Everybody likes a pretty picture, and a good cheese. Well, maybe not everybody likes cheese, but when you team it up with grapes, chocolate, and other goodies it becomes something altogether different - an edible work of art.

Running a startup in any industry is building a plane in midair. You might think you know how fly, but then you hit turbulence. Or you figure out that you need to also know how to sell plane tickets. These days, it’s not enough to know the work, you’ve got to know how to sell it. When you're an entrepreneur that means selling yourself - more often than not on social media. 

Christiaan Mader's guests today have both taken the plunge into startup life, in their own ways. What they have in common is that they both sell whimsy and imagination, and in most cases they have to sell it themselves. 

Denise Gallagher got her start in advertising, working for 15 years as the art director at BBR, a well-established ad and marketing firm. She bet on herself and left the company in 2013, pursuing a second act as an illustrator for hire and a children’s book author. Her most recent book, Peg Bearskin: A Traditional Newfoundland tale, was published earlier this year. 

Mandy Osgood co-founded Graze Acadiana in early 2019, in partnership with her mom.

Graze Acadiana creates what they call "foodscapes" - custom, seasonal sharing platters for social gatherings, corporate thank yous, or maybe an evening at home with a big appetite. It’s food that makes you feel good, and the designs are beyond appetizing.

The contents of the foodscapes are all fresh and wherever possible locally sourced, but the Graze Craze itself is imported from Down Under — New Zealand and Australia. 

Out to Lunch is recorded over lunch at Chopsticks restaurant in Lafayette.

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If you don't have hours to spare in a doctor's waiting room, or you live in a remote spot of Acadiana, you're going to love the advent of Tele-Health: You can get first-class healthcare anywhere in Acadiana. Now.

We’re getting a lot of what we need from the internet these days. You can pick up your iPhone, unlock it with your face, and get a month’s supply of dog food delivered in two days. That’s convenience.

E-shopping is nothing new, even as it’s gotten faster and offered more stuff. But over the last decade, better and faster broadband has made it possible to network services that aren’t just about making it easier to be lazy. 

And that’s well on display in the healthcare industry where advances in telemedicine are tackling serious quality of life issues with fantastic results. 

Over miles of fiber optic cable hospitals now come to you. Telemedicine programs bring doctors, nurses and  counselors where the patients are — at work, at school or even miles from the nearest hospital in areas where geography is a big hurdle in getting good health care. 

Chistiaan Mader's lunch guests on this edition of Out to Lunch both work in extensively in telemedicine, advocating and advancing its benefits to the work place and to community health in general. 

Attorney Nadia de la Houssaye, launched one of Louisiana’s first teleradiology networks, with her husband, a radiologist, more than 20 years ago. Nadia served as the company’s general counsel. Today, Nadia is a partner at law firm Jones Walker where she’s also the head of Telehealth.

Lafayette General Health is one of the major players locally in telemedicine. The system introduced a telemedicine clinic on site at jewelry manufacturer Stuller in 2012, offering on-the-job healthcare access to the jewelry maker’s 1,200 employees. Lafayette General’s program has since grown to serve public school systems and Lafayette Consolidated Government, where it provides care for more than 2,200 government workers. 

Cian Robinson has been one of the big reasons for Lafayette General’s wins in that space. Cian ran the Lafayette General Foundation for several years and now serves as the health systems’ executive director for innovation, research and real estate investments.

You can see photos from this show recorded over lunch at Chopsticks restaurant in Lafayette here.

Hear more from Cian Robinson on past Out to Lunch shows here and here.

Meet Matt Stuller from Stuller Inc here.

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Your grocery and drug store purchase cards allow the stores to predict when you're going to need laundry detergent and Advil, and when you don't buy it in time they send you a coupon to get you to come back in. Then there's an even more advanced (some might call it "insidious") form of Artificial Iintelligence (A.I), like Frankie Russo's. Frankie's A.I knows you want to buy a car before you do.

 We humans have an uneasy relationship with algorithms and robots.  Sure, we create them. But there is a general sense of foreboding about a world where humans and algorithmic-driven bots co-exist.

Part of that fear is rooted in a Hollywood science-fiction vision of the future, which is more fiction than science. And then there’s the all-too-real truth about the advent of driverless cars; the massed DNA information database that Ancestry.com is building; and how much Facebook knows about you already.

When you consider this growth of Artificial Intelligence, you might start to realize that a science fiction future isn’t going to look like a Will Smith movie - where we’re fighting humanoids in the streets - but it’s also not futuristic. It’s happening right now.

Even right here in Acadiana. In fact, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence in the world of marketing is Lafayette’s own Frankie Russo.

Frankie Russo is a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence in the world of marketing. Which is why Frankie’s company, 360 IA, knows what you want to buy, before you do.

If you think that’s fascinating, listen to this conversation.  If you think someone who can accurately predict your purchasing future is just too freaky, you might want to skip this.

You can see photos by Lucius Fontenot from this show, recorded at Spoonbill Watering Hole & Restaurant in downtown Lafayette, here.

You can hear Frankie's previous appearance on Out to Lunch here.

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When you’re starting a new business, every consultant will tell you, rule number one is - make sure your business solves a problem that people want solved. That last part of the sentence is considered to be vital. If you don’t have a product that people are looking for, you’ll never sell it and your business will never work.

Then, of course, there’s the exception to the rule. For example, dehydrated cocktail mixes that allow you to make a delicious bar-quality cocktail on top of a mountain, on a desert island, or in a foreign country where they don’t know how to make a good Old Fashioned.

Those dehydrated cocktail mixes are made right here in Lafayette. They’re called Leisuremann’s Cocktail Mixes. You might not have woken up this morning, or any morning, thinking, “I wonder where I could buy a dehydrated cocktail mix to take on vacation,” but it’s one of those strange things that once you know about it, you wonder why nobody thought of it before.

One of the people who did think of it is the co-owner of Leisuremann’s Cocktail Mixes, Cliff Couvillion.

Besides dehydrated cocktail mixes, there are many other things in life you can live without. They include gelato, sorbetto, coffee, wine, croissants, gluten-free baked goods, and brunch.

However, if you decide your life would be a lot better if you didn’t live without any of those things, you can find them all in downtown Lafayette at the stylishly re-vamped café and wine bar, Carpe Diem.

The owner of Carpe Diem is Liz Payne.

This show was recorded live over lunch at Chopsticks restaurant in Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Lucius Fontenot and more, here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.