(Transcript) Embracing Modern Meteorology with Matthew Cappucci

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[00:00:00] Gabriel: Howdy folks and welcome back to another episode of the Chaser Chat podcast. I am I’m Gabriel Harbor, and I have a very special guest for all of you today, Matthew Cappucci. How’s it going?

[00:00:11] Matthew: Doing pretty well. Just got back from a lengthy trip to Europe. A lot of folks know I hardly ever take full relaxing vacations. So I was gone for about two weeks. My best friend Tess just took the BAR, and so this was her bar trip. And so we went to Sweden, Finland, Paris, and Copenhagen. Flew back late last night, and here I am, running on a little sleep.

[00:00:31] Gabriel: That is absolutely insane. I definitely want to ask you some questions about that, but I am impressed that you’re still going strong. I’m guessing that the jet lag is probably hitting pretty hard right now.

[00:00:41] Matthew: I’m immune to jet lag in that, for two and a half years, I worked five jobs at once. So I’d have every day be like a 20 hour day. Sleeping in a little two, three hour increments. And so like last night, for example, I got back around 7:45 to Dulles airport, west of DC and went through customs, made it back here. And I had three minutes to spare. Like I got here, ironed a shirt and was on live TV for Germany. And then my friend showed up for rooftop drinks and pizza. So I run things like a Japanese train schedule.

[00:01:11] Gabriel: You know what, as I was doing reconnaissance on your background before we scheduled this episode that does not surprise me at all. You have a CV that I think few people could match over the course of their entire career. And you’re what? Not even 30 yet, right?

[00:01:25] Matthew: I just turned 27 last week.

[00:01:28] Gabriel: Yeah, that is damn impressive, my friend. Damn impressive. And I’m excited to get into some of that. But before we do start with your background, I just want to ask you about that trip. Was there any weather related incidents at all? Did you chase Aurora Borealis or anything like that? Was it purely pleasure?

[00:01:43] Matthew: It was purely a non weather trip and it’s funny because all my friends know that I have a very difficult time unplugging. Not because I’m a workaholic, but because all of us I genuinely love the weather that much like I cannot put my phone down if there’s something happening. You know, I was up tweeting tornado warnings in D.C one night when I was in Paris until five in the morning local time there. But fortunately, there was no weather whatsoever on the trip. It was sunny every single day. And I think the universe almost forced that such that I could relax because… We all know there’s a single thunderstorm. I’d be, I wouldn’t be relaxing.

[00:02:17] Gabriel: Yep. No totally understand that. Totally understand that. All right. Let’s start with as far back as you would like to go. And I know for you, it does go back quite far. How did you first get interested in the weather and what set you on the trajectory that you’ve had for your career?

[00:02:32] Matthew: Gosh, when I was about two years old, I used to be obsessed with the anemometers spinning on people’s roofs. When I was five, my dad let me watch a documentary on tornadoes and I was hooked. And we had this little book on wind and there was a page about water spouts. And It just was always a thing. When I was seven, I saved my money from First Communion to buy a video camera so I could storm chase. I say that in air quotes because I grew up on Cape Cod Mass, and we all know that they don’t really get much in the way of tornado activity there. I guess now they do. Since 2018, they’ve had tornadoes every single year on the Cape. And coincidentally I graduated in 2019, so I missed them all. It was the worst. One tornado passed right near my house when I was in Africa a couple years ago. That was a bummer. But anyway, yeah. Have loved weather ever since when I was in high school. I was trying to figure out how to do weather as a career. Had always wanted to be a TV meteorologist. Then when I went to apply to colleges I searched around for good weather schools, settled on Cornell, but you might know that Cornell is extremely expensive. They wanted $37, 000 per year, and I just did not have that kind of money. And I’ve been working 40 hours a week for the longest time, whether it be selling golf balls, shoveling driveways, and then eventually tutoring, working as a landscaper, waiting tables. Every day after school, weekends, dawn till dusk. And still hadn’t saved enough money for college, applied for a bunch of scholarships, but I realized that Cornell would do like the Ivy league price match guarantee. And so I applied to Harvard on a whim, knew they had better financial aid to offer, got into to both Cornell matched the offer. So the offer went from 37 grand down to 10 grand. So both schools were affordable, but I wound up at Harvard, which didn’t have atmospheric sciences. Had to make my own major from scratch. It worked, went to MIT three days a week. It was the weirdest educational journey you can imagine, but wouldn’t have traded it for the world. And when I graduated, couldn’t find a job anywhere. TV jobs are paying dirt. TV jobs now are still for the most part paying dirt. I decided that I’d go to Wall Street.

[00:04:33] And then Jason at the Washington Post called, Jason Samenow, who’s the Capital Weather Gang’s editor. He’s one of the most talented folks in business, said, Hey, come on down to DC. We’ll give you a job. It’s not quite TV, but it’ll get your foot in the door. And from there, everything just blossomed. And so I wound up moving to DC. It’s my favorite city in the entire world. My apartment, this is an audio only podcast, so you can’t see out the window, but I have a 20th floor apartment that overlooks the city. There’s not a single building that blocks my view of the skyline. I love it. So I wound up very fortunate. Thanks to a lot of really nice people.

[00:05:04] Gabriel: You said something interesting, really interesting actually, at the beginning there when you were mentioning water spouts, because I think you, if I’m not mistaken, were the youngest ever presenter at the AMS, correct? And it was something to do with water spouts, right?

[00:05:16] Matthew: Yeah, so I was obsessed with water spouts growing up. Tornadoes, too, but we didn’t have any in Massachusetts. But there was an interesting event on July 24th, 2013, I believe it was, in Manomet, Massachusetts, where there were multiple water spouts that spun up along the leading edge of an outflow boundary. So for the folks at home, a cool air exhaust exiting thunderstorms. And the water spouts behaved very erratically because they were being steered by that cool air surge behind the outflow boundary. A couple came ashore and I started noticing that there were several repetitive events across eastern Massachusetts where if you had an outflow boundary, so that thunderstorm exhaust intersecting the coastline are propagating down the coastline, at a roughly right angle, you could get little vortices to spin up along the outflow boundary, get tilted vertically, stretched into water spouts, and oftentimes be pushed ashore as very weak tornadoes. And I wound up working with the local weather service there, trying to put together some examples of, cases when that had happened, look back at some of the data, and they ended up appending certain statements to thunderstorms that were producing water, that were producing outflow boundaries that basically matched that pattern such that we could warn both mariners and people at the coastline like, Hey, isolated water spots are possible. They would move erratically and potentially come ashore. If that’s the case, move inside and away from windows. So not quite tornado warnings, but enhanced phrasing and severe thunderstorm, especially marine warnings to accommodate that potential for landfall and water spouts in those outflow battery setups.

[00:06:48] So that was to be 14, 15. And it was nice because I got to present at the AMS broadcast conference in Nashville that year. And it was so much fun. I got to meet so many of my weather idols. I think I talked in the same panel discussion as, or not panel discussion, but like same conference session as Spann. And so my knees were shaking the entire time, but my knees still shake when I talk to Spann, which, because he’s that amazing, it was fun.

[00:07:14] Gabriel: Yeah, that had to be absolutely crazy to be 14 years old and be thrust into the middle of the height of meteorological academia. What do you remember the most about being at that conference? Besides of course, the weak knees when you were presenting in the same area as Spann.

[00:07:30] Matthew: One of the tricky things is when you’re 15, you can’t really check into a hotel room alone or even fly alone very easily. And so my mother came as did my aunt and my cousin, and we made like a little vacation of it. Well, they made a vacation. I was at the conference the whole time, but nobody would talk to me at first. They all thought my mother was a meteorologist and not to knock her. She’s the sweetest lady in the entire world. She’s a nurse. But no one in my family is super like sciencey or nerdy. And so people kept going up to her thinking she was a meteorologist and ignoring me. And I don’t think she knows. Every so often she impresses me when she’s there was a cumulus cloud today. I’m like, great job, mom. You’re on the ball. But yeah, eventually after I gave my talk, everybody was talking to me. They were so nice. And it was like night and day before and after I talked and I’ve gone back pretty much every year since. And it’s nice because the same folks who were once my mentors have now become my friends and sometimes they come to me for advice and so it’s like the weird switcheroo where, the little kid is now the peer and I love it. I still feel like a little kid inside sometimes. And yet now there are students coming to approach me and ask me questions and it’s the weirdest thing.

[00:08:36] Gabriel: So would you say that having that opportunity is something that really helped to set you up for the success that you’ve experienced since then?

[00:08:43] Matthew: Oh, 100%. Because in so many fields, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And the who you know also helps teach you so much in terms of the subject matter knowledge. I met so many amazing people who helped coach my broadcast style, who helped coach my writing style, who helped coach my social media approach. Hell, if we scroll back five, six years, we can see that I’ve definitely become more refined since in all those different facets. And so just the connections I’ve made, many of whom have become lifelong friends, have been invaluable. Dan Satterfield, for example, Chief Meteorologist at WBOC in Delmarva. He and I met back when I was in the Boston conference in 2012. It was August of 2012. And back then I was only 14 and, we became great friends. We’ve seen each other every year at the conferences since, but we’re friends outside of that.

[00:09:31] We flew to Chile a couple of years ago to see a total solar eclipse. We’ve gone to Nebraska together. We’re planning a trip to Spain in 2026. So many of these people who share the same passion are close friends and great mentors and colleagues. And, I’ve just met so many amazing people, so I highly recommend as many opportunities that students have to get involved, do it. And I think meteorology is a very unique field in that, if you’re 14, 15 years old, a medical conference is not going to let you present. A computer science conference, probably not going to let you present. But for the meteorology conference, for the AMS to let me present speaks volumes about how it’s run and people like Keith Sider, who, executive director for many years who fostered that environment that made it possible for me to present. It’s just such a great organization. I know NWA is similar for students too, and what they do for students really can’t be, emphasized enough. It just, it helps so much.

[00:10:25] Gabriel: I feel the same way oftentimes about this podcast, because folks like yourself and some of the other amazing guests that I’ve had on the show, you guys are like the Michael Jordans, the LeBron James is the Kobe Bryant’s of the meteorology industry. And yet somebody like myself is able to reach out, have a conversation like this. And it’s just, even somebody like Reed Timmer, who represents really like the absolute pinnacle of what you could hope to achieve in storm chasing and even someone like that. So accessible compared to what you would consider to be like the legends in other fields and I’ve always felt that it’s just such a welcoming and open community compared to a lot of others that I’ve experienced.

[00:11:05] Matthew: Oh yeah, like Tom Skilling wished me a happy birthday via Facebook Messenger the other day and sent me the nicest note. And you’ve seen the commercial, he’s Tom freaking Skilling. I just can’t believe how many people in this field are, how accessible they are, and that they’re real people. And it’s funny because, growing up I always watched a guy named Harvey Leonard in Boston on Channel 5, WCBB, the ABC affiliate up there. And then to see him at the conference, number one, I was like, I was 14, I was like, oh my gosh. Harvey’s three dimensional because I had only ever seen him on a TV screen. And I don’t know why, but the fact that he was like 3D just blew my mind. But then the fact that he’s become a mentor over the years and so many other people have. The giants are giants in the field, but also so humble and I love that about this field.

[00:11:49] Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You spoke a little bit earlier about not having a job right off the bat. And you looked at broadcast meteorology and weren’t too enthused about that as an option. What would you say about the state of pay when it comes to broadcast meteorologists? Because it’s almost become like a meme on social media where people will pick out broadcast meteorology jobs and post them and say, how the hell do you expect me to live on 30k a year when I’ve got 75 grand in student loan debt and I’m living in a city where my rent is going to be, over half of my monthly paycheck. What are your thoughts on that? And do you see that improving any time in the future? Or do you think that’s just how it’s going to be?

[00:12:28] Matthew: So I have a very pessimistic view. But I also believe it’s a realistic view. I think a lot of folks, my age fell in love with a job that no longer exists. When I was growing up, they had a five o’clock, five thirty – six o’clock and 11 o’clock evening newscast. And that was it. And you focused on putting together really good news, high quality products for those four newscasts. And you could do a good job. You might do seven, eight weather hits in the evening and they’d be really good hits. When I do TV, I do 58 hits sometimes during the course of a morning. The viewership is dropping so much in TV that in order to recoup even some semblance of the same amount of viewership, you have to have, basically 24 hour coverage. The station I used to work for, amazing station, great management, great people, but they were on close to 20 hours a day. And so that is taxing broadcasters far more than was the case generations ago. Now, it’s always been the case that little TV stations, little markets pay very little. The issue is that even those little wages are disproportionately lower than they used to be. I had a job offer from Monroe, Louisiana for 31 grand. I had Bakersfield, California for 29. 5. Even Oklahoma City, the Fox station there offered me, I think, 40 grand, which, you have to start somewhere. But at the same time, for students who graduate with student loans, that money is difficult to survive on to begin with, never mind repaying loans, having debt grow. And in the past, students would be able to work their way up over the course of several years or decades to top markets. Nowadays, even the top markets aren’t paying what they used to, and salaries are coming down quickly. I will say very candidly, the main reason I’m not in local TV here in D. C. anymore is because I got a massive pay cut. Eleven days before the end of my contract, this, I had, two or three back to back contracts. Eleven days before the end, I found out I’d be getting a 30 plus percent pay cut. It happens. I’m not there anymore. At the same time, I work for a digital platform that gave me a 30 percent pay raise to counteract that. And, it just, it shows where the industry is these days. I hold no hard feelings. I love the station. I love the management. I love the people there, but that’s the reality of TV these days. So for the folks who are my age and younger, we won’t be able to have 20, 30, 40 year careers in TV.

[00:14:48] I’ve had a number of friends, my age, whose stations have shut down, closed down. For those who are still in the business, the pay is not going to keep up with inflation. The ceiling is coming down. You’re not going to have the chief meteorologist who make 500 grand or more these days, even top markets, you’re going to make maybe half that. And those jobs will be few and far between, that folks need to be well rounded and be on all platforms. And that’s the reason why I never took a full time job at the TV station. They offered me full time and I said, no, because if I took full time, I’d have to sign a non compete. Which meant no more writing, no more radio, no more anything else, and in today’s day and age, you have to be everywhere because TV’s fizzling, as unfortunate as that is. And it’s tough to reconcile, the job I fell in love with doesn’t exist the way it was 20 years ago. That’s okay. Something new and exciting is going to emerge. Like with MyRadar, for example, I think we’re on the ground floor of something new, and I think a lot more outlets like that will begin popping up. So it’s more transition, but, TV’s not what it used to be.

[00:15:50] Gabriel: Yeah, I think of people like yourself and Aaron Jayjak who also works for MyRadar, and how ubiquitous people like you now are in the digital sphere. In a way, like you mentioned, you would never see with a high level chief meteorologist back in the day. They were married to their station. They were the face of that. And, that was who they were going to be for the next 30 years or so. What do you think has been the key to your success in actually managing all these different platforms and writing a book, which we’ll get to in a little bit here. Just taking on all this stuff at once, because I know there’s going to be a lot of people that are listening and they’re thinking to themselves, okay, Matthew, that sounds great and everything, for those of us who don’t have unlimited energy to, go on a European excursion for a week or two, and then get right back in the fold an hour or two after I get back in town. How would we go about doing something like this? Where would people start?

[00:16:42] Mathew: So the honest answer is I will do something only if I like it. And this sounds like such a privileged thing to say, but it’s not meant to sound like that. And what I mean by that is I do it because I love it. I don’t have to work four or five jobs. I can easily do one and still, save plenty. But I do it because I genuinely love it. Like I used to wake up every morning for work at about 2 to 15, throw on the suit, throw on the makeup, go to work, do TV from 4 a. m. to sometimes 10 or 11 a. m. during the commercial breaks, write a Washington Post article, prepare scripts for MyRadar, come home, film MyRadar for several hours, take a 30 to 90 minute nap, get up, do radio hits, teach students in the evening, run eight miles, have a small dinner, and then-

[00:17:22] Gabriel: I like the run eight miles that you just snuck in there. That’s crazy.

[00:17:27] Matthew: What little energy I had to try to stay slim for TV. But yeah, I did it because I loved it because the fact that someone will pay me to talk about weather, I just, I love. So I think honestly, viewers, readers, consumers can see if someone’s not having fun. And, there are tons of people, you turn on the TV, there are tons of people who are not having fun. There are tons of people writing who are not having fun. So I think being successful means that you inherently have to love what you’re doing or enjoy what you’re doing because it’s like teaching. You can tell which teachers loved their jobs and which teachers didn’t. And the students could tell when they walked into a classroom if they were going to have a good day or not a good day based on if the teacher liked what they were doing or not.

[00:18:04] Same thing’s true in any industry, especially a public facing industry. When I do radio, people can tell that I love talking about the weather. People can tell that I’m very invested. There were days in D. C. When I get on the air and say, You know what? D.C’s Weather’s boring today. Let’s take a look at this Angela bore in Texas and people at home would learn something. And I highly doubt Joe Schmoe was waking up in the morning at five a. m. being like let’s turn on, channel whatever so I can learn about Angela bore. But I think when they turn on TV, see someone passionate talking about something they love, sharing that passion, suddenly it incites a little bit of enthusiasm in them. Maybe only for 30 seconds or a minute, but that’s long enough to captivate someone in today’s day and age. And so truly, it doesn’t matter how much energy you have, you’ll find the energy if you love it, but cater your career towards doing what you love, but monetizing it too. Now that’s not to say I don’t get tired.

[00:18:59] There were days when I’d have to pull over at a gas station and sleep for 20 minutes coming home from work. Or there were days where I would literally sleep behind the green screen. I don’t know if they knew I did that, but I did. There are, there have been times when, you know, between meetings that have worked for MyRadar, I’ll take a little 5-10 minute nap. Everyone knows this. They know that I’m inaccessible between 2-2:45 every day, but you find the energy to do it if you love it. And if you can monetize it, all the better.

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[00:20:12] Gabriel: That’s cool to hear. Now you mentioned MyRadar and how you’re really excited about them being on like the precipice of something even bigger than what they are now, really tapping into something special into the future. Could you share a little bit about that and what you think your role with them might be moving forward?

[00:20:30] Matthew: Yeah. So, MyRadar started, I want to say 15 years ago when a guy named Andy Green, who is like this tech genius. Brilliant guy, he, and he’s a coolest person. He looks like this surfer dude. If you saw him on the street. He’s so humble. So down to earth, he started the first internet service company in Rhode Island, profited off that, jumped around to a bunch of different industries, created an aviation weather app just for fun to help his own flying. He’s a pilot, his friends liked it. He put it in the app store back in like 2008. When it was first, when apps were first becoming a thing and it took off. And it was free at a time when other apps were 99 cents. And so people downloaded MyRadar, loved it and kept spreading it to their friends. And now we have 15 million monthly users and that’s a huge user base for an app.

[00:21:18] Now, the cool thing about MyRadar is that it’s the only weather app that also has daily push video. So daily focus videos for specific regions that are experiencing active weather. And it’s cool because when I did TV, it was like a one size fits all. We’d cover the entire area and whether or not weather was a thing that day and you’d have to wait until 5 whatever for the forecast. Whereas with MyRadar, We have data that says, this user might be located in Pocatello, Idaho, and we know where that phone is. And so we can draw a box around a map or box around an area that’s getting bad weather. I can produce a video forecast for them and we can push it to them, make their phone buzz instantly. And so they have down to the second weather information from me on camera. So like a TV style forecast right at their fingertips, they don’t have to wait for it. We’re not bugging them on their days off or, when the weather’s not doing anything. We’re only letting them know when the weather’s active. And it’s so cool. There’ve been times when a squall line might be pushing through and, 30 minutes before we’ll send out an alert where I’m on camera explaining where kinks in the line are and why tornado circulations are possible. And it’ll come through within an hour. And so we can do some really cool short fused stuff that I don’t think any other app is in a position to do. I don’t think any TV station is in a position to do. And the fact that we have so many users who eat this up and love it and really live by it during hurricane season. We might get a quarter million views. multiple times per day during big hurricane episodes. And we know it’s going to the people who need it because it’s based on location.

[00:22:57] Gabriel: Just as you were explaining that, it really dawned on me that what you’re describing is something that bridges the gap between the classical broadcast, weather on television and like the live streamers who are out there. I’m not going to say that the streams are boring, but you definitely can’t expect a person with a busy day to be tuned into a live stream just sitting there listening to a storm chaser talked his chat for two or three hours before something happens. So having that push notification come in with the very timely video explaining Hey, you’re in this geofenced located area, and here’s what you’re about to experience in the next 15, 20, 30 minutes. I can see why that would be incredibly useful and something that people would really have a desire for.

[00:23:44] Matthew: Absolutely. And, I think in media in general, if we want someone to give us their time, consume our content, it, whatever we produce has to be greater than different from, or more useful than whatever the competition is. And it has to entertain, educate, or inspire somehow. And historically has been to inform. That’s why TV was King because for decades, the only place to go for weather information was as a TV. And so it was purely informational. Nowadays, you can get the weather literally from anywhere, newspaper, TV, Twitter, Facebook, heck, Tinder, my Tinder matches know the weather, you can get weather information.

[00:24:24] Gabriel: I’m going to use that from now on, by the way, thank you for the idea.

[00:24:27] Matthew: Of course. But realistically, you can get weather information from anywhere. So the reason TV is faltering is because TV is in this identity crisis where they’re trying to be both informational and, entertaining, but they’re not sure how entertaining to be. And, you can get information anywhere. So are they trying to be inspired? There’s this whole thing with the online platforms, folks like Ryan Hall are doing a great job of being both informational and highly entertaining. And especially nowadays. People are not loyal to brands. They’re loyal to people.

[00:24:59] And so for the brands who are people, whether it be Reed Timmer, whether it be Ryan Hall, whether it be Aaron, J Jack, whether it be, I don’t know if I’m to the brand level yet, but maybe me someday, I think that’s the success to these online streamers, what we do, and what I think is especially valuable is that we keep that sort of personal brand, personal touch, like my videos and Erica’s videos are vastly different. And we both retain our own personal brands and people love that. I think the fact that we have the user location data really helps make things even more timely than a stream. And I think that’s, we also do live streaming too, and we’re beefing up our streaming capabilities for late 2024 and early 2025, which has made a big investment. I think it’s a new medium. No one’s really doing it yet. I’d like to foray more into the YouTube space as well, which we’ll be doing in the coming quarter, but yeah, a lot of exciting stuff we’re doing.

[00:25:52] Gabriel: Switching focus to you as an author, which again, hat tip, crazy to think that you’re out there, gallivanting around the United States, covering weather everywhere, and you still find time to write a book. What was the inspiration for that? And what are your plans for being an author into the future? Because I think that there’s something timeless about books that maybe gets lost in the shuffle of doing these little quick hits that you’re talking about every single day. Obviously they’re great and they’re entertaining and informative for people, but the book is something that, someone’s going to put on the shelf. They’re going to have it there for 10, 15, 20 years, maybe even pass it along to their children. So I like the juxtaposition and the timeless quality there.

[00:26:32] Matthew: Yeah. So writing book had always been on my bucket list, but finding out how to do it was challenging. I tried in college, nothing really came about. And then when I moved down to DC literary agency down the street, randomly stalked my email, found my email address and emailed me and said, Hey, we follow your stuff in the Washington Post. You have a really unique, different writing style that we think would do really well for a book. Would you ever want to write a book? I said, sure. And so we met for coffee and, discussed back and forth. And this was back when I was, I want to say, 21, just turning 22, my first year in D. C. I was only working for the Washington Post at that point. And we hashed around some ideas and, some things stuck, some things didn’t.

[00:27:11] And then the pandemic came. And everything shut down. Publishing stopped, the industry just fell apart. And that put my proposal on hold. During the pandemic, the first year I didn’t really do much of anything, and the second year when travel was beginning to become more feasible, I said, screw it. I’m sitting at home, I’m working remote, I’m bored as hell, and I texted a buddy of mine one day, and I said, you know what? Flights tomorrow to Alaska are $200 round trip. Want to go see the Northern Lights with me? And he said, okay. No, he wasn’t a weather friend, he was just literally a friend down the street. And like idiots, the two of us in March of 2021 boarded a plane to Fairbanks, Alaska. Now, I was 23. And fun fact, if you’re 23, you cannot rent a car without paying some insane surcharge. And so we couldn’t rent a car. So we got to Alaska and I had a bright idea of renting a U Haul van. So it’s 14 degrees outside and both of us are in this U Haul van driving around doing donuts in the Walmart parking lot, hunting for the Northern Lights.

[00:28:11] We see the Northern Lights, we get to fly beneath them in the airplane. We, there’s nothing to do in Fairbanks, Alaska in March. So we went and played bingo with the old people at one o’clock in the morning. We nearly hit a moose, like all these random things. I brought this buddy to storm chasing a couple months later because, I had all the time in the world since I was only working remote for the Washington Post. And so storm chased, got seven tornadoes, did a bunch of hurricane stuff, went down to see the meteor shower in the Atacama Desert, did all this stuff. And fast forward to mid 2021. I get a call from the local station here in DC, Fox 5 saying they had basically responded to my Twitter DM.

[00:28:51] I had a glass of wine one night, DMed them, and I was like, Hey, I see you have an opening. I no experience, but you should gimme a shot. And lo and behold, they did. And suddenly I found myself on TV in DC, which was my absolute dream job. Best boss in the whole world, Paul McGonigal. And suddenly my whole life came together and the literary agency reached back out and said, you know what? We followed you for the past year and a half. This is your book. This is the story, what you’ve been out seeing, what you’ve been doing, the science behind it, how it all came together. And we put together a proposal very quickly. And to my surprise, a publisher reached out and said, Hey we’ll buy it.

[00:29:28] And the group, the agency said to me, do you want to shop around for other offers? I said, no, I don’t know if we’ll get any, let’s take this one immediately. And so we did, and they said to me, I could take a year or two to write it. And I said, no, what’s the earliest we can publish. I said, August of 2022.

[00:29:44] I said, when would you need it by? And mind you, it’s now July and August of 2021. They said, we need it by December 1st. I said, okay. So I had 89 days to write 92, 000 words. And also, I was working five jobs at a time, and somehow, I did it. Every commercial break, I’d be typing frantically, every car ride, I’d be typing frantically. But it was a fun book to write because it was all my favorite adventures and my favorite people. And, some characters stick around for additional volumes, additional books, and, it’s nice that people get to meet the folks in my life who have made all this possible.

[00:30:16] Gabriel: What is that book title again, and where can people find it if they want to pick up a copy?

[00:30:20] Matthew: “Looking Up: The True Adventures of a Storm Chasing Weather Nerd” available anywhere books are sold. And then I had another book come out last year that is a Oh, a kid’s book. It’s more like a weather textbook for students. And when I say it’s good for anyone literally from age 8 to 80, it is. It’s not your typical weather book as I’m sure you can imagine because it gets very nerdy and complex but soft serve. Like I explained the brown ocean effect to third graders. I explained what cyclostrophic balance is in a way that a fifth grader can understand. It’s very technical, but very accessible. It’s a weird book and a fun book, and I like it, except there’s a typo on page 111 that is eating away at my soul.

[00:31:03] Gabriel: Alright, you heard it, people. You gotta get the white out and correct that for him if you have a copy at home.

[00:31:07] Matthew: Yeah, that was all my fault. I wrote the final chapter when I was on vacation in Italy and I was actually on a beach and I think I just I don’t know, I must have had the sun in my eyes or something.

[00:31:16] Gabriel: I like what you said about explaining these difficult concepts in a distilled way that people who are younger can understand. There’s this idea that I really love called The Zone of Proximal Development, basically that none of us really actually better ourselves and progress forward and whatever it is we would like to do in life, unless we are at the precipice of our own abilities being pushed into unfamiliar territory and being forced to learn as we go. And it sounds like that is the balance that you were striking with these ideas in the book that you wrote.

[00:31:52] Matthew: Yeah. And again, I think that’s been central to my career thus far in that. I’m known for being very technical, but accessible. I try to do soft-serve science. There’ve been times I went on TV and I showed them a mesoscale convective vortex. And I said, Hey, this is what’s going to cause our weather and DC today. Let’s talk about it. I’ve shown vorticity on air. I’ve shown, sound things on air. I’ve shown 3d stuff on air. I’ve gone outside. I’ve literally like, ran off the set on TV and come back in with a frozen branch before to explain icing and rhyme ice and crystalline structures. We’ve done cloud microphysics on TV before, and, at first, I think everyone had their doubts about whether or not it would work. And nowadays, it’s taken off. All these international outlets are calling BBC News, DW News, Sky News Arabia, Australia. I do them probably, once a week each. And I think there’s an appetite for people to satisfy their curiosity.

[00:32:45] I think so often, we stop learning in life, and that’s why life gets boring. When I watch the weather with most meteorologists, even my competitors, I turn on the TV, I watch them, They show the current temperature, Whoop-De-Freaking-Do, they show the relative humidity or the dew point, they don’t explain what dew point is, they show the future cast, which an app can do, and then they show the 7 day forecast with panels, or they show a panel being like, wow, 7 o’clock is going to be 5 degrees warmer than 3 o’clock, so look, the bar’s up, and it shows like a little bar graph, and there’s no value added. This is all stuff the iPhone app can do. And so we’re, wasting an enormous opportunity to teach people something new and push the boundaries of what they can understand and edify them. And so my entire career is not me being, a TV personality or, a weather personality. It’s me being a teacher who happens to stand in front of a TV camera or happens to stand in front of a camera that’s broadcast to, a quarter million people on an app or happens to, do these TV and radio hits because I just happen to be a teacher that teaches weather. That’s the way that we need to frame our careers. And that’s how I frame mine. I’m not, a personality. I’m a teacher and that’s my main goal always.

[00:34:00] Gabriel: And I think people really appreciate it, too, when they’re not talked down to, but they’re actually given information that is maybe a little outside of their comfort zone, given an explanation for it, and then basically told, here you go do what you want with it, and if you’re interested, there’s a whole other world of information that you can dive into if this is something that you find fascinating.

[00:34:22] Matthew: Yeah, and I think people are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. So often we don’t use big words because we’re taught that a big word will scare viewers. Big word will scare viewers if you don’t explain what it means. Vorticity. Oh my gosh, what the hell does that mean? That was, if I say there’s a pocket of vorticity coming today. Should I jump out the window? Should I duck and cover? What do I do? But if I say, Hey, we have this pocket of vorticity or spin moving towards us. That’s going to help enhance upward motion and boost the chance that showers and thunderstorms will form this afternoon. And suddenly viewers like, oh, I see this spin in the weather system on the satellite that’s coming this way. That’s why there’s going to be storms today. And they can make sense of it. And I think that education aspect is empowering. The more we teach people, the more they feel empowered to react to the weather, understand the weather and make smart decisions for themselves.

[00:35:15] Gabriel: Keeping on that theme of being taught, it does seem like from what you were sharing that you were taught a lot of things when you were writing that book. What were some of the lessons?

[00:35:24] Matthew: You should always feel something when you’re writing. And when I write for the Washington Post, I’m not saying like I’m emotional over temperatures, but when I’m writing a book, if you want people to join you on your personal journey, you have to spill some stuff. You have to share some stuff and you have to feel a little bit. They should swell with pride when you have something exciting happen. And they should be, the viewer should be crying there with you when something bad happens. There were chapters I was writing where I was tearing up and I was sad, literally, in a restaurant called Dos Amigos, a Mexican restaurant down the street where I wrote the book.

[00:35:55] There were times I was sitting there with a margarita writing this book and like tears streaming down my face because it was a sad chapter. There were times when I was grinning at my computer screen as I’m sitting on the subway going to work, writing something. And so if you’re writing a book, you should be feeling something the entire time because if you feel something writing it, then the viewer or the reader will feel something reading it. And that’s always the goal of a book, to make them feel something. Because if they read something without feeling anything, then they’re not experiencing your story. They’re just being narrated to.

[00:36:29] Gabriel: Did you find that easy to imbue that emotion into the words that you were writing, or did you have to really focus on how you were going to bring that to life on the page?

[00:36:38] Matthew: Truth be told, I found it very easy because I think that I wear my heart on my sleeve. Anyone who’s ever seen me on Twitter knows this. I’m a very straight shooter. What you see is what you get. And so I think that was also to my success in TV and, has helped me brand wise so far. And that’s why people I think seem to like me because I’m genuine. So many people craft this TV voice or TV persona or, social media persona, that’s not actually them. It’s just not genuine. With me, if I have a bad day, people know I’m having a bad day. If I have a good day, great. I caught a slug the other day when I was in, where the hell was I? The Åland Islands, Finland. And I posted it on Twitter because it made me happy and it was cool. And people like that. And so I think, the more genuine you are, the better your writing will be, but also the more relatable you’ll be to viewers and the more your brand will work. And I think that’s also true for broadcasting. That’s also true for success in the industry. If you want to gain trust, Yes, you have to know your stuff, but you also have to prove that you’re human to have that human connection. People follow me not because I’m the smartest meteorologist. I sure as hell am not. They follow me because they like me and when we’re interacting, they feel like it’s a conversation and they can trust me. And so that trust comes not only from knowing your stuff, but also establishing connection through being genuine.

[00:37:57] Gabriel: I think that is an excellent answer. And I’ve got one more thing that I want to bring up here. Before I let you go, I know you’ve got somewhere to be tonight, but you set me up perfectly for this. You said earlier that people don’t have loyalty to brands anymore. And I just have to say counterpoint: Waffle House.

[00:38:14] Matthew: It’s funny. I see no matter how much money I ever make, I will be- I like cheap things, and Waffle House is the epitome of cheap things, but it’s so good! You go in there, and sure, you might stick to the booth, and sure, there might be a little brawl, and maybe one or two people in there are a little bit tipsy, but the food is always good, they’re open 24/7. I always joke that Waffle House is like my church. They’re open all the time. They don’t judge you. They don’t care what time you show up rich, poor, sickness, health, whatever. They don’t care who you bring, what you look like. Waffle house is the way the church should be. And so I just, I love waffle house and all the times I’ve traveled, Waffle House is always there, especially because Waffle House is always storm chase territory. And you know what I found? Waffle House is a great litmus test for a second or third date. You bring someone to Waffle House, if you have a good time, they’re a keeper. If they complain, set them free.

[00:39:05] Gabriel: I like the one two combo, by the way. You give them the forecast on Tinder to see if you want that initial date. And then the second or third date rolls around, you take them to Waffle House. You’ve already known, you’ve gotten all the information you need at that point.

[00:39:16] Matthew: I’m like, if someone doesn’t like me by that point it’s not gonna get more exciting. I chase tornadoes for a living, for crying out loud. I’m fun. But, they also should know what they’re, dealing with.

[00:39:25] Gabriel: Absolutely. I think that’s a good place for us to leave the conversation. Matthew, absolutely wonderful talking with you. Before I let you go, could you tell people where they could find you on any social media platforms? Any, MyRadar type stuff you want to plug and then again, just let people know about your books.

[00:39:40] Matthew: Yes, definitely. So we’re doing a contest or I guess like a sweepstakes to MyRadar where you can win an all expense paid storm chase trip for two to literally fly out to wherever I am next year and storm chase with me. So the entry is free. Just go online to MyRadar.Com. There’s a big red banner at the top where you can click for more information and to enter. And I think you can enter once per week, so hopefully you will win because I’d love to have company with me next year. You can find me everywhere at Matthew Capucci. Last name is spelled like cappuccino without the no. I’m fun. I’m most fun on Twitter, Facebook. I’m trying to get better at. TikTok, I’m lousy at. Instagram, I’ve been doing better lately and I’m crushing my arch nemesis, which is great. So help me crush my arch nemesis more on Instagram. Follow me there, make 5 million accounts and just follow me so I have more followers. And yeah, interact with me. I always respond. People seem so surprised when I respond to messages, but I always respond.

[00:40:38] Gabriel: Awesome. Thank you again, Matthew. Great conversation. You have a wonderful night.

[00:40:42] Gabriel: Thank you so much. It was great meeting you.

[00:40:43] Gabriel: Thanks for listening. If you’re not already subscribed, hit that button right now and then make sure notifications are turned on so you never miss an episode again. There are lots of ways to show your support for Chaser Chat. You can pick up something from the merch store, leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, leave a comment and a like on YouTube, or just share the link to this episode on your preferred social media platform.

[00:41:04] Thanks again for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next episode.