AGI - Advance, Grow, Innovate with AI

EPISODE DESCRIPTION Indiana's AI future will be decided by the people willing to build, teach, fund, hire, and keep learning now. Jason talks with Chris Hutchinson, Director of Engagement at TechPoint, about how TechPoint and CICP connect Indiana's tech economy through the Indiana AI Innovation Network, CIO and CDO peer groups, founder support, Xtern, Xtern Challenge, and the Mira Awards....

EPISODE DESCRIPTIONTiffany Preston spent 19 years putting away the kind of people most of us never want to think about. As a federal prosecutor she convicted Buster Hernandez, the "Brian Kil" sextortionist who threatened at least 375 kids and drew a 75-year sentence. So when she talks about how AI is changing crimes against children, it lands differently. She and Jason get into the part...

EPISODE DESCRIPTION OpenAI is handing out 50 million dollars in unrestricted cash to nonprofits, and the application closes July 15. Julie is off this week, so Jason Padgett brought in his boss, CitizenAI Chief Operating Officer Oliver Belanger, to break down the OpenAI Foundation's 2026 People-First AI Fund and what it takes to actually win it. The pitch is almost suspiciously simple. Grants...

Morgan Mason works with early childhood educators, coaches, and school leaders through Keep Indiana Learning, and she brings a grounded view to a conversation that can get weird fast: what should AI do around young children? Jason and Morgan talk through AI toys, Mr. Potato Head with a language model inside, the risks of sycophancy and anthropomorphism, and the bigger opportunity sitting right bes...

Jason put OpenAI's Codex and Claude CoWork in the same Slack channel and told them to automate his workflow. They saved hours, built working software, duplicated work, defended territory, missed messages, and required more management than either agent expected. That experiment opens a wider Weekly Blitz conversation with Julie Koehrer about the human skills agentic work will demand. Clear instruct...

Lena Darnay spent years as a school librarian before she landed at the Central Indiana Educational Service Center, and that librarian's brain turns out to be exactly what the AI moment needs. In this School's Out Saturdays conversation she and Jason dig into why K-12 has to expose kids to AI early instead of blocking it, why every industry panel she has ever sat on names the same must-have...

EPISODE DESCRIPTIONA frontier AI model got pulled offline by executive order this week, and Jason and Julie use it to open a bigger question. The government was ahead of nuclear and ahead of UAPs, and for the first time it is behind, trying to regulate a technology that did not start in its labs and that officials admit they do not fully understand. The two get into what happens to a business when...

EPISODE DESCRIPTION Scouting America rolled out an AI merit badge in fall 2025, and Bryon Haverstick is about to put it in front of around 30 kids at the University of Scouting at Purdue on December 5. Bryon runs scouting across 14 counties in north central Indiana for the Sagamore Council, and the event has grown into the largest University of Scouting in the country, close to 3,000 people from 2...

EPISODE DESCRIPTION Everybody throws around "agentic AI" like it means the same thing as the chatbot they have used since 2022. It does not, and Jason walks Julie through exactly where the line sits. A chat interface answers your question. An agent goes off and does the work. Jason's own setup pulls a week of voice memos out of NotebookLM, drafts the No Code CAIO and Field Notes news...

EPISODE DESCRIPTIONAnne Leftwich runs learning technologies for all of Indiana University, and her message to AI holdouts is blunt: you can't shape what you won't use. Refuse to touch the tools and you forfeit your seat in the conversation about how they get used in your classroom and your kid's bedroom. In this episode she walks through how IU earned the AI Transformation Award at Tec...

EPISODE DESCRIPTIONPope Leo XIV dropped roughly 43,000 words on AI in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and Anthropic's co-founder sat at the Vatican to mark the moment. Jason and Julie work through what the Pope got right, the pragmatic warnings about power concentration and worker displacement, and where the document jumps ahead of the actual conversation by debating AI rights befor...

Jeremy Hill handed his Richmond High School students MagicSchool and told them to break it. They couldn't, and that two-week red-team is why teachers across the district trusted the tool enough to let students use it. Hill, MagicSchool's 2025 AI Educator of the Year, joins Jason with two of his tech team members, high school junior Sophia Hill and Wittenberg University sophomore Maren Bols...

EPISODE DESCRIPTIONThree commencement speakers got booed this month for mentioning AI, and the reactions say something real. Eric Schmidt got drowned out at Arizona. Gloria Caulfield couldn't finish a sentence at UCF. Scott Borchetta told Middle Tennessee State students to "deal with it" and got the response you'd expect from arts and media graduates who just watched their career...

A Purdue computer science junior breaks down the real AI job market for new grads. Why Big Tech froze entry-level hiring, where the actual opportunities sit, and what technical skills survive when AI writes code. Key topics covered: Why Meta, Amazon, and Big Tech aren't hiring entry-level CS grads Where startups and SMBs are paying premium for AI-fluent grads The "individual contributor&q...

What happens when Elon Musk texts Sam Altman's co-founder that "by the time this is over, you'll be the most hated men in America"? This week, Jason Padgett and Julie Koehrer unpack the Musk vs. Altman federal trial, Anthropic's new compute deal with xAI, and why China's chip strategy could determine who controls global AI. Jason also breaks down what GPUs, neural network...

China graduates 2 million engineers a year. The U.S. graduates 150,000. Jeff Towson has spent 17 years on the ground in China studying what that gap actually produces. In this 90-minute conversation on The Vibe, Jeff breaks down how Huawei rebuilt its supply chain after the 2019 U.S. entity list ban, how open-weight models like DeepSeek V4 and Alibaba's Qwen are pulling Silicon Valley costs do...

Most AI in education conversations skip elementary school. This AI podcast episode starts there. Zionsville Community Schools Digital Learning Coach Stevie Frank walks through what K-8 AI literacy actually looks like in a district that never blocked ChatGPT. Stevie supports three K-8 buildings and teaches kindergartners that "AI is a robot, not a her." Jason and Stevie met days earlier a...

275 million records stolen, 9,000 institutions hit during finals week. Ashton Schultz joins Jason on the Weekly Blitz to unpack the Canvas data breach, Anthropic's surprise compute deal with Elon's Colossus data center, and why Microsoft Copilot is the most pragmatic AI tool for locked-down enterprise environments. Ashton, a 19-year tech distribution veteran and founder of Spicy Brain Spea...

A Purdue computer science junior stood outside Chicago Union Station with a sign that said "Can AI do this?" The response surprised him, and the conversation that followed surprised Jason. Ethan Dawes joins School's Out Saturdays to talk about why mass-applying for jobs is broken, where CS students should actually look for opportunity in 2026, and what AI in education needs to look l...

What's the difference between ChatGPT and Magic School AI inside a K-12 classroom? Tanika Kinartail, Professional Learning Specialist at the Central Indiana Educational Service Center (CIESC), joins host Jason Padgett to answer that question and a dozen others educators are asking in 2026. Key topics covered: - Magic School AI vs ChatGPT: how vertical AI handles a frustrated student differentl...

Why are AI subscriptions about to break? This week's AI podcast unpacks tokenomics, the gym-membership flaw in ChatGPT and Claude pricing, and what happens when AI agents start running 50,000 queries a minute instead of one human at a time. Plus Huawei's 7nm chip independence, the Musk vs Altman trial, and what Meta's Indiana data center should look like if big tech borrowed the solar...

A graphic designer who uses AI every single day sits down with Jason to explain what that actually looks like – including why AI-generated logos can't be copyrighted and why ChatGPT will never give you the same output twice. Key topics covered: Using AI as a daily marketing and design tool: brain dumps, prompting strategy, and how to iterate fast Why AI-generated logos create a copyright probl...

Alpha School says its students finish core academics in two hours a day and score in the top 1% nationally on MAP tests. This episode gets into how that actually works. Jason and co-host Ronda Swartz (assistant principal, nearly 30 years in Catholic K-12 education) sit down with Sofia Swanson, Head of Partnerships at Alpha School, to walk through the 2 Hour Learning model from the beginning. MacKe...

AI is forcing consulting, law, and web design to abandon hourly billing. Jason Padgett and Julie Koehrer unpack what changes when clients know AI compressed 20 hours of work into 3, and why workers aren't sharing in the productivity gains. Key topics covered: The death of hourly billing in consulting, law, and web design How Claude in Chrome is building an entire HubSpot CRM in Jason's bro...

Only 23% of Americans have a positive view of AI in 2026, about the same approval rating as ICE. Jason Padgett and Julie Koehrer dig into why the gap between foundation-model leaders and the public is widening, and why Jason argues the fix isn't UBI, it's equity. Key topics covered:- The April 6 shooting of Indiana Councilman Ron Gibson's house (13 rounds, "No Data Centers" n...