It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

If you’ve lived in New Orleans for longer than 12 months, there’s a good chance someone has asked you if you’re going to the track for Thanksgiving. 

If you’ve never heard that question, well, “The Track” is the Fair Grounds racetrack in Mid City. They’ve been celebrating opening day of the horse-racing season there on Thanksgiving Day since 1892.

124 years later, in 2019, Ingrid Ander...

The English language is tricky. Take the word “vision” for example. By one definition, vision is the ability of the eye to see what it’s looking at. The other definition of vision is about imagination: the ability to conjure up a picture of something beyond everyday reality. In other words, vision is either seeing what’s there, or what’s not there.

And then there’s the combination of both: where ...

In the past week, podcast listeners to this show have come from across the US, Canada, Austria, the UK, and Spain. If you’re one of our far-flung podcast listeners, "Hello!"

If you live in New Orleans, you might hear us on WWNO. In which case you will have probably heard, as part of the local news, reporters from The Gulf States Newsroom.

The Gulf States Newsroom is an NPR-driven news-gathering collaboration of WWNO, WRK...

If you live in New Orleans, you’ve probably had this happen: A friend gets in touch and says they’re coming to town for something to do with their work. Usually a convention. They’ll be in touch when they get here and know their schedule. The next communication you get is an apology. They’re on the way home. They went to Bourbon Street their first night here, and everything else is kind of a blur.

That doesn...

There’s a reason you’re familiar with Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie A Few Good Men yelling, “You can’t handle the truth!” Partly it’s because of the intensity of Nicholson’s performance, but mostly it’s because it’s a hard-hitting piece of universal reality: A lot of the time we’d rather not know the truth.

It can be as bland as the ubiquitous, “How a...

If you’ve lived in New Orleans for any length of time, you know we love to rebuild. We rebuilt the levees. We rebuilt the schools. We rebuilt the Superdome. After every storm, we rebuild thousands of roofs and hundreds of homes.

After Hurricane Katrina, a small group of New Orleanians decided that the way they could make a contribution toward saving the city was to help build companies. They revived a small volunteer-run orga...

There are two things we know a lot about in New Orleans: partying and hurricanes.

For a long time those weren't unrelated. The hurricane party was a New Orleans institution — you'd ride out the storm with your neighbors, a case of beer, and a sense of invincibility. These days, after Katrina and Ida, hurricanes aren't quite the occasion they used to be.

But there's still a connection between the two — just a more busine...

Although each of us is free to believe whatever we want, when it comes to our personal finances, we tend to operate with a number of shared beliefs. One of these is the belief in the benefit of ownership. For example, it’s better to own your own business than be an employee.

Financially, that benefit is not necessarily true. Many startup business owners go for years before they even pay themselves at all. And many employees m...

I want to start out today by running through a few notable New Orleans landmarks:
The new terminal at Louis Armstrong Airport. 
The U.S Custom House.
The gold/copper skin on the Superdome.
The Civic Theater.
The W New Orleans French Quarter Hotel.
The Xavier University Dormitories.

There are a whole lot more on this list too. If you’re wondering what the link is between all of them, it’s the const...

If you’re under 30, and you have any kind of original, innovative ideas, you might not know that before you were born people like you generally left New Orleans and went to places where forward-thinking was appreciated.

Then, in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina had knocked the city to its knees, the river of intellectuals and social activists started to flow in other direction. All kinds of smart people with new ideas started co...

In the mid 1700’s, a French author, Voltaire, wrote a biting satire that has remained a classic piece of literature ever since.

The novel, Candide, is about a student who is continually beset by all kinds of horrific disasters. It’s basically a buddy comedy in which the kid’s super-upbeat tutor keeps encouraging him, by saying, “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” It’s kind o...

If you think it feels like things are speeding up and change is coming faster than ever, well, you’re right. It took us hundreds of thousands of years to get to a worldwide population of 3 billion. We got there in 1927. From there, it only took about 70 more years – one lifetime – to get to a population of 6 billion.

Back at the 3 billion mark, fewer Americans lived in urban areas. When they needed to shop for nec...

In conversations about business, you don’t hear Karl Marx quoted very often. That’s principally because of his enthusiasm for communism, which is kind of the opposite of business… But Marx was an economist back in the mid 1800’s and the reason we still know about him is because he had some insights that are still relevant.

Among them is the observation that everything contains the seeds of its own destructi...

Things don't always work out like you planned. You know, they just don't.

Nobody gets married planning to one day get divorced. But, somehow, around 40% of people who get married for the first time find themselves at some point in that position.

For people who get married a second time, 60% of those end in divorce. And if you’re brave enough to try it a third time, your chances of getting divorced go up to 70%. 

Add &lsq...

People who try and explain the complexity of human existence sometimes talk about “the seen and unseen world.”

The seen world is the world of everyday reality in which we live.

The theory of the unseen world attempts to explain some events in the real world - like love, happiness, and talent - in terms of the intangible. These explanations might range from suggestions of the existence of a soul, to past lives and karma.

When you’re the CEO or Executive Director of a company, you’re responsible for, well, everything. If the company does well, you’re a genius. If the company does poorly, you’re fired.

Typically, the definition of business success is how much money a company makes. And that can be a function of market share. Both of my lunch guests today are executives of major New Orleans companies. Each of these companies ha...

Most people start a business for the same reason: to make money. John Roberts started a business to give money away.

John and his business partner, Mickal Adler, would certainly like to end up making money at some point – that is the end goal of their company, Boot 64 Ventures. 

It’s the word “venture” that’s the key to what’s going on here. Boot 64 is a venture capital company. The money th...

When we started out making a show about New Orleans business, people – even in the business community – said, “Well that’s great, but what are you going to do after 6 weeks?”

That was 2011. We’ve recorded a new episode of Out to Lunch almost every week since then. And we still haven’t run out of guests. In fact, there are so many people doing interesting things in New Orleans business that ...

I have three questions for you. One - What are your parents’ names? You can probably answer that easily. Two - What are your grandparents’ names? You can probably answer that as well. Now here's the third question. What are the names of your great grandparents? Do you know? Off the top of your head…

This is not a scientific survey, but I’ve asked enough people this question to be fairly confident that most ...