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.

It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Bloks

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 current 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.

From New Orleans to Mars

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.

Real World Tech

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.

That's Your Business

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.

Can You Hear This?

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.

CBD Chefs

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.

Your Kids and Your Bank Balance

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.

Survey Says

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.

Syrup, Pot, 'n' Peanut Butter

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.

Copyright, Patents, 'n' Pics

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.

Wind Design

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.

Crypto

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.

Screen Time

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 Neil 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.

Beer Wine Cider Pizza

OUT TO LUNCH finds economist and Tulane finance professor Peter Ricchiuti conducting business New Orleans style: over lunch at Commander's Palace restaurant. Each week Peter invites guests from the New Orleans business renaissance to join him. The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Inc magazine have all named New Orleans the best city in the USA to be an entrepreneur. Out to Lunch is the cafeteria of the new New Orleans entrepreneurial movement. You can also hear the show on WWNO 89.9FM.

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It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

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