Chapter 1: From the Valley to the Prairie Chapter 1 From the Valley to the Prairie On a windy fall day on the back patio of Eggy''s Red Garter in Eveleth, Minnesota, I stood in front of twenty-five angry small business owners. Sitting on folding chairs perfectly spaced six feet apart, they glared at me with a collective grimace. Proprietors of bars and restaurants of this and a handful of other small towns on Minnesota''s Iron Range, they''d gathered for a town hall to discuss the governor''s COVID-19 restrictions. It was October 6, 2020. Margie Koivunen, owner of the Roosevelt Bar next door, took a microphone attached to a portable karaoke machine. Tall and somber, she''d become a leading voice in a local hospitality community that was fed up with pandemic restrictions. She held tightly to the yellow legal pad pages of a handwritten speech that flapped in the wind as she began. "Your one-size-fits-all restrictions on businesses don''t make any sense up here," she said.
"We don''t have the same COVID cases here like you have down in the Twin Cities." For the last several months, the state government''s business closures and limits on capacity in bars, restaurants, and other businesses had generated no end of controversy. Especially in rural parts of Minnesota. "I''ve tried to call the governor''s office several times and got no answer," she complained. Then she turned to her fellow small business owners. "Could all of you please stand up?" she asked. As everyone rose to their feet, the intensity of their disgust felt suddenly stronger. "Now, please sit down when the following statement applies to you: How many of you have taken out a bank loan?" Several people sat down.
"How many of you have laid off or terminated employees?" Several more sat down. "How many of you have dealt with stress, anxiety, or depression?" Margie joined the rest of the small business owners as everyone took a seat. "I''ve long since sat down," she concluded. The wind was really blowing now, and suddenly the pages of her speech fluttered from her grasp. I jumped forward and grabbed them off the ground before they blew away. "Nice reflexes," I heard someone mutter. I handed Margie her speech back and hoped the moment provided a bit of levity. But this was not a crowd in a mood to smile.
I shouldn''t have been surprised. For months I''d been hosting roundtables like this one with business owners across Minnesota, sharing the latest pandemic news and hearing their feedback on our efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Most of these conversations happened in my basement, over video conference. But being here in rural Minnesota, in person, felt a lot different. Looking someone straight in the eye who might be losing their business felt a lot different than seeing them on a screen. Dave Lislegard, the Democratic state representative from this area seated behind me, had invited me to come to his district a few weeks earlier. Getting the commissioner of the state''s economic and workforce development agency to come listen to his constituents would make a difference, he said. He didn''t have to tell me, but I knew he was also in a tough reelection battle.
Margie handed the microphone to other business owners who expressed their frustration. They talked about having to take second jobs to keep their restaurants afloat. They complained about lack of government assistance. One business owner said his cooks were getting so overheated from wearing masks in the kitchen that they had to cool off in the walk-in freezer. But mostly, they groaned about the restrictions coming out of the capital, St. Paul. They argued that it was different in Greater Minnesota (what Minnesotans call the parts of the state outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area) and therefore the same restrictions need not apply to them. Why couldn''t we see that? The pandemic had started seven months earlier, but it felt like seven years.
When I joined the governor''s cabinet to help grow the economy of my home state the year before, I''d been excited to focus on growth. Success would be measured by the number of startups we could help get off the ground, or the number of small businesses that succeeded under our watch. Our wins would come in the number of innovative businesses we could attract to Minnesota and the jobs we''d create. But now my job was exactly the opposite. To slow the spread of this deadly new virus, we were shutting down small businesses to keep people safe. I was helping hundreds of thousands of people leave the workplace and get on unemployment insurance. We weren''t creating jobs--we were killing them. Minnesota lost over 416,000 jobs in the first month alone.
From the first days of the pandemic, our newly elected governor, Tim Walz--whom I''d known since his upset victory for a congressional seat back in 2006--had asked me to serve as his point person with the business community. Alongside our state''s health commissioner, I was tasked with advising him on what our economic approach should be in the crisis, and communicating those decisions to the public. Like every state government, we were operating without a playbook. Meetings ran around the clock, where we debated our approach to school closures, business restrictions, social-distancing protocols, PPE disbursement, and more. And every day at 2:00 p.m., we addressed the public in statewide press conferences live on television, sharing the latest information we had and explaining our approach. Under the bright lights of local news media and reporters, my job was to articulate what our business restrictions were, how they worked, and why we were doing what we were doing.
I also had to introduce how unemployment insurance worked to thousands of people who never imagined that they''d need it. I myself had only been vaguely aware that the unemployment insurance program was part of the agency I was being asked to lead when I started this job, until my first day, when I had to sign a piece of paper to capture my signature to print on the checks that we issued to people. Now I was the face of the program to more than 5 million Minnesotans, many desperate for a lifeline. Every customer service complaint mattered, and our system and team were overwhelmed. I heard countless tragic stories of people struggling every day. How had I found myself here? My story is a story about coming home. It''s a story about taking a very different turn in life, trying something different, and letting it take me somewhere new. It''s a story about reinventing myself and investing in community at a time when America often feels unmoored.
It''s a story that, I hope, offers a fresh perspective to those who are looking for a new way forward in their lives at a time of great upheaval. Just a few years earlier, I wasn''t even living in Minnesota. My wife, Mary, and I were firmly planted in an area of California that''s bustling with new ideas and flooded with sunshine. In the heart of Silicon Valley, we lived in Menlo Park--just a few miles from Meta and a few more miles from Google, where we both worked. We''d met at the company, were married in Mary''s hometown of San Diego, and had begun a comfortable life together in the Bay Area. We were happy living in the cradle of American innovation. Every day, I would ride my Vespa scooter fifteen minutes to the Googleplex in the sun, where I led a team that I had started, called the Google News Lab, focused on using Google''s resources to help the news industry. Mary was the founder of Google for Startups, a similar outreach effort with a different target--startup companies around the world who would use Google tools to grow faster.
We had incredible colleagues, big budgets; we built global teams and traveled the world. In our living room hung a map with pushpins for every country we''d visited for work, either alone or together. After a while, there were too many pushpins to count. I loved working in tech, even if I''d stumbled into it. I was a journalist and a teacher who spent much of my twenties doing what I might generously describe as "focused wandering." I taught English in Japan, worked for my dad''s small landscaping business, and moved to Boston to do freelance journalism for a few years. Then I went to grad school for public policy, thinking it might make me a sharper journalist. By then, I''d racked up a considerable amount of debt and wasn''t sure how I was going to pay it off.
Truth was, I didn''t really know where I was headed. And then I discovered YouTube while posting clips for a class project in grad school. I became enthralled with the new phenomenon of online video. Watching people create videos by themselves seen by millions, defining "viral" for the first time in the internet age, I became transfixed. A British senior citizen with the handle Geriatric1927 posted a two-minute video called "First Try," where he shared his "geriatric gripes and grumbles," and quietly racked up over a million views. A pair of high school pranksters calling themselves "Smosh" posted goofy songs and skits and suddenly become stars. It seemed like, overnight, everyone had a broadcast TV truck in their pocket. And the phenomenon instantly started shaping news and politics.
In the 2006 midterm elections, the incumbent senator from Virginia, George Allen, was caught on video calling his opponent''s campaign staffer a "macaca"--a clip that was uploaded to YouTube and became the first viral political video to make national news. The racist quip unearthed deeper issues with Allen''s.