The IBJ Podcast with Mason King

For its 10th movie, Bloomington-based Pigasus Pictures has mounted its biggest production yet, with a $10 million budget and a key role played by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Indiana has more than its fair share of inspirational sports movies, and Pigasus is diving deep into the genre with “Little Five,” the story of the first Women’s Little 500 bicycle race on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. Pigasus is the lead production company, but it received a boost from co-producer Somewhere Pictures, founded by Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway. Pigasus CEO Zachary Spicer returns to the IBJ Podcast this week to talk about one of the recent low points in his career that inspired him to develop a movie about the first Women’s Little 500. He discusses the evolution of the concept, raising the $10 million and his longtime connection with Hathway that led to her company’s participation. He also reminisces about filming in Bloomington, where he attended IU, and how the football team’s national championship helped the production team. Plus, we get the lowdown on the Pigasus project “Trash Mountain,” that debuted last Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival. 

The financial media’s laser pointer is often so jittery that it’s tough to figure out which developments are most important to your financial life. The topic that received the most focus last week was rising bond yields. As we’ll discuss in this week’s podcast, that issue could have serious legs, and its feet appear to be pointing downhill.    You might be surprised to know that the yield on a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond is considered by many to be the most important interest rate in the world. It plays a big role in determining your cost when you borrow money – from a mortgage to a car loan to a credit card. And news that yields are rising means that bonds are falling out of favor in the marketplace, indicating there’s considerable anxiety over the government’s ability to handle inflation, budget deficits and the war in Iran, among several concerns.   In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Peter Dunn, aka IBJ columnist Pete the Planner, joins us to help focus on the meaning behind rising bond yields. He also discusses the duality that many Americans face in the current financial system, in which some folks thrive and others fall behind. You’ve probably heard it referred to as the K-shaped economy.

IBJ celebrated philanthropy, nonprofit organizations and the businesses who support them at our second annual Nonprofit Excellence Awards event on Aug. 4 at the Indiana Roof Ballroom. During the event, IBJ reporter Dave Lindquist interviewed Taggart Birge, the 2025 winner of the Philanthropist of the Year Award. Tag, who is a real estate investor, and his wife annually support scholarships, education programs and public art, among other efforts. For this week’s IBJ Podcast, we bring you that conversation. Dave talks in detail with Tag about how he and his wife have settled on their philanthropic strategy and the personal connections that led them to focus particularly on helping disadvantaged students. And you’ll hear Tag answer questions submitted by those in the room at the event. You can find a full video of the 2026 Nonprofit Excellence Awards event here.

For all of the people who have said at some point in their lives, “Wouldn’t it be fun to open a small bookstore,” consider the story of Julia Breakey and Jake Budler, a married couple who opened Tomorrow Bookstore on Mass Ave in 2023. They hurdled all of the concerns that likely dissuade most folks from following through. Questions like, “How do I get startup capital?” How do I compete with Amazon?” “Why try to sell printed books in an increasingly digital world?” And “How can I, a constitutionally introspective person, survive a career that requires intense customer service?”   The origin story of Tomorrow Books seems all the more unlikely given that Breakey and Budler hail from South Africa and are in their very early 30s. But they had a built-in advantage, in that Jake has a wealth of expertise related to startups as an employee of a global firm that supports high-growth entrepreneurs. In this week’s edition of the podcast, Julia and Jake explain how they chose to settle in Indianapolis and open their own business, how they divide the duties of running a bookstore, how they found the right mix of financing and why they have embraced the recent wave of new independent booksellers in Indianapolis instead of considering them competitors. 

On July 27, public officials in West Lafayette joined local business leaders and executives from the Fort Wayne-based Parkview Health system to break ground on the site of a planned $200 million hospital and medical office building expected to create 250 health care jobs. The Lafayette/West Lafayette area already is served by two hospitals in the IU Health and Franciscan Health systems, but the leaders assembled said the area’s growth made clear the need for the new facility.   Meanwhile, Parkview has been working through an agreement with Lebanon-based Witham Health Services, which provides medical services to residents throughout Boone County, to join Parkview later this year. That would bring Witham’s hospital under Parkview’s purview, as well as several clinics across the area. Parkview is also building a freestanding emergency department and urgent care facility in Marion. And Parkview and Noblesville-based Riverview Health are nearly a year into a managed-services agreement aimed at getting the struggling county-owned hospital system’s finances in order.   Parkview started growing outside of the Fort Wayne area in 1995 and now counts more than a dozen hospitals, medical centers and health institutes across northern Indiana and northwest Ohio. And It’s looking to continue to expand. In this week’s podcast, Dr. Greg Johnson and John Bowen, two Parkview executives leading the system’s growth, discuss the push into central Indiana and what makes it attractive for expansion. They also cover how they determine demand for another market player, what they think differentiates Parkview from other systems, and how they plan to staff the West Lafayette hospital. 

Here's an amazing second act in the career of an Indiana journalism luminary. Longtime subscribers to the Lafayette Journal and Courier newspaper read the work of Dave Bangert over 32 years in his roles as a reporter, editor and columnist. He was so highly regarded that in early 2021 he became one of a handful of journalists to receive the Sagamore of the Wabash. That’s a statewide honor awarded by the governor for outstanding leadership, achievements and/or civic contributions. One could assume it was meant as a career capper. Bangert had taken a buyout from newspaper owner Gannett in late 2020, with vague plans to get a normal day job for several years until hitting typical retirement age.   That’s not what happened. Within a few months he received a few obvious signs that his news career might not be over. He soon started carving out a home for himself on the online Substack platform named Based in Lafayette, allowing him to create a news website and shoot stories to subscribers via email. He quickly became a one-man news bureau for Lafayette, West Lafayette and the rest of Tippecanoe County, making all the editorial decisions himself and leveraging sources he developed over three decades. He has nearly 10,000 subscribers between two basic tiers — some who receive a limited amount of content for free and others who pay a fee to see everything. (The latter options are $7 per month, $70 per year or $150 per year.) He works just as hard as he did for the Journal and Courier, but now it’s all on his own terms. In this week’s episode of the podcast, Bangert explains how he knew it was time to get back in the game, how he assembled the business plan, how he covers his turf as a one-man band and what he has learned about the news business from his view on Substack.

Josh Driver, CEO of Indianapolis-based Selflessly, jokes that he’s practically in a common law marriage with his AI assistant, named Phil. (That’s short for “philanthropy,” which is Selflessly’s focus.) They’re a good match: Phil handles much of the administrative drudgery and helps clients figure out their philanthropic strategies so Driver can stay focused on big-picture strategy and client relations. But they get into the occasional tiff, and Phil can overstep his bounds. In fact, he recently went way off script with a client. Such an episode points up the risks in turning over so much responsibility to AI. But Driver sees Phil as an indispensable tool and interwove it into Selflessly’s recent from-the-ground-up platform rebuild. His interest in AI’s potential was piqued once he began using it to bypass some of the pitfalls of having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Recent episodes of the IBJ Podcast have focused on potential long-term risks of the widespread use of AI. In this week’s edition, we use Selflessly as a case study in how AI is being used by a small business right now. Driver also discusses his early career in emergency medicine — specifically, burn and wound care — and how that led him to technology and nonprofits.

Election Day is scheduled for Nov. 3, so we’re just a bit more than three months away. This is the midterms, so there’s a lot at stake at the federal and state levels, in additional to many referendums for local school districts. On July 16, President Trump delivered a 26-minute prime-time address about election security, warning us that our elections are vulnerable to fraud and need immediate attention. Among his claims, Trump said China was able to acquire 220 million U.S. voter files in 2020 and wants to exploit that data. He also said a Department of Homeland Security investigation found that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in federal elections.   Regular listeners of the IBJ Podcast know we already had scheduled a return visit with Chetrice Romero, senior cybersecurity adviser for law firm Ice Miller, to talk specifically about election security, so the president’s address gave us even more grist for the mill. Romero has worked extensively with the state and federal government on election security and is currently consulting with state and county officials on November’s election. In this week’s edition of IBJ Podcast, she starts off by putting Trump’s comments in context and gauging the threat level of his claims. She then goes in great detail explaining the many steps that local and state officials are taking in Indiana to secure the election. And she weighs in on proposals to go back to an all-paper voting system.

This is prime parks season for folks in Indianapolis who want to hit splash pads, climb jungle gyms or just grab some grass in the shade. What they’re finding is dozens of parks with new or improved trails, sports fields, shelters, bathrooms, water features and playgrounds. The Indy Parks Department is nearing the finish of $150 million in upgrades to about a third of its 218 parks, using a huge infusion of funds outside of its typical $6 million annual budget for capital improvements. Some of the projects are wholesale transformations, such as turning Riverside Golf Course into Riverside Adventure Park. Some are more modest but perform the essential service of providing safe and modern playgrounds for neighborhood kids. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Indy Parks leaders Brittany Crone and Andre Denman discuss the funding and execution of this extraordinary wave of upgrades and how several of the biggest projects came about. They also tackle the question of what comes next, given the size of the annual capital improvements budget. And they discuss the likelihood of creating new parks in a city with some recreation gaps.

According to a report last month from the Social Security Administration, the trust fund that the government uses to help pay out benefits to retirees is expected to run out in late 2032. At that point, Social Security will only be able to pay 78% of your scheduled retirement benefits. This isn’t a surprise: We’ve known for many years it eventually would happen, but there hasn’t been enough political will in Washington, D.C., to rescue the system.   Late last year, President Trump began making references to the public retirement system used by Australia. On July 6, Trump made his most definitive declaration yet, saying his administration is looking at adopting the Australian system — or at least elements of the Australian system — and would try to get Congress onboard.    There is no magic wand in this scenario. Merging one system into another – or adding a giant appendage to the current system – wouldn’t be easy. As IBJ financial columnist Peter Dunn says in this week’s podcast, there could be significant tradeoffs. But who should take the biggest hit? In this week's discussion, Pete takes the point of view of employers and host Mason King has the perspective of someone who plans to retire soon. They also also hash out the viability of tweaking the current Social Security system to get the fund back on track.  

Larry Smith grew up on the east side of Indianapolis. After graduating from Southport High School and then Williams College, he landed at Fortune 500 engine maker Cummins Inc. and quickly found himself on the fast track to upper management. By his early 30s he already was director of corporate strategy, but he felt a strong calling to a different path. Smith switched gears and started a distinguished career in the Indy area’s nonprofit sector, holding leadership positions with such organizations as Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, YMCA of Greater Indianapolis, Indiana University’s Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence and the Hamilton County Community Foundation. Then, in 2022, he received another calling – this one through actual phone calls and text messages – to take over as president and CEO of Fathers and Families Center, a modest Indianapolis nonprofit that provides counseling and other resources to help men become better fathers and stabilize their families. The mission harmonized with Smith’s lived experience, since he grew up without a father and himself became a father when he was 16. On this week’s podcast, Smith lays out his plans to continue growing the capacity of the center with hopes of doubling the number of men served by its programs. To that end, it is in final stages of a $5.5 million fundraising campaign and preparing to move into a new headquarters near the Children’s Museum. Smith also explains his strategy for doubling revenue within five years or so, including a new focus on individual contributions.

Last week, an international alliance of intelligence agencies released a warning about the evolution of AI and how it soon will be able to overwhelm cyber protections used by governments and businesses. This will happen within a matter of months, according to the group, and companies should take an all-hands on deck approach to the threat. That means significant involvement from owners, top executives and other leaders. To get a sense of the gravity of the warning, IBJ Podcast host Mason King invited cybersecurity expert Chetrice Romero to be the guest this week. Romero started her career in public relations but developed expertise in cybersecurity as a state and federal employee. Her positions have included cybersecurity program director for the Indiana Office of Technology and the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, and cybersecurity adviser and state coordinator for the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. She currently works for the law firm Ice Miller, helping clients prepare for cyber attacks and their aftermath. In this week’s podcast, Romero explains the risks involved in the looming AI-related threat and why the time to prepare is now. She also shares what she learned from her somber experience on the search and rescue task force responding to the Surfside condo building collapse in 2021.

In 2009, a freshly graduated Jason Flora opened a law firm in a tiny office on the west side of Indianapolis near Hispanic-run car lots, Honduran restaurants and Guatemalan grocery stores. In its early days, the firm was a one-man shop, with Flora, who speaks Spanish fluently, working 60 hours or more a week and often driving back and forth between Chicago’s immigration court and his office. Last month, Flora Legal Group ranked No. 3 on IBJ’s list of the region’s fastest-growing companies based on its two-year growth, which ballooned 250%. It now has 23 attorneys among its nearly 140 full-time employees, who handle thousands of cases per year. And yet the firm’s mission is essentially the same as it was in 2009: to protect the rights of immigrants and provide the legal services they need — particularly in immigration cases — to make their lives better and more prosperous. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Flora expounds on the evolution of his firm. As he explains it, one of the reasons he started his career as a street lawyer was due to the lack of interest from recruiters in established law firms. And he delves into how he learned he could be more valuable by pursuing more growth for the firm than he could by spending all of his time practicing law.

Darin Brown is an executive for a global software testing firm with hundreds of employees and a roster of some 80,000 freelancers. But to do his job, he doesn’t have to leave his home in Westfield, Indiana. The firm, known as Testlio, is one of an increasing number of companies that don’t have physical home bases and instead let employees work entirely remotely. Brown recently had the same arrangement when he worked for Zoom, the company virtually synonymous with remote work. In 2022, Zoom acquired a startup that Brown co-founded in central Indiana which led to him being named Zoom’s head of product for productivity applications. He left Zoom earlier this year to be Testlio’s chief product and technology officer. Brown boasts a distinguished career in the Indianapolis area tech community as a project manager and developer. The list of companies includes ChaCha Search, ExactTarget, Salesforce and then Angie’s List, where he was chief technology officer. There he found a problem that he was inspired to solve by co-founding the startup Docket, which then led him to Zoom. In this week’s podcast, Brown discusses his new position with Testlio, his tenure with Zoom and how he made the transition at mid-career from supervising team members in the office to being an online-only leader.

In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Indy Pride Inc. board Chair Alex Richardson previews the June 13 parade on Massachusetts Avenue and a revamped festival footprint spanning Military Park and White River State Park as the nonprofit marches forward under new leadership. Richardson, a DePauw University faculty member who became board chair in December, discusses the January hire of Executive Director Jennifer Carruthers, who previously led Capital City Pride in Des Moines. Richardson also addresses the financial pressures facing Indy Pride, including a $210,000 budget shortfall in 2024 tied in part to reduced corporate sponsorship, and explains how new individual giving programs and small-business outreach aim to close that gap. This year’s events will include a Saturday night concert featuring headliners Todrick Hall, Brooke Eden and Crystal Waters, in addition to a New York City ballroom showcase rooted in the Harlem ballroom scene of the early 1970s. Richardson also responds to Gov. Mike Braun's proclamation of June as "Nuclear Family Month.”

Hitting six figures in household income is a powerful milestone. You are situated comfortably in the middle class, which in the U.S. is currently defined as making $56,000 to $168,000 per year. If we want to zoom in on Indiana, the parameters for the middle class are $48,000 to $144,000 per year. We all know that the cost of living is rising faster and higher than anyone wants, but doesn’t it seem like you should be able to make it work on six figures per year? Over the last couple of years, a national conversation has been brewing online about why some people who make as much as $150,000 per year feel like they’re barely getting by. And consumer sentiment just last week hit its lowest point in at least 50 years. Pete the Planner isn’t here to judge. His computations show how easy it can be for the finances for a $150,000 household to go off the rails. One unexpected blow to your budget for housing, transportation, child care or essentials like food can make it feel like the ceiling is caving in. At the same time, we need to consider whether the expenses we believe are necessary are actually the result in our culture of normalizing overconsumption. Pete is our guest this week to explain the math behind the financial struggles for $150,000 households and provide some guidance – with a dose of straight talk – about reducing expenses.

Santiago Jaramillo has been the subject of – or at least mentioned in – 44 articles in the Indianapolis Business Journal, including several columns he wrote about entrepreneurism. The stories largely appeared between 2013 and 2021, while he was building, running and exiting two Indianapolis-area tech companies. After the second firm, known as Emplify, was acquired for $50 million in 2021, Jaramillo had a severe case of burnout. He went on an extended sabbatical, planning to forego any future forays into founding startups. Then ChatGPT dropped. Suddenly entrepreneurs and executives had widespread access to artificial intelligence tools, and Jaramillo quickly saw their potential for transforming businesses and the workflows of their employees. The pull eventually proved too great. Jaramillo co-founded a firm named Pragmatico to help companies make the leap into AI in a way that sticks. In this week’s podcast, Jaramillo takes us on his entrepreneurial journey, which began in Colombia, South America, where he narrowly avoided a kidnapping. His career took turns through Florida, Indiana and Australia before settling back in the Hoosier state. Jaramillo also discusses why he decided to get back in the game, the reasons why many firms have trouble adopting AI and why the technology shouldn’t be set loose without human judgement as a guide.

We at the Indianapolis Business Journal committed a serious error earlier this month that created significant problems for one of central Indiana’s most important not-for-profit organizations. If you listened to last week’s podcast, you have a sense of what happened. In the interest of transparency, IBJ Editor Lesley Weidenbener explained in her latest column how the error occurred and how that affected the organization. The column opens a window to the workings of the IBJ newsroom and the potential for multiple editors to miss a red flag when moving quickly to break news. For this week's episode, host Mason King recruited Weidenbener to throw open the curtains and give you an even broader look inside IBJ. In this week's episode, she addresses the error, some of the questions posed regularly about IBJ's financial health, and how its leaders maintain barriers between the newsroom, advertisers and the politics of IBJ’s owner and CEO.

Founded in 1970, Indiana Black Expo has broad brand recognition for its 10-day Summer Celebration, which highlights Black culture and elevation. But the umbrella not-for-profit organization operates 365 days a year, acting as a voice and vehicle for the social and economic advancement of Black youths and families. The other high-profile annual event hosted by IBE is the Circle City Classic, which typically features a football game between two historically black colleges or universities, along with a downtown parade and events focused on education, careers and culture. Last week, IBE announced a change at the heart of the Classic amid declining attendance, as well as the addition of a new event that would bring basketball teams from HBCUs to Indianapolis. CEO Alice Watson is our guest this week to explain in detail the economic tensions behind the switch this fall from college football programs to Indianapolis-based high school teams, including the $750,000-plus price tag IBE faced to recruit college teams and their bands this year. She also delves into the creation of an HBCU basketball invitational for 2027, which is expected to be more affordable for attracting programs. And she takes a deep dive into all of the educational programming and scholarships IBE offers throughout the year without nearly as much fanfare.

Virtually every large or medium-sized company today says it’s dedicated to innovation, especially in light of the generational disruption in business created by artificial intelligence. But “innovative” is a broad and squishy term. One company’s so-called “cutting-edge development” might look to another like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Elliott Parker of Indianapolis-based startup builder Alloy Partners has seen many examples of what he calls “the illusion of innovation” – meaning corporate attempts at change that are either mostly for show or that don’t go nearly far enough to make a real impact. Indeed, Parker says, large companies often are unable to innovate their business models because they’re designed and incentivized to keep doing the thing they’re successful at doing. For the owners, executives and managers who are truly interested in making big bets on innovation and challenging dogma within their businesses, what will work? Parker is our guest this week to talk about his book, titled “The Illusion of Innovation,” and how companies can evade the traps. He also discusses how the recent explosion in AI is altering the innovation ecosystem and how companies are built and run. Parker says he’s optimistic, although “things are going to get very, very weird very quickly.”