It’s New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Hosted ByPeter Ricchiuti

OUT TO LUNCH finds the country's most entertaining finance professor Peter Ricchiuti conducting business New Orleans style: over lunch. Each week Peter invites guests from the New Orleans business world to join him, sometimes for fine dining others for pizza. From CEO's to startups, managers, musicians, biomed needle-movers, Silicon Bayou success stories and entrepreneurs of all stripes put aside the elevator pitch and the talking points and actually enjoy themselves. It's business, New Orleans style.
You can also hear the show on WWNO 89.9FM.

Virtually Real – Out to Lunch – It’s New Orleans

From the beginning of recorded history we’ve  had a fascination with the blurred lines between the real world and the supernatural world. Greek gods and Hindu gods were described as humans with superpowers who lived in other dimensions and interacted with people on Earth. In biblical times, an all-powerful but invisible God granted some humans super powers, like parting seas and feeding multitudes. In our own times we’ve continued to blur the lines between the real and non-real worlds. We’ve created a non-real online world where a regular person can have a whole different persona – on places like Facebook. We can strap on goggles and walk, swim and even fly, in what we call virtual reality. And when it comes to business, we’re coming to accept the blurred line between transactions that happen in the online world and real world as perfectly normal.

Peter’s lunch guests are both on the cutting edge of this blurred line – if in fact a blurred line can have a cutting edge.

Stephen Morel

Stephen Morel is Chief Legal Officer at a company called CivicSource. CivicSource takes real world houses that are blighted – or what they call “tax-distressed” – and puts them online where they are auctioned and sold. You can find CivicSource here in Louisiana,  as well as Tennessee, Mississippi and Missouri. Since 2008 CivicSource has sold over 37,000 pieces of property.

Matt Findley

Matt Findley is President and Voice of Reason at inXile Entertainment. inXile is one of the most influential and successful creators of online games in the country. They’re responsible for titles like The Mage’s Tale, The Bard’s Tale, and Wasteland. If you play video games you’re already impressed. If you’ve never heard of any of this, you’re going to be impressed by the multi millions of dollars involved and the unique crowdfunding business model that inXile has pioneered.

Matt Findley, Stephen Morel, Peter Ricchiuti

photos at Commander’s Palace by Alison Moon.