Small Lake City

What happens when you walk away from a stable corporate career to pursue something completely different? This week on the Small Lake City Podcast, I'm joined by entrepreneur Andrew Hong to talk about taking risks, building businesses, navigating failure, and finding fulfillment along the way. Andrew grew up in Silicon Valley, worked in corporate consulting at KPMG, and eventually followed his...

A mysterious gravestone. An abandoned historic mill. And a monster supposedly hiding in the Great Salt Lake. Welcome to another episode of Spooky Lake City , where we're uncovering the strange stories, local legends, and mysterious history of Utah. This episode takes us to the Salt Lake City Cemetery to investigate Lilly Gray's infamous “Victim of the Beast 666” headstone, explores the h...

What does it mean to build a creative life on your own terms? This week on the Small Lake City Podcast, we're joined by Cat Palmer, a Salt Lake City photographer, artist, and longtime member of Utah's creative community. Cat's story begins in Southern California, where an early passion for photography led her to document the Los Angeles punk scene. Eventually, her journey brought he...

Utah has a dark side, and some of its creepiest stories are hiding in plain sight. 👻 Welcome to Spooky Lake City 2026! In this episode, we're diving into the haunted history, chilling ghost stories, mysterious locations, and disturbing events that have become part of Utah's darker history. From supposedly haunted buildings in Salt Lake City to unsettling legends and real-life tragedies,...

What if your morning coffee could change someone's life? ☕❤️ This week on the Small Lake City Podcast, I'm joined by Katie, co-founder of Lucky Ones Coffee, a Utah coffee shop that's doing a lot more than serving great coffee. Founded in 2018 by Katie and her co-founder Taylor, Lucky Ones Coffee was built around a simple but powerful mission: creating meaningful employment opportun...

456 nuclear reactors on federal land near Price, Utah, built to power AI data centers. That’s the core of Project Beehive, and it’s why Carbon County is suddenly the center of one of the wildest energy fights in the state. I walk through what Valor Atomics is proposing, what “small modular reactors” actually means in practice, and why a packed planning commission meeting is surfacing deeper questi...

Brandon Sanderson joins the Small Lake City Podcast to talk about Mistborn, Dragonsteel, his journey to becoming one of the biggest fantasy authors in the world, and the unconventional business he’s built around his books and fans. Brandon shares how he went from writing books in a friend’s basement to building a global fanbase, why a dispute between Amazon and his publisher helped change the way...

How did Altra go from experimenting with running shoes in Utah to becoming a global running brand? Brian Beckstead, co-founder of Altra, joins me on Small Lake City to tell the story behind one of Utah’s most recognizable companies. Brian shares how his own experiences with running and injuries led him to question traditional running shoe design, the early experiments that helped inspire Altra’s z...

Salt Lake City's weekly news update is here — and this week hit different. The Disability Law Center just dropped a damning report called "Profits Over People" — detailing how three Utahns with disabilities died in the care of a state-licensed company operating facilities with no heat, no running water, and staff admitting to locking residents in a basement at night. The state shut...

What if reading could be one of the best ways to meet people and build community in Salt Lake City? In this episode of the Small Lake City Podcast, I sit down with Amanda Warren of Bookish SLC to talk about how a love of books grew into a community bringing hundreds of people together around reading, connection, and shared experiences. Amanda shares how living in New York helped inspire the idea b...

A sitting Utah lieutenant governor says no to handing over private voter data, and the Trump administration’s DOJ responds with a formal investigation. I break down what the federal government is asking for, why Deidre Henderson argues it violates Utah law and privacy protections, and why this turns into a bigger states’ rights fight than a typical election administration story. The most telling d...

A single street sign downtown can be a trapdoor into a whole erased world. When we see “Japantown Street” near the Delta Center, it’s easy to assume it’s just a name. It isn’t. Today we sit down with filmmaker Kelyn, creator of the PBS short documentary “Japantown,” to follow the Japanese American history in Utah that built a real neighborhood and then watched it get dismantled by urban renewal, e...

At 6 a.m., Utah’s public lands story changes in a very real way. I’m walking through what it means as the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument cuts officially take effect, putting nearly 3 million acres into a new legal reality where mining claims can be staked and old pressure points come roaring back. We get specific about what areas are impacted, why ancestral cultural sit...

If you’ve spent any time in Salt Lake City, you’ve probably been to Sugar House Park. But about 75 years ago, instead of runners, sledders, playgrounds, and soccer fields, you would have found something very different: A prison. For nearly a century, the land that is now Sugar House Park was home to the Utah Territorial Penitentiary and later the Utah State Prison. And its history gets pretty wild...

What if getting good at art has less to do with talent—and more to do with learning how to see? Micah Christensen is an art historian, educator, painter, and the owner of Anthony’s Fine Art and Antiques in Salt Lake City. His path to the art world was anything but straightforward, taking him through opera, business, Harvard, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and a PhD studying how artists were trained f...

Southern Utah got hammered by monsoon storms, and the footage doesn’t fully capture how fast things can turn. We walk through the Bryce Canyon flash floods that stranded hikers across multiple trails, the rescue delays caused by lightning, and the death of a hiker found near the Fairyland Loop area. If you hike Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, or slot canyons, we also get practical about what “predictab...

Josh Rosenthal: Borderlands, Ultra Running & DFL Before DNF Josh Rosenthal is the founder of Borderlands , a trail running media company built around the people, stories, and culture that make the sport special. But Josh’s path to the trail running world started somewhere completely different. In this episode of the Small Lake City Podcast , Josh shares his journey from building businesses in...

Utah gave Tyson Foods tax breaks to bring jobs to Eagle Mountain. Now the plant is closing, 723 workers are losing their jobs — and the tax incentive agreement is still active. Welcome to the Small Lake City Weekly Update covering the biggest Salt Lake City and Utah news from the last 7 days. Each week, we break down the local headlines you need to know — from development, transportation and local...

Utah’s restaurant scene isn’t “all chains” anymore, but you have to know where to look and that’s where Amber (Mile High Food Fairy) comes in. We sit down with a pediatric dentist who somehow also became one of the most useful guides to Salt Lake City restaurants and Utah County food, and we get into the real mechanics of how people pick where to eat in 2026: saved posts, short-form video, and a h...

A surveillance camera shows up at a busy Mill Creek park, quietly scanning every passing license plate, and when someone asks who approved it, the answer is chillingly simple: nobody. We walk through what happened, why the camera was removed, and why the bigger story is the data trail. Who collects it, how long it lives on servers, and who can search it are the questions Utah still struggles to re...

A single question sits at the heart of this conversation: what do you send when someone you love is hurting and you can’t get on a plane? Marti, founder and CEO of Spoonful of Comfort, shares the true origin story behind her comfort food delivery brand, starting with the call every family dreads and the search for something more meaningful than flowers or candy. When she couldn’t find a chicken so...

Salt Lake City keeps getting compared to other Western cities, but the closer you look, the more the comparison breaks down. The mountains aren’t a weekend trip from here, they’re a backdrop you can touch, and that single detail changes how people visit, how they meet, and how the local economy grows. We’re joined by Kaitlin Eskelsen, CEO of Visit Salt Lake, to talk about what destination marketin...

A downtown eyesore locals jokingly called “Sears Lake” is finally turning into something real, and that’s only the start of a packed week. We break down the long-awaited redevelopment of the former Sears site near 300 West and 400 South, where Intermountain Health is beginning environmental remediation ahead of a new hospital campus. After years of stalled potential, the cleanup alone feels like t...

You can be fit, tough, and motivated and still get wrecked by a simple mistake like the wrong breakfast. We sit down with ultra runner and nutrition coach Jesse Rich to trace the real path from “I don’t like running” to finishing and competing in ultramarathons, including the hard-earned lessons that only show up when you’re deep into a 50K or staring down a 100-mile day. Jesse breaks down the mom...

109 degrees. That’s not a hot day, that’s a line in the history books, and Salt Lake City just crossed it. We recap a week where Utah breaks its all-time heat record, watches foothill fires flare up under extreme conditions, and then gets hit with monsoonal storms that turn burn scars into fast-moving flood threats. If you’ve been feeling like the weather is getting sharper and less predictable, w...