Depending on your disposition for integrating technology into your work day, you believe AI is either a tool for increased efficiency and productivity. Or it presents challenges such as job displacement, the potential for bias and misinformation, and other ethical concerns. By the way, AI wrote that, which might foretell the end of my career as a writer and radio host. My two lunch guests today potentially worry about the future of their jobs too. Taylor Bennett is the founder & CEO of Mesh,...
Jul 13, 2025•31 min
If you read the bestseller “Bowling Alone” in 2000 or are taking notice of wellness stories offering advice on how to reconnect with others IRL, you know that Americans are facing a crisis of loneliness. According to an advisory issued in 2023 by then U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, about one-in-two adults in America report experiencing loneliness, a condition that impacts mortality at a similar rate as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. For entrepreneurs, business owners, or corporate ex...
Jun 29, 2025•29 min
Here’s a plotline we’re all familiar with, something from a novel or a movie. After years of good health, our heroine begins to feel less like herself. She feels sluggish and fatigued at work. She loses her appetite and can’t sleep at night. She begins to worry. So she makes an appointment with her doctor and the recommended specialists, of which there are many. Yet, the medical diagnosis is the same: there’s no cure for what ails her. Then, as in all Hollywood blockbusters, our heroine discover...
Jun 22, 2025•29 min
When you think back on your most memorable meal, what comes to mind? The company you kept? The exceptional wine list? An entre made up of the freshest Louisiana ingredients? Chef Barrett Meeks and Abney Harper are two Baton Rouge restaurateurs making memorable meals for locals with successful establishments located just doors apart from each other on Corporate Boulevard in Baton Rouge. Executive Chef Barret Meeks of Mansurs On The Boulevard developed his passion for cooking when he was just 8 ye...
Jun 15, 2025•31 min
We all know raising kids takes a village—but what if you’re the one building that village? What if you're the one creating the spaces where children feel safe? Daycare Tessa Holloway is the Owner and Director of Kidz Karousel , a network of early learning centers with nine locations across South Louisiana. What started as a personal decision to save her children’s daycare in Port Allen has grown into one of the region’s most recognized family-centered childcare businesses. Tessa and her husband ...
Jun 08, 2025•29 min
Only a particularly hard-hearted human could see a dog or cat in trouble and not want to help. Maybe you’d share a post on social media. Or make a donation to a shelter, or a Go-Fund Me for a pet. But would you contemplate turning your back on your current career and dedicating your professional life to saving the lives of thousands of pets? That’s what J.T Hackett did. (J.T’s real name is Jacelyn, but everybody calls her J.T.) For 12 years J.T. was co-owner of Petz Plaza, a pet-focused business...
May 25, 2025•29 min
Asking for help isn’t always easy, but sometimes, it’s the smartest thing you can do, especially when it comes to learning. Amanda Martin learned that firsthand as a parent. When her kids hit middle school, she started looking for academic support — something beyond worksheets and flashcards. She found that the tutoring landscape felt outdated and uninspired. So Amanda decided to build the kind of place she wished existed: Studyville — a modern, membership-based tutoring lounge where students ca...
May 17, 2025•31 min
Food is culture. It’s memory and identity. But turning tradition into innovation takes more than a good recipe. It takes creativity, grit, and a deep understanding of what people crave. Yvette Bonanno knows that well. She grew up in the Baton Rouge restaurant scene and that early exposure sparked a lifelong love for food. Today, she’s combining that experience with cutting-edge food production as the founder of Crave-a-Ball , a Baton Rouge-based company turning classic Louisiana dishes into hand...
May 11, 2025•29 min
Entrepreneurship can start in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it starts with a tiny idea that just grows alongside a community. Other times, it comes from a personal need—something you realize just isn’t out there yet, and you decide to build it yourself. That’s exactly what happened with Abbey Lovett. She’s a mom of two who saw something missing in the Baton Rouge business scene: a flexible, supportive workspace built with women in mind. So, she created Pathos Collective —a space that gives ...
Apr 20, 2025•30 min
Baton Rouge is a city known for its strong sense of community. But it’s also a city that’s becoming more aware of the need to protect and enhance its natural environment. In a region where development has often meant the loss of green spaces, there’s a growing movement to restore and care for what’s left—especially its trees. Sage Roberts Foley is Executive Director of Baton Rouge Green , an organization she’s been involved with since 2010. Baton Rouge Green is a nonprofit dedicated to planting ...
Apr 14, 2025•29 min
We love to divide things into categories of two. Tall or short. Hot or cold. Liberal or conservative. And then there’s creative, or not. That one’s simply not true. Everyone has something they want to see come to life. Everyone has a vision of something they’d love to create that doesn’t exist… yet. 18 years ago, Chris Dykes started tracking his habits on an Excel spreadsheet. In the course of the next 18 years, Chris quit his job and co-founded an app-building business, Clear Blue Design . With...
Apr 07, 2025•29 min
Animals. For most people animals are a part of their everyday life. Maybe it's your dog that loves it so much when you come home from work. Maybe there's a duck in the park you go to that remembers you because you feed him every time you see him. Regardless of where you run into them or what your relationship is with them, animals affect all of us. But some deal with animals you don’t see every day. One of those people is T-Mike Kliebert, Head Tour Guide at Kliebert & Sons Gator Tours. T-Mik...
Mar 24, 2025•30 min
When you draw up a business contract, lawyers try and predict the myriad things that could go wrong and plan strategies and remedies so if they do there are no surprises and you know what to do. Well, outside of business, real life is different. You can’t even imagine the number of things that can go – well, if not totally wrong, not as right as you’d like. When things go off the rails, or before they do, to try and head off the worst outcome, there are places and people to turn to. Like Stephan...
Mar 17, 2025•29 min
"Hi, how are you? " It's amazing how often the word "hi" and the question “How are you?” go together. The latter is such a standard greeting it barely registers as a serious question. The standard answer is, “Good. How are you?” Now, if we were to stop there and have a real conversation about how we are, most of us would say we’re good, but we could be better. We’d like a better job, better car, bigger house, more money, less stress… But much of the time these kinds of life-improvements are out ...
Mar 10, 2025•30 min
In the past few decades, technology has taken over the way we live our lives. From the books that we read to news we receive, the way we consume media has been changed forever. But recently, there’s been a movement to return to the analogue. Whether it’s vinyl records, DVDs, or even newspapers - the demand for physical media is growing. Creators and storytellers across the nation are meeting that growing need by making new and interesting physical content of their own. Christopher Payne is doing...
Feb 24, 2025•32 min
Baton Rouge has long been a city of tradition. People here can be a little resistant to change. This is true from centers of political, economic and even medical focus. But recently, the stage has been set for the capital city to become a place of innovation. We never know where life might take us. Something small that happens to us, or that we witness as children, may change the course of our lives. Andy Barth grew up in Baton Rouge and was in and out of the hospital. After his mom suffered a s...
Feb 17, 2025•31 min
The golden rule of real estate has always been, "Location Location Location." Today in Louisiana it's more like, "Location, Insurance, Mortgage." When we say "real estate" we're mostly talking about something more than just a transaction. "A man’s house is his castle," as the old saying goes, or maybe we should say a person’s house is their castle. But whatever, the adage speaks to something really meaningful about the value and significance we place on home ownership. It defines who we are. And...
Feb 10, 2025•31 min
In some ways, there are two Louisianas. There's the one the tourism marketing folks sell to visitors, centered on New Orleans on one side of Baton Rouge and Cajun Country on the other. And then there's the Louisiana that we live in, which is Baton Rouge. Maybe to tourist salespeople it looks like there's nothing very exciting going on here, but that is far from the truth. Baton Rouge is anything but a civil-service seat of government town like other state capitals. Though we do have a decent num...
Jan 20, 2025•29 min
When you’re launching your own business, some of the first questions you have to ask yourself are, who is your target market? How are you going to differentiate yourself from the competition? Are you going to try to be all things to all people? Or go niche? Will you specialize in a certain area, or combine some of your talents and skills to appeal to a particular customer base? Getting these foundational questions wrong can be the difference between making it and being one of those 50 % of small...
Jan 13, 2025•31 min
We live in fractured, divided times where sometimes even simple facts about basic reality are too much for folks to agree on. Partisan politics, social media and the internet serve to divide us and keep us apart. And experts tell us all the time that even though we’re more digitially connected than ever, we’re paradoxically more isolated and lonely. How do we address this complex challenge? On this edition of Out to Lunch, Stephanie is visiting with two community-engaged local entrepreneurs, one...
Dec 02, 2024•29 min
"All the world's a stage," as Shakespeare famously wrote, and we are "merely players" performing roles, today as professionals or politicians or teachers in a classroom of students. or parents modeling behavior for their children. In an era when traditional media, social media, and ever-present modes of telecommunications determine how these roles and personas are received and perceived, crafting images, honing messages, and telling stories around them has given rise to entire industries. Stuart...
Nov 18, 2024•31 min
Making a business plan is an essential part of launching a new business. But it’s not a skill an aspiring business owner necessarily has. Which is where Camille Terk comes in. Writing business plans is literally what she does for a living. Her firm, Terk Consulting , is a boutique consulting firm that specializes in business planning. Camille founded her firm in 2005 and in the nearly two decades since has served over 700 clients, helping them draft business plans and pitch-decks to present to i...
Nov 11, 2024•28 min
Around two million people in the United states will be diagnosed this year with cancer. Taken together, each one of these individual life-changing diagnoses forms a part of an overall cancer care industrial complex which adds to up to an annual $75 billion sector of the national economy. And, like every other business heading into the second quarter of the 21st Century, cancer treatment is changing and advancing with the implementation of technology that includes AI. In Baton Rouge, very few peo...
Oct 21, 2024•30 min
There are cose to 3 milllion apps available today – nearly 3 times as many as there were a decade ago – and they are designed to do everything imaginable, whether it’s helping us buy a house, track a hurricane, rent a car or remember to breathe. In other words, there is nothing that cannot be digitized and commodified with the right software and a creative entrepreneur. One of the popular fields of app by numbers downloaded are apps that marry the worlds of music and tech. You've no doubt heard ...
Oct 14, 2024•29 min
When is the last time you heard someone say, “I love email?” I would bet, probably never. Every day it seems like we’re swamped with more spam. And when we do actually rely on email for something important, well, you know how that goes. You send someone an email and ask them three questions. They reply to one. You reply with a comment about their reply and re-ask your other two questions. They reply with a comment on a whole other subject and before you know it you’ve got a long list of back and...
Oct 07, 2024•30 min
The complexity of healthcare today and all the western advances that go with it – from AI generated diagnoses to online scheduling platforms to cold, impersonal clinical settings – has a lot of people – and their four-legged friends - looking for alternative, more holistic, wellness-centered approaches to healing and feeling better. Stephanie's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch are are experts in this segment of healthcare. Dr. Keta Patel is owner of the Excel Wellness Center in Baton Rouge...
Sep 30, 2024•29 min
Ask anyone in Louisiana, or any other state, and they’ll tell you that two of the greatest problems today facing the average American are access to affordable housing and access to quality affordable healthcare. Despite billions in federal funding and policies intended to help, the need continues to grow. On this episode of Out to Lunch, Stephanie talks with two local entrepreneurs who are taking matters into their own hands to fill the void and make things better. Wendy Green Daniels is Preside...
Sep 23, 2024•29 min
For most of the 35-thousand years or so that humans have roamed the Earth, we were able to represent what we see and hear through art and music. But we were not able to capture images and sounds and replicate them until - in the grand scheme of things - relatively recently when the inventions of the industrial revolution brought us rudimentary photography and phonographic recordings. Imagine how that changed the world. Not only the way we see and hear ourselves and others, but the way we think a...
Sep 09, 2024•30 min
For more than half a century, American educators and policymakers have been grappling with a problem that just keeps getting worse: A lot of American children don’t learn how to read, at least not very well, and despite new programs and curricula, the literacy gap keeps growing. In Louisiana, the problem is particularly acute – studies show that more than a quarter of our population has a low literacy rate. Baton Rouge author Susie Shepherd is working to change those statistics. She is a childre...
Aug 20, 2024•28 min
Despite what statistics show about fewer people getting married and more people getting divorced, Americans spent more than $50B on weddings last year, and the numbers continue to grow. Venues, food, liquor, music, gowns, flowers, cake, photographer – and that’s not counting bachelor and bachelorette parties or what’s involved if the big day is a destination wedding in another state or country. Call it the wedding industrial complex. Or call it good fun. Either way, local entrepreneurs know all ...
Jul 29, 2024•28 min
