Biz Talks

Biz Talks is a local business interview program with a wide New Orleans lens. It treats business as the connective tissue between public infrastructure, food, arts, retail, education, festivals, and entrepreneurship. Kim Singletary, editor of Biz New Orleans Magazine, guides the conversations with a direct and approachable style. The episodes are friendly, but they are not vague. A conversation about a food and beverage incubator gets into federal earmarks, design work, kitchen equipment, competitive grants, and the practical needs of entrepreneurs producing at wholesale scale. A hurricane-season episode explains the West Bank’s flood protection system through levees, floodgates, floodwalls, maintenance cycles, soil compression, and coordination with larger engineering operations. The scale matters. So does the everyday consequence. Biz Talks often works best when it takes something familiar in the region and shows the machinery behind it. Lakeside Shopping Center becomes a story about retail leasing, career paths, advertising work, and post-Katrina continuity. A TikTok creator segment connects restaurant spotlights and local experiences to modern business visibility, creator work, and conversations in Washington, D.C. The arts coverage is similarly practical. Broadway in New Orleans is discussed through seasons, venues, touring shows, and audience appetite. Loyola’s Gasa U partnership turns a live music club into a training ground for students learning the actual business of shows, internships, labels, managers, studios, and alumni networks. The French Film Festival conversation frames film as a cultural and civic platform, with partnerships and public debate sitting alongside screenings. The entrepreneurship episode looks at the region’s startup narrative, capital challenges, talent attraction, and coordinated strategy through the New Orleans Entrepreneurship Council. Across the sample, the show’s strongest quality is its local specificity. It does not flatten New Orleans into a party backdrop. It follows the people trying to build, protect, program, lease, fund, teach, and organize the region. The mood is optimistic without losing sight of operational detail. Guests are allowed to explain their work in plain language. For listeners tracking Southeast Louisiana’s business climate, Biz Talks offers a steady map of who is doing what, why it matters, and how the pieces fit together.