Best Code City Crack The Code Podcasts (2025)

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Has Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Cracked the Code on Progressive Governance in Blue Cities? 40:55

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21h ago40:55

40:55

Four years ago, a 36 year-old Harvard Law grad and City Councilmember named Michelle Wu rolled to victory as the first elected female, non-white mayor of Boston. Since then, she's racked up further governing successes: Boston these days is often touted as the safest big city in the country, and Wu has delivered progressive wins (albeit incremental …

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Did Blue City America Get Covid Wrong, Too? 54:07

8d ago54:07

54:07

This week we take a look back at the COVID-19 pandemic with Steven Macedo, a professor of politics at Princeton University and co-author of "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us." The book offers a self-critical examination of how blue leaders and institutions navigated the unprecedented crisis. Macedo makes a provocative argument: that cosm…

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It’s different all over: Embracing the complexity of human biology 20:02

15d ago20:02

20:02

By uncovering critical sex-based differences related to brain and metabolic health, researchers Gillian Einstein and Minna Woo are making the case that tailored interventions are key to improving health outcomes for women — and everyone else. Through their work exploring how conditions from Alzheimer’s to kidney disease can have varied effects depe…

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Nicole Gelinas: Blue City Lessons from NYC’s 100 Years' War Between Cars and Transit 54:27

20d ago54:27

54:27

New York Times contributing opinion writer Nicole Gelinas, who writes regularly on New York City issues, is the author of a deeply researched and informative book, Movement: New York’s Long War to take Back Its Streets from the Car. In this fascinating account, Gelinas cogently argues that NYC’s unwinding of its robust early 20th century streetcar …

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Episode 60: City Matters with the Mayor 22:36

23d ago22:36

22:36

Dave Moore welcomes Mayor Heather Graham to the podcast again. She talks about new businesses in Pueblo, the unhoused, budget cuts, as well as the upcoming election with ballot measures and four city council seats up for grabs. Mayor Graham is also hosting four town halls during the month of September in all four districts. Join her for City update…

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Dispatch from an Urban Drug Market 47:37

1M ago47:37

47:37

In this special episode we venture outside our respective basements to explore a sprawling open-air drug market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, which resembles similar drug markets in poor, blue city neighborhoods across the US that have been overrun by the urban fentanyl and methamphetamine crises. Whether it's the Tenderloin in San Franc…

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What’s the Matter with Chicago? 48:43

2M ago48:43

48:43

The Windy City is not just a great American metropolis – the third largest in the United States – it is a world class city, recognized globally as a center of finance, trade and economic dynamism, and as a cultural and tourist mecca. But there is an emerging counter-narrative about Chicago, a declension story of a great and proud urban powerhouse n…

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Trump Just Defunded Public Media. Did NPR Help Bring This Disaster on Itself? 1:01:33

2M ago1:01:33

1:01:33

In the latest installment of Blue City Blues, we welcomed Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, to join us in delving into the Trump-led defunding of public broadcasting. Zimmerman, whose incisive public commentaries have been published at the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inqui…

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Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on What Urbanites Get Wrong about Rural America 36:49

2M ago36:49

36:49

The political gulf between educated urban progressives and rural and blue collar Americans has accelerated in recent decades. The consequences for blue cities - and for the Democratic Party - are profound. In this episode, we explore the evolving rural/urban divide with Blue Dog Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington’s State’s …

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Cold comfort: How to keep cool without destroying the planet 27:13

3M ago27:13

27:13

The hotter it gets outside, the more we use air conditioning, and the more we use air conditioning, the hotter it gets. AC units and refrigeration combined adds up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But how can we solve this cooling paradox? Building on last episode’s conversation with the UN’s global chief heat officer, host Manjula…

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Celinda Lake on What NYC’s Political Earthquake Means for the Politics of Blue Cities 52:45

3M ago52:45

52:45

Zohran Mamdani's upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary wasn't just a win; it was a seismic event that's shaking the foundations of the Democratic Party. How did a self-described socialist unseat a political giant like Andrew Cuomo? And what does it mean for the future of progressive politics in America's blue cities? This we…

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Sherman Alexie: A Res Indian Take on Monsters, Colonizers and the Urban Left's “Minor League Maoism” 50:54

3M ago50:54

50:54

In this episode of Blue City Blues, we invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities. Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won th…

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Episode 59: Growing the tradition with our favorite fair 19:43

3M ago19:43

19:43

Andrea Wiesenmeyer joins Dave Moore on the podcast. She is the new General Manager of the Colorado State Fair. She was selected for the position by the Colorado Department of Agriculture. She outlines all you need to know about the state fair coming up. A few new things this year pig races are back as free entertainment and there will be a dedicate…

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Heat warning: Are we ready for a hotter climate? 34:23

3M ago34:23

34:23

Extreme heat waves are anything but normal, but they’re quickly becoming the new reality. The 10 hottest years on record have all happened in the last decade. And because temperatures in urban centres can be 10 to 15 degrees Celsius higher than surrounding areas, cities can be dangerous places to be when the mercury rises — particularly for the eld…

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Katie Herzog on What the Decline and Fall of Twitter Means for Blue Cities 57:54

3M ago57:54

57:54

In 2020, when the power of social media – Twitter, in particular – to police the boundaries of acceptable thought in blue cities was at its cultural zenith, journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal launched their boundary-shattering podcast, Blocked and Reported. BARPod, as it’s referred to by its growing legions of fans (us included), is focused …

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Is Abundance the Answer to What Ails Blue Cities? 59:37

4M ago59:37

59:37

In January of 2022, The Atlantic published staff writer Derek Thompson’s manifesto calling for a fundamental reform of progressive governance. “We need an abundance agenda… focused on solving our national problem of scarcity,” he asserted. Fleshed out by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and a small nucleus of like-minded, mostly Bay Area-based …

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Episode 58: Detailing the new diverging diamond 15:38

4M ago15:38

15:38

Scott Dalton with CDOT talks to Dave Moore about big changes coming to I-25 and Highway 50B. You may have noticed construction started in the area in November 2024. Dalton explains the timeline of the program and why they chose to make it a diverging diamond with a signal at the top. This project is located in Pueblo on I-25 from Mile Point 99.7 to…

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Regrowth strategy: To adapt to a changing climate, restoring nature is critical. But do we have the seeds we need? 34:00

4M ago34:00

34:00

A quarter of Canada’s trees are at risk, and upwards of a million species around the world face extinction in the decades to come. Restoring nature is essential to survival — it can make communities more resilient to climate change, it can regrow areas destroyed by increasingly intense wildfires and it can help reduce atmospheric carbon. But repair…

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Defund/Abolition Is Dead in Blue Cities. What now? 54:20

4M ago54:20

54:20

Public safety policy reformer Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 for her work creating the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which has become a much touted national model for progressive criminal justice reform. The idea is to help low-level homeless offenders arrested for crimes like shoplifting by connecting them …

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Invisible Intelligence Reshapes Our Cities 21:28

5M ago21:28

21:28

Join host James Nixon on The AI Show as he explores the evolving landscape of AI with Adrian McClanahan of Synnectix. From security solutions in public spaces to the future of smart cities, discover where AI is headed in transport, home automation, and beyond. We'll touch on AI's increasing autonomy, the potential for driverless vehicles, and the e…

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AI Revolution Starts Within 23:32

5M ago23:32

23:32

In this insightful episode of The AI Show, host James Nixon interviews Georgios Mikellidis, Chief Technology Officer of Peppercorn AI, as he shares his perspective on how to best approach AI implementation, emphasising an internal efficiency-first strategy and the importance of democratising decisions. Mikellidis also touches on data management and…

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Why Does Progressive Megadonor Nick Hanauer Blame Blue Cities’ Woes on … Barack Obama? 45:45

5M ago45:45

45:45

Seattle venture capitalist and Democratic megadonor Nick Hanauer doesn’t fit neatly into pre-fab boxes. He’s a wildly successful tech investor who denounces tech moguls as “narcissistic sociopaths.” He’s a billionaire “class-traitor” (his term) who’s been sounding the alarm about what he sees as the dangerous obliviousness of the ultrarich to the r…

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Compounding the cure: How our overzealous efforts to zap infections could be making animals — and humans — sicker 23:36

5M ago23:36

23:36

Experts are calling antimicrobial resistance the silent pandemic: Each year, AMR is responsible for more than a million deaths around the world. It’s a threat to our health that’s been exacerbated by the very medications used to treat it. This problem has been growing for decades, and healthcare practitioners have responded by developing new antibi…

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Why is San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan Breaking So Many Eggs? 44:14

5M ago44:14

44:14

In a quest to reinvent municipal governance, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is breaking ranks and breaking a few eggs. A Harvard grad who made his bones in the disruption-centered world of Silicon Valley tech startups, he tells us he's put his focus on prioritizing results over ideology since becoming mayor of one of California’s biggest blue cites in 2…

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NYT’s Peter Goodman on Tariffs, Trade Wars and the New Crony Capitalism 45:22

6M ago45:22

45:22

This week, we take a close look at Trump's tariff-happy trade war and its impact on blue cities with New York Times global economics correspondent Peter Goodman, the author of Davos Man and How the World Ran Out of Everything. We explore the political tightrope blue city and Democratic Party leaders are walking on trade policy. Are they anti-tariff…

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Dan Savage: How Blue Cities Should Resist Trump 2.0 52:58

6M ago52:58

52:58

Donald Trump is in full retribution mode and the anxiety – and anger – in blue cities is spiking. Sex advice columnist and friend o’ the podcast Dan Savage joins us to talk about how blue cities should (and should not) resist an aggressively authoritarian administration that sees them as the enemy. We go deep on the April 5th protests, dissecting e…

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The Inside Story on How Tech Billionaires Sparked San Francisco’s Moderate Backlash 36:45

6M ago36:45

36:45

In recent years San Francisco, widely regarded as America’s most progressive city, has experienced a far-reaching anti-progressive backlash. In 2022, voters recalled three progressive school board members and progressive DA Chesa Boudin. Then moderates took control of the city’s Board of Supervisors. Last year they won a majority on the city’s Demo…

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Episode 57: A Community Conversation: Pueblo Cracks the da Vinci Code 27:49

6M ago27:49

27:49

This is a little bit of a different format than the traditional podcast. Craig Eliot was giving a presentation to the Southern Colorado Press Club of which our host Dave Moore is a part. Because the news of the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of North America calling Pueblo home is so exciting, Craig has allowed Dave to share his presentation on the podca…

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Mike Pesca: Is Blue City Media Up to the Challenge of Covering Trump 2.0? 59:21

6M ago59:21

59:21

Former National Public Radio and Slate journalist Mike Pesca, host of the longest-running (and highly entertaining!) daily news podcast, "The Gist," joins us to talk about the tough challenges blue city media is facing during the terrifying roller coaster ride that is Trump’s second term. Especially at a time when public trust in the media is at a …

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Waste opportunity: Can we design plastic out of healthcare? 29:39

7M ago29:39

29:39

Modern medicine has a dirty secret. While plastics have revolutionized healthcare, research increasingly shows that they’re also making us sick. Items such as PPE, syringes, gowns, IV bags and protective wrappings have allowed for a higher standard of sanitary patient care that vastly reduces the risk of cross-contamination. But all that plastic is…

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Has the American Labor Movement Lost Touch with the Urban Working Class? 50:28

7M ago50:28

50:28

In this episode, we dive deep into some of the big questions every left-of-center political observer has been asking: what the hell went so wrong in the last election? Why did so many urban working class voters in blue cities swing hard towards Trump? And is there any reason to think that the Trumpist right is making a credible and serious economic…

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Keith Humphreys: Why Drug Reform Failed In West Coast Blue Cities 45:00

7M ago45:00

45:00

The wave of bold new decriminalization-centered approaches to drug policy reform that swept West Coast cities from San Francisco to Vancouver, B.C. starting around 2020 has failed, according to one the nation’s leading drug policy experts, former Obama White House drug policy advisor and Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys. On this week’s…

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Why Does Rep. Adam Smith Believe Blue Cities Contributed to Trump’s Win? 54:40

7M ago54:40

54:40

Democrat Adam Smith has spent the last several years engaged in a (perhaps quixotic?) crusade to save the Democratic Party from itself. The veteran congressman, who represents parts of Seattle and its South King County suburbs in Washington's 9th Congressional District, recently played the starring role in a New Yorker article titled "The Not-Quite…

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Freddie deBoer: Blue Cities Progressives Need to Get Real on Involuntary Commitment 55:01

7M ago55:01

55:01

Freddie DeBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. He has, as they say, lived experience. Freddie is also one of our most original and independent commentators on American cultural trends. A self-described Marxist and a cogent critic of recent i…

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Fire alarm: Rethinking innovation in an increasingly volatile world 25:03

8M ago25:03

25:03

The wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray in 2016 burned more than 579,000 hectares of land, drove 88,000 people from their homes and caused nearly $10 billion in damages. It’s often seen as an outlier, a freak natural disaster. But extreme wildfires, like those that tore through Los Angeles earlier this year, are becoming more intense and harder …

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Why Didn't Blue Cities Going Woke Help the Marginalized? 46:30

8M ago46:30

46:30

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi is having a well-deserved moment. His highly praised new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press), released last October, has caused quite the stir, becoming the cutting edge of a burgeoning elite cultural reassessment of the decade plus-long “Great Awokening” …

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Episode 56: Creating Community for our Seniors 34:09

8M ago34:09

34:09

Dave Moore welcomes Carma Loontjer to the podcast. She is the newest Development Director of the SRDA. The SRDA is the Senior Resource Development Agency. The program helps seniors in Pueblo County through 12 different programs. The most visible program is likely the Meals on Wheels program where food is delivered to home bound seniors. Another pop…

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Cracking the code: How generative biology could transform medicine 25:23

8M ago25:23

25:23

Can AI unravel the mysteries of human biology? Could it help design specialty treatments and cures for disease? Geoffrey von Maltzahn and his team at Generate:Biomedicines are bullish on both counts. AI has greatly accelerated progress in genome engineering, bioengineering and nanotechnology and they are getting closer to developing tailored therap…

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Innovation hotline: Answering the tech sector’s burning questions 39:42

10M ago39:42

39:42

For many in Canada’s tech sector, 2024 was a challenging year. At times, it seemed as if the only constant — whether it was the economy, geopolitical relations or health of the planet — was uncertainty. To take stock of the past year and look ahead to 2025, we reached out to members in the innovation community to hear what’s on their minds. Can tec…

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Soak it up: Can sponge cities save us from flooding? 33:46

11M ago33:46

33:46

As the effects of climate change trigger record-breaking rainfall and flooding, cities from Montreal to Mumbai are re-thinking how urban design can keep inhabitants safe from natural disasters. Kongjian Yu, a landscape architect based in Beijing, has a counterintuitive idea. Instead of fighting water by building more dams, sewers and pipes, he prop…

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Will Trump’s win make the rocky marriage between big tech and big blue cities even worse? 55:09

11M ago55:09

55:09

America’s bluest big cities are in a tense, co-dependent relationship with the tech giants that power their economies and anchor their prosperity. It didn’t start out that way. When tech giants first decided, about 20 years ago, to decamp from their cloistered suburban enclaves to embed themselves in the vibrant hearts of big blue cities, a torrid …

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Was the "insufferable left" to blame for Trump's big gains in blue cities? 53:10

11M ago53:10

53:10

In decisively winning the presidency, some of Donald Trump’s biggest gains came in the places you’d least expect them: big blue cities and urban suburbs. A lot of Trump’s victory is due to voter dissatisfaction with mass migration and the price of eggs. But Dan Savage suggests urban progressives also need to look in the mirror: did an “insufferable…

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Episode 55: Community talent takes center stage 17:35

11M ago17:35

17:35

Dave Moore welcomes Jeff Orman and Raeann Herrick with Pueblo’s Musical Community Productions back to the podcast. The theater group has done Christmas musicals for 30 years and they say they're more than a theater group. Pueblo Memorial Hall is set to be the home of White Christmas production this year. It's expected to be better than ever, with a…

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Dan Savage on Trumpism and the future of blue cities 44:20

11M ago44:20

44:20

Twenty years ago, in the wake of a searing presidential defeat, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities and to fortify them into an “Urban Archipelago” of culturally separatist bastions that rejected the reactionary politics of the larger red American landscape. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places got redd…

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Striking a chord: Why neuroscientists believe music could hold the power to cure what ails us 33:48

11M ago33:48

33:48

Music makes us feel better — for most of us, this is an intuitive truth. But scientists are only now beginning to understand the remarkable ways that music affects our brains. With the help of innovation, researchers are working to assess and codify the whats, whys and hows that could help us harness this power as a therapeutic tool to treat people…

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Episode 54: On the Move 27:04

12M ago27:04

27:04

Amber Shipley from CDOT joins Dave Moore on the podcast to discuss everything you need to know if you're on the move in Pueblo County and beyond. The upcoming construction project at I-25 and the Belmont Bypass will be a diverging diamond. She lets drivers know what they can and cannot do when they're driving by a snow plow in the winter.…

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Solve for X S3 Trailer 0:51

1y ago0:51

0:51

In season 3 of Solve for X, we meet the innovators and entrepreneurs solving for climate change, economic disparity, diseases and more. Subscribe and listen beginning September 26. Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high…

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The methane hunter: Meet the man who is tracking down emissions — from space 25:08

1y ago25:08

25:08

With more than 80 times the short-term warming power of carbon dioxide, methane is a significant climate threat. But finding and fixing methane leaks is no small feat and ground-based detection methods struggle to pinpoint this colourless, odourless gas. In this episode of Solve for X, host Manjula Selvarajah sits down with Stéphane Germain to disc…

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Episode 53: Spicing up a yearly tradition 14:02

1y ago14:02

14:02

It's the 30th year Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival this month. Duane Nava President & CEO and Vice President Donielle Kitzman of the Greater Pueblo Chamber of Commerce join Dave on the podcast. The event features live entertainment, street vendors, cooking competitions, and chilies of course! It's along Union Avenue. The festival draws Pueblo loca…

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Episode 52: Paving the way for local non-profits 41:41

1y ago41:41

41:41

Dave Moore welcomes Chris Segura and Mario Gernazio Jr. to the podcast. Both work at the United Way. Chris is the Director of Communications and Engagement and Mario is the Director of Resource Development. They discuss how United Way is helping non-profits from the ground up. By providing capacity development resources at the Nonprofit Lead center…