(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Kevin Lin: My name is Kevin Lin. Born and raised in New Orleans, co-founder and former Chief Operating Officer of Twitch. Living in Taipei these days working on a game company called Metatheory, hiring folks out here to build games for the world. I’m very happy to be here today.

Julienne Lauler: My name is Julienne Lauler and I'm an assistant Cultural Affairs Officer at AIT. I'm really excited to be here today with Kevin Lin to talk all things New Orleans.

It's actually been years since I had the chance to visit New Orleans. But when I think about New Orleans, I think about the food, the music, the community, the resilience of New Orleans. Could you tell us a little bit about your connection to the city?

Kevin Lin: So I was born and raised in New Orleans, originally in a town called Metairie, which is just to the West, and then grew up in Kenner. I left for college and I'd go back to visit here and there. But these days, I go back pretty regularly, as often as possible.

Started taking my friends to Mardi Gras like six years ago so it became a quick tradition. A nice escapism event. I still love it. I tried to do some stuff out there in the startup scene, but just, mostly try to get people to go out there to enjoy the place.

Julienne Lauler: When was the last time you were at Mardi Gras?

Kevin Lin: 2020 right before COVID. They did sort of an underground version of it last year. They shortened some of the routes and things like that. But I hope to go in 2023.

Julienne Lauler: I imagine that growing up in New Orleans, the Taiwanese community was pretty small. Could you tell me a little bit about what that was like growing up?

Kevin Lin: It was not a big community. If you expand out of New Orleans, let's say an hour in each direction, there were maybe like 40, 50 families. There was a foundational group of families that would get together. My parents, we would always go monthly to these dinners at this restaurant, typically a restaurant called Fortune Garden, which was also in Kenner. We didn't like to go very far.

And they call them hui-ah 回啊. My parents would go and bring an envelope with a number on it, typically with a five at the beginning. Only later did I realize what was going on. It was sort of a community funding mechanism.

Julienne Lauler: Oh wow.

Kevin Lin: So the way it would work is you start off and everyone has to chip in $500. The next month or next quarter, depending on the frequency of meetings, you could write a higher number than 500 on your contribution. If you are the highest number, you got that pot of money. And then you could do something with it.

Julienne Lauler: So like an investment.

Kevin Lin: To buy a car, to buy a restaurant, to put a down payment on like a motel, to start their business, to start building their career there.

But a lot of the families I'd say, for the most part, were small business owners. So the parents would run like a roach motel effectively, and they’d live there. My parents were teachers, so they kind of established themselves as teachers and they started opening little shops. They started with like a pita sandwich shop in the mall then they opened —

Julienne Lauler: Pita sandwich?

Kevin Lin: Before I was born they opened a bar. I used to go hang out there. My parents made me count the money. But a lot of the families live there. They live behind lobbies. So whenever I visit my cousins or my — I don't know who was actually my cousin and who wasn’t. Everyone was a cousin — but I’d go hang out with them and we'd hang out in the room behind the lobby. We'd just play there, and in the parking lot.

One of my best buds growing up, Billy Lou, they lived at this place called Peacock Plaza Inn, right next to LaFreniere Park, which is awesome because I’d go visit them, we could literally walk to the park and go hang out. It's good memories.

But you know, you think about it in retrospect. Man, it was tough. It was hard to raise a family in a motel.

Julienne Lauler: Sounds like the community savings group that they were a part of really goes along with the spirit of New Orleans - kind of that strong sense of community and people banding together to get through tough times.

Kevin Lin: The money obviously helped. Money is the technology that helps you get going, but it was really the support - they shared knowledge. They helped each other hire people. They helped find the right folks, and they really cared for and protected each other. That's how tight that community was. For a lot of people that was the only way to do it.

Julienne Lauler: Shifting gears a little bit, one of the things that New Orleans is most known for is its food culture. The food in New Orleans is really just this mix of different cultures and different people coming together and creating new dishes.

We have food on the table right now, so why don't we try it and see how it is? Do any of these remind you of your childhood?

Kevin Lin: That looks like Gumbo. We also have fried chicken and waffles. Fried chicken, there’s a big festival every year. New Orleans loves festivals. Someone told me that New Orleans has the highest per capita festivals annually in America.

Julienne Lauler: Where do you think that comes from? Why are the people of New Orleans always wanting to celebrate?

Kevin Lin: Oh, people love hanging out.

People love partying. They have pretty active social lives there and it's very local. People hang out with their neighbors. They live by people that they know and invite them over for food all the time. Crawfish boil culture is huge. You go get some crawfish, you knock on your neighbor's door, and say come on over if you want.

Julienne Lauler: I wonder if our audience all know what a crawfish is. Is it just a lobster or…?

Kevin Lin: It's like a tiny lobster that lives in the mud. Some people call it mudbugs. Crayfish, normally we call them crawfish. They're great though.

It's funny because the amount of meat you can eat off of it, the amount of actual protein you extract is like - 30% of the thing. But it tastes great cooked in Cajun Spice, crab boil with potatoes, corn, sausage, all kinds of things.

Julienne Lauler: Yeah, mmm. I’m getting hungry. I think we need to eat some of this food. Talking about it is making me hungry. So we have this gumbo here.

Kevin Lin: Gumbo is one of my favorite foods. It is not easy to make. And it's truly a hodgepodge. Cajun food and Creole food. A lot of people get that mixed up. It's a little confusing because there's a lot of overlap. Cajun country, it's in southern Louisiana, west, along the Mississippi. So, the history of Cajuns roughly is um, the Acadians.

Julienne Lauler: From Canada right?

Kevin Lin: French migrants moved to Canada that moved to Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, that area is called maritime. After, I think it was the Seven Years' War, they moved down there and tried to go to New Orleans, and the Creole just were like, you don't really belong here, go somewhere else. So they moved into the swamp. And in the swamp, everything is there.

All the meat, all the game. There's alligators, turtles, rabbits, squirrels, like almost anything you can imagine, ducks, all kinds of fowl. Louisiana is known as a sportsman's paradise for hunting, and so you could really live off the land, and so they did.

And so gumbo is really this mix of food.

So, I used to make this with my mom.

Julienne Laule: Oh, wow.

Kevin Lin: So it starts with a roux, which is French influence.

So you have a fat, usually a flavorless oil, like canola oil. Or sometimes people use duck fat or some other form of fat to make the roux. So you put flour in it one-to-one. You cook that typically almost until it's black. A lot of what you'll see is super, super dark. Not everybody cooks it that dark. There are sort of blonde roux and everything in between.

Then you put, what they call the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is more Spanish influence actually. So it's onions, green peppers, celery.

So you put that in, you cook that up, it basically melts into the soup. And then you put a protein in there. Oftentimes they're seafood combos that might have whole crab, broken up crabs in there, shrimp, crawfish. But the thickening agents in gumbo, there's actually four.

So okra, was one of the chief thickening agents that you put in gumbo. The theory – anyway I don't know if I believe it but this is what they say — is the name for gumbo came from the name for okra.

Julienne Lauler: Ohhhh.

Kevin Lin: So okra came from Africa with the slave trade from the French. And so the word for okra – ah I forget the name of the African language – Bantu, maybe something like that, is ki ngumbo. And so they just took it and made it gumbo. So there's okra, and then also - you'll put this powder called filé powder on top of it which is made from sassafras leaves.

So you got a little bit of influence of everything. The rice is also originally from Africa. Typically you pour your bowl of gumbo, you scoop it out, and then you put a little bit of rice on top.

Julienne Lauler: Put the rice on top!

Kevin Lin: Some people put potato salad on top which is also really good. I don't know where that came from but it's delicious.

Julienne Lauler: Sounds like gumbo is just perfectly representative of New Orleans just bringing together every influence.

Kevin Lin: Yeah, a little bit of everything. It was born from necessity. Most of the meat they just caught. Whether it was caught in traps, or hunted, or otherwise they would use whatever was on the land. A lot of the spices you see just grows naturally in the swamps.

A lot of the New Orleans foods cooked in one pot - you mix everything together. And that's the dish you eat that night.

Julienne Lauler: Like a big stew at all.

Kevin Lin: Yep, like a big stew.

Julienne Lauler: And then that means you can share with a lot of people too, which I think also seems very New Orleans. Just have a big pot. The whole community comes and just eats from it.

Kevin Lin: Yeah, it's true. You never know who's hungry.

Julienne Lauler: I read something. Apparently, there's a queen of Creole cuisine who said that like all the world's problems can be solved over a bowl of gumbo.

Kevin Lin: Oh, I believe that. Was that Leah Chase?

Julienne Lauler: Leah Chase! You know her!

Kevin Lin: And Dooky Chase. Yeah, very famous restaurant. She just passed not too long ago.

Julienne Lauler: So her legacy lives on.

Kevin Lin: One of the most influential people. Dooky Chase was well-known. They have this green gumbo, I don't think anyone ever really quite figured out how they made it. But she was known. She would go to what they called neutral grounds, the median in the street, and just pick whatever was fresh there and use that to cook that day.

They were also known for their fried chicken.

Julienne Lauler: She was like a forager. I’ve heard there’s been this research on foraging culture —

Kevin Lin: She’s like the OG, I mean, like New Orleans people. That's how they just went and found stuff and ate it.

Julienne Lauler: Ok, let’s try it out. This is like the first gumbo I've had since I was maybe 13 years old. Is it usually spicier than this or…?

Kevin Lin: So New Orleans is interesting. Everyone thinks New Orleans food is spicy, but it’s actually highly varied. It just depends on the person. It has a lot of peppers, so they use a lot of green and red bell peppers. They will use little picante peppers. They'll use cayenne, they'll use paprika. They'll use other things that are available and local, but most of the cooking is not that spicy.

New Orleans is also known for spicy hot sauce right? Yes. There's Tabasco. There's red dot there's–

Julienne Lauler: Tabasco is from New Orleans?

Kevin Lin: It's from Louisiana. Tabasco is made in Louisiana.

Crystal sauce, which is my favorite, is made in Louisiana, but none of that’s that spicy.

Some people make their foods super spicy.

Julienne Lauler: But can you make gumbo at home?

Kevin Lin" Yeah, It's very tedious to make. It does take some time. And you got to get the roux right. A lot of people screw up the roux. You burn it too much, or you cook it too fast.

Julienne Lauler: Don't screw up the roux.

Kevin Lin: That's it. You mess that up. You can't, you gotta start over.

Julienne Lauler: That’s the motto, that's what we learned here today.

Should we try the fried chicken and should we try it with some syrup?

Kevin Lin: Yeah, why not? You know there's a battle over who makes the best-fried chicken.

Julienne Lauler: You were saying Popeyes is from New Orleans.

Kevin Lin: Popeyes is from New Orleans. That's, that's the benchmark, right?

Al Copeland was the guy. He was a very famous restauranteur. Very ostentatious dude. He had a restaurant called Copeland's. He opened a bunch of places. He had this hot pink Lamborghini Diablo that everybody knew about. He actually rented or bought probably this whole right on the interstate in Metairie, right by Causeway.

He bought this open warehouse where you could see all of his fancy cars. He used to do this crazy thing where, over Christmas, he would put up these giant Christmas-like structures, like dinosaurs and palm trees. And people would drive down this little street just to wait to drive through his whole palatial house thing.

Julienne Lauler: He created your favorite…

Kevin Lin: Yeah, one of my favorite foods.

Cheers.

Julienne Lauler: Cheers.

Kevin Lin: Oh, it’s thigh. It looks like a tender, but it's actually thigh.

Julienne Lauler: So I'm guessing you didn't eat much chicken and waffles growing up or…?

Kevin Lin: I ate a lot of fried chicken. I didn't eat that many waffles. My mom would make stuff, french toast, pancakes. We didn't have a waffle machine, so we didn't eat waffles too much.

Julienne Lauler: When you're thinking about New Orleans food, what's the thing you miss the most?

Kevin Lin: Ooh, okay. I do love gumbo. I think it's a very, it’s just an all-around food.

Po’ boys I miss a lot. I just love sandwiches. And I think the po boys is just this like, the thing is okay. You can't recreate po’ boys anywhere else in the world.

Julienne Lauler: Why is that? It should be just a sandwich right?

Kevin Lin: You’d think so. Because the original po’ boy – you still can get this everywhere –is roast beef. Well, they call it beef debris. So as you’re roasting the beef, the beef falls off, and you scoop up all the beef in the gravy. So it's like extra gravy-ish and you put some gravy on it.

Po’ boys in New Orleans you either get dressed or undressed – undressed is just the meat in the bread. Dressed is lettuce, tomato, mayo, and maybe pickles depending on the place. A lot of people know po’ boys as like fried seafood. And so you get fried shrimp, fried catfish, fried oysters. I like it all — it's all really good.

But the bread. And I knew this before, because you hear this constantly as a kid, it's like, "oh, it's that Leidenheimerbread".

Julienne Lauler: The Leidenheimerbread, sounds German.

Kevin Lin: It is. And so there's something about the way they make the bread where it's super crispy on the outside. It just flakes off when you bite it, but it's not overdone. It's not hard. It's not like a baguette. Inside is like a pillow.

It’s just melts in your mouth, has a lot of flavor. We called it the French bread. You know, it's known as French bread, but I never had French bread like that.

Julienne Lauler: That's why I'm surprised to hear a German name.

Kevin Lin: Every time I go somewhere, they’re like "oh they got French bread", I'll try it. And actually, a lot of that same bakery does a lot of the Banh mi.

So there's actually a really big Vietnamese population in New Orleans as well. And so Banh mi is part of New Orleans culture. There are Asian influences. There’s a dish called Yaka Mein, which is like an Asian-influenced sort of noodle soup. It's a hangover cure.

There's this place way out in a town called Man Shack, way out in the swamps. It's an hour's drive out from New Orleans. And they have two awesome dishes there. One is the thin fried catfish. So they pound out the catfish almost to a chip width, then they deep fry it in corn meal. Super good. And then they have these massive soft-shell crabs. I don't know where they get them. But they're huge.

That place is awesome. I think eating in New Orleans is also just about everything around you. Like, there's music everywhere. People are just jibber-jabbering about anything. There's a lot of the ambiance and the noise you don't necessarily get elsewhere.

Julienne Lauler: Another thing that people really think about when they think of New Orleans is the music. And I remember when I was a teenager, I went to New Orleans. And I couldn't enter the bars at that time, I was too young.

I remember walking down Bourbon Street and hearing jazz and music coming from even the cracks in the sidewalk, like just emanating from everywhere. And I remember the city feeling so alive. I hope that soon I can go back.

But until then, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your experience with like music and arts and in New Orleans.

Kevin Lin: New Orleans has really deep musical history, in addition to all the various influences from the people that ended up there, the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans. A lot of folks from the Caribbean that move there. Jazz is I guess what the first thing is that people think of, a lot of the jazz that people understand today — the improv, the brass came from New Orleans.

Buddy Bolden, they call him the father of jazz. From there, you had Louis Armstrong and the Marsalis Family, and so on. But what a lot of people don't know is most American music is influenced through New Orleans. Rhythm and blues came from there. That ended up influencing, or heavily influenced by New Orleans musicians.

Then that ended up birthing rock and roll. So bounce music is a big New Orleans thing.

Julienne Lauler: I've never heard of that. Tell us about Bounce music.

Kevin Lin: Bounce music is actually twerking. So twerking came from bounce music. it's like intense Hip Hop. So twerking, they say came from New Orleans as well.

And then a lot of rap influence. So Cash Money and No Limit Record — that was big, back in the sort of 1980s, 1990s era, very influential in America. Lil Wayne came from there.

Julienne Lauler: No way!

Kevin Lin: Drake was originally signed by I think Cash Money. House of the Rising Sun is in New Orleans, the place itself. And so there's a lot of different kind of music. Jazz is everywhere.

Music, it just falls from the sky. If you ever go down Frenchmen Street, there's all the sort of famous places: DBA, Snug Harbor, Spotted Cat.

A lot of these places on Frenchmen Street, despite having music inside, there’s musicians playing on the street corner too. And they just take tips and that's how they make their money.

But it is deeply rooted in a lot of different types of music. Funk. A lot of the origins of funk are from there. The Meters, they're still performing. You can go to Preservation Hall — we saw Partners-N-Crime there, heavy influence for Snoop Dogg, and sort of his cohort of musicians.

Julienne Lauler: That’s amazing to think about all the influences that came to New Orleans, and then they work together to make this music that's now influenced pretty much everything we listened to.

So if we were going to go out on a Friday night in New Orleans, where would we go?

Kevin Lin: You got to eat somewhere first. There are good restaurants everywhere. I like hanging out uptown.

Julienne Lauler: What's uptown?

Kevin Lin: So, New Orleans people don't really use cardinal directions correctly. They'll say things like East and West, but they don't really mean east and west.

So downtown is what everybody knows: French Quarter. They call it downtown. Down in this context means down river.

You've got to remember, New Orleans did this weird W thing. The river kind of turns. Where you see New Orleans, it's kind of wrapped in the river - runs through. Then on the other side of the river, which is technically the west bank of the river, but is south of New Orleans is called the Westbank. And that's a whole part of New Orleans most people never see.

Then you go upriver; uptown, technically, geographically west of downtown New Orleans. But you're technically going up the river. You're going north the river.

Julienne Lauler: I’m lost!

Kevin Lin: The river goes west, and then people think riverside, lakeside. So if someone says lakeside, that means north. If someone says riverside, that means south. Okay?

So, very confusing.

But uptown. So what people know for uptown is the Garden District. And the reason people know the Garden District, for the most part, is because all these fancy celebrities bought houses there.

Julienne Lauler: Is that where they have the beautiful architecture?

Kevin Lin: Yes, big houses.

St. Charles, if you ever go to Mardi Gras, there’s always parades around St. Charles. That's these huge houses that have yards and everything. Then you go south of there. There's the Garden District is also just these beautiful old homes, gigantic mansions, so a lot of people know it for that. Then Commander's Palace, which is a famous restaurant there.

But uptown it's much more mellow than downtown, downtown is — as awesome as it is —it’s where the tourists all go so it gets pretty crazy over there.

Julienne Lauler: So eating, we're eating uptown.

Kevin Lin: I would say eat uptown.

So I have two favorite restaurants now. Atchafalaya – they're really good for brunch, but their dinners are also really good. It’s a small, little, Cajun-Creole spot.

And then, the best Mediterranean, middle eastern food I've ever had, is a place called Saba.

Julienne Lauler: Second only to the pita that your parents owned.

Kevin Lin: Of course, my parents' pita shop is always going to be the best. There's a whole history between Alon Shaya, he was an up-and-coming restaurateur. He got twisted up with the best group. He had a restaurant called Shaya at first, which became quite famous. And then he spun out and started a new one called Saba, so that place is great.

And then afterward if you want music, you gotta go to Frenchman Street. Frenchman Street is great. It's super chill. And you got to remember New Orleans, you could drink everywhere. You walk around with your drink, they give you a go-cup.

Julienne Lauler: That might be the only place in the US that you can do that.

Kevin Lin: Them and Vegas I think.

During COVID in San Francisco, they started relaxing the rules. You weren't supposed to walk around with your drinks, but you could stand outside of the bar, which was a start. But yeah, I think Frenchmen Street is great.

So there's an old bar called LaFitte’s Blacksmith Shop. I don't exactly remember the history, but there's something about it being the oldest bar in the south. But I'd say Frenchmen is the easy place to go for music.

And then I love just walking down Royal Street. There’s just all these cool little shops, antique stores.

Julienne Lauler: Can you still hear music as you're walking downwards?

Kevin Lin: You can hear it everywhere. It's everywhere.

So the Sazerac is a New Orleans-invented drink.

Julienne Lauler: I like Sazerac!

Kevin Lin: So that's from New Orleans.

And Peychauds Bitters, which is in Sazerac. That's also from New Orleans. And I believe this store that it was made in originally is on Royal Street. You can just buy these old muskets and like blunderbuss and weird guns.

Julienne Lauler: That sounds like a fun Friday night.

Kevin Lin: They got weird shops there. It's still fun to explore downtown. I just say it's a little bit hectic. I definitely encourage people to explore other parts of the city.

Julienne Lauler: New Orleans has also been through a lot in terms of kind of natural disasters. There's been Hurricane Katrina. There's been other hurricanes since then. And the city has always had to rebuild after these disasters, which in some ways is similar to what Taiwan deals with sometimes when in terms of typhoons, earthquakes.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about your experience growing up in New Orleans. Do you remember Hurricane Katrina? Where you were? What happened after that?

Kevin Lin: I was not there during Katrina. But I'd say, hurricanes were a regular occurrence. As I was growing up, we never left. My parents were never really worried about them. We just stuck through it, stayed at home, no big deal, prepared a little bit, power would go out.

Sometimes the house would flood a little bit, but nothing too bad. You get maybe a couple of inches of water in the house, that’s just normal. And that happened all the time. It rained so much the streets would flood, and we still had to drive to school when it was flooding.

And so they just accept it as part of life.

For Katrina, I was in New York, I had just graduated from college. I kept hearing about it in the news, and I kept calling my parents. And I was like, I think this is going to be bad. And they're like, no, it's fine. We've been through so many don't worry about it, don't stress.

I kept calling and kept calling them. And finally, 12 hours before landfall, they left and drove to Baton Rouge. And it took them — Baton Rouge is normally like a 45-50 minute drive from where we live. It took them all about eight hours to get to their friend's house.

Luckily they had a friend that allowed them to stay there. And then it hit, and then we didn't know what was going on. We had no idea. We couldn't see anything. No one could go back. They didn't let anybody back for weeks.

Julienne Lauler: I guess the cell phones were kind of not… it was hard to communicate.

Kevin Lin: It was hard to communicate. So they stayed there for a couple of weeks, and finally when they opened that part of town, where my parents live, back up, they went back home. By then it's too late. I mean, even if you don't get too much flooding damage.

New Orleans is semi-tropical. It's humid. It's hot. Mold and mildew was everywhere, the whole house inside. They also had a little strip mall - everything was basically destroyed, if not from water damage. There was water damage and a little bit of flooding damage in our case.

My parents didn't live in a place where it was like 20 feet of water. But the inside definitely flooded. You could see the water line. It was maybe six inches up - that wasn't the hard part for them. It was the roof had collapsed and water came in, and there's mold everywhere. So you really had to throw away most of your stuff, and you had to rip out everything.

Eventually I made it back and we were just cleaning up, you know? Sad. Throwing away all the stuff.

I remember seeing my dad find his diploma from his Ph.D., and it was covered in mold now. What are you going to do about it? So you just got to toss it, and it's just another memory. So we threw away a lot of stuff. We sat in the driveway eating MREs.

You know, what was really messed up about that whole experience? Insurance companies are terrible. They're just evil. At least in our experience on the home insurance side, they don't want to pay you. And they make you jump through hurdle after hurdle, hundreds of pages of paperwork, just to get a few thousand bucks when it's very clear what happened.

But what was crazy was, our neighborhood overall, lower middle class, middle-class neighborhood. Not that nice, you know, some older homes there. But very much suburbia.

We got a phone call probably a month and a half in. They were distributing trailers. This is a very white neighborhood. In fact, there was only one black kid that lived in my neighborhood growing up and they moved out. Everyone accused him of breaking into somebody's house. You know, that's the type of neighborhood it was.

We got a phone call saying, hey, do you want one of these trailers? FEMA was handing them out. My mom called me - I had left by then. She's like, do you think we should take one, live in it, we could put it in a driveway, house wasn't livable. They lived in my cousin's house, ten minutes away. Because they couldn't live in our house.

I was like you know what, mom? No, we don't need it. You should give it to somebody else.

Next thing, my neighbor got one, and their house was fine.

And you know, the trailers weren't going to the places that were really hit. They didn't call the black neighborhoods that were truly destroyed by this thing. It just makes you realize how unfair things really are there. And it continues to be a problem.

Poverty is, highest poverty rates out there, and highest crime rates in America, homicide rates. It sucks for all the beautiful things about New Orleans, it has major problems.

But it's still a great place to go. People still love it. People there still love it, which is why they come back after Katrina, after Ida, after everything. They still come back because of the community, the way it feels, and just how people are able to be themselves in any way they want.

Julienne Lauler: Since that time, I understand you've been working on some rebuilding efforts, or just kind of working with the community to address some of these issues. Can you talk a little bit about stuff you've been doing?

Kevin Lin: To be honest, I haven't done that much lately. I'm so far away now. I feel bad. I still keep in touch with folks there, I was trying to help for a little while, in the way I uniquely could, which was startup stuff. Help mentor some companies there. Invest in some companies there. Invested in a fund out there. Just to, since I'm not there most of the time. But it's, you know, I haven't done as much as I was before.

But I do love New Orleans. There are some great people out there doing stuff.

My friends, Gerard Ramos and John Bogran, Gerard started this company called Revelry. They're sort of like an outsourced dev shop, but they started spawning companies out of there. They also invest in other companies and give them development resources. So they're trying to become the central engines that are trying to help aspiring entrepreneurs get off the ground if they don’t know anything about development.

Julienne Lauler: From diverse backgrounds.

Kevin Lin: Yes. And they're focused on diverse backgrounds.

But it's tough. Education is core, because you still need a bank of local talent in the technology case, of course engineering and product. And then you need money. There's money everywhere, right? New Orleans has a lot of money too. It’s just the people with money have to have the desire to put it towards innovation.

And Gayle Benson, the Benson family, own the Saints, they're a big, big family out there. Gayle’s been trying to put together a fund to invest in early-stage startups, so you see it starting to happen. It takes time to build something like that.

Julienne Lauler: How have you seen the city change after Katrina? You were mentioning Hurricane Ida just recently.

Kevin Lin: So historically, in the last 10 years, I'd say I go two, three times a year. So I see it a decent amount. It's almost frozen in time in a good way. In a bad way, too, in the sense that, it's very hard to change things when they need to be changed. And “need to be changed” is obviously highly subjective. But I think you see a lot of the same people go back. A lot of people came back after Katrina, people came back after Ida.

But I think New Orleans overall was generally a little bit better off than it was during Katrina. New Orleans, as messed up as it is socio-economically, people don't really let it get to them too much. I think that's kind of the same here, which is why I like it. Everything that people think of New Orleans is still there.

Julienne Lauler: Yeah.

Kevin Lin: The spirit, the culture, the friendliness.

Julienne Lauler: It's amazing that people can be affected by these things that just kind of keep going.

Kevin Lin: Another day, you know. It sucks, but it's another day and you just got to get past it. I think not without its problems, of course, like any other place, but it does feel like it has this strong, very broad, and very deep foundation of arts and music, and food and culture in general. And hospitality.

Julienne Lauler: Any last words about New Orleans to share with us?

Kevin Lin: The last thing about New Orleans is definitely go for a visit. It's a lot of fun.

If you're coming from here, if you're listening in Taiwan and you need some help, let me know. There’s tons of Taiwanese people out there that can take care of you too. Thanks for listening, and hope you'll visit New Orleans.

Julienne Lauler: Thank you so much for joining us here today. Kevin, and just talking to us about your hometown, New Orleans, and it was wonderful to get to taste some New Orleans cooking with you.

Kevin Lin: Thanks for having me.

This episode is produced by Emily Y. Wu. Teresa Yen is our production coordinator and editor. Our editing assistant is Gerald Williams. Engineering supervisor is Dino Lin. Graphics by Logan Dosher. Thanks to Chloe Ramond and Mikey Redding for assisting.