A Storm Update: Shorter, Frequent News-Oriented Ski Podcast Coming in September

Also yes I keep injuring myself but yet here I am still alive

TLDR if you want to skip the long, dumb intro: I will launch a shorter, more frequent, news-oriented podcast format in September. It will not replace the newsletter or the long-form Storm Skiing Podcast, though it will reduce the frequency of the latter from historic levels.

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How incredible is the human body? Lockheed Matin’s F-35A fighter jets cost $83 million apiece. Each plane’s expected lifetime use is 8,000 hours, spread over 30 to 40 years. Hourly operating cost is $42,000. Annual maintenance ran $6.6 million per plane as of 2024. Pilot’s helmets cost $400,000 each. Each F-35 takes 18 months to build along a 24-hour-per-day assembly line staffed with 4,000 workers and 50 robots.

And yet, the human body, able to operate 24 hours per day for a century or longer, outlasts this intricate machine even with a far simpler production process. Human life expectancy in the United States is 79 years. Humans are generally free to make, by a process that requires only two workers and less than one minute. Humans then build themselves. And they are amazing. Nothing in life or make-believe has astonished me more than watching my daughter, now 18, emerge from her mother. She was still for a moment, then erupted. A fully formed human. How did this happen? Somehow the female body takes bread and chicken and lasagna and Coke and raspberries and refried beans and water and synthesizes them into a construct more complex and durable than any machine of human crafting.

Human maintenance, however, is not free. The pre-industrial human lifespan hovered around 30 years. Writing for The New York Times Magazine in 2021, Steven Johnson summarized the miracle of extended human longevity in a remarkable article (based on his book of similar name), How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life:

“…during the century since the end of the Great Influenza outbreak [1918-19], the average human life span has doubled. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this. If you were to publish a newspaper that came out just once a century, the banner headline surely would — or should — be the declaration of this incredible feat. … In a sense, human beings have been increasingly protected by an invisible shield, one that has been built, piece by piece, over the last few centuries, keeping us ever safer and further from death. It protects us through countless interventions, big and small: the chlorine in our drinking water, the ring vaccinations that rid the world of smallpox, the data centers mapping new outbreaks all around the planet.”

I often (maybe constantly), wonder about life before this “invisible shield.” Contemplating the carnage of Civil War battles, at the dawn of industrialized warfare but long before industrialized medicine, horrifies me. Our amazing, invisible-until-you-need-it medical system’s trauma interventions have saved my shattered leg and, two years later, my heart. To be inserted, unexpectedly, into a gigantic and intricate medical-industrial machine that you did not realize existed is humbling.

But broken legs and hearts are outlier events that make a good story. Less dramatic medical developments are no less a miracle. The cholesterol drugs and blood thinners prescribed to me post-heart incident. Childhood vaccines administered to me and my children. And all the machines and scanners and detectors: the colonoscopy that identified a small, benign polyp in my colon; the ultrasound that unveiled images of my children from their earliest weeks (it’s incredible to me that, even in the late 1970s, my parents had no idea of my sex until I popped out); and, my personal bestie at the moment, the MRI.

I say “bestie,” but I hate MRIs. The claustrophobia and noise. When technicians slid me into one about six years ago, I panic-buttoned my way directly back out to the room with a high ceiling that was not going to ingest me like Pinocchio’s whale. But over time, I’ve adopted a sequence of breathing – four breathes in, hold four counts, four counts out – that, along with keeping my eyes shut the entire time, has made the experience at least tolerable.

It’s a good thing, because I’ve had four MRI scans in the past year: one to determine whether the plate nailed to my left tib-fib was infected (it wasn’t); one to confirm that my left shoulder had rotator cuff tears (it did, along with a biceps tendon tear); one to examine my brain for abnormalities related to chronic migraines (all it showed was some dancing cartoon figurine surrounded by unreadably dense charts and spreadsheets); and a final one, this week, to root out the source of neck pain (it found three pinched spinal nerves and a slipped disk).

Like machines, people’s parts wear out. No trauma, just slow decline. In my case, a Manhattan doctor explained to me the following day, mild arthritis had infected my vertebrae. The miracle treatment: a 20-minute epidural infusion done onsite, same-day, under anesthesia. That was yesterday. I feel better already. In two weeks, I’ll return for a follow-up and, if needed, an additional infusion.

And how incredible is all that? The neck pain had erupted more than two years ago, waxing and waning and often making long drives or long hours at a computer – both crucial to my job – unbearable. Over the past couple of months, the stiffness and tension worsened to the point that I was borderline non-functional, constantly on ice packs, whisky or wine my bottled nightly painkillers. I couldn’t sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time, and rarely more than a few hours per night. But in less than a 30-hour span, Our Amazing Future identified and fixed all that with skin-penetrating scanners and a lightweight surgical setup.

Neck pain is the kind of thing that sounds too stupid to complain about. None of the drama of the brain or the heart, or even of a rash or cut. The only material representation of neck pain is complaining about neck pain. But what I’ve come to appreciate over a lifetime of ridiculous injuries is how interdependent this amazing human body is on its countless parts, and how debilitating and painful even the smallest ailment can be: toothaches, a polyp on the tongue, a jammed finger or toe. When the neck is squeezed into a constantly-wrenching vice grip, only the neck hurts, but the discomfort of that takes the rest of the body out with it.

Hopefully I’ve solved the problem (and hopefully my endless run of orthopedic woes will take a few years off). But the neck has contributed to a productivity drop. Unable to sit upright for any amount of time, sleeping poorly, and unable to summon the tremendous mental concentration required for writing, I’ve released content at an irregular pace. But I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I believe that the long-term improvements to The Storm that I’ve been contemplating will be worth the short-term productivity lag.

The big change will be in the podcast. I am proud of The Storm Skiing Podcast. When I launched in 2019, long-format interviews were the safest choice. I was best prepared, at that time, for one-on-one conversations with a deeply knowledgeable leader focused, usually, on a single ski area. The format has worked really well. The 227 episodes add up to a permanent archive of modern lift-served skiing’s inner workings, with many of the most accomplished individuals in the sport, a few of whom are now deceased. The pod has nearly 1.5 million downloads, and no doubt fueled The Storm’s rise from side-hustle startup by an industry unknown into a sustainable small business. And the North American Snowsports Journalists Association has honored the pod with the Harold Hirsch Award as best ski podcast for two consecutive years.

I’m not going to make haphazard changes. I don’t like fixing things that aren’t broken. And I don’t like doing things just for the sake of change. But it’s become apparent to me over the past year or so that the current Storm Skiing Podcast format is inadequate in several ways:

Frequency: In its best years, The Storm hit around 45 episodes. That’s pretty good, but most of the podcasts I listen to publish several times per week.

Duration: The average Storm pod times in at one hour and fifteen minutes. That’s appropriate for long-form interviews, but given the hyper-specific subject matter of each episode, it’s hard to scale the per-episode audience outside of the resort’s season passholders and hardcore ski nuts, especially with the smaller operations.

Relevance: About 70 percent of the average Storm Skiing Podcast is probably evergreen, meaning it’s covering unchangeable facts. But plans change, alliances shift, managers leave. Probably at least a quarter of my podcast guests are no longer in the role they represented on the podcast. Meanwhile, most pods I listen to are discussing what’s happening today.

Scope: Perhaps the greatest intangible benefit of The Storm is that I’ve sewn together a tremendous network of industry contacts. I regularly exchange texts, emails, and phone calls with a large proportion of my former guests. But with each episode so fixed on one resort, I can really only host each person on the podcast once every year or two, at most, no matter how charismatic or interesting they are.

Size: Man The Storm Skiing Podcast is carrying around a lot armor, from the write-up to the audio-video execution. Each pod takes 20 to 30 hours to assemble. For that reason, I often release them months after recording.

So what’s the fix? A new podcast format, focused on news, launching after Labor Day. It will air several times per week, many weeks, with the highest frequency in the September-to-December lead-up to ski season and the new-pass releases in the first half of March. It will be short – the goal is 30 to no more than 45 minutes. It will go live the same day I record it. It may actually air live and then immediately hit the archives. I will record emergency podcasts when something titanic – like last year’s sudden return of Rob Katz as Vail CEO – goes down. It will be video, though audio-only options will exist in all the places they do now. There will be little-to-no text component. It will blend analysis of current news, short guest interviews, and listener interaction. The guest list will blend big-timers who run resorts with lower-level employees in operations, communications, ski school, and ski patrol, offering a voice to the accomplished and knowledgeable up-and-comers, as well as journalists, policymakers, activists, and locals. It will live on the existing podcast channel on all platforms. It will be fully integrated into The Storm, and will come directly to your email, just as newsletters and podcasts do now. It will not replace The Storm Skiing Podcast, which I will continue to record 10 to 20 new episodes of each year. The rest of the newsletter will live on exactly as is for now, with all of its unpredictable willfulness and weirdness.

I still have a lot to figure out from a production pipeline and publishing point of view. The great thing about being a content creator in 2026 is that you no longer need a studio of 50 people to produce a newscast. The flip side to that is the bewildering mechanics of self-production. I still maintain that I am a writer with a podcast, not a podcaster with a newsletter, a distinction acutely obvious when I am flummoxed into an hour-long file transfer that would take someone else five seconds.

This week, a representative from one of the big ski companies texted to ask if I was working on a story about the impacts that the shift to permanent daylight savings time (a bill that passed the House and is now with the Senate), would have on skiing. I was not, so she sent me the statement they’d provided to their local congressional representative, and offered to brief me on the company’s approach to the issue and link me up with resort teams to explore the granular impacts in more detail. And I thought, “Yeah, that’s a great story, and how cool would it be to just say, ‘hey, let’s chat it up tomorrow on the pod?’”

This shift will, I believe, make The Storm an overall more relevant and influential source of ski news and analysis. I have to follow the world where it’s going, and it’s going to video, to more frequent pods with news-of-the-day flare. I’ve drawn the blueprint and laid the concrete. This tower is rising. But expect some degree of variation and experimentation as I figure out what this thing is, which parts of it are resonating, and how frequently I can produce them.

I’d welcome your thoughts, either in the comments below, or by replying to this email (or emailing skiing@substack.com). What do you think of the podcast refresh? Am I reading the room right here that we need a reset? What are some segments that other news-focused podcasts do that you’d like to see on The Storm? What else?

One of my goals is to build in benefits for paid subscribers, such as the ability to interact live with the show or submit questions for a weekly Q&A of the “what’s your least-favorite ski area and why?” variety. What would be useful or cool for you?