A (17:36)

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C (18:34)

The American west to walk a wilderness trail. Wasn't afraid to be out on his own, but Eric Robinson vanished in the Hyawinta Mountains. I remember thinking Eric, what were you thinking mate? I'm Dave Cawley. Join me on my podcast Uinta Triangle where I travel the world to answer the question what happened to Eric Robinson? Follow Uinta Triangle. That's U I n t a triangle on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. I grew up in Northfield, Minnesota in a family that had to work hard to make ends meet. My dad started a landscaping business with nothing but a wheelbarrow and a shovel, and my summers working for him gave me a front row seat to what it meant to grind out a living as a small business owner in a small town. It was hard. I remember my dad bartering landscaping services with our town doctor to pay for the hospital bill that came with my younger sister's birth. We didn't have health insurance for most of my childhood. Every day at Google I felt further and further from my roots. At the same time, I started seeing how the influences of platforms like YouTube that had drawn me to Silicon Valley in the first place were not, in fact, all upside. When the Arab spring exploded on YouTube in 2010, we scrambled to develop a curation process that could get verified videos of the protests to news organizations to use in their coverage. The mere existence of YouTube gave protesters the confidence to document their struggle to the world and build support for their cause. But those same clips also gave the Egyptian government the ability to identify the protesters and jail them. Or worse. YouTube wouldn't create a face blurring technology to help protesters protect themselves in videos for several more years. The technology was moving too fast for us to keep up. And then came fake news. The Russian attempts at online interference in the 2016 election shocked us at Google and changed forever our understanding of how technology's power could be manipulated. It also changed how we engaged with the media industry, who had gone from telling us to leave the truth telling to them, to being outraged that we allowed people to access fake news on our platforms. Things were shifting under our feet faster than ever. I remained an optimist about technology, but there was something about the changes underway that made me wonder if these new problems, along with other major challenges that seemed to be rushing toward America at breakneck speed, were best solved in Silicon Valley. Maybe other places had perspectives to offer. Mary was starting to feel similarly. She'd spent the last five years building startup ecosystems around the world and saw innovation happening everywhere from Milan to Milwaukee. She was building partnerships with local startup incubators and in some cases building physical co working spaces for Google to help the next generation of startups get off the ground. Often I'd travel with her and noticed the energy and excitement that existed outside Silicon Valley. Those tech economies felt different from California, more connected to other industries, more focused on solving people's real problems, and free of coastal elitism. And then five years into our marriage, our lives changed when Mary became pregnant with twins. We'd struggled for many years to get pregnant, and finally succeeding after multiple rounds of IVF gave us a new perspective. Every parent is changed by their kids, but for those who've struggled to build a family, the process takes on a new gravity. We felt lucky, and the process also made us more deliberate people. What would be the best life for our new little girl and boy? Where did we want to raise them and what do we want to expose them to? Do we want to live near our extended family. Answers to questions like these are different for everyone, but the questions got us talking. Mary is the daughter of Thai immigrants, entrepreneurs who found their way to San Diego to start a chiropractic business. Her mother passed away after a long illness a few years into our marriage and her father still lived in San Diego. Her sister Annie was in Chicago and her brother Joe in the Bay Area, though he wasn't sure he was there for the long haul. Meanwhile, my family was all concentrated in the Midwest. I'm the oldest of four kids and have 15 cousins, most of them in the middle of the country. My sister Kelly lived about one mile from my parents farm in Northfield with her husband and five kids. What if we actually moved to Minnesota? I hadn't lived there in 20 years and Google didn't have offices there. Mary had been born in Iowa but hadn't lived in the Midwest since she was 2. Nothing was forcing us to move other than our own conversations about what we wanted the next chapter of our life to look like we stumbled around that conversation for months. Growing up, I'd always wanted to leave Minnesota and seek new horizons. But the more we spoke, coming home was beginning to feel just as exciting. As I talked with others, I realized we weren't alone in our thoughts. The Bay Area has seen some of the highest outmigration in the country over the past 10 years. Minnesotans in particular are famous for moving back home. Because the quality of life in the state is so high. Minnesota always finds itself on top five lists of places to live in the country, based on everything from education and infrastructure to amenities and professional opportunity. Mary was intrigued, too. Her work building up startup ecosystems all over the country gave her the sense that there was possibility outside the valley. As a native San Diegan, though, could she stand the winters? What was it like to live through five months of snow every year? We both agreed that we loved having twins, and raising them with family around to help could be a big, welcome change. I don't know if there was just one reason we decided to take the leap. Mostly, we felt that reinventing ourselves in a new place would be an adventure, and that maybe in a moment of so much disruption and pessimism, we'd find purpose in it. What made it possible wasn't me, but Mary. She'd been offered a new job with a venture capital firm started by AOL's founder, Steve Case, called Rise of the Rest, focused on investing in startups outside the coasts. It was based in D.C. and the assumption was that she would work for Menlo Park. But living in the middle of the country could be a powerful way to live out the mission of her new job. What if she suggested she did the job from Minneapolis? I could hardly contain my excitement. The momentum of our discussions had grown, and this seemed like the perfect path to give Minnesota a shot. Within a month, Mary had taken the job. I'd agreed with Google to work remotely from Minneapolis, and we were searching for a new place to live in Minnesota. It happened fast. In fact, it happened so fast that part of me wondered if either of us really understood what we were getting into. Especially Mary, who was taking an even bigger leap than me, something that would present us with some challenges in the years that followed. In April 2018, we moved to a new home in Minneapolis. We planned our arrival to hit in the spring so we could begin our new chapter by enjoying the precious few months of good weather Minnesota has every year. A week later, an April blizzard dropped a foot of snow on our new front yard. This is a story of coming home and reinventing my life in my home state. In reflecting on this major personal transition, I hope my journey might offer an opportunity to look at where American life is going. Reinvention has always been at the heart of the American ideal, but it's happening in a more uncertain environment than ever before. So much of what we've taken for granted in this country is shifting. The headlines of America's diminished trust in its core institutions can make the way forward seem less and less clear. Yet I discovered that the way to a stronger country starts, as it always has, with building stronger local communities, with investing in a physical place and finding purpose in it. For all that technology has done to connect us globally, the deepest purpose we can find comes with investing in our chosen communities and making them feel like home. Moving home to Minnesota was my first step in that journey. But it wasn't the only one. Eight months after Mary and I moved our young family to Minneapolis, I had the opportunity to leave Google and join Minnesota's state government, becoming the Commissioner of the Department of Employment and Economic Development deed under Governor Walz. It was another reboot. The job was a massive change for unknown outcomes with not much assurance of success. Bureaucracies are famously challenging to run, and I would be a complete outsider. But it also felt like a chance to focus on the very things that inspired Mary and me to move to the heartland in the first place. And when the pandemic hit, that possibility took on a whole new meaning. Leaving the comforts of Google to run a 1, 400 person government bureaucracy during a global health crisis gave me into how American life is being transformed than I ever got working in technology. And it gave me a shot at making a real difference in the place I grew up. I wrote this book to share the insights I discovered to a simple but important question. How can we find purpose in our lives and build community in a modern America that feels increasingly disconnected from its promise? My journey home taught me many answers to that question. It taught me the power of going local. It taught me that putting yourself in an entirely new situation is often the best way to learn. It taught me that public service is a unique way to make a big impact. It taught me to invest in what makes your chosen community unique. It taught me the benefit of spending time with people who aren't just like you. It taught me about family, faith, and making friends in your 40s. It taught me about reconciling old differences, about the kind of father I wanted to be, and about what it really means to have a partner in life. And it taught me that crises can bring communities closer when we invest in strengthening the things that bind us together. I also got something else from moving home to Minnesota. Bringing fresh eyes to my native state gave me a lens into why this place, I came to believe, is uniquely worth watching for insights on where America is headed. My new community, I discovered, was both exceptional and paradoxical. For example, Minnesota has boasted the lowest unemployment rate in American history, yet it is home to some of the steepest workforce shortages in the nation. It enjoys the moniker Minnesota nice, yet has some of the worst racial disparities in the U.S. the state has made decades of outsized investments in education and infrastructure that have helped build the densest Fortune 500 metro area in the entire country. Yet tense, urban rural divisions are reshaping the state's political climate, especially since the pandemic. It is consistently named one of the best places to live in the country. Despite having some of the coldest temperatures in America and nestled amongst a sea of red states in the Midwest, Minnesota has not elected a Republican to statewide office in almost 20 years. It's a unique place, but most people probably don't give much thought to Minnesota or to the Midwest in general. Flyover states don't get national attention unless they become important in presidential elections. Yet our country ignores the Midwest at its own peril. There is more happening here that has something to say about America's future during a time of great upheaval than you might think. Just a few months after COVID 19 had arrived, George Floyd, a black man, was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer and caught on video by a bystander just a few miles from our new home. I heard sirens all night and walked through burned out neighborhoods that had been destroyed. The next day, as protests unfolded around the world, Minnesota became the center of global attention. The racial disparities that led to George Floyd's murder and the protests and riots that followed run deep. They are complex or simple, depending on your view, and they exist everywhere. Minnesota has had a challenging history of racism. I would discover more deeply in the weeks and months that followed. Tasked with negotiating with legislators for state dollars to rebuild the neighborhoods that were destroyed, I saw up close the challenges and controversy that shape our conversations about race. They served to highlight just what an inflection point we find ourselves at as a state and as a nation. And so in what follows, Minnesota itself is a character in my story as much as the people and family I connected with in my new community. But I'm not here to cheerlead Minnesota or the Midwest. Rather, I hope my home state story like my own is one worth telling that sheds light on the promise and peril of community renewal. The story you're about to hear is a personal one. It's the story of going from riding my scooter in the sunshine to work at the world's most innovative tech company, to standing on the windy back patio of a bar in northern Minnesota debating the appropriate table size and social distancing protocols with restaurant owners during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, and how I learned to find purpose and build community along the way. My story, like everyone's, is both unique and universal. It's the story of a place in a country that is reinventing itself through the eyes of a person trying to do the same.

B (33:49)

Ready to hear the rest of the story? Go to your nextlisten.com Copyright 2025 by Steve Grove. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon and Schuster Audio from the audiobook How I Found Myself in the Midwest, read by Steve Grove, published by Simon and Schuster Audio, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Used with permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Your next listen is a production of Lemonada Media in Simon and Schuster Audio. I'm your host, Jackie Danziger. I produce a series with Lizzie Breyer Bowman. Isara Acevez is our associate producer. Bobby Woody is our audio engineer. Music by APM Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Whittles Wax. Production support from Lara Blackman, Tom Spain, Sarah Lieberman and Lauren Pierce help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Parents. We know the child care crisis is not just another headline. It's a daily struggle playing out in millions of homes across this country. I'm Gloria Rivera, and this is no One Is Coming to Save Us. This season. We're demanding a child care system that actually works for kids, parents and educators. We mean free birth to five full day nearby. Easy to apply. No one is coming to Save Us Season 5 from Lemonada Media, out now.