Booming

If you have sticker shock at the grocery store, you’re not alone. In Seattle, the cost of groceries is about 30% higher today than before the pandemic. 

Those high prices are straining family budgets and causing many people to change how they shop.

Today, creative hacks for putting food on the table now that your dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to. 

GUESTS:
Rebecca Cho...

Twenty years ago, buying a house in Seattle felt like a stretch. Today, it feels like you need to win the lottery. 

Homeownership is slipping out of reach for a lot of people, especially those with modest incomes. 

But there’s a movement underway in Washington State -- one that could bring housing costs back within reach. 

State legislators want to make it legal to live in an RV in someone’...

Data centers needed more space, so they literally moved there. 

This week, Elon Musk announced he has merged his rocket company, Space X – with his AI company, xAI. The reason? He wants to build AI data centers in space. 

But his company is not the only one that wants to take the cloud... off the planet. Various companies from Google to Blue Origin to smaller startups are looking to Earth's orbit as the next da...

This week, Amazon announced it's laying off 16,000 employees. 

It’s part two of a continued downsizing Amazon started in October, when it laid of 14,000 employees. Taken together, this is Amazon’s biggest reduction in force ever. This week's layoffs are also the latest in a series of tech downsizings over the past few years that have pushed Seattle’s unemployment rate well above the national rate.  

The cost of child care is at an all-time high. The typical American family with young kids now spends more on child care than housing.

In most of the developed world, the government pays for child care so parents can work and contribute to the economy. But free, universal child care is nearly unheard of in the U.S.  

At least it was until a few months ago. In November, New Mexico became the first ...

According to a Harvard economist, spending on data centers and artificial intelligence accounted for 92% of U.S. economic growth in the first half of last year.   

That's fueled speculation that we’re in an AI bubble, because spending on that level doesn’t feel sustainable. If the bubble pops and the spending stops, the shockwave could hit all of us. Past economic collapses led to bankruptcies, lost retir...

Austin, Texas is not a cheap place. But for the last few years, it’s been a real outlier. While many cities saw rent go up, Austin’s average rent actually fell. A lot. 

On today's episode, what is Austin doing right? And what could Seattle learn from it? 

GUEST:
Audrey McGlinchy, Housin...

Happy New Year! The Booming team is taking a week to rest and recharge before the new year begins...we’ve got lots of new episodes up our sleeve that we’re excited to share with you.  

In the meantime, we wanted to revisit some of our favorite episodes. This one is about the rising costs of Seattle sports tickets, and how you can enjoy games on a budget.

This episode first aired in November 2024 -- you can rea...

The Booming team is hard at work on some new episodes coming out next year. In the meantime, we wanted to revisit some of our favorite stories this holiday season.

We think this one will be particularly useful for those of you still doing some last-minute holiday shopping. It explores the ways AI is being used by some of your favorite retailers to get better at selling you stuff.

This story first aired in December 2024 -- you can r...

We all know the cost of living is really high in Seattle. Whether it's housing or groceries, this town is a tough place to make ends meet. 

But just how expensive is Seattle compared to other cities?

On today's episode, Monica talked to a researcher who sends armies of shoppers to find out. And we get his tips for making your dollar stretch as far as possible in this very expensive city.

GUEST:
James McCafferty, Director of...

The Pacific Northwest has been booming for decades, and home builders have struggled to keep up.  

That’s led to a housing shortage, homelessness crisis, and transportation headaches. But we may see an even bigger population boom here as climate change makes more places unlivable.  

Climate migration is difficult to study, and even harder to predict. But some researchers say a historic population shift has...

You may have heard that the economy is maybe... definitely... probably... in an “AI bubble.” 

Companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build the AI infrastructure of the future. The hope is all that spending will pay off with super-advanced AI that will more than cover the cost of building it.

But that payoff isn’t coming — at least not yet. Companies are struggling to make a ...

Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you enjoy this bonus episode.

The Booming team recorded a live event a few weeks ago at the Seattle Public Library about the future of Seattle’s highways – so we wanted to drop it in the feed in case you missed it.  

Booming's Joshua McNichols co-hosted the event with Ian Coss. Coss is a reporter from WGBH in Boston and host of The Big Dig, a podcast about one of Boston’s bigg...

Our power grid is maxing out. We're plugging in electric cars, massive data centers, and heat pumps all at once. And it's not stopping anytime soon. Demand is expected to grow by 30% over the next ten years.  

And the increasing demand is spiking our energy bills. But Big Tech is betting on a solution straight out of science fiction. Nuclear fusion.

Today, could nuclear fusion fix our growing electricity crisis? Or is it ...

On our most recent episode, we reported on how tons of young people are choosing trade school over college out of fear of white-collar jobs drying up. Companies appear to be making big bets that AI can replace huge chunks of their workforces. 

It seems like “go to trade school” has become the new “learn to code.” 

But Dan Grossman -- professor and vice director of the University of Washin...

When it comes to the white-collar workforce, warning signals are blinking red. That uncertainty has more kids going blue collar. Trade schools are booming.

On today's episode, as artificial intelligence and economic uncertainty reshape the labor market, could trade schools be the new ticket to the American Dream?

We want to know what you think of the show, and what you'd like us to cover. Fill out our audience survey, linked h...

Seattle has more single people living alone than any major U.S. city.

The average new apartment size in Seattle is just 650 square feet -- that’s the smallest in the nation. If you’re single, that might work for you. But if you want to raise a family in a larger space, that can get expensive: $3500 a month on average for a 3-bedroom apartment. That’s more than double what a studi...

Seattle and Portland are wrestling for the title of the city with the lowest birth rate. But it's not just the Pacific Northwest. Birth rates are declining across the country. 

Environmentalists say there are benefits to slowing population growth, like less consumption and strain on resources. But economists start to worry when birth rates dip well below the replacement rate. That’s because it can mean slower econom...

In the debate over how fast we should be embracing artificial intelligence, one thing comes up again and again. The claim from tech CEOs that AI can cure cancer. 

So can it?

On today's episode, we get into what new AI developments in Seattle's biotech industry could mean for finding a cure. 

Sign up for our first FREE live event at KUOW.org/events. Join Joshua and The Big Dig podcast to explore the future of Sea...