I was interviewed again on Lounging with Lanna Lee

Back in early 2012, I was on the first episode of Lanna Lee Maheux’s great podcast Lounging with Lanna Lee. Lanna has since published a podcast per week for the past 80 weeks and this week I was fortunate to be a guest on her show once again.

I particularly enjoy being a guest on Lanna’s podcast because I learn as much about myself as the listener does.

I touched on:

  • Honesty: Lanna asked what steps folks should be taking to change the world and I suggested that taking steps toward being honest with the self is important. As I get older, I am able to be more honest with myself, and to be more self-critical for the positive. I am more honest with myself about my relationship with consumption, with other people, with politics, with business, and from doing so I feel more equipped to commit myself to positive, important, and constructive action.
  • Turning 30: I turned 30 this year and I didn’t see my 30th year as this one turned out. In fact, I don’t think I really ever thought about being 30 until this year. The beginnings of online culture as we know it today began when I was a teenager and I had a Geocities website and was a frequent visitor to message boards from the age of 13 on. I could spend up to 10 – 12 hours on the Internet daily, and it sounds sort of lame in retrospect, but I grew up in a pretty rural place and I felt on the outside of a lot of things. I found new affinity groups, new music, new ideas, and community online. When we were kids, we heard in school that “in the future,” thanks to “the Information Super Highway,” we would go to school online and make our livings online. I figured this was bullshit, but for me it ended up working out that way.
  • Knack Factory: With regard to my work for Knack Factory, and my aesthetic preference, I don’t know if this is because I was raised on The Real World or because of the prolonged proliferation of reality television, or because of the popularization of independent documentary in the 90s, but I am almost exclusively interested in documentary style production at the moment. I enjoy showing things as close to the way they actually are as possible. This can be upsetting depending on who ends up seeing it. When we produced Food Coma TV, someone got in touch from the community I grew up in to wag a finger.  She was very upset about the language that was being used, and she felt as though we were promoting a specific sort of behavior.  I understood where she was coming from, but I responded as frankly and respectfully as possible, I worked with her son at a restaurant when we were 15, and I told her that she might not have known this, but at the time we were working in close proximity to white supremacists, drug addicts, sex addicts and all sorts of damaged folks. These can be the realities of the food industry, and that is what we were trying to show. By no means were we trying to glamorize it what we were showing off. It can be a big, dirty, gluttonous reality, and that is what we intended to show.
  • Food Coma TV: Speaking of which, I had lunch with Joel Beauchamp, one-time co-host of the now-defunct Food Coma TV earlier that day, and we had been joking that the reason that show worked is because it looked absolutely unsustainable, and like the people featured on screen were real. It looked messy and like it was going to fall apart, which is why it resonated with food industry folks in particular. There is always a moment where it all falls apart, or that’s what I remember about working in the industry. There are always these great folks who are amazing workers, and they’re so much fun to work with, but it is only a matter of time before they throw a spatula across the kitchen and walk out on a shift.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We talk about a million different things over the course of a very quick half hour and if you have the time to give it a listen, please consider doing so.

Alex Steed

About Alex Steed

Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was an insufferable teenager. He has run for the Statehouse and produced a successful web series. He now runs a content firm called Knack Factory with two guys who are a lot more talented than himself.