The IBJ Podcast with Mason King

Karmen Johnson had the trappings of traditional success in her mid-20s: the corporate job in finance, the new house and a wedding in the works. Then she took a hard left turn in the early 2020s and transformed working from home to working and living on the road. She got a taste for what folks call van life—outfitting a truck, bus or van as a mobile home and traveling the country for months at a time. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Johnson discusses the challenge of rearranging your life and career in a way that feels truer to your interests and values. She also goes into great detail about the logistics of van life and the accident that pointed her in a new direction. She persuaded her employer, Indianapolis based credit union Elements Financial, to allow her to work remotely and off the beaten path. She was involved in a near fatal accident in Texas that could have ended her wandering ways, but she instead used it as a wake-up call to devote more of her life to a deferred dream of become an artist. In addition to her remote marketing and communications job with Elements Financial, she now takes commissions to create large-scale murals across the country through her firm Karmen of Earth Designs LLC.

You might already be familiar with filling out the FAFSA form, or you might only know it by reputation. That reputation is somewhere between filing your annual income taxes and running an Ironman triathalon. Revisions, technology issues and widespread confusion over the availability of the form over the past two years might make it seem even more sinister.Let’s back up. What is the FAFSA? If you have a child finishing high school this school year, the FAFSA plays a big part in determining how much financial aid you could receive—including grants, loans and scholarships—to help pay for college. In Indiana, most families are now required by law to fill out the FAFSA unless they seek a waiver. Despite recent tumult, all signs point to the FAFSA being ready to fill out this year by the traditional launch date of Oct. 1. Our guest this week is Bill Wozniak, vice president and chief marketing officer of INvestEd, a nonprofit based in Indianapolis and created by the Indiana Legislature to help families navigate the FAFSA process. He provides an overview for the uninitiated and shares some of the biggest misconceptions of FAFSA. For example, if you think you are sufficiently wealthy to put any financial assistance out of reach, you very well could be wrong. If you think you just need to get it done by the end of the year, you might want to think again. And, Wozniak says, the process isn’t nearly as arduous today as its reputation might suggest.

In this episode of the IBJ Podcast, USA Today columnist and sports broadcasting veteran Christine Brennan speaks with IBJ's Mickey Shuey about "On Her Game," her bestselling unauthorized biography of Indiana Fever’s star Caitlyn Clark. Brennan explains how a chance encounter at the Olympic swimming trials led to a whirlwind book deal, and why Clark’s impact on attendance, viewership and cultural visibility is unlike anything women’s team sports have seen. She also speaks candidly about the WNBA’s handling of Clark’s debut, arguing that league leadership failed to prepare for her arrival and continues to struggle with how to balance promotion, parity and politics. Brennan shares the story behind her viral press conference questions, including one about Clark’s social media activity following a Kamala Harris endorsement, and reflects on what it means to report critically and fairly on the league's biggest star. Plus, Brennan offers her take on Indianapolis’ vision to become the capital of women’s sports, praises the city’s execution of the WNBA All-Star weekend—even without Clark on the court—and urges leaders to keep Clark in Indy as long as possible.

Natalie van Dongen grew up in a small farming community outside a modest city in central Illinois. She spent most of her youth either in school or in the woods by her home. Approaching high school graduation, she wanted to study theater in college and definitely didn’t want to go to Butler University, where both of her parents graduated. But that’s where she eventually chose to go. Two weeks ago, she became the Hogsett administration’s point person for addressing the concerns and complaints of nearly 1 million Indianapolis residents. In eight years, she had risen from an internship with the mayor’s office to the city’s director of community outreach. Along the way, her positions included liaison to the City-County Council and then deputy director of policy and planning for the Department of Public Works. She was a key figure in the city’s push for universal curbside recycling that’s now expected to begin in 2028. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, host Mason King asks Van Dongen about the principles of effective communication with an incredibly broad range of people and organizations. She also digs into the nitty-gritty of universal curbside recycling and the education campaign planned over the next two years. And she excavates her roots in the village of Towanda, Illinois, and how they led her to explore the power of community.

Host Mickey Shuey unpacks the high-stakes arrival of the 2025 WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis—and explores what it means that the league's biggest star, Caitlin Clark, is sidelined. With thousands descending upon the Circle City. Featuring interviews with WNBA Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison, USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, sports marketer Ken Ungar, and leaders from Visit Indy, Indiana Sports Corp., and Pacers Sports & Entertainment, this episode dives into the marketing, civic planning, and vision behind one of the biggest weekends in WNBA history as the city looks to use the weekend as a catalyst for its own ambitions around women's sports. If you enjoyed the episode, get caught up on the season in your favorite podcast app or on IBJ.com.

We’ve hit a head-spinning milestone in the history and development of women’s basketball in Indiana. This week, Indianapolis is hosting the WNBA All-Star Game and all of its related festivities, coming amid an unprecedented surge in popularity for women’s basketball. The top vote-getter for the game is Caitin Clark of the Indiana Fever—a team that now sells out an 18,000-seat arena for nearly every game. The international media is here, and everyone is talking about the potential for players’ salaries to significantly rise. Exactly 50 years ago, Judi Warren was preparing to enter her senior year at Warsaw High School. She didn’t know that she was on the precipice of history. The Indiana High School Athletic Association had officially sanctioned girls basketball, which meant it would have its first statewide girls basketball champion at the end of the season. Warren would end up a transformational figure in the state’s most popular sport, becoming the first Miss Basketball and helping kick-start the rapid growth and evolution of the game for Hoosier girls and women. She’s our guest this week to provide a first-hand account of how girls who played the game in the early 1970s had to fight for respect, funding and even decent practice time—and then how quickly attitudes changed after she guided Warsaw to the first state championship. She then became one of the early recipients of a college basketball scholarship, helped nurture talent through basketball camps, and became a coach—returning to the state finals with Carmel High School. In these ways, she understands the path that has led to this moment as Indy hosts the All-Star Game. She also weighs in on the impact of the WNBA and Caitlin Clark in particular.

Independent bookstores have been on the retail death watch for a few decades now. But, as one American author might put it, reports of their impending demise have been greatly exaggerated. For many, the recipe for success is local ownership, strict attention to local needs and concerns and calendars packed with special events to help create a sense of community. This is what Tiffany Phillips has found over nine years as founder and owner of Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin. Phillips had a well-established career as an attorney in the health care industry as she was turning 40. But Franklin didn’t have a bookstore. One thing led to another as Phillips sought a new office space, and soon she was doing double-duty as a lawyer and a bookshop proprietor. She had a bigger vision for the store as a hub for cultural life and a haven for anyone interested in creativity. As Wild Geese approaches its first decade in business, it has developed a national reputation on the authors circuit as a destination where Phillips and her staff pull out all the stops to host hundreds of fans and involve other local businesses, like the historic Artcraft Theatre and the Main & Madison Market Café. IBJ’s Taylor Wooten recently wrote about this in the May 30 issue of the paper. For the IBJ Podcast this week, host Mason King wanted to chat with Phillips about the small-business challenges of opening and growing the shop and how she fights against persistent fears that investing in the printed word in a small Indiana city is, well … kind of crazy.

Coming after the baby boomers, Generation X is often referred to as “the forgotten generation,” the self-reliant generation and perhaps the last free-range generation. Today, you certainly could argue that it's becoming the financial-panic generation. The first Gen Xers hit the workforce right around the time pensions gave way to 401(k) accounts with self-directed invested assets. Recent studies indicate that Gen Xers who have retirement accounts have saved on average somewhere in the neighborhood of $180,000. That’s well below the $1 million popularly seen as the minimum requirement for beginning a comfortable retirement. (Of course, the ability to sustain income in retirement depends a lot on your spending habits and the quality of life you try to pursue.) Nearly 50% of Gen Xers don’t even have a retirement plan, according to asset management firm Schroders. So IBJ Podcast host Mason King began compiling some of the most common questions his fellow Gen Xers ask about pending retirement or, if need be, semiretirement. For example, when is the best time to start taking Social Security, especially given that it’s headed for a funding deficit early next decade? What exactly do you do with your 401k funds once you retire? And what should you start doing today if your retirement savings are in the five figures or low six figures? In this week's episode of the IBJ Podcast, columnist Pete the Planner weighs in on the big questions for Gen X and warns against a common strategy for diversifying portfolios that King thought was genius.

Nearly one year ago—July 1, 2024—the urban university in downtown Indianapolis known as IUPUI—or Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis—officially split into two separate campuses. This created Indiana University Indianapolis, a standalone campus in the IU system, and Purdue University in Indianapolis, which is considered an extension of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette. IU Indianapolis took the vast majority of the land and buildings considered part of IUPUI. The school is focusing in part on research, commercialization and student opportunity in the life sciences and biotech sectors. With its Lafayette extension, Purdue wants to draw more students interested in engineering and business to the university, including through new degree programs such as motorsports engineering and executive education. With a relatively modest amount of land set aside for its Indianapolis operations, Purdue needed to figure out how it eventually could have an outsized impact. It recently revealed its long-term plans—16 buildings ranging from five to about 20 stories on just 28 acres of land in the northwest sector of downtown. In this week’s edition of the podcast, IBJ’s Mickey Shuey unpacks Purdue’s high-density strategy to serve 15,000 students per year by 2075. Mickey also digs deep into perhaps the greatest hindrance to growth in that area—West Street, the wide and heavily trafficked thoroughfare that essentially creates a barrier between the Mile Square and everything to the West. As Mickey reports in the latest issue of IBJ, tearing down that figurative wall is becoming a greater priority for the city of Indianapolis. The Hogsett administration has begun “preliminary discussions” with the neighborhood and universities to develop potential solutions. But any fix likely to come from those talks—whether spanning the roadway with bridges or tunnels, creating a parkway, or adding more crosswalks to slow traffic—will be expensive and likely require consensus from many stakeholders.

Indianapolis-based housing developer Onyx + East recently scored a three-peat on IBJ’s annual list of fast-growing companies—all of which were on the watch of CEO Kelli Lawrence. She took the top job in 2019, when its annual revenue was about $19 million. By 2024, its annual revenue had climbed to $90 million—a nearly 375% increase over five years. Founded in 2015 as an offshoot of Indianapolis-based apartment developer Milhaus, Onyx + East has specialized in for-sale housing such as townhomes, duplex homes and single-family residences within planned communities in high-demand urban and suburban areas. Its focus has widened from Marion Couty to the Indianapolis metropolitan area to markets in Ohio and Florida. It also has expanded into the build-to-rent category. Kelli Lawrence grew up in a traditional suburban home in Toledo and was a first-generation college student. She entered Ball State University with a strong sense of what she wanted to do—study urban planning and development in Ball State’s school of architecture—and a hunger for student governance, joining and leading a wide array of campus organizations. He first job out of school was long-range planner for the city of Carmel, getting involved in the early stages of some of the city’s signature projects. All of these topics are on the table for this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, as well as her current role as CEO of Onyx + East. We discuss the economics of developing and pricing its projects in central Indiana, how to onboard new employees in the midst of business growth, her early years in the housing development when she often was the only woman in the room, and why she describes herself as a “joiner.”

Doug Boles already had his dream job as president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway since 2013. Then Roger Penske, owner of both IMS and the IndyCar Series, asked him to be president of IndyCar following the departure of Jay Frye in February. The pitch: Boles would retain his first job while also taking on the second. “It wasn’t something that I expected,” Boles says in this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast. “When Roger Penske calls you and says, ‘I need your help,’ you don’t usually say, ‘No.’ You say, ‘Yes, sir, how can I help?’ And then you get on board and you start figuring it out.” A few months later, early in the morning after qualifying for the Indy 500 on May 18, Boles called Penske to inform his boss that he felt it was necessary to ratchet up the severity of penalties against two Team Penske drivers—including two-time defending champion Josef Newgarden—by placing them at the very back of the field. “It was not the [phone] call I wanted to make,” Boles said. Nor was it the only difficult conversation Boles would have with IndyCar teams about costly penalties by the time the Indy 500 victory banquet rolled around on May 26. “This month was probably the most physically and emotionally draining and taxing month that I’ve had since I’ve been [IMS] president,” Boles told IBJ. These have been the highest-profile decisions to date in Boles’ tenure as IndyCar president as he works on implementing Penske’s larger vision. Most importantly, that means bringing together IMS and IndyCar to work more as a single unit and leverage their strengths. It also means working with Fox, IndyCar’s new broadcaster, to find ways to build the audience. It means working with promoters and sponsor. All of those topics are on the table in this wide-ranging podcast, as well as emerging efforts to improve inspection of cars and to create an independent officiating board that would operate completely outside the Penske organization to quell concerns about conflicts of interest. Boles also shares his take on the need for the annual irritant shared by many local fans: the TV blackout of the live Indy 500 broadcast.

With an estimated value of $4.8 billion, the Indianapolis Colts franchise is arguably the best-known family-owned business in Indiana. While we reflect on the passing of team owner Jim Irsay, who had significant influence on building the physical plant and identity of modern Indianapolis, we have the luxury of knowing that three more Irsays are in a position to continue that work and stewardship of the team. Daughters Carlie Irsay-Gordon, Kalen Jackson and Casey Foyt already are co-owners of the team and have been entrenched for years as high-level executives. In particular, Irsay-Gordon has been so deeply involved in every aspect of football operations that it’s widely assumed she will claim the role of controlling owner. These women have spent much of their adult lives preparing for this eventuality, but experts maintain that succession in professional sports is always a challenge, regardless of the circumstances. Jim Irsay seemed very comfortable in the public eye and as a sometimes larger-than-life figure. His daughters have kept much lower profiles—so much so that many casual fans probably aren’t aware of their existence. In this week’s podcast, we’re going to try to change that. IBJ has interviewed both Carlie and Kalen in past years, and we’ll share excerpts from those interviews that are relevant to this moment. We also have comments from one of the team’s leaders on the field about his experiences with Irsay-Gordon and Jackson. Our in-studio guest is IBJ’s Mickey Shuey, who has a story in the latest issue of IBJ about the ways the three sisters have carved out roles for themselves with the Colts. He also explores how the NFL typically handles succession issues and what financial concerns the daughters likely will have moving forward.

The week between qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 and the actual race is usually pretty quiet from a news perspective. But there’s nothing usual about the last week in this year’s Month of May. Major penalties assessed to two cars owned by Team Penske—including the car driven by two-time defending champion Josef Newgarden—inflamed long-running concerns about Roger Penske’s ownership of both the IndyCar Series and arguably its most successful team. In an extraordinary press conference on Monday, IndyCar President Doug Boles announced that he and another Penske executive decided that harsher penalties were warranted in an effort to protect the integrity of the Indy 500. Their decision, he said, was made without the input of their boss, Roger Penske. Two days later, Team Penske announced something that would have been unthinkable before the 2024 season--that it was parting ways with three of the team’s top executives. That included President Tim Cindric, long considered to be Penske’s successor in the racing part of his automobile empire. The departures have been widely reported as firings. Boles dropped another bombshell late on Wednesday. He revealed that IndyCar has been exploring the creation of an independent governing body beyond Penske’s control to officiate the series without the appearance of bias. If you live in the central Indiana media market, these rapid-fire announcements might have been bewildering. You’ve heard references to “cheating” and “scandal.” You’ve heard that the smoking gun for the qualifying penalties was something called an “attenuator” that had been illegally modified in some way. You’ve heard that all of these developments are a “big deal” for Penske, and therefore the series. If you don’t follow IndyCar religiously, this week’s podcast gives you the relevant background and serves as a primer on which elements are important. Our guest is John Oreovicz, a journalist and author who has covered IndyCar for three decades.

You may have become so used to them that you no longer notice, but snaking through downtown Indianapolis’ northwest quadrant are the remains of a revolutionary public transit system that transported riders on elevated tracks 30-feet high. It was called the People Mover, developed for $44 million by Clarian Health Partners, the hospital system now known as Indiana University Health. From its launch in 2003 to 2019, it recorded roughly 6 million rider trips on a 1.4-mile track running between Methodist Hospital, University Hospital and Riley Hospital for Children. The People Mover had the cooperation of city officials, who allowed the track to use public right of way along Senate Avenue, West 11th Street and University Boulevard. And the People Mover was filled with promise, as some predicted it could be expanded to a larger public transit system that would include Indianapolis International Airport. But tram came to screeching halt in 2019, when IU Health said it would begin offering shuttle buses instead and expected to save about $40 million over 10 years. That also was about the time IU Health began planning a massive facility consolidation and modernization project downtown. IBJ reporter Daniel Lee has a personal connection to the People Mover and recently began looking into what remains of the twin-track system and whether IU Health has any plans to resurrect it. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Lee also gauges support for a proposal that would transform the infrastructure into an elevated trail celebrating the heritage of Black communities on downtown’s northwest side.

These are uncertain times for the U.S. economy. We’re in a grace period for many of the Trump administration’s promised tariffs on dozens of trading partners. U.S. consumer confidence plunged again in April, hitting its lowest level since October 2011. First-quarter gross domestic product for the U.S. hit negative territory for the first time since the first quarter of 2022. On May 7, the Federal Reserve again opted to hold interest rates at the same level, wanting to wait and see how President Trump’s tariff policies shake out. In the financial press, pundits are quibbling about how close we could be to a recession. At the same time, there are several positive indicators for the economy, including strong jobs reports. Trump recently told Americans via social media to “BE PATIENT!!!” for the economic boom that his policies will create. In essence, we’re holding our collective breath to see how all this plays out. In the meantime, the Trump administration on May 5 resumed collecting on defaulted student loans, ending a five-year pause that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. For more than 5 million student loan holders currently in default, this is significant news, and millions more could join them in the near future. The redirection of their income to loan repayment likely will have an effect on the economy as well. IBJ columnist Peter Dunn, aka Pete the Planner, returns to the podcast this week to sift through the data and help us get a footing in this economic limbo. He also takes a closer look at the decision to resume collecting on defaulted student loans and the possible consequences.

In the early hours of Friday, April 25, Indiana legislators passed a $46.2 billion budget for state expenses over the next two years—specifically, from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2027. Legislators knew going in that state revenue to fund the budget would be tight, and they got a nasty revenue forecast with about a week to go in the session. The last week of a budget-writing session is usually pretty hectic, and this one had plenty of surprises as lawmakers tried to find ways to generate more tax revenue while simultaneously reducing funding for agencies and departments. Fledgling Gov. Mike Braun jumped headfirst into his first legislative session and made progress on his campaign promise of providing property tax relief. The Republican-led General Assembly also passed legislation aimed at lowering health care costs for Hoosiers with an approach that focused on hospitals. In both of those cases, of course, the bills passed were the product of much debate, lobbying, negotiation and compromise. Lawmakers also entered the session knowing that reforms would be proposed for the Indiana Economic Development Corp., the state agency charged with helping attract businesses to Indiana and helping businesses currently in the state grow. Its fate wasn’t entirely decided until very late in the session. To take stock of the latest budget-writing session and how it will affect Hoosiers, we’ve invited a panel of reporters who covered some or all of the General Assembly to share their insights on fiscal issues and a few surprises. From the Indianapolis Business Journal, we have Cate Charron and Daniel Lee. And they’re joined by Casey Smith of Indiana Capital Chronicle.

Any day now, a federal judge is expected to give final approval to a $2.8 billion settlement of three antitrust lawsuits that could dramatically alter the landscape of college sports. And given the tumult since the creation of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness opportunities for athletes, that’s saying something. In addition to awarding damages to athletes over the last decade who lost out on NIL opportunities, the settlement agreement lays out a framework for compensating athletes going forward that smashes the status quo. Under the deal, schools will be able to pay athletes directly for the use of their names, images and likenesses as a form of revenue-sharing. However, athletes still will be able to receive money from other NIL sources, and that includes what we call NIL collectives—independent groups, usually founded by alumni and boosters, that pool money for NIL deals benefitting their schools’ athletes. There are rules in the settlement for what qualifies as a legitimate deal via collectives, but this element of the settlement has its skeptics. In a special edition of the IBJ Podcast, host Mason King consults Pete Yonkman, president of Bloomington-based Cook Group and the founder of two collectives established to help Indiana University athletes benefit from NIL opportunities. If the settlement agreement is approved as anticipated, Yonkman foresees a blizzard of lawsuits and a college sports landscape with only a relative handful of schools that can attract top talent and compete for championships. What's at stake, he says, is "what we love about college sports." He also suggests a framework for a solution.

Comparing company employees to a sports team is a well-worn management trope, but Kelley Gay knows as well as anyone the value of translating the experience of a championship-level athlete to the corporate world. She graduated from one of the most lauded team cultures in the history of college athletics: the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball program. In 1995, Gay played forward on UConn’s first women’s national championship team. Earlier this month, the UConn women’s program won its 12th national championship, all under coach Geno Auriemma. Today, Kelley Gay is senior vice president and chief marketing officer of OneAmerica Financial, the largest private company based in Indianapolis. But the lessons she learned from her father, a former NFL lineman, and on the court with UConn are still top of mind. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Gay discusses the importance of learning your role in a large organization while understanding how everyone contributes, when to celebrate your successes and when to push your team to accomplishments they might not believe they can achieve. She also explains her role on the local host committee for July’s WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis—essentially an all-star team of Indy-area executives comprised largely of women.

This week’s IBJ Podcast features a conversation from our Forty Under 40 awards breakfast last week with Maureen Weber, the winner of this year’s Alumni Award. Maureen was originally a Forty Under 40 honoree in 2010. Back then, she had just finished reorganizing the Indiana Department of Education and had taken a job as director of community outreach and engagement at Clarian Health, now Indiana University Health. Sixteen years later, Maureen is president and CEO of Early Learning Indiana. She said she took the job because she saw the opportunity to transform the lives of young children, especially vulnerable ones. IBJ Editor Lesley Weidenbener talked with Maureen on stage about the work Early Learning Indiana is doing today and about leadership and learning from failure. You can read more about Maureen and see our latest Forty Under 40 class here.

In this era of online entertainment, you could switch to a steaming service this very second and watch one of many classic movies filmed in Indiana. You would be hard-pressed to find many movies and TV shows that recently were filmed in Indiana—even those where the stories are set in Indiana. Other states, including several of our immediate neighbors, have been much more aggressive than Indiana in offering financial incentive to filmmakers, TV producers and commercial creators. In 2022, Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a law that offered state tax credits for certain elements of a production’s budget. But that solution isn’t the best fit for some producers, who can find better deals elsewhere. And not a single project has been approved by the Indiana Economic Development Corp., which administers the tax credit. New legislation working its way through the Statehouse hopes to make the film and media tax credits more desirable. It would allow producers to sell the tax credits for a percentage of their value. But there are enough limitations to stymie a medium- or large-scale production. IBJ’s Dave Lindquist has been studying the issue and breaks down the new proposal in a story in the latest issue of IBJ. He’s the guest this week on the IBJ Podcast to talk about interstate competition for media projects and why an upcoming movie set in Indianapolis and featuring Al Pacino was instead shot in Louisville. He also asks current Indiana filmmakers whether they believe the new proposal would be valuable.