Small Lake City

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 opportunities for individuals with disabilities while building a community where everyone feels welcome. What started as ...

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 questions about transparency, NDAs, and who gets heard when a project is this big. Then we shift to th...

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 he thought about his career, and how that eventually led to building Dragonsteel and going direct...

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 zero-drop approach, and what it was actually like trying to build a shoe company from scratch. Fro...

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 the company down — but only after three people died. We break down what the DLC is calling for, why the Legislat...