doesn’t work or nobody uses it, well, you don’t get to be a billionaire, but it also hasn’t cost you anything. Because, Bloks is free.

When people write business plans they’re typically expected to include some sort of overall goal for their new business. Some people plan on building a company that is attractive enough to be bought by a bigger company. Others are shooting for a specific goal, like acquiring a target number of customers.

Then there’s the kind of ridiculous goal, inspired by companies like Amazon and Apple, that is commonly referred to as “world domination.” Obviously, for most companies starting out that kind of goal is, politely, unrealistic. Actually, it’s delusional.

But when you look at what Harry Fox and Reed Stevens have created here with Bloks, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that this company could become a very serious player in the world of online creation.

The center of the universe is already our phone. And most of our phone use is all about apps. If they can get Bloks out into the world, Harry and Reed might well be in a position to embark on at least some version of world domination.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. Hear about other local tech companies involved with breakthrough advances in both VR and assistive medicine. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 electrical grid is apparently in a constant state of precariousness.

If your observations of our engineering abilities stopped there, you’d be justified in concluding we’re a bunch of inept losers. But, if you look just a little harder, and a little further east, you’re going to get a different impression. A very different impression.

Heading east on the I-10, after you pass the remnants of another piece of failed engineering, the long-abandoned Six Flags theme park, you pass an innocuous looking highway sign that says “NASA Michoud Assembly Facility.” If you took that exit, you’d find yourself at one of the largest manufacturing plants on Earth. There are over 43 acres of manufacturing space under one roof. You’ll find 3,200 people working there. 1,200 of these people are directly involved in building a rocket.

That rocket is called the Space Launch System. It’s a part of a NASA program, called Artemis. When it’s finished, this will be the most powerful rocket ever built. It’s going to take astronauts to Mars. We can’t fix the streets or keep the power on in New Orleans, but we can build a rocket to take astronauts to Mars.

The Director of the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility is Lonnie Dutreix III. 

If you raise your gaze off the potholed streets of New Orleans, you don’t have to look as high as deep space to see some other impressive engineering, and  architectural, achievements. For example, the new Higgins Hotel and Conference Center that’s part of the impressive World War 2 Museum. Or, the Carondelet Street hospitality corridor, including the Ace Hotel. And then there’s the St Vincent Hotel, and the 100,000 square foot co-working space at the CAC.

All of these, and many other notable examples of new and renovated construction in New Orleans, are the projects of a construction company called Palmisano. Palmisano started out in construction in 1950, and it’s been in business continuously since.

Oh, and by the way, when you drive on a smooth section of New Orleans roadway and say “Thank God they fixed this street,” that’s possibly the work of Palmisano’s civil engineering division.

The Market Leader at Palmisano is Nick Moldaner. 

It’s not unusual for people who live in small towns to believe they’re the center of the universe. You don’t have to go very far to find the self-described “Strawberry Capital of the World” - Ponchatoula. Or the even more quaintly delusional, “Rice Capital of the World” – Crowley Louisiana.

In New Orleans, we don’t have a grandiose slogan to market ourselves with. If there’s anything like it, it’s “Laissez le bon temps roulez.” While it’s an attractive part of our DNA not to take ourselves too seriously, it’s also worthwhile celebrating the enormous achievements in business, engineering, and science in New Orleans.

The folks at NASA Michoud in New Orleans East are taking us to another planet. And Palmisano is well into the third generation of building the city itself. It’s worth noting once in a while that we have more to be proud of in New Orleans than our food and music.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can see photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. For more lunchtime business and construction conversation, check out Wes Palmisano's visit to Out to Lunch. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 into our daily lives, we say we “couldn’t live without them.” In reality, though, we could. If Uber, Pandora, or even Amazon disappeared tomorrow, it might take a little adjustment, but our lives, for the most part, would go on just fine.

But, there are advances in technology that have an extraordinary impact on the quality of life for people whose lives do, literally, depend on them. Here in New Orleans, since 2012, an organization called Team Gleason has delivered more than $15m worth of life-changing technology to 20,000 people living with ALS, a neuro-degenerative disorder, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Inspired and guided by Saints football legend and ALS patient Steve Gleason, the technology that Team Gleason is most involved with is a sophisticated interface that allows someone with ALS who no longer has the ability of speech, or other motor functions, to use miniscule motions of their eyes to trigger a device that talks – in the person’s own voice – and performs other commands, like operating a motorized wheelchair, or changing channels on a TV.

As you might imagine, this extraordinary technology is expensive. Team Gleason has been instrumental in every step of its production and implementation. They’ve gotten these high-tech devices funded, designed, and developed. And they’ve spearheaded the political lobbying that has resulted in this assistive equipment being covered by Medicare.

Blair Casey is Team Gleason’s Chief Impact Officer. Among other responsibilities, Blair heads up the division of the organization that finds the people and the money to fund and build this technology.

There’s another kind of real-world tech I want to tell you about. This one takes the Virtual Reality most of us associate with gaming, and turns it into a product with a profound  application. The product is called Stratus. It’s developed and built by a Virtual Reality company here in New Orleans, called Kinemagic.

I’m far from an expert on any of this, but broadly, this kind of Virtual Reality is built by creating what’s called a “Digital Twin” – an exact, detailed digital re-creation of a 3D space, say, the room you’re in right now. If you think about writing computer code that represents every single tiny facet of that space, viewed from every imaginable angle, you can understand why this process takes an enormous amount of computing power, time, and human input.

What Kinemagic’s product, Stratus, does, is create a Virtual Reality digital twin in a matter of minutes. And it’s done by one person. This is revolutionary. Which is why Stratus, which was only unveiled in 2019, is already being used by companies like Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil, and many others.

The creator of Stratus and the CEO and founder of Kinemagic is Brian Lozes. 

Most of us take our business, our career, or our job seriously. But, mostly, we manage to keep things in perspective by reminding ourselves that, at the end of the day it’s just a job. We’re not changing the course of human history.

And then there are people like Blair Casey and Brian Lozes. The work they’re doing is allowing people with neuro-degenerative disease to regain the power of speech. And revolutionizing Virtual Reality. When they’re having a tough day, they don’t have the benefit of shrugging it off by telling themselves what they’re doing isn’t all that consequential, because, simply, it is.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 determination to make it happen. Some of the more notable among these laser-focused legends are the empires of Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton.

Although they haven’t reached the same world-domination-status, yet, these kinds of dream-driven business biographies are also the stories of two local entrepreneurs.

Amina Dearman had a successful career in sales. She was Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at jewelry design company, Mignon Faget. It was a great position and she’d spent a work-life building toward it.

But in 2019 Amina walked away from security and success, to do what she really wanted. She started a company called Perspectives, a boutique travel consultancy. Evidently, it was a good move. A year later, in 2020, Amina was named by prestigious Travel + Leisure magazine as a member of “The A List of the World’s Top Travel Advisors.”

When Beth Nettles had her first child, she quickly discovered that getting a ride with Uber or Lyft wasn’t quite as simple as it used to be. Not because she had a baby and a diaper bag to juggle – well, that too - but mainly because the Uber and Lyft cars didn’t have a baby seat. To solve this problem, Beth did something pretty radical. She started her own rideshare company.

Krewe Car is the only ride-sharing car service that offers car seats for their customers. 

There are a number of other differences between Uber, Lyft, and Krewe Car too. Krewe Car has fixed prices only – there’s no surge pricing. Krewe Car pays its drivers more than Uber and Lyft. Krewe Car has a membership model for customers. But perhaps the biggest difference, in a business sense, is this: in their startup years Uber and Lyft both lost billions of dollars. Krewe Car is already profitable.

Sometimes you have to just go for it. You have to believe in yourself and do what you really want, no matter how crazy it might seem. If at any time you need to be reminded of the benefits that can come from following your dreams or, proverbially, jumping off a cliff, you don’t need to look any further than Amina Dearmon and Beth Nettles. Amina's and Beth's stories are inspirational. But they’re also grounded in smart business practices, and a lot of hard work.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over Lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation with local New Orleanians with world-beating ideas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a free-market economy, the role of government is often debated. On the one hand, business generally prefers to be left alone by government, interpreting the word “free” in free-market as free from regulation. On the other hand, there are any number of business organizations whose principal functions are to extract as many regulatory and tax advantages as possible for their particular industry. 

In response to this lobbying, the Louisiana State government, like any good investor, does its best to diversify. The state has instituted economic development initiatives to attract and grow a wide range of businesses, from film to aerospace.

You might remember a few years ago, starting with the re-development period after Hurricane Katrina, there was a big push to create what was called New Orleans’ Biomedical District. That economic development has, as of today, reportedly created 34,000 new jobs and had an economic impact of some $3.3 billion.

The Biomedical District includes the Veterans Administration Hospital, the University Medical Center, the Louisiana Cancer Research Center, and the New Orleans BioInnovation Center. 

The New Orleans BioInnovation Center provides office space, laboratories, business support, and even financial investment for biotech startups. They have a 66,000 square-foot building on Canal Street that opened in 2011, and cost $47m to build.

This size investment in a “build it and they will come” strategy takes some serious financial and science skill to navigate. Similar state-funded bio innovation initiatives in Baton Rouge and Shreveport failed. To keep the New Orleans enterprise afloat, in 2021 Kris Khalil was named Executive Director of the New Orleans BioInnovation Center.

In one type of best-case scenario, the object of biomedical innovation is to come up with a medical device that becomes an everyday piece of equipment that sells in the millions. For example, the FitBit and Apple Watch have turned the decidedly un-sexy concept of a heart monitor into a fashion item.

In the same way, eyeglasses are technically a medical device. But somehow, Warby Parker and others have turned assisted vision into what is now a fashion accessory. What’s next? Which otherwise pedestrian item that we use for medical-assisted-living could become hip and ubiquitous?

With the growing number of people walking around with ear-buds blasting sound directly into their ears, could the next medical fashion item become the hearing aid? If you’ll excuse the pun, that might not be as crazy as it sounds. Federal legislation called “The Over The Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017” finally went into effect in early 2021.

This legislation allows hearing aids to be sold in stores or online, without any consultation, prescription, or referral. As a result, some trend-spotters are predicting major growth in the hearing aid industry.

Dina Zeevi is President of the Louisiana Society of Hearing Aid Specialists, and a Board Member and Administrative Secretary of the Louisiana Board of Hearing Aid Dealers. She’s also a Hearing Instrument Specialist and the owner of a hearing aid store on the Westbank, called Hear Now.

Out to Lunch is recorded over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. 

And here’s more lunchtime conversation about New Orleans’ health and hearing.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are people who leave high school with their whole lives mapped out in front of them. They have a career plan, and they set about executing it.

Then there’s the rest of us. Today, more than ever, many of us regularly find ourselves embarking on new jobs, and, in some cases, whole new careers.

Take Shane Mutter for example. Shane is a member of the 4th generation of New Orleans family owned business, Doerr Furniture.

Things went much as planned for Shane and Doerr Furniture. Shane went to work in the family business, learned all aspects of it, and took over as President of the company in 2014. Then, in February 2019, things took an unforeseen turn. Shane left Doerr Furniture to go work with his dad and his dad’s best friend in their second careers. As hemp farmers.

That’s the short version of how Shane Mutter gets to be National Sales and Marketing Director of Seed2System. It’s a farm-to-consumer operation that grows hemp, processes it, and sells their own brand of what is being hailed as the wonder drug of the 21st Century, CBD

Barrie Schwartz never intended the dinner parties she threw at her house to lead to one of the most unique careers in catering. But that’s what’s happened.

Barrie started out calling her home-based dinner events, My House Social. Today, My House Social has evolved into My House Events and bridges the gap between large groups who need to be fed, like conventions, and high-end creative chefs.

Normally these two things never come together. Large groups typically get fed by institutional chefs who, because of the demands of feeding a lot of people at the same time, don’t turn out the finest cuisine. But folks who come to New Orleans for an event expect the food to be great. After all, that’s what New Orleans is famous for.

So, what Barrie’s company does, is provide everything creative chefs need to cook for a large group, without these chefs having to make institutional cooking their full-time gig. This is essentially an inspired catering interpretation of the very simplest business  principle: supply and demand.

This edition of Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Commander's Palace. You can find more conversation about CBD and food over lunch here.

Photos by Jill Lafleur.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’re like most people, when you do your taxes once a year you’re genuinely surprised at the numbers staring up at you. You can’t believe how much you spent on various items. Maybe it’s car repair. School supplies. Travel. Eating out. Shoes. Or even groceries. You’re so surprised at how much you spent, compared to how much you earned, that you tell yourself you won’t do that again next year. Then, of course, next year rolls around and you see you’ve repeated the same pattern.

Your Bank Balance

If you’re 12 times more determined than most people to exercise financial control, you go through this exercise once a month, when you look at your bank statement or credit card bill.

Splendor Financial Wellness (which changed its name from Budget Bee Financial Wellness since we recorded this conversation) is a service that sets out to break this pattern of retroactive remorse. Splendor FW turns you into a person who looks forward instead of backward, so, like a business, you know your expenses ahead of time, and you end up making a profit at the end of the month.

The founder and owner of Splendor Financial Wellness is Molly Richard.

Your Kids

If you have small children, you inevitably find yourself buying toys. If you’re trying to exercise some financial discipline and you’re looking at your monthly budget, do you put toys in the “essential” column? Or the “extravagance” column?

The answer to that question is, Not all toys are created equal.

If you go to a big-box store or look online, there are a lot of toys of dubious quality, and with little or no educational or enriching value. That’s the reason Melissa Beese founded her company, Little Pnuts. 

Melissa started Little Pnuts as a toy subscription service. You sign up and Melissa sends you a monthly box of toys curated from around the world that are high quality and, depending on the child’s age, enhance developmental progress in areas like motor skills, focus, and concentration.

Melissa also makes a special Travel Box for 3 - 6 year olds that fits on a plane’s tray table. Little Pnuts also has a physical storefront, on Harrison Avenue in Lakeview and they've expanded to also include their "Party Boutique" division.

There’s an old saying about the two things that are inevitable in life: death and taxes. But they might equally be debt and childhood. Molly and Melissa are both working in fields where there are huge markets, and seemingly unlimited opportunity. And they're both growing businesses that have sprung out of their own experiences and your own passions.

This edition of Out to Lunch was recorded over lunch at Commander's Palace. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And if you're looking for more lunchtable conversation about how your kids and your budget can make the world a better place, check out this conversation about Miles for Migrants and the Youth empowerment Project.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In business, every decision you make is a risk. Some risks are small. Others have more serious consequences.

For example, before you spent millions of dollars designing and building a new car, it would be good to know if it’s the size and shape of car that people want or need.  Before you open a neighborhood po-boy shop, it would be good to know if people in that neighborhood eat poboys.

The best hedge against risk would be a time machine. You could go into the future and see how things turned out if you did “a” instead of “b.” Until that technology exists, we rely on other methods of prediction. These methods have various incarnations and names, from random sampling to A.I.

One of the country’s leading software companies specializing in this kind of predictive information- gathering is called Lucid. Lucid is right here in New Orleans. Lucid is also in New Delhi, London, New York City, Sydney Australia, Dallas, Singapore, and Sao Paulo Brazil. They have 330 employees. 150 of them are here in New Orleans. Including the Chief Revenue Officer of Lucid, Andy Ellis.

Even a software company that deals in information and knowledge, needs an office space and office equipment. And even when we talk about something that sounds as ephemeral as “the cloud,” what we’re actually talking about are pieces of machinery in physical spaces.

All of these physical work spaces need human beings to design, build, and maintain them. Some organizations do this themselves. Others out-source this to specialists. 

The world’s leading provider of physical resource management solutions is a company called Accruent. Accruent has over 10,000 customers in over 150 countries. As you might imagine they’re involved in every kind of business, including healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and even education.

In June 2018, Accruent opened an office in New Orleans. The Director of Accruent New Orleans is Johnny Culpepper.

Back in the early 2000’s, when the entrepreneurial tech boom started in New Orleans, we started making Out to Lunch, as a podcast. At that time, people would frequently ask us what we’re going to do after the first six shows. After we’d presumably talked to everybody with an interesting business.

Then, after the first year or so, they’d ask what we were going to do when the tech boom was over, and these entrepreneurial people moved on to other cities. The growth and success of Lucid is the best answer to any questions of doubt about the strength and future of New Orleans business. And the arrival of Accruent is a testament to the ongoing faith people in American business have in our city and the people here.

This edition of Out to Lunch was recorded over lunch at Commander's Palace. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And take the time machine back to 2014 to hear Lucid CEO Patrick Comer on Out to Lunch.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the 1960’s, the hippie movement grew up as a rebellion against the intertwining of politics and capitalism, which it called “The Establishment.” The pot-smoking hippies accused The Establishment of putting the pursuit of profit above everything, to the detriment of every aspect of our society, from the environment to our access to recorded music.

Flash forward to today. It turns out the pot-smoking hippies were right about a lot of stuff. As pot is becoming increasingly legalized across the country, today’s generation of socially conscious activists can be found inside the business establishment. They’re a part of a movement called Conscious Capitalism.

Conscious Capitalism says we can make and sell products for a profit, but do it in a way that is consciously aware of who makes the product, what’s in the product, and how the product is marketed and sold. Locally, a great example of conscious capitalism was Naked Pizza. It was an attempt to curb the country’s obesity epidemic by making one of its contributors into a healthy option.

Naked Pizza was born in New Orleans. Its co-founder was Robbie Vitrano. Robbie’s contributions to New Orleans entrepreneurship are numerous and legendary. And now he’s back with not one but two socially conscious products: Good Spread - a peanut butter; and Uncanny Wellness - a company that is finding unique ways of delivering the legal derivative of cannabis, CBD.

Dr Bill Accousti is an orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans. He’s an Associate professor of Orthopedic Surgery at LSU Health Sciences Center. And Dr Bill is the creator of Dr. Bill’s Syrup.

Dr Bills Syrup is a unique blend of maple syrup and cane syrup. You can find Dr Bill’s Syrup at a number of places, including some Rouse’s supermarkets and well-known New Orleans restaurants. Because Dr Bill is a proponent of bone health, and aware of the vitamin deficiency that erodes it, each serving of Dr Bill’s Syrup has a full day’s supply of Vitamin D.

One of the most cliched pieces of advice in marketing is, “Build a better mousetrap.” In other words, take a pedestrian product that everybody needs and make some change to it that will make it more attractive than the currently available options. You might not think there's much you could do to improve peanut butter, cane syrup, or maple syrup. And you probably didn’t think about taking your favorite drink and adding CBD to it. This conversation might not change your life, but it could sure change your breakfast.

This episode of Out to Lunch was recorded in the wine room at Commander's Palace. Out to Lunch You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And meet another two fascinating New Orleanians around the lunch table, wind-power engineer Hiram Mechling and designer Caroline Landry Farouki.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Orleans has given the world all kinds of music. We refer to ourselves as the birthplace of jazz. We’re one of the principal breeding grounds of funk, bounce, and brass band music. And then there’s a style of piano playing that’s so identifiably from here it’s simply called, “New Orleans piano.”

Generations of legendary New Orleans piano players became identified with the places they played. Fats Domino at the Dew Drop Inn. Professor Longhair at Tipitina’s. James Booker at The Maple Leaf. Today you can hear masters of New Orleans piano like Jon Cleary, Tom McDermott, Joe Krown, and others at clubs around town, like Chickie Wah Wah, The Bon Temps, and Buffa’s.

Or, you can hear them at your place. 

You can have an A-list New Orleans piano player show up at your place - with a grand piano - and play your birthday party, wedding, or just a random Friday night,  thanks to Jacques Ferland’s business,  Piano On A Truck.

Piano On A Truck is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a grand piano on the back of a yellow, 1972 International pick-up truck.And it comes with, or without,  a piano player.

In our seemingly never-ending attempt to place order on a chaotic world, we like to categorize things into twos - either/or. Tall or short. Black or white. On the rocks or straight up. Today, for a lot of white-collar occupations, the either/or distinction is either working in the office or working from home.

Well, like so many things in life, it turns out there’s a 3rd way.

Billy Schell describes himself as CEO, owner and van driver of an apparel company called NOLA Shirts. NOLA Shirts designs and manufactures New Orleans themed Polo shirts, T-shirts, and hats, and sells them online or at various brick-and-mortar stores around New Orleans.

The “van driver” in Billy’s job description is a reference to the company’s headquarters which are also Billy’s living quarters – a Mercedes Sprinter van that’s been his principal home and office since 2021.

Around 5,525 years ago - it was probably a Thursday - in ancient Mesopotamia, the wheel was invented. To say it was a revolutionary invention is not just a bad pun, it’s also the understatement of several millennia. And just when you think every possible use of the wheel has already been thought of, along comes the 21st Century - and hashtag-van-life and Piano On A Truck, two New Orleans entrepreneurs discovering yet more places the revolutions of a wheel can take us.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Technology has changed a lot of occupations. And derailed some careers. Perhaps none more than the career of the professional photographer. What used to be a profession that demanded technical skill and artistic talent, and required specialized equipment – cameras, lenses, and lights – is now something that every single person can do, with a phone.

Pics

Even when there is still a call for a professional photographer, the very product that the photographer makes has changed. A photographer used to produce a photograph. This was a paper product. Sometimes in a frame. Today, a photograph is most commonly a digital file. It’s gone from being a physical thing you could hold in your hand, to what’s called Intellectual Property.

Local New Orleans photographer Cheryl Gerber has navigated all of these changes. Cheryl started taking photos professionally in 1991, and she’s still snapping images of New Orleanians. You’ve seen Cheryl’s work in New Orleans Magazine, Gambit, and many other outlets, as well as in 6 books. 

Copyright, patents

Photographs are like music, books, and movies. They all used to be manufactured objects that came in various forms of hardware. Most recently, music was on CDs, movies were on DVDs, and books were on of paper. If you wanted to listen to music, watch a movie, or read a book, you had to buy them.

Now, all these items are intellectual property. They’re digital files that live somewhere in the ether. You can get a hold of them on a device that fits easily into the palm of your hand. And, mostly, you don’t have to pay much for them. You can even flat out steal some of them.

That, of course, is not legal.

There is a lot of law that governs intellectual property. Beyond music, books, and photographs, intellectual property encompasses every piece of software that drives every device – from an operating system to a food delivery app – and every single idea and patent that drives practically everything in our lives.

The law firm Jones Walker is a major sponsor of Out to Lunch. So, we thought we’d take advantage of that relationship and invite Michael Leachman to have lunch with us. Michael is a partner at Jones Walker. He’s a specialist intellectual property attorney.

Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, all of us are brushing up against intellectual property multiple times a day. Every time you’re on Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or even listening to the radio, you’re consuming intellectual property that you may – or may not – be paying for.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Commander's Palace. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And meet New Orleans photographer Frank Relle along with Monica Davidson, creator of Crawfish Monica.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are twin economic and technological shifts taking place in the United States that are changing the geographical demographics of the workforce. That’s a fancy way of saying, folks are on the move and things are changing.

The economic element of this change is the increasingly prohibitive cost of living in cities that have been essential to move to if you’ve had ambitions about building a serious career. Mainly, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

The technological element of the change is the internet. It turns out that with high-quality video communication, many of the kinds of jobs you could only get if you lived in an expensive city can now be done from anywhere. 

There’s no need to pay exorbitant rents in Silicon Valley, spend hours commuting in Los Angeles, or pay extraordinary sums for your kids’ education in New York, when you can live in a spacious house in Mid City New Orleans, send your kids to Ben Franklin, and go hear music at The Maple Leaf on the weekend.

Consequently, New Orleans, and other small cities around the country, are becoming home to a new population of fascinating, smart, creative, and interesting people. Not that those of us who are already here aren’t fascinating, smart, creative, and interesting ourselves, but it’s definitely to our benefit that we’re now able to count as neighbors people like Peter Ricchiuti's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch.

Wind

Hiram Mechling is one of the country’s most highly regarded engineers in the field of wind power. Hiram is Vice President of a company called Wood Thilsted USA which specializes in green energy production - including wind power - and has offices and projects around the world, in Denmark, Japan, Taiwan and the UK.

Here in the US, we are trailing way behind other nations in the development of wind power. Although it’s well accepted worldwide that wind-generated power is a key component in moving away from fossil fuels, the Biden administration has only just started focusing on the development of major off-shore wind farms with the approval of the country’s first utility-scale off-shore wind energy project.

It’s called The Vineyard Wind Project and it’s located on the outer continental shelf, south of Massachusetts. The Senior Project Manager & Professional Engineer of Record on the Vineyard Wind Project, is Hiram Mechling.

Design                                               

Caroline Landry Farouki is a partner in an architecture and interior design company called Farouki Farouki. The two Faroukis are Caroline and her husband, Sabri.

The Faroukis were living in New York City when they decided if they were ever going to have a decent quality of life for themselves and their son, they’d have to make a change. That decision resulted in relocating to New Orleans.

So now New Orleans is home to the Farouki family, and Farouki and Farouki with its nationwide clientele and international design and architecture projects.

New Orleans 

We all agree that New Orleans is a great place live. We’d also have to agree that running a business here comes with challenges. But when it comes to work/life balance, the advantages of living here undoubtedly outweigh the difficulties.

And as financial and technological opportunities make it more attractive for talented people and successful companies to locate here - and less necessary for talented locals to leave - we’re only going to see our business-base expand.

It might be a bit premature to call this a renaissance but it wouldn’t be totally out of line to call Caroline Farouki and Hiram Mechling indicators of change.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And you can meet other interesting business innovators over lunch in this conversation about recycling glass and Louisiana's French language. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic created a lockdown that closed almost every business in America, the Federal Government wrote checks to individuals and businesses in the amount of two trillion dollars.

Here, on Out to Lunch, we tried to make sense of what was going on with this economic stimulus by talking to a member of the Federal Reserve – the central bank that gave the two trillion dollars to the government. In that conversation, Federal Bank Vice President Adrienne Slack explained to us that there’s not actually a room with two trillion dollars in it. And that, in fact, the money was basically a digital file that the central bank sent to the government.

Now, imagine that digital file is not centralized on one computer in one place in Washington DC. It’s spread out over thousands of computers around the world. And imagine that it’s not the property of the Federal Government, but that it’s available in some way so that it can be accessed – or “mined” - and then traded, by individuals. This decentralized series of digital ledgers is called Blockchain. And, very broadly, this is the concept behind crypto currency.

The most popular crypto currency is Bitcoin. There are another estimated 5,000 crypto currencies in existence. Many of them are currently worthless, but others, like Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Polka Dot are being taken increasingly more seriously as currency that’s used in regular commerce.

This gradual shift that is seeing crypto currency creep its way out of the shadows and into everyday use means that if you have a business, you now have to think about what happens when someone wants to pay you in crypto currency.

How does that even work? And if you do accept crypto currency, what happens then? Can you pay the rent, the light bill and other vendors with it? The answer to those questions is now yes, thanks to a New Orleans based software company called Gilded.

Gilded is designed to integrate digital currencies into a company’s existing accounting processes. They call themselves “your blockchain back-office solution.”

The CEO of Gilded is Gil Hildebrand.

According to Coinbase – which is the most popular online place to buy Bitcoin and some other crypto currencies – about 11% of Americans own some amount of  Bitcoin. If you’re one of the 89% of people who doesn’t own any Bitcoin, you might be wondering how you can get into the Bitcoin market.

If you’re not a wonky finance person, a day trader, or someone who gets to spend an inordinate amount of time online researching cryptocurrency, there’s now a way for you to get into the crypto world too.

In Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, you can find kiosks that look like ATM machines where you can buy and sell Bitcoin. These crypto ATM machines are the product of a company called Pelicoin.

Pelicoin was founded in 2016 by brothers Brown and Will Haynie, and Will is the company’s CEO.

You might have heard the saying, “There are two types of people in the world – those who believe there are two types of people in the world, and everybody else.” There are definitely two types of people in the world when it comes to crypto currency – those who think it’s a passing fad, and those who think it’s the future of commerce.

Only one of these predictions is going to be right. From what we learn in this conversation, if it’s all a fad and it’s all going to fade away, it’s apparently not going to be any time soon.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you hear the term “screen time” these days, it’s usually associated with something judgmental and negative. People generally talk about “Screen time” as a measure of how long you can stare at your computer or your phone, before something bad happens to your brain.

Your phone has even started giving you unsolicited weekly reports about your screen time, with a percentage of whether it’s up or down compared to last week.

But there was a time, in the past, when the screen wasn’t considered a potential mental health hazard. It was a place of magic. A linear portal into other worlds - realms of fantasy, adventure, drama, and epic wondrousness. I’m talking about movie screens. The movie theater was a cherished childhood place for many people, including Brian Knighten.

Growing up in New Orleans, Brian dreamed of owning his own movie theater. In 2014, after a career in construction and real estate development, Brian’s dream came true. He bought what had been a warehouse, then a boxing gym, on Broad Street, and turned it into The Broad Theater. Today Brian is the owner of both the Broad Theater and the event space Broadside.

Meanwhile back at your computer or phone screen, if you’ve got your phone set up so that it vibrates when you tap a letter on your keyboard, that feeling of a vibration in response to your touch is called “Haptics.”

If you’re a video gamer, and you have a shooting game, when you pull the trigger, the feel of the controller in your hand recoiling is a big part of your interaction with the game. The controller’s communication with the screen that causes a real-life recoiling feeling, is also haptics.

As you can probably appreciate, devising and building haptic devices is not simple. And it’s especially complex when there’s a demand for a total immersive experience, in virtual reality. That can be in a game, or more seriously in a VR training simulation for the military.

Two tech companies here in New Orleans are both significant players in the worldwide development of haptic and VR devices. The companies are Haptech Inc and Striker VR. Both companies operate in the field of haptics. They’re the holders of 13 patents and five design patents. And, if you’re thinking “That sounds a like a pretty big deal,” you’re right - both these companies are seriously big deals.

The Vice President, Chief Business Officer and co-founder of Haptech Inc and Striker VR is Martin Holly.

Brian Knighten and Martin Holly are both working in worlds that make dreams come true for other people, for an hour or two at a time. But they’re also building companies that are making their own creative and business dreams come true, and that are making big and lasting changes.

Brian 's contribution is to the entertainment and culture of New Orleans, and Martin's contribution is to the worldwide development of a technology that still seems to be in its infancy, but that could well find its feet here in New Orleans. As outlandish as it might seem, because Silicon Valley has yet to find a way to sell VR to the mass market, it's possible that because of the influence of Haptech and Striker VR, New Orleans might be the Silicon Valley of VR. Watch this space!

Out to Lunch was recorded over lunch at NOLA Pizza. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If I told you that on this edition of Out to Lunch we’re talking about two types of alcohol – one that you can make at home, and one that’s made by professionals, and that one of them is wine and the other is beer - you’d naturally assume we’re talking about a winery on the one hand, and home-brew beer on the other.

Well, you’re 180 degrees off. We’re talking about New Orleans first craft beer brewery. And home-made wine. Yes, home-made wine.

Wine, Cider

If you didn’t know there was such a thing as home-made wine, well, apparently there is, and -here’s a shocker - most of it reportedly tastes pretty bad. That’s why Liam Meier and Neal Shulman spent a good deal of 2020 – which you might recall was the year bars were closed – holed up at home perfecting their DIY wine product, Brewsy. 

Brewsy is a wine and cider-making kit that the company says, “takes 15 minutes to start and 5 days to finish.” A single Brewsy kit will run you $45. You choose which juice to add. And you make 12-18 bottles of wine. That comes to about $2.12 a bottle.

If you’re thinking this is a crazy idea that’s never going to take off, Brewsy already has 5 full time employees - and they’ve sold over 20,000 kits.

Beer, Pizza

This episode of Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza. It’s the pizza restaurant in the taproom at New Orleans longest running craft brewery, NOLA Brewing.

Given our long history and love of alcohol in this city, you might expect that NOLA Brewing was founded in 1808. Actually, it was founded in 2008. Although in the past, New Orleans has been home to breweries like Jax, Falstaff, Regal and Dixie, by the time Hurricane Katrina blew through here in 2005, there was no beer at all being brewed in New Orleans.

Then, in 2008, a retired US Navy Surface Warfare Officer by the name of Kirk Coco built and opened NOLA Brewing. In the beginning, Kirk Coco’s landlord was Doug Walner. Doug was also an investor in NOLA Brewing.

Ten years later, in 2018, Kirk moved on to other interests. Doug Walner became the major shareholder in NOLA Brewing, and built a pizzeria, NOLA Pizza, into the business. Today NOLA Brewing produces around 10,000 barrels of beer a year, which puts it in the top 20% of breweries nationwide. And NOLA Pizza is winning food critic awards for best tasting pizza in the city.

You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And go back to 2015 with this very candid conversation with NOLA Brewing founder Kirk Coco.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the second in our series of shows in which we take a local look at a nationwide problem – the relationship between home ownership and the widening wealth gap.

What exactly is the relationship between the wealth gap and home ownership?  Well, it’s pretty simple. The way most of us in the United States accrue wealth is the appreciation of the value of our home.

Why this leads to a wealth gap is easily demonstrated here in New Orleans: over 50% of New Orleanians rent. Not because they’ve made some maverick financial decision about home ownership, but simply because they can’t afford to buy a house.

Because more people with more wealth spend more money - and therefore fuel the economy - most economists agree that widespread wealth is economically better for everybody - even the already-wealthy. 

So, given that the best way to widespread wealth is widespread home ownership, how do we make homes affordable for the 50% of New Orleanians who are priced out of the market? Getting someone who can’t afford to buy a house to become a homeowner might sound like an impossibility - but that’s exactly what both of Peter's guests are doing on this edition of Out to Lunch.

Will Bradshaw is Chairman and co-founder of the property development company, Green Coast Enterprises. As a property developer, Will is familiar with the various tax incentives and financial products people in big-business-real-estate use to finance and build houses. Today, Will is using his expertise to put those same tax incentives and financial products to work for low-income would-be home owners.

He’s doing this through a project he’s created,  called the Reimagine Fund. Basically, it works by forming groups of people who pool their money. The Reimagine Fund uses that money to leverage tax advantages normally only available to wealthier property developers, and through these complex maneuvers is able to finance people into properties they would otherwise never be able to afford. It’s a fascinating, unique hybrid of property development and social activism. 

There’s another way of making home ownership affordable: Make the price of new-construction homes cheaper. That sounds impossible, right? The price of a new house is determined by the unavoidably high cost of building it. But, what if you could find a revolutionary way to build new houses that is substantially cheaper than anything that’s ever been done before? 

That’s what a local New Orleans company is doing. The company is called Shibusa Systems, and its CEO and co-founder is Katy Reynolds.

The word “systems” in the company name refers to the method of building houses they're pioneering. Shibusa Systems homes don’t require contractors to build them.

Shibusa Systems homes don’t require contractors to build them. Let that sink in - your brand new Shibusa Systems house is not built by a long line of sub-contractors who are each expensive and require the kind of hand-holding and choreography that would make Alvin Ailey throw up his hands in despair, as many home-building contractors and home-owners frequently do. The components of a Shibusa Systems house are pre-cut, packaged, and delivered to the site of a new home where they are easily assembled by Shibusa's single team of in-house construction crew who, get this, show up every day. It’s kind of like getting a house from Ikea, delivered. And that’s not all. There’s a long list of innovative cost-cutting elements to the Shibusa home building system.

The uneven distribution of wealth in our country, and in our city, is a gap all of us would like to see narrowed. Nobody wants wealthy people to become less wealthy. But we all agree that it would be a good thing if less-wealthy people had more access to resources.

The most fundamental way more of us can have greater wealth, and hand it on to the next generation, is through widespread home ownership. It’s fairly well accepted that we can be a nation of homeowners without upending the economy or unleashing an economic revolution. We just need to stop talking about the widening wealth gap and instead find ways to start closing it.

It can be done. It’s not easy. It requires vision for a community, dedication to an economic and financial plan, and hard work. There are people actively working on this. Katy Reynolds and Will Bradshaw are pioneers in this field who are both in a position to have a massive future impact on this issue, nationwide.

This show was recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in New Orleans. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website.

And here's more lunchtime conversation about broadening home ownership and closing the wealth gap.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

According to the US Census Bureau, 80% of Americans live in urban environments. One of the interesting aspects of that statistic is that the food we all need to survive is grown mostly in rural America. In other words, 80% of us are dependent on 20% of the population for survival.

Given that our very survival depends on it, you’d think we’d make the infrastructure of rural America a priority. But we don’t. Government and private companies alike create infrastructure that is designed around how we live in cities.

Power

Take cell service and internet service for example. Cell towers - the towers that deliver service – need power to run them. When that power goes down, backup batteries run the network till service can be restored.

If you live in a city, there’s a repair person close enough to get the cell tower back up and running quickly. If you live in a rural area, service can be out for a couple of weeks till someone gets there to fix it.

So having backup batteries that are charged and functioning is vital. The problem is, checking on how those batteries are charging, and whether they’re functioning properly is something that has to be done by a technician.

That is already a chronic problem in rural America. And it’s now becoming a growing city problem as well. That’s because baby-boomers are reaching retirement age, leaving us with an extreme shortage of qualified technicians.

That’s where Chris Mangum comes to the rescue. Chris has developed a method that allows the kinds of batteries that power cell towers to be monitored remotely. This monitoring doubles the life of batteries, and it totally solves the problem of the declining population of technicians.

Chris’s company, Servato, is spearheading a quiet revolution. It has spread across 27 States and it’s headquartered here in new Orleans.

Chocolate

The structure of the global economy is not unlike the divide between the urban and rural economies in the US. 

Globally, the bulk of populations who live in wealthy, developed nations rely on the populations in poorer and developing nations to provide all kinds of products. Some of these products are inarguably essential – like the components of cell phones - and some are arguably essential – like coffee and chocolate.

In 2013, Carol Morse traveled from New Orleans to visit her husband who was working in Guatemala. While she was there, Carol met local cacao growers and chocolate makers. When she came back to New Orleans, Carol started importing cacao, and taught herself how to make chocolate. When she got good enough at it, she founded a company, and called it Acalli Chocolate.

Acalli is an Aztec word that means canoe. The Aztecs invented chocolate, and it was the canoe that transported the cacao beans great distances, just as Carol is doing today. Acalli Chocolate is made in Gretna - currently from cacao beans from Peru and Mexico - and it’s sold across the country.

This edition of Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Commander's Palace in New Orleans. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And check out more lunchtime conversation about food and science with pioneering medical researcher Dr. Trivia Frazier and vegan entrepreneur Claire Steiner.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’ve heard anybody talking about the New Orleans economy recently you will have heard about a segment of it that’s come to be called, “the cultural economy.”

The bars, clubs, restaurants and festivals that make up the cultural economy are the main reason millions of tourists and conventioneers come to New Orleans. And, as we discovered during the Covid pandemic when visitors stopped coming, our cultural economy is now the financial lifeblood of the city.

One of the strongest elements of the New Orleans cultural economy is music.

Although it might normally go without saying that music is played by musicians, it’s important to make that point, because in the case of the New Orleans cultural economy we have two very different types of music. And two very different types of musicians.

They’re so different, in fact, that New Orleans musicians operate in what is essentially two parallel universes.

Almost all of our tourist music revenue is generated on Bourbon Street, Frenchmen Street, and at private gigs for conventions. But New Orleanians almost never go to Bourbon Street to hear music. As Frenchmen Street has become more like Bourbon Street, we’re increasingly less likely to go there either. And you can live your whole life here and never go to an event at the Convention Center.

The live music New Orleanians listen to is almost totally unrelated to the tourist-driven cultural economy. The local live music industry happens mostly in clubs and bars outside of the French Quarter, and it’s mostly funded by our local economy. In other words, local non-Bourbon Street musicians keep the lights on at home as a result of whatever you and I pay when we go out to hear music.

Peter's guests on Out to Lunch today are both members of that locally-supported music economy.

Andrew Duhon is a New Orleans singer songwriter. His album, The Moorings, was nominated for a Grammy. He’s been praised in the rock press, including by critics at Rolling Stone, he tours widely across the country and in Europe, and locally you can catch Andrew live in a number of settings, from the intimate confines of Chickie Wah Wah to the big stage at Jazz Fest.

In certain circles, both in New Orleans and around the world, Musa Alves is a celebrity and a taste-maker. Musa is a DJ. For many years she was based in New York and has DJ-ed in clubs, at concerts, and at music festivals around the world in too many countries to list here, including Russia, Spain, Egypt, Greece, Singapore, and many more.

Musa got her start here in New Orleans as a teenager, promoting dance parties in the French Quarter, where she grew up with her mother who for nearly 50 years has been a piano player at Pat O’Brien’s.

The music industry is a vital part of the Louisiana and New Orleans economy. But, unlike other vital sectors of the economy, there’s very little in the way of formal state or city financial support for musicians. Or for any aspect of the music business.

Although there are various music-lobbying groups who show up at the Louisiana legislature, there is no recognizable industry-wide organization that represents the music industry in a powerful enough way to get the kind of incentives and tax breaks given to oil and gas, or even the film business. For that reason, musicians, and other members of the music business, are pretty much on their own here in Louisiana. 

As New Orleanians we depend on music and musicians not just for the city’s finances but also for a measure of our own happiness. And so it’s incumbent upon us to understand and to care about the creators of our vital cultural economy.  

This show was recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. There's more  recent lunch table conversation about other New Orleans cultural contributors, authors, here.

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New Orleans is a city built on tradition that is indestructible. We’ve proven this in our own lifetime. In 2005, New Orleans was as close to being totally destroyed as is possible.

After the flood waters receded, there were all kinds of plans for how we could re-imagine and rebuild the city. After we vigorously debated the possibilities of green spaces, canals, and many other options, we decided that the best thing we could do was build the city back exactly how it was.

Two of the pillars of these indestructible New Orleans traditions are our historic architecture, and Mardi Gras.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is more than the Tuesday before Lent. Like the tip of the iceberg, there’s a big part of Mardi Gras that most of us don’t get to see – the year-round activities of Mardi Gras Krewes. The center-piece of this activity is each Krewe’s Mardi Gras ball.

If you’re a woman, what you wear to the Mardi Gras ball is as important as your wedding dress. And it takes just as much time and planning to design and make it, especially for you. Today, the premiere designer and dressmaker of Mardi Gras ball gowns is Suzanne Peron St Paul.

If you drive, walk, or bike around the Garden District, the French Quarter, or Uptown New Orleans, you can’t help but admire the architectural beauty of the city’s grand homes.

Here’s another thing you’ll notice: if there’s a “For Sale” sign outside any of these substantial structures, there’s a fair chance it has the name Eleanor Farnsworth on it.

Your casual observation can be backed up by statistical fact. Eleanor has sold the most expensive house in New Orleans history and she's the holder of a host of other prestigious real estate records, including a Lifetime Membership of the Million Dollar Club. Eleanor Farnsworth is a living legend. 

In every grand institution – even one as magical as Mardi Gras or as majestic as the Garden District - there is a place where creativity meets business. At that juncture, you find a human being – a person who is responsible for making the magic happen.  Suzanne Peron St Paul and Eleanor Farnsworth are both great examples of the magician behind the curtain, the person who works in the background to allow beauty and pageantry to take center stage.

This show was recorded live over lunch at Commander's Palace. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's lunchtime conversation about the strangest Mardi Gras in New Orleans history.

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New Orleans is often referred to as a “Destination City.” In the world of tourism that’s shorthand for “A place people come to, to enjoy our architecture, food, music, and liberal attitude toward alcohol consumption.”

People who organize activities that depend on attracting large crowds – like conventions – capitalize on our reputation as a Destination City. These folks figure if they hold their meeting in New Orleans it will be an incentive for people to show up.

The Superbowl

The same is true of sporting events. We’re hosting the Superbowl again in 2025. That will make a total of 11 times New Orleans has hosted the Superbowl, the most of any city in the country, equaled only by Miami.

But the Superbowl, the NCAA Final Four, and other what-are-called “Tier 1 sporting events” don’t decide to come to New Orleans just because fans can walk down Bourbon Street with a Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane and do karaoke at The Cat’s Meow.

Well, okay, that’s part of the reason. But the greater parts of these decisions are made in boardrooms for considerations that are complex and financial. The New Orleans representatives in these business meetings are members of an organization called The Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation.

Since its inception in 1988, The Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation has been responsible for creating $3.4 Billion worth of economic impact for the city of New Orleans and State of Louisiana.

For most of that time, Jay Cicero has been a part of the Foundation. And since 1997 he’s been its President and CEO.

Mini-Golf

If you live in New Orleans, your own sports activities are a lot more frequent than the Superbowl. They’re also a lot less flamboyant and flashy - though they can still frequently be accompanied by an alcoholic beverage.

Take for example putt-putt. Or mini-golf as it is also known. We have two 18-hole mini-golf courses in New Orleans. They’re both in City Park. In an area called City Putt.

City Putt is the most recent attraction to be built in City Park. It opened in 2013 at a cost of $2.7m. And, because of wear-and-tear brought about by putt-putt’s enormous popularity, the courses were totally refurbished in 2017.

Today, New Orleanians play over 80,000 rounds of mini-golf a year at City Putt. To put that number in context, it’s double the number of rounds played at courses in other cities of comparable size.

The guiding light of the New Orleans mini golf industry is the Director of Recreational Services at New Orleans City Park, Waymon Morris.

This show was recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza. See photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. 

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If you’re not a musician, you might occasionally think how great it would be to be a musician. If you are a musician, you might occasionally think how great it must have been to be in The Beatles.

New Orleanian Bruce Spizer is not a musician. He’s a lawyer and an accountant. But, not only has he occasionally thought how great it must have been to be in The Beatles, he’s written 16 books about them.

Bruce is a world-renowned Beatles expert. He’s been a guest on practically every major American TV news show. He’s made countless TV appearances around the world. He’s a Beatles consultant for Universal Music Group, Capital Records, and Apple Corps – the Beatles’ own label – and he wrote the questions and answers for The Beatles edition of Trivial Pursuit.

In case you’re wondering why any of this would make Bruce Spizer a guest on a business show, his book sales alone have earned over $3m. One of his books is selling on Amazon for over $4,000, and there are more books in the works.

If you live in New Orleans and you like festivals and live music – and if you don’t, you’re probably planning on leaving – you’ll be familiar with the work of Stephen St. Cyr.

If you’re trying to place his name and wondering what band he’s in, or whether he’s maybe a celebrity chef, nope, it’s none of that. Stephen is President of a company called Vivid Ink.

Vivid Ink makes visual artwork for festivals and events – like stage banners, sponsor signage, practically everything that’s not food or music, at events like Jazz Fest, Sugar Bowl, Hogs For The Cause, Tales of the Cocktail and a long list of others.

There are two branches of Stephen’s company – a Baton Rouge office that works with corporate clients, and the more fun New Orleans division - a big building on Poydras Street where a staff of 29 creates all the live event stuff.

It’s kind of nice at this point in their respective careers to talk with Stephen and Bruce about the extraordinary successes they’ve both accomplished. But none of this success was handed to either of them. Their own creativity and hard work has made all of this happen. And it doesn’t look either of them are taking their foot off the gas any time soon. Their future achievments may turn out to be as notable as their histories.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

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In every field of human endeavor, there are people who change the game. You know some of their names – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. But there are many others who change the world and don’t become celebrities. 

For example, can you name the person who invented the electric guitar? Or the person who invented traffic lights? You probably can’t, even though both of those innovations have had more impact on the world than anything Elon Musk has created so far.

Here in New Orleans, you are almost certainly going to discover in time that Dr Trivia Frazier falls into this same category of game-changers. In the nexus of science and business, Dr Frazier is known as “The fat-on-a-chip lady.” She’s called that because Dr. Frazer has made a scientific breakthrough that is changing the way medical research is conducted. 

Fat

Basically, Dr Frazier’s company, Obatala Sciences, is pioneering a technology that grows human fat outside of a human body. This allows new drugs and medications to be tested on human tissue without wasting billions of dollars testing them on mice, only to find out later that the drugs don’t work the same way on humans.

This fat-on-a-chip technology also allows researchers to create human tissue of different types, so that drugs and medications can be tested on a wide demographic of humans from the very outset of research.

It’s hard to over-state what a monumentally big deal this is - both in science and in the business of research and development of medications.

Vegan

On the other hand, Claire Steiner is not a fan of animal fat. Or milk. Or eggs. Or cheese. Or most non-plant-based foods.

Claire is the founder and owner of a business called Clairly Vegan, a vegan meal-prep service that makes home-cooked vegan meals for delivery or pick up. Claire started the company in the middle of 2020 – which you might remember was the era of the pandemic lockdown.

Today the company has a staff of 6 – three chefs and three delivery drivers.

Game Changers

We know that every living being on Earth makes some sort of contribution to our shared existence on this planet. If we had the technology to record it, a true and complete record of life on Earth would include every single action each one of us takes. But we don’t have a way to even process that kind of data collection. And so, to make sense of our world, we write our history based on broad-stroke, big picture descriptions.

Some of these are major headlines that, in the fullness of time, turn out to have been fleeting and insignificant. And then there are the quiet achievements that don’t make headlines at all -- victories and triumphs that go unheralded, but which turn out to be life-changing for the people they touch.

Trivia Frazier and Claire Steiner are modestly and without any desire for special recognition, making a huge difference in the lives of many people. Trivia's contribution to human health is on a potentially worldwide scale. Claire's contribution is to the health and wellness of one person at a time.

This conversation was recorded over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the Nola Brewing Taproom. You can find photos at our website. Check out more recent conversation about New Orleans vegan options here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are simple facts about the economy that we all know. One of them is, the way most people in the United States accrue wealth is through the appreciation of the value of their home.

The fatal flaw with this foundational economic principle is easily demonstrated here in New Orleans: over 50% of New Orleanians rent. Not because they’ve made some maverick financial decision about home ownership, but simply because they can’t afford to buy a house.

The other economic principle that we all know is this: there’s a growing wealth gap in the country. And in our city.

The reason we know these simple facts about the economy is because we hear these types of conversations, often. What we don’t hear very much of, are solutions to the problems of housing and wealth inequality. But there are people working on these issues. People who are making a difference in closing the wealth gap in the US, and here in New Orleans.

Nicole Barnes is Executive Director of the Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative. Jericho Road works to provide affordable housing, in two ways. They develop and build affordable houses. And, they work with people who would normally be unable to afford to buy a house. They put together loans and financing that can get a person into their own home for a down-payment of $1,500. Yes,  $1,500.

Jericho Road is making a fairly significant impression on local housing. In under 20 years they’ve invested almost $40m in the local real estate market. They’ve re-habbed over 270 houses,  built and sold over 100 houses, and co-developed over 260 rental units.

William Stoudt is Executive Director of Rebuilding Together New Orleans.

You might think that we invented the concept of “rebuilding” here in New Orleans  after Hurricane Katrina nearly wiped out the city in 2005. But, in fact, an organization called Rebuilding Together was formed in Midland Texas in 1973. The New Orleans branch was founded in 1988.

Rebuilding Together works with low income and elderly home owners to provide critical health and safety home repairs so that elderly and low-income people can afford to maintain their homes, and stay living in them. Since their inception, Rebuilding Together has revitalized over 1,700 homes in New Orleans.

Most of us accept that a certain house on our street is a wreck and maybe we assume the person who lives there just doesn’t care. The truth, apparently, can be quite different. People who are elderly or disabled often don’t have enough income to keep up with home maintenance. Rebuilding Together is focused not just on the upkeep of these types of homes, but also on remodeling or repairing houses so that elderly people can continue living in their homes while they age.

The uneven distribution of wealth in our country, and in our city, is a gap all of us would like to see closed. Nobody wants wealthy people to become less wealthy. But we all agree that it would be a good thing if less-wealthy people had more access to resources. The most fundamental way more of us can have greater wealth, and hand it on to the next generation, is through widespread home ownership.

It’s fairly well accepted that we can be a nation of homeowners without upending the economy or unleashing an economic revolution. We just need to stop talking about the widening wealth gap and instead find ways to start closing it.

It can be done. It’s not easy. It requires vision for a community, dedication to an economic and financial plan, and hard work. There are people actively working on this issue, like Nicole Barnes and William Stoudt. In future shows we'll talk to other people working on closing the wealth gap in the US and in New Orleans.

This show was recorded over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can see photos from the show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation about affordable housing programs in New Orleans.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are certain occupations that most of us would agree take a good deal of skill to perform. Neurosurgeon comes to mind. Airline pilot. Cirque du Soleil performer.

And then there’s the kind of job that everybody thinks they could do, if only they weren’t too busy doing something more important. For example, hosting a radio show. Or writing a book.

Everybody can write. And most people believe they’ve got at least one great story to tell. But if you’ve ever actually sat down to write a piece of fiction, or even non-fiction, you very quickly discover it’s not as easy as it looks. And if you do have the discipline and perseverance to write an entire book - whether it’s a serious examination of the role of leadership in business, or a whimsical examination of the inner life of cats - you then have to traverse a minefield of publishing-politics to get anyone to read it.

Then, if everything goes right and you’re a published author, one of the glamorous things you get to do is go on a radio show and podcast about business, and share your first-hand insightful observations about the state of the publishing industry.

That’s the situation both of Peter's lunch guests find themselves in on this edition of Out to Lunch.

Adam Bryant is a New Orleans resident and creator of the popular New York Times column, The Corner Office. Adam wrote the column as part of his 18-year career at The Times.

Adam is also the author of three books. They’re all based in some way on his interviews and consulting work with business people, including his most recent, THE CEO Test: Master the Challenges that Make or Break All Leaders, which was published in March 2021 by Harvard Business Review Press.

Jim Gabour has been a columnist for the British newspaper, The Guardian. He’s also a producer and director of music videos, filmed live concerts, and long-form documentaries that literally span the music world, from Spinal Tap to Nora Jones.

Living in New Orleans for most of his life, and sharing his home with cats, Jim hit on an interesting thought. When New Orleans was originally settled by French people, they brought their cats with them. Eventually, the French humans were outnumbered by people of other nationalities. But the French cats remained, well, French. The result of this observation is a book called Meow Monsieur: The French Felines of New Orleans, which was published in March 2021 by Pelican Publishing.

If you walked into a teenager’s bedroom any time in the past 50 years you would see photos pinned to the wall - of pop stars, rock stars, sports stars, movie stars, and today TikTok and YouTube stars. But you would have to visit a lot of bedrooms to find fan photos of authors.

What’s statistically interesting about this observation is that in 2020, over 750 million books were sold. And that’s not including e-books which account for another 300 million-plus sales.

Maybe in the future, A.I will write books, but for now, every one of these billion books that were sold in the last 12 months were written by somebody. And yet, despite this enormous popularity – authors are generally not celebrities in our society. For that reason, you can get to meet extraordinarily talented authors at book signings at your local bookstore. And for a couple of slices of pizza they’ll even agree to come on a radio show. For which we are very grateful.

Find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur, recorded over lunch at NOLA Pizza, at our website. Here's more lunchtime conversation about newspaper and app publishing.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you live in New Orleans, you’re hardly going to be surprised to hear that on this edition of Out to Lunch we’re talking about food and music.

Even if you don’t live in New Orleans, and you’ve never been here, you probably still know us for our reputation for food and music.

Interestingly, even though we often talk about food and music in the same breath, in New Orleans the food business and the music business are generally not related. Which is just one of the significant differences about Peter's lunch guests today.

Music

Misha Kachkachachishvili is a classically trained musician who came to New Orleans in 1994. A lot happened after that, but we’re going to cut straight to 2013. That’s when Misha opened the doors to the largest production and post production recording studio in Louisiana - Esplanade Studios.

In the ensuing years, in a city not lacking for musical accolades, Esplanade Studios have become one the country’s most highly regarded epicenters of recorded music. A long list of musicians have beaten a path to the studio,  including Wille Nelson, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Solange Knowles, Common, Janaelle Monae, and many more.

Misha Kachkachachishvili is a rare combination of musician, business person, and visionary. 

Food

Esplanade studios takes its name from the street it’s on, Esplanade Avenue. Right next to the studio, around the corner on Broad Street, there’s a café, called Lamara Coffee and Kitchen.

A number of things set Lamara Coffee and Kitchen aside from a regular New Orleans cafe. Firstly, it’s menu is entirely plant based. They feature healthy vegetarian food, a superfood smoothie bar, and gluten-free house-made baked-goods. There’s no refined grains, oils, or sugar in anything.

Apart from its non-traditional fare, the other thing that sets Lamara apart from other New Orleans food businesses, is that it really is connected to the music business. It’s not a coincidence that it’s right next door to Esplanade studios. The café caters to musicians who frequent the studio. Plus, also not coincidentally, the owner of Lamara Coffee and Kitchen, Diane Heying, is married to Misha Kachkachachishvili, the owner of Esplanade Studios.

Food and Music

When the 21st Century’s entrepreneurial boom started in New Orleans, the business incubator Idea Village tried to encourage people to start a business with the slogan, “Trust your crazy ideas.” 

Having faith in a business that looks to other people like a crazy idea takes you down a path that is often walking a fine line between delusion and inspiration. It’s only years later, when the business is successful, that the doubters disappear and everyone agrees that you were a visionary all along.

It’s not hard to understand why Misha and Diane are married and why they're great business partners too. They share the courage, determination, and vision required to take bold steps and carve out unique businesses.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In New Orleans, we’re proud of our local businesses and we try and support them as much as we can.

If you own a local business, you have to compete for customers against every online business in the world, and against nationwide businesses who have a brick and mortar presence here. And it’s not enough just to compete on price. You’re also competing on marketing, visibility, perception, name recognition, and all sorts of other variables that go into consumer decision-making.

Big companies have big budgets to fund in-house departments or hire big-name agencies to take care of this kind of positioning. Local companies here in New Orleans have their own, smaller, but nimble and effective resources. Like Trepwise.

NOLA

Trepwise calls itself an “impact consulting firm.” The company’s 12 employees work with established businesses and early-stage entrepreneurs to give local businesses the kind of competitive edge they need to survive and grow.

Blake J. Stanfill Sr is the Director of Growth at Trepwise.

Style

When we talk about small local businesses, we often think of what are called “mom and pop” stores. If there ever was actually a time that most retail outlets were run by a mother-and-father team, those days are largely behind us, but in New Orleans we do have a history of small, specialist retailers whose products and personal service set them apart from large retailers.

One of the problems that a small retailer has though, is presenting themselves in a way that showcases their sophistication, without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-end photographers and ad campaigns. Taylor Morgan has solved this problem, with a product called The Scout Guide. 

The Scout Guide is a guide book with almost no text, that tells the stories of specialist retailers in beautiful, stylish photographs. The Scout Guide is in its 9th year and is now in more than 60 cities across the country.

All of us agree that supporting our local small businesses is a great thing to do. For most of us, that amounts to going shopping once in a while. For Blake Stanfill and Taylor Morgan, supporting our small business community is what they do every day. Because small business makes up the bulk of our economy, their daily efforts ultimately ripple out and affect the whole city.

See photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. This edition of Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Commander's Palace.

There's more lunchtime conversation about back office local business support here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We like to divide things into categories. We talk about short people and tall people. Black and white. Gay and straight. In business, we talk about big and small. But this kind of categorization isn’t quite as useful as it might be for other hard and fast demographic descriptions.

For example, if you’re a short adult, you’re never going to be tall. If you’re white, you’re never going to be black. But in business, every big business started out small. Apple started in a garage in Northern California. Walmart was originally a small store in Arkansas. McDonalds started as a handful of burger joints in San Bernardino.

From day #1 of their existence, these now international conglomerates were in competition with bigger businesses. Apple was in the shadow of the giant IBM. There were plenty of department stores when WalMart came along. And every diner in America made hamburgers that were just as good as McDonalds.

Likewise, if you’re a small business today, you have to compete with big business. But big businesses today have vast technological resources and advantages that make that competition uneven, to say the least.

John Marshall is founder and Managing Principal of a company that’s trying to level the playing field. Series Next Solutions is a company that provides small or growing businesses with the kind of services that bigger businesses have in-house. They can be a small business’s Chief Financial Officer, an accounting department, or a Business Intelligence Department.

One of the advantages big business has over small business is information. Big businesses have the resources to put into research. Even something as simple as researching a potential hire - to make sure the person you’re bringing into your company is everything they say they are - is simple for a big business. But it’s difficult and expensive for a small business.

This information gap is where a company called AVeriFact comes in. 

Sandra Lovett-Tillman is Managing Director and co-owner of AveriFact. Sandra is a licensed Private Investigator who puts her investigative skills to work for small businesses, many of whom are banks and finance companies.

The secret to success in small business is pretty much the secret to success in any walk of life: know and maximize your strengths, and identify and minimize your weaknesses.

One of the ways you can minimize your weaknesses in small business is to partner with people who can do what you can’t. In other words, partner with businesses who have particular strengths you don’t.

John Marshall and Sandra Lovett-Tillman head up specialized organizations that are focused on bringing skills and advantages to companies. Although some of their clients are very visible locally, and some are even nationwide, their own businesses don’t generate headlines or get attention. But their contributions are vital to the health and bottom line of the companies they work with. This edition of Out to Lunch turns the spotlight on them for a change and illuminates what goes on in the back office.

See photos from this show recorded at NOLA Brewing Taproom by Jill Lafleur at our website.  And here's more lunch-table conversation about small business support.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The United States Declaration of Independence declares that our inalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There’s a school of thought that suggests the word “pursuit” wasn’t intended to be defined as chasing. But, rather, as being. In the same way that stamp collecting is a pursuit, “the pursuit of happiness,” according to this interpretation, is our inalienable right not to chase after happiness, but to be happy.

There’s no need for all 300 million of us in the U.S. to agree on what individually makes each of us happy. But you can be pretty confident there are two things most of us would agree on: Love. And ice cream.

Love

Love generally requires two people. You and someone you love, and who loves you. Finding that special someone to share love with is definitely a pursuit. In both senses of the word. To achieve it, in the past 20 years or so we’ve developed any number of dating apps. The major criticism of these apps is, either they are too shallow for finding love – like Tinder – or they develop into endless online chats, and people seldom actually end up meeting in real life.

To solve these problems, there’s a new dating app. It’s called The Meetery. The Meetery is focused on people meeting in real life.

In existing apps, the endless online chat issue is all about wanting to know some basic stuff about someone before you commit to going on an hours-long date with them. The Meetery dispenses with all that by setting you up on a commitment-free, real-life mini-date. It only lasts 15 minutes.

New Orleanian Bayleigh Frickey is co-founder of The Meetery app. 

Ice Cream

And so to the other pillar of American happiness: ice cream. For those of us who love it, there’s no doubt that the more we enjoy the taste of a particular ice cream, the happier we are.

In pursuit of satisfying that desire, there are numerous ice cream manufacturers and ice cream stores all striving to deliver that even more chocolatey chocolate, fruity-er fruit, richer salted caramel, and hundreds of other inventive flavors. So, if you’re in the ice cream business it would seem like there’s a key question you’d need to be able to answer: What makes one ice cream taste better than another?

Abby Boone can answer that question.

Abby had been a pastry chef for over 10 years when the Covid pandemic landed her at home with nothing to do but take care of her child, Lucy, and mess around with her little 1-quart ice cream maker. And that’s how Lucy Boone Ice Cream was born. It was, almost literally, an overnight success.

Abby’s husband quit his job to join Abby’s burgeoning home-based ice cream enterprise, and today they make and sell hundreds of pints of Lucy Boone Ice Cream out of a commercial kitchen. They market it exclusively on Instagram, sell it around town at pop-ups, and out of a brick-and-mortar ice cream shop on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District.

You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. There's more lunchtime conversation about dating apps here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If somebody was to ask you, “What do you know about brain chemistry?” you’d probably answer “Not much,” or even “Nothing.” well, it turns out you’d be wrong.

When you decide you need a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, and you prefer one kind of tea over another, or you avoid a certain type of wine because it gives you a headache, what you’re actually doing is adjusting the fine balance of chemicals in your brain - like dopamine, opioid peptides, serotonin, theanine, and glutamate.

We didn’t know any of this science when humans started drinking tea in, 2737 BC. Nor did we know it when animals first started drinking fermented fruits, reportedly 80 million years ago.

Although we might enjoy drinking wine and tea in the same way our ancestors did, we’ve come a long way with manufacture and distribution.

Tea

If you know anything about tea, you probably know it comes from India. Well, yes, a lot of tea is grown in India. But what you may not know is, tea is also grown in Mississippi. Brookhaven, Mississippi to be exact.

The co-owner of Brookhaven’s The Great Mississippi Tea Company is Timmy Gipson.

Wine

So now that you know tea comes from Mississippi, where would you least expect wine to come from? How about New Orleans?

Ole Orleans Wines was founded in 2018 and makes wine with labels like Tchoupitoulas Blanc du Bois, Ole Carrollton, and Vieux Carre Rose.

The founder of Ole Orleans Wines is Kim Lewis.

Whichever day of the week it is you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance that today or tomorrow you’re going to be drinking tea or wine.

More than half of Americans over the age of 30 drink at least two glasses of wine a week. And we consume 1.4 billion pounds of tea in this country, every single day. So, choosing to go into tea or wine production seems like a smart move. But being pioneers in those businesses, and finding new ways to operate in already entrenched marketplaces, comes with significant challenges.

See photos from this show by Jill Lafleur on our website. And check out more lunch table conversation about beer and groceries.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Although this is a show about business in New Orleans, once in a while we have to admit there’s some pretty interesting things going on an hour or so west of us, in Baton Rouge.

There are two impressive institutions in Baton Rouge – not including the legislature. One is the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. It has over 450 employees. They work in 43 laboratories, on a 200-acre campus, focused primarily on researching causes and cures for chronic diseases.  And then there’s the LSU Innovation Park. It’s an incredibly successful business incubator and technology transfer office. In the last 20 years it has generated $22m and created 134 full time jobs in Baton Rouge.

The Associate Executive Director of the Pennington Biomedical Research center is Dave Winwood. The Assistant Executive Director of the LSU Innovation Park, is also Dave Winwood.

Christina Womack is a New Orleans native. Christina’s business covers New Orleans, the Northshore, Southern Mississippi, and Southern Alabama.

Christina employs 10 independent contractors. When you need one of them, they’ll show up at your house, or school, in an unmarked vehicle. The reason the vehicle is unmarked is that there is apparently a social stigma involved with Christina’s business. And that is, killing lice.

Christina’s business is called Nitpicking in NOLA. Christina founded it in 2009. And, although people might be reluctant to admit they use it, business is booming.

Generally on Out to Lunch we pair guests whose businesses have something in common. It's hard to imagine any business having much in common with removing lice, and it's equally hard to match the groundbreaking work going on at Pennington. Strangely, Dave Winwood and Christina Womack make for great lunchtime conversationalists.

Photos over lunch at Commander’s Palace by Jill Lafleur are at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation about New Orleans bio innovation.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you pull up at a red light, and you’re the only car on the road, instead of sitting there waiting, aggravated, do you ever wonder, “Why doesn’t someone invent smart traffic lights that react to real-time traffic conditions?”

If that thought has never crossed your mind, you’re like most people. Most of us accept and deal with the world around us as it is. And that’s the difference between most of us, and entrepreneurs.

People with the entrepreneurial gene see the same world you and I do, but instead of enduring the status quo, they think, “There’s got to be a better way.” That’s the thought process that led both of Peter's lunch guests on this edition of Out to Lunch to their current businesses.

Movn

Brandon LeBeau was a Tulane undergrad, with a pickup truck. He used his truck to help so many fellow students move, that when he came back to New Orleans in 2018 - after a stint as a professional football player - he started a moving company.

The company is called Movn.bid. It’s called that because when you’re ready to move, you upload pictures of your stuff, and tell the company what you’d like to pay them to move it. If Movn.bid agrees to your price, your move is all set. And it can even happen the same day if you want.

Tortillas

Carlos Avelar has 3 sons, Will, Fernando, and Raoul. Will was chef du cuisine at Emeril Lagasse’s restaurant, Meril, when he heard that the company that supplied Meril with tortillas was for sale. The company was called Mawi Tortillas.

Will told his dad and brothers that this would be a golden opportunity for them to buy a company and start a family business. And that’s what they did. The Avelar boys set about combining their knowledge of Latin American food with their business skills, and built Mawi into a business that sells a range of Salvador-inspired foods, including tortillas, salsa, bean dip, and imported cheeses.

Back when the family bought Mawi Tortillas, in 2017, brother Fernando Avelar had just graduated from UNO with a degree in business management. Today Fernando is the company’s co-owner and Manager.

In the entrepreneurial world – and probably in life in general – there are people who take opportunities, and there are people who make opportunities.

Movn Tortillas and More

It’s definitely a talent to be able to see and take advantage of an opportunity. But it’s a whole other level of skill to manage a series of incidents, and even setbacks, and rearrange them to create a new path that takes you and your business to a better place. Brandon and Fernando are both those guys. They've both grown a business, made adjustments to navigate severe headwinds, and emerged better for it.

See photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. Here's more conversation about LatinX business and Pang Wangle too.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, it's Peter Ricchiuti. I’ve got a scenario I want to run by you, and I want your opinion.

Here’s the situation: It’s morning. I get ready to leave the house. I pick out an outfit, get dressed, I look great. Then my wife says, “You can’t go out looking like that. That shirt doesn’t go with those pants. That tie is hideous. And 1998 called and wants its jacket back.”

So, here’s my question. If I think I look great, do I look great? Or is there such a thing as objective, universally agreed style, and could I, in that case, actually look terrible? Not just to my wife, but to everybody. What do you think?

On this edition of Out to Lunch, I put that question to Tracee Dundas. 

Tracee is founder and Executive Producer of New Orleans Fashion Week. She’s the Fashion Correspondent at WVUE-TV, Fox 8, she’s the Program Coordinator at Dress For Success, and for the past 22 years has worked as a freelance fashion writer and editor at Renaissance Publishing. Tracee also produces fashion shows and other fashion events for regional clients, including Essence Festival.

If you’re a woman of color with larger breasts, and you want to wear certain fashion-forward clothes you see in stores, or on Instagram, you might run into a snag. And that is, getting your breasts to work with that dress. You can do it - but a bra is not going to work. You’re going to need something called boob tape.

There’s a good chance you already know what boob tape is. If you don’t – it’s tape. That holds breasts in place. It looks a bit like duct tape. But when you’re done with it, it peels off your breasts without peeling your skin off with it.

When Kaelin Bass went looking for boob tape, all she could find was tape that was too small to do the job for her breasts. And it was all made to match skin tones that weren’t hers. So Kaelin created her own boob tape. And in 2020 she started her own company, KM Boobies. Today you can find KM Boobies Boob Tape all over, including on Amazon and at Walmart. Kaelin is selling up to 4,000 rolls of boob tape a month.

In business – like pretty much everything in life – you enjoy the greatest security when things are predictable. When you know what’s coming around the corner, when you know what tomorrow’s going to look like, you can plan for a known future.

Well, fashion is the exact opposite of that. The only way fashion moves forward is by changing. And the only way to stay relevant in the fashion business is to stay ahead of the trend and embrace the unpredictable. It's not a business lifestyle for the faint of heart.

Tracee and Kaelin are both carving out successful careers in this world: they're both creating businesses and products that weren’t there before they came along. And they're both doing it from here in New Orleans.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 they can’t teach STEM subjects to any greater degree, because they simply don’t have the $70,000 that’s required to buy specialized materials that they only use a few days out of the year.

So. What’s the solution to this logjam? It might be something called the STEM Library Lab.

It’s a lending library of STEM equipment. Teachers who need 30 thermometers or 2 3D printers, borrow the equipment, get help learning how to use it, and can even get help putting together a lesson plan.

The STEM Library Lab is here in New Orleans and it’s the first of its kind anywhere. The co-founder and Director of the STEM Library Lab is Todd Wackerman.

Girls

Ok, so, in New Orleans we don’t have enough STEM graduates coming into the local workforce to remain competitive in the national economy. That’s already an alarm bell that’s ringing. But we have an even more dismal record if you look at the number of the women in the tech sector.

That’s where Electric Girls comes in.

Electric Girls is a non-profit learning space where girls learn STEM skills from each other. They have after school programs, Saturday classes, and Summer camps. Electric Girls has been running since 2015 and their programs have reached around 1,000 girls.

Flor Serna is co-founder and Executive Director of Electric Girls.

In a world where everything we hear about seems to be some form of disturbing news that’s delivered by mass media that half of us distrust, or social media that most of us distrust, it restores your faith in human nature to discover that there are people out there who are genuinely working for the greater good of all of us.

Check out more conversation about unique New Orleans education, with John Fraboni from Operation Spark and Michelle Fridman from the Waldorf School of New Orleans.

Photos from this show at Commander's Palace by Jill Lafleur are at our website.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 in one way or another.

When we first met Desiree Ontiveros, in 2017, she’d recently launched her business, Badass Balloons. Basically, the company made balloons with sayings printed on them. Sayings that were too raunchy to repeat on radio.

Under Desiree’s savvy leadership, Badass Balloons grew into something much more than a novelty business. It grew into a company with an international footprint that does massive balloon art installations for major events.

When Covid hit and brought her business to a standstill, Desiree was so incensed by what she saw as a government response that was impotent, incompetent, and indifferent to the professional and personal plight of so many people and businesses, that she’s decided to try and change the government.

While still running Badass Balloons, Desiree is also running for Congress.

We first met Amanda Dailey back in 2014. Amanda had recently opened a store in the French Quarter called Queork.  At Queork they sold stuff made from cork.  Wallets, shoes, briefcases, handbags, dog collars, and much more. Then they started designing and manufacturing their own cork products, and business boomed. Within a few years, Amanda and her partner had a chain of 5 Queork retail outlets, including stores in Florida and New Mexico.

When Covid hit, they had two stores in New Orleans – one in The French Quarter and another on Magazine Street. The sudden disappearance of tourist traffic resulted in the French Quarter store closing permanently.

The continuing changing landscape of retail has forced Queork to adapt to e-commerce and online marketing, while fighting to keep a single store open, in an environment that has seen their retail sales plunge by 95%.

All of us are caught up in the continuing health and financial crisis brought about by the Covid 19 pandemic. One the one hand, we’re all going through this together. On the other hand, we all have individual struggles that are uniquely our own.

Desiree has both personal and public struggles going on at the same time with her efforts to keep her business, Badass Balloons, operating while running for Congress.

And Amanda's personal battle to keep Queork open is a part of a nationwide struggle for the survival of brick-and-mortar retail outlets.

Amanda and Desiree's skills that made them successful business people in the first place haven’t deserted them. Although times are extraordinarily tough right now, you can be confident we’ll be meeting back here to catch up again in the years ahead.

Photos from this show by Jill Lafleur are at our website.

Check out Desiree's first appearance on Out to Lunch here and Amanda's first appearance here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 failure wasn’t an option? Where you absolutely had to find some way to stay afloat. Because your business is a school.

That’s the position both of Peter Ricchiuti's lunch guests found themselves in.

John Fraboni is founder and CEO of an education institute called Operation Spark.

If you haven’t heard of Operation Spark, and you or someone you know would like a career in writing code for software, you don’t even need to listen to this show. All you need to know is this: if you learn coding at Operation Spark, you’ll 100% for certain graduate into a job. And that job will pay a minimum of $65,000.

If you’re currently in high school, you can take classes at Operation Spark while you’re in school and graduate directly into your $65,000 job.

While Operation Spark prepares kids – and adults – for a career in tech, one of New Orleans most innovative elementary educators takes a dim view of the place of screens in education.

The Waldorf School of New Orleans is a member of the largest group of independent schools in the world. There are 1,150 Waldorf Schools in 72 countries. As well as seeing screen time as an impediment to child development, Waldorf schools have all kinds of innovative approaches to education - including keeping kids with the same teacher from 4-8 years. And never, ever, assigning a letter grade to educational attainment.

Keeping the business side of the New Orleans Waldorf school running is the task of the school’s Finance and HR Director, Michelle Fridman.

The New Orleans that kids are growing up in today is not the same New Orleans you grew up in. And that even goes for parents who are in their 20's. Elementary education options now include choices like the Waldorf School, which opened here in the city in 2000. And high school and later options include training for a career in software coding at Operation Spark, which opened in 2014.

The more choices people have for living their lives, the more reason they have to stay here in New Orleans. And the more rich and varied the city becomes, the better it is for all of us.

You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And check out more lunch table conversation about STEM education with Electric Girls' Flor Serna and STEM Library Lab's Todd Wackerman.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.