Booming

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 podc...

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 gr...

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 o...

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 ou...

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’...

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...

Electronic Arts (EA), one of the largest video game companies in the world, just sold for $55 billion, a record for a leveraged buyout.  The sale is sending shockwaves through Seattle's video game industry. Not just because a lot of people in Seattle worked on EA games, but because the company is banking its future on generative AI.  Generative AI has created a cultural conflict so deep,...

Coding looks like one of the first real-world skills AI is close to mastering. And AI coding tools are helping a lot more people build apps and websites – no technical expertise required.   But there’s a problem. It turns out, handing the keyboard over to a robot can end up costing more time and money than hiring a human to do that work.  Today, the unintended consequenc...

The long-awaited trial between Amazon and the FTC is over... after just a few days. Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the case over its Prime membership program.  On this bonus episode, Joshua and Monica were in the courtroom during the trial, so they sat down to chat about what they heard during the hearings and why they think Amazon might have settled the case so soon. Thank y...

Have you ever found it impossible to find the “unsubscribe” button? Maybe you’ve accidentally opted into “accepting all cookies?” Then you may have fallen for a "dark pattern." Dark patterns are at the heart of a lawsuit between Amazon and the federal government. The FTC claims Amazon used dark patterns to trick millions of users into subscribing to Prime without mean...

College football season is here! If you follow college athletes on Instagram, you may have noticed -- they're doing a lot more commercials lately. And for doing this work, some athletes are raking in big bucks.  A court settlement this summer determined that students have a right to make money from sports. And for the first time ever, universities will be the ones to pay them.   How...

Every year, tens of millions of tourists visit Seattle’s Pike Place Market, the Elliot Bay waterfront, and sports stadiums.   That tourism industry is growing -- this year, a record number of cruise ships are expected to fill Seattle’s piers. Next year, the population of Seattle will swell- to about double its normal size when it hosts the Word Cup.  On today's episode,...

Thrifting has long been a favorite pastime of Seattleites, so much so that we have the biggest Goodwill store in the world.   But buying second-hand is also an economic survival strategy for people who can't pay full price on back-to-school clothes or home appliances.   Now, in this increasingly expensive city, there's a sense that thrift stores are no longer fitting that need. On today'...

It's music festival season. Seattle's own Bumbershoot is just days away. But music festivals across the country are on shaky financial ground, and their futures could be in trouble. Over the past few years, dozens of small festivals have been canceled, and even the biggest ones are showing some signs of softening demand.  On today's episode, why is it so hard for this generation of music fest...

For decades, owning a home was considered a golden ticket to economic security. The reality looks a lot different today -- the median price of a single-family home in Seattle is around $1 million, and the greater Seattle area is the third most expensive in the nation.  So, why do prices keep going up? And what would it take to make the dream of owning a home in this city affordable again?&nbs...

Millions of people are asking tools like ChatGPT questions every day. But your questions don’t just fly up into the ether. They go to a real place.  AI has a backend, and it looks like massive data centers sprawling across farmland in places like central Washington.   Data centers provide the essential infrastructure needed to run AI apps and everything else we do on the internet....

It's been almost 25 years since the Nisqually earthquake, the last "big one" to hit Seattle.  But the region is due for an even bigger one -- one that could be more massive than the underwater quake that just hit off the coast of Russia.  The Nisqually quake did at least $2 billion worth of damage across the Puget Sound region. It hit Seattle’s historic brick and stone buildings ha...

Bellevue, Washington – Seattle's neighbor to the East - is having a bit of an identity crisis. For decades it’s been the younger sibling... trying to get out from under Seattle’s shadow. But now, Bellevue is preparing for a major change. Workers are putting finishing touches on the long-awaited link across Lake Washington. When it’s finished next year, two of the largest ci...

Microsoft is spending $4 billion dollars on workshops, technology, and other initiatives to get artificial intelligence into the hands of millions of people around the world. The company pioneering the AI revolution says it could be bigger than the Internet, bigger than mobile, and that the best comparison is the advent of electricity.  So, what does it mean for all of us? Booming host Monica...

For nearly a century, Washington’s timber industry produced everything from paper to 2x4s to the massive wood beams that hold up the Tacoma dome. But the industry’s been on a long decline since the 1990s.   Now, President Trump wants to reduce foreign competition and increase U.S. logging to bring back those jobs. Could Trump’s strategy revive the timber industry i...

Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs leaves even more tech workers in Washington without a job – and with a new worldview called "cruel optimism." Just a few years ago, a job in tech was considered a straight shot toward economic security and affordability in Seattle. But today, employees are afraid that if they lose their job, they won’t be able to find another one. To understand...

Mayor Bruce Harrell has a big to do list. He’s got to fix bridges, build housing, and spruce the place up for the World Cup next year.  But to make all this happen, he needs federal dollars... money the city could lose. The Trump administration has used executive orders to cut funding for cities that don’t cooperate with its immigration enforcement agenda. And now, Seattle is figh...

Seattle is one of the wealthiest and most expensive cities in the U.S. One out of every fourteen Seattleites is a millionaire.  By some estimates, costs in Seattle have risen more than 20% in just a few years.  On today's episode, we ask more than 300 Seattleites: How much money would it really take to live comfortably in this city of millionaires? And if you can't make enough, what can you d...

Washington state is known for its cherries. We produce more sweet cherries than any other state in the country, and we export them all over the world. But to supply the world with cherries, Washington farmers need a lot of workers to show up for a very short harvesting window. Usually they do, but not this year. High profile ICE raids are keeping migrant workers from the fields. Today, how a cultu...