Podcasts about Austin, Texas

What dominates the Austin feed is Elon Musk, heard from two directions. On The Austin Daily News, Julia and Charlie check the TeraFab announcement against ERCOT's numbers: a chip plant needing ten-plus gigawatts at full scale, and Musk's answer that most of the chips are going to orbit, so the grid is not the constraint. Another episode sets the twenty-five-billion-dollar factory beside Tesla battery promises from six years ago that never materialized. On the Austin Business News Podcast from the Austin LGBT Chamber of Commerce, Tesla is a labor story: 2,700 jobs cut at the Gigafactory, HEB overtaking it as the area's largest private employer, and a prediction that Musk leaves Texas.

The counterweight is the people who were in the neighborhoods before the plants. Lonnie Limón, across two parts on Austin Found Podcast, describes being bused out of East Austin school by school in the integration years and calls East Austin's 78702 the most gentrified zip code in the country. Tia Williams, on the Austin360 podcast to discuss her series on gentrification, describes neighbors leaving for Pflugerville and Round Rock: it is not just the house, the shops and bars where people looked like them go too. She keeps statistics out of the work because people who become numbers get forgotten.

What Austin is

Austin is the capital of Texas, on the Colorado River in the center of the state, home to the state government and the flagship University of Texas campus. It is known for live music and festivals, for a tech industry that grew fast over the last two decades, and for being one of the fastest-growing large metros in the country.

The city as a business story

The Austin Business News Podcast, hosted by Chamber President Tina Cannon, sounds like a roundtable that moves from personal catch-up, Pride events and nightlife into a prepared headline segment that explains the stakes and argues to a judgment. Its titles are the civic agenda in list form: a state film bill, new housing rules, Texas high-speed rail, driverless Uber rides, the Convention Center design, a federal funding freeze, the sale of the Sail Tower. The Austin Daily News describes itself as treating Austin as a live test site for big systems, TeraFab, SpaceX, Samsung, Waymo and Zoox on some days, a vacant lot or a blocked housing project on others; each episode is titled with its date.

Two smaller shows work the built city. The House Nextdoor, with Barbara Giglio and Anthony Harris, is a conversational real estate show with an unpolished rhythm: Giglio babysitting a client's toddler for three hours during a home inspection, the pair putting promises about flexible hours and unplugged vacations on trial and finding them mostly false. Work in Process's Podcast is building people talking through problems at a worktable: Christine Williamson's rule, have the party you can afford, applied to houses and scope creep; Jordan Smith arguing that a drafty door beats the R13-versus-R19 wall debate. Texas Business Minds ranges the whole state; its Austin entry is a Waterloo Records episode, and the clips here are Dallas and Houston interviews.

Comedy, the loudest thing on the page

KILL TONY sounds like a crowded room that never settles: comics pulled from the bucket get a minute, then face a panel that probes their jokes, jobs, dating lives and family stories. The clips are exactly that: Henry Cruz measured at five foot three after claiming five nine on dating apps, Ty Marion's scooter crash and torn patella tendon, Matt Rivera's Dexcom sensor and the bar frisk that made someone think he was wired. Comedy Wham is the scene's own record, Valerie Lopez presenting the people of the Austin comedy scene; the clips come from CCPP, a ten-part comedy class with Ellis Aych, on self-promotion and getting paid, and Lopez says she has interviewed over three hundred comics. Its titles run from Moontower Comedy Festival picks to comics such as Jen Kober and Ke'Juan Moses. Seven Minutes In Evan is one voice, Evan Lopez in long, tumbling monologues that keep landing on a comic point through repetition and ridiculous metaphors, moving between fatherhood, a daughter's days in the NICU, and the city, in "Austin Is Basically Jurassic Park Now", where downtown has dinosaurs running all around.

Old Austin, haunted Austin, and the stages

Austin Found Podcast, from journalist Michael Barnes and radio personality J.B. Hager, is filed under History and tells the city's past straight: titles that take institutions by their age, Zach Theatre at 99 and the Austin Symphony at 109, and clips that are people, the Limón parts and Jacqueline McGee breaking a school hierarchy run by football coaches by recruiting teachers and leading with a smile. I Love You So Much: The Austin360 Podcast, with Addie Broyles and Alyssa Vidales, covers the pop-culture side, with titles on Trail of Dead, Texas roller derby, Harry Edohoukwa and ATX hip-hop, and a clip of chef Chris Shepherd turning fish sauce, lime, sugar and chilies into a starter kit for home cooks. Both shows' episodes here are dated 2019 to 2022.

Haunted Texas and Beyond comes from Austin Ghost Tours, with titles including "Yes, The Driskill Hotel IS HAUNTED!!" and "Austin's Block of Haunted Mansions"; its clips are a military ghosts session in which Gail follows a disembodied voice to Chris Kyle's grave at the Texas State Cemetery, a thunderstorm arrives mid-recording, and Janine's door swings open by itself while her dog trembles. BedPost Confessions describes itself as a live storytelling show based in Austin, each title a performer's name and a story: Spike Gillespie on walking ten to fourteen miles a day in London with an ocean between her and the animals at home, Julie Gillis linking pelvic-floor repair to rebuilding a political foundation.

CobraCast Podcast with Bobby Sharron is the music scene's hangout, loud, profane and built on the assumption that everyone knows the backstory: Chalava on shooting a pilot in Austin and Pflugerville with thirty-five people on set, Tony Park on a 333 live recording that needed one bass note repaired, a goodbye episode for the Hug It Down Power Hour. In its title run, a July 2025 episode is billed as the show's farewell and an October one as its return. Leah Lovise's Food Forest Walk is the outlier, a guided tour of the permaculture garden at Festival Beach, walking the layers from canopy to ground cover and stopping at epazote for beans, locust trees that release nitrogen when cut back, and mullein, which the tour calls cowboy toilet paper.

The Longhorns, and a radio block

Stories Inside the Man Cave is filed under Sports, a Texas sports show centered on Austin and the Longhorns, and its clips are football people talking shop: Marcus Myers on why Texas needs real contact in practice to build tacklers fit for the SEC, Mike Adams on a Louisville quarterback room emptied by the portal, Marcus Boswell's prep-school bus breaking down twice before a delayed Georgia game. The titles add the Texas women's basketball run to the Final Four and the 1972 Pub in Austin. Click Here For Full Schedule is the Bridge Austin's programming block, filed under Religion & Spirituality and broadcast into forty-three Central Texas counties: sermons and ministry updates, with Pastor Jeff Schreve on kindness at home and a VOMRadio report from Afghanistan in its clips. It is about faith, not the city.

Where to start

• For the city as it is argued about now: The Austin Daily News on TeraFab and the grid, then the Austin Business News Podcast on Tesla and HEB.
• For the city before the boom: the Lonnie Limón parts on Austin Found Podcast, then Tia Williams on I Love You So Much: The Austin360 Podcast.
• For comedy: KILL TONY for the room, Comedy Wham for the people in the scene.
• For Longhorns talk: Stories Inside the Man Cave; for the Driskill: Haunted Texas and Beyond.

The Austin feed on this page plays clips from these shows.