Jackson Free Press

Sergio Lugo II's day job is as a real-time operations supervisor for Comcast, but when he is not managing scheduling or performing other tasks for work, he hosts popular local podcast "Reality Breached."

Lugo got involved with podcasting when his friend, Carl Minor, who was a contributor on podcast and web community "Techpedition," wanted to go to video-game expo E3.

"I was like, 'OK, cool, I want to do that,'" Lugo says. "He said, 'If you write for this website and get on the podcast, we can try to finagle our way to get there.'"

They ended up going to E3, and afterward, Lugo became a mainstay on "Techpedition," eventually transitioning to host. In 2011, Lugo decided to launch his own podcast, "Reality Breached."

When coming up with a plan for it, he and his then-co-hosts, Reid Walker and Josh Alcaraz, decided to make it a video-game podcast. To keep the content fresh, their idea was to talk about specific topics, such as used games or female protagonists in games, on each episode.

"(We wanted to have) very focused conversations, so we're not just idiots who record themselves," he says.

Lugo says the biggest challenge in podcasting is finding an audience.

"Podcasts are so easy to produce and easy to put out there for people to hear, and they're free because (most people don't) charge for their podcasts," he says. "So everyone wants to do one, and everyone thinks theirs is better than everyone else's. In a sea of three million podcasts, how do you get attention? ... You want to have a focused enough podcast that people come and find you, but you don't want to be boxed in."

Since its early days, "Reality Breached" has expanded to feature a rotating lineup of co-hosts talking about multiple facets of nerd culture. Lugo has started partnering with other local podcasts, such as "Techpedition," and about a year ago, he started doing a monthly "Local Spotlight."

"It's been really what has pushed us through into the next level," he says. "... ... We don't always focus on exclusively Jackson stuff, but there's stuff to do in this town. There are places to go; there are interesting people. There's a culture here that I don't think gets enough attention outside of the clique that is Jackson. If you're in the Jackson culture, you know about the Jackson culture. Outside of that, this is just that place with potholes."

Lugo is married to local musician Ariel Blackwell, and they two kids.