Mark Warner was making dinner and listening to a podcast one evening in fall 2012 when he thought Hey, I should check out a ski podcast! But when he searched, he couldn’t find one. “That night as I was falling asleep a lightbulb went off,” he recalls. “I thought: I live in a town where I personally know dozens of the world’s biggest-name skiers.”
Warner snapped on the real light and jotted down some ideas before going back to bed. As with most brainstorms before they fully break, this one ruminated a while. Then, in spring 2013, Warner got serious and checked out a YouTube tutorial on how to make podcasts. “I started working on it that summer. The previous winter I’d skied a Khyber lap with a group that included Ian McIntosh and laid out the whole idea. McIntosh encouraged me to do it so he was my logical first guest.”
The Low Pressure Podcast (LPP in popular parlance) was born. Now heading into Season 9 with some 200 episodes in the can, Warner’s lightbulb has expanded into a de facto network with the recent addition of The Brett Tippie Podcast featuring the eponymous freeride mountain-bike legend, former snowboard racer, and gregarious event host. But that’s only the most recent waypoint in Warner’s saga. In the beginning it was just the Coquitlam native, his 13-year stint as a ski-mad Whistlerite for cred, and a new microphone.
From the outset, the LPP channelled the gestalt of people and personalities who’ve dedicated their lives to snowsports—pro and not so pro, reprobates and industry folk, filmmakers, photographers and writers (full disclosure—I’ve been on). Although he disavows favourites of any kind, noting he has great chats and learns from everybody, Warner will admit to a certain fascination with the photographers who hold up a mirror to the sport. “The conversations often end up on creativity—not just how they view skiing but how they use their craft to portray it. Not so much about their lives as the concept of what we all do.”
Naturally, leveraging stories out of people isn’t as easy as flicking a switch. Many are out of their element. “You need to have a few tricks in your back pocket,” says Warner. “For instance, I’ll often show the guest a piece of blank paper and say ‘These are all the questions I’ve written down’ and it loosens them right up. With someone who thinks they have nothing to say, I make it my mission to find something they’re enthused about. My job is to make people feel comfortable—to have a conversation and not conduct an interview. If a guest finishes a story with ‘I’ve never told anyone that before,’ I consider it a success.”
For his part, Warner has never had trouble talking. “I’ve served tables my entire adult life and you learn quickly how to figure out people in a few minutes—to gauge moods and get information without being intrusive—and talk.”
Fifteen years ago, he told someone he’d eventually find a way to talk about skiing and be paid for it. “Well, I’m halfway there—I have the opportunity to chat with the most amazing people in skiing and not get paid for it,” he jokes of the difficulty in keeping a good podcast going, of tracking down subjects, of the tech time involved and of getting sponsors—not to mention navigating the current glut of podcasts in a subject area he pioneered.
“I did an episode at the Ski Industries America show with a few other ski podcast hosts. One of the questions posed was ‘How often do you think about quitting?’ Most of them answered ‘Every day.’ I said ‘never.’”
During the entire life of LPP, in fact, Warner has worked fulltime at the usual Whistler roulette wheel of jobs. It’s a big commitment, and eight years of fascinating conversations with a hobby that just barely paid for itself got him thinking about what was next. It was time, proverbially, to shit or get off the pot. “During one crappy restaurant shift I started thinking about what my out was. Could I improve the episodes? By this point I was also filming each one, which required even more time and energy and made me realize I didn’t really have the resources to go to this next level. So, I thought about starting another podcast—which I knew how to do. It planted a seed. Then, in August 2019 I saw Brett Tippie during Crankworx and I knew he was the answer. I didn’t know him but walked straight over and introduced myself. We chatted a bit but I didn’t call him back until March. We talked some more and I agreed to produce a podcast for him. It took a bit longer than expected, but now it’s out and kicking.”
It’s likely not the end of Warner’s branching out. “I have ideas for doing a few bigger things with podcasts that haven’t really been done, but we’ll see if I can get the right sponsors.”
In other words—he’s ruminating.
Leslie Anthony is a Whistler-based author, editor, biologist and bon vivant who has never met a mountain he didn’t like.
