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February 14, 2025

Introducing Season 3 of The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout

Growth Machine

By: Elizabeth McQueen

The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout is back for a third season, and Growth Machine host Audrey McGlinchy will be co-hosting some of the episodes with Mose Buschele.

In this season of The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout, the podcast explores the history of oil and gas regulation, how the industry became essentially self-regulating — with the help of compliant state regulators — and how some Texas officials continue to see natural gas as the future of electricity production, despite the rapid rise of renewable sources like solar and wind.

In the first episode, you’ll hear the story of a con man and a group of hardscrabble East Texas farmers who uncovered the biggest oilfield in U.S. history — and how that discovery forced an obscure state agency to confront the destructive forces of unrestrained oil drilling.

Listen and Subscribe to The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout

November 18, 2024

Introducing: 24 Hours in Austin

Growth Machine

By: Elizabeth McQueen

The Growth Machine podcast would like to introduce you to the new podcast 24 Hours in Austin tries to answer the question: What does a day in the life of Austin, Texas sound like? A team of audio producers from KUT spent the last several months documenting a handful of days in the life of Austin. They spent 24 hours straight in one location, talking to anyone who’d talk to them. They found that as big as Austin has gotten, standing still, it gets a little smaller.


Subscribe to 24 Hours in Austin

The first episode is 24 hours on 6th Street during SXSW: Part 1. Sixth Street in downtown Austin is wild enough on a regular night. But for two weeks every March, it gets even crazier when South by Southwest brings thousands of people to town. We spent 24 hours straight on 6th Street, between Congress and I-35 on March 14-15, 2024. Hear the first half of the day in this episode.


August 18, 2023

Grow or Die

Growth Machine

By: Audrey McGlinchy

(Episode 7) Now that the machine has done its job, what now? We explore some of the existential questions that Austin’s housing market has wrought.

August 10, 2023

Pigs in a Parlor

Growth Machine

By: Audrey McGlinchy

(BONUS — Deleted scene!) We go back 100 years to tell the origin story of modern zoning.

August 4, 2023

There Go The Neighborhoods

Growth Machine

By: Audrey McGlinchy

(Episode 6) Austin last re-wrote its land development code in 1984. Sounds boring, right? Well, that rewrite made it harder to build denser forms of housing. We explore the history of zoning in Austin and the opposition to changing the rules today, which could make the biggest difference in fixing Austin’s affordability crisis.

July 27, 2023

Welcome to Silicon Gulch

Growth Machine

By: Audrey McGlinchy

(Episode 5) Not that long ago, Austin’s economy was sleepy, to put it mildly. People came here for UT, to work for the state or for the military.

A little more than 50 years ago, a bedsheet changed everything — including the housing market.

July 20, 2023

Fertility Drugs for Cars

Growth Machine

By: Audrey McGlinchy

(BONUS) We talked in episode 2 about cars and roads — and how they affect where we live. We didn’t talk about one other way that cars affect housing: making places to put all the cars.

July 13, 2023

Smart Growth or Dumb Growth?

Growth Machine

By: Audrey McGlinchy

(Episode 4) When a new mayor came to power, he found what he thought would be a compromise — a way to bring new businesses and build housing for all the people coming to Austin without threatening the city’s ecological gems. It turned out to be more complicated than that.