This podcast was recorded in late August 2025. Much has occurred since then, both in Minnesota and nationally, and listeners are asked to consider the episode’s treatment of politics and current events in the context of the time in which it was recorded.
Steve Grove is the publisher and CEO of the Minnesota Star Tribune. For many years, he had been a high-flying executive in Silicon Valley, working for firms like Google and YouTube. Then in 2018, he and his wife — who worked for a venture capital firm investing in startups outside of the coasts along with AOL founder Steve Case and now-Vice President JD Vance — decided to return to Minnesota, where Grove had grown up. His recent book, How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention, is about leaving the global hub of innovation for what’s often disparaged as “flyover country.” It’s also a story of recommitting to civic and political involvement, as Grove went to work for Minnesota governor (and future Democratic vice-presidential nominee) Tim Walz as head of the state’s departments of economic and workforce development. He was in this role when the pandemic struck the state, making him the principal liaison with a business community struggling to cope with restrictions meant to stem the spread of COVID.
In this podcast conversation, Grove discusses his personal experience of moving from Silicon Valley back to Minnesota, the benefits and tradeoffs of relocating there, and what he learned from having moved between the worlds of high tech, government, and publishing. He describes his experiences with finding both resistance and innovation in state and local government, and the perspective that gave him on Elon Musk’s DOGE attempt to reinvent government along Silicon Valley lines. (Grove believes that “If you’re going to reboot government in a more powerful way, starting local has a lot better shot than starting national.”) He discusses the challenges of heading the Safe Reopening Group during the pandemic, which he frankly characterizes as a “deeply uncomfortable exercise in social engineering.” And he also describes his work since 2023 in attempting to reimagine the venerable Star Tribune at a time of severe challenges for print journalism and the news media more generally.
Transcript
Steve Grove: There are reasons why government employees feel risk-averse. There are reasons why innovation doesn’t happen. I think if you can empower some of the people inside of an institution to be a part of that journey, you’re going to be better off versus coming in from the top down with no buy-in from the people that are there. You’re not going to get change to happen longer-term.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoffrey Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by Steve Grove. He is CEO and Publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, which is the largest newspaper in the state and is known there by the affectionate nickname, The Strib.
Steve came to that position from having been Minnesota’s Commissioner of Employment and Economic Development. And he previously had spent a dozen years in Silicon Valley as an executive at Google and YouTube, where among his other responsibilities he had been the founding director of the Google News Lab. He recently came out with his first book, How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention, which was published this summer by Simon & Schuster. Welcome, Steve!
Steve Grove: Hey, Geoff. Thanks for having me.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Thank you much for being here. As you know, you’re the second person from the Star Tribune that I’ve welcomed to my podcast.
Steve Grove: Oh, I know.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: About a year and a half ago, I spoke with Lori Sturdevant, who’s retired but I guess still writes occasional columns for the paper…
Steve Grove: She does.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And we spoke about the memoir she had helped Senator David Durenberger write, entitled When Republicans Were Progressive. And I remember that toward the end of that conversation, Lori mentioned that people often come to her, because she’s such a well-known ghostwriter and assistant on memoirs, and ask her whether they should write their memoirs. And her view is that a memoir is a gift to the next generation and that it’s very important to leave a record of what we have done, and where we have been, so that people in the here and now as well as those yet to come can draw upon that understanding in order to better handle our present predicaments. I totally agree. So I congratulate you again for having contributed your own record.
Steve Grove: Thanks. It was a fun journey to write — a little earlier than most people might write a book like this, but I felt like I had a story to tell and hopefully it does some good.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I hope so too. I read a lot of memoirs just for my own entertainment and edification, I suppose. Most recently — what was the one I read most recently? I read The Day Gone By, which was the memoir of Richard Adams, who’s probably best known for having written the children’s novel Watership Down — a beautiful, evocative memoir about his growing up in the Berkshire Downs, his time at boarding school at Oxford, and then his service during World War II.
Your memoir is a different kind of chronicle of course, but it does begin also with your origins growing up in Northfield, Minnesota, which as I understand it is a small college town in a rural area that’s a 45-minute drive south of Minneapolis. Is that right?
Steve Grove: Yes. The town motto of Northfield is “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.” It’s a small town, but with Carleton and St. Olaf colleges, so it kind of punches above its weight when it comes to academic foundations. But it was a great place to grow up. And growing up there, I never thought I’d stay in Minnesota long-term. I always wanted to leave. But the story of my book is a bit about growing up in Minnesota, loving it, but also wanting to go away, and then twenty-five years later coming back as a boomerang. And it’s a somewhat common story in that sense that many Minnesotans will leave and come back. My wife jokes that most Minnesotans have a homing beacon inside of them and it goes off at a certain point, once you’ve left, to call you back home. But for me, the story wasn’t just a boomerang story, but also leaving tech and jumping into government, which really was the jumping-off point for the book.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I’m actually a little bit familiar with the area where you grew up because I had friends who lived for a number of years in Faribault, which I guess is a nearby town.
Steve Grove: Yes, it is.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: He worked in Minneapolis. She was a teacher at the Shattuck-St. Mary’s School, if I’m remembering that correctly.
Steve Grove: Yes, a great private school.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And I remember visiting that area and Minneapolis a few times. It always shocked me, as an Easterner, to see how Minneapolis just sort of shoots up out of the ground from this flat prairie land. It’s a very different kind of geography than we’re used to in the east.
Steve Grove: It is.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Because the principle focus of this podcast is really on politics, there are a lot of things you wrote about that I found very interesting that we probably won’t be able to get to in the time that we have. I was interested in your descriptions of your education at Carleton and then Claremont-McKenna and Harvard’s Kennedy School, your overseas travel, your initial forays into journalism, your meeting your wife Mary and raising your two children initially in Silicon Valley, your faith journey, your reflections on the difficulty of making new friends after age forty… Lots of things. But I wanted to ask you some somewhat more targeted questions about some of the episodes you write about, because you do have this interesting perspective from the three worlds of tech, government, and journalism, which are relatively rare to find combined in one person, if that makes sense. So I’m quite interested in your perspective there.
As we’d mentioned, you spent twelve years in Silicon Valley working for YouTube and Google. I guess you were among the first hundred employees at YouTube, so in there relatively early on. And you mentioned that almost everyone you knew there worked in tech and held liberal political views. And you also cited the statistic that in 2016 77% of Bay Area voters went for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, which was the largest percentage of any metro area in the country.
But more recently, there have been a lot of stories about Silicon Valley people supporting Donald Trump — obviously high-profile figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, but extending well beyond that. Have you been surprised by this development or do you feel that you understand why some members of your former community might have gone in that direction?
Steve Grove:I would say in some ways it’s surprising, in some ways it’s not. I think business leaders tend to follow where the power goes. And for the last eight years, power has shifted pretty considerably in this country, as we’ve seen with Donald Trump’s rise and the MAGA movement. And especially with his second victory in returning to the presidency, I think Trump has turned the heads of a lot of people in tech, and that the whole social contract we have in this country has shifted.
When 2016 happened and Trump won, all of us at Google were in fact very surprised and shocked, and there was a lot of analysis being done. I write in the book about surveys we put out there to figure out why this happened and how we’d missed it. And of course, at the time, a lot of the conversations were around how Trump had won and what role social media and platforms like Google had played.
But I think eight years later, a lot has changed, and so have the viewpoints politically of many in the Valley. And so I would not say I’m terribly surprised. But I think in many ways Silicon Valley is still trying to figure out where the future of tech leads. And the criticisms against Big Tech have only gotten bigger.
I came up in technology at a time that was sort of utopic. It was just like, “Oh, tech is here to help everyone, and it’s democratizing content, and there’s no downside.” And of course, here we are a decade later where in fact most of the conversation around tech is around mitigating some of its more challenging aspects. And so the political calculation changes if you’re a tech leader in that dynamic. And so I think that’s why you’re seeing some of the shifts politically happening in the Valley as elsewhere.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: You mentioned that at the time you moved to Minnesota in early 2018, your wife Mary had recently taken a job with a venture capital firm, the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund that focused on investing in startups outside of the coasts. And that firm was started by AOL founder Steve Case but also JD Vance, whom Case had lured away from Peter Thiel’s Mithril firm. I wonder if you have any speculations about Vance’s turn toward populism?
Steve Grove: Mary and JD worked together for some time a couple of years, really only in a business context. Of course, he was rising as a political star at the time, and his book had come out, and so things were changing for him. But I think his career after Rise of the Rest took a very different turn. I don’t know that I have any special insight to share about that.
But I would say that that firm was part of the reason that we moved to Minnesota. The idea of investing startups outside the coasts is a really powerful one. And if you look at the data, I think over 85% of the venture capital dollars in the country today go to states that voted for Harris/Walz compared to Trump/Vance, and so the political ramifications of where venture dollars are going are considerable. And what that firm was trying to do, and I think is continuing to try to do, is to invest in parts of the country where entrepreneurs are underestimated and where coastal tech dollars just aren’t focused. I think that’s a really laudable goal. In fact, Mary has since left Rise of the Rest and started her own venture capital firm here in Minnesota called Bread & Butter Ventures that tries to leverage a really thick network of corporate leadership here as mentors and potential acquisition targets for startups that she and her firms invest in. So I do think that that theme of tech ecosystems outside the coasts is a really strong one regardless of your politics.
And, frankly, the case I make in the book is that if you want a stronger tech ecosystem in this country, you can’t have it centered in just two coastal hubs that are somewhat divorced from the realities of the rest of the country. A more purpose-driven startup ecosystem in places like Minneapolis and St. Paul maybe has a better shot at solving some of our bigger problems in the country.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: That’s an interesting question and I think one that a lot of people are wrestling with. I remember Steve Case at the time talking about the rationale behind his firm, and one of the statistics he used to throw around was that New York, California, and Massachusetts accounted for 75% of all US venture capital funding in that period from 2014 to 2016. But there are also the counter-arguments made that there are significant agglomeration effects, which is why most of not just this country’s but the world’s AI research on the cutting edge is done within a few blocks in San Francisco.
What else am I trying to say here? I saw that you thanked Jim Fallows in your acknowledgments. I’ve had Jim on my podcast and he’s a big booster of the parts of the country that are often referred to as the provinces or the left-behind places. He feels that they have lots of strengths. But there are sort of two opposite cases here: the agglomeration effects case, which is that most of the outstanding achievements and breakthroughs are going to come from a relatively small number of people and places, and this other idea that the country would benefit from a greater dispersal of those kinds of opportunities and investments. How do you come down on this after having thought about it for a while?
Steve Grove: It’s a great question. I think it’s undoubtedly true that if you want a good startup ecosystem, it requires a lot of different factors to be in play. If you look at how Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley, it was a government funding mechanism, it was Stanford University, it was a whole host of companies that were adjacent and similar to one another trading talent and treasure and ideas. And I think you saw that in Minnesota too. One of the things I discovered coming back home is that Minnesota was actually the center of the very first supercomputer boom. It was before software had taken off, and this part of the country was where all the energy was around big supercomputer technology growth…
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Honeywell and companies like that.
Steve Grove: Yes, Control Data Corporation and what have you. And that was a real legacy that ended up spawning our med-tech cycle. Minnesota kind of lost out on the software boom because we didn’t make that shift very effectively, but it was undoubtedly having a bunch of different factors at play that made it work. So while I think that’s great to have happen in places like the Research Triangle or New York and Boston or Silicon Valley, I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive from it happening in other parts of the country.
And the idea of these tech hubs across the country that have maybe a more specialized focus is pretty exciting. In Minnesota, it’s Medical Alley. This is the state that has the highest number of medical patents per capita of any state in the country. Of course, the Mayo Clinic, the world’s number one hospital is here. U of M has an extraordinary research and development unit that’s focused on medical technology. Some of the best startups in the country are here.
So I think it’s about specialization in some ways in these other ecosystems, not trying to be the whole of it. One of the challenges I think you see in Silicon Valley with big tech companies is when these companies get so big, everything they do has to start with this perspective of massive global scale. When you start local, you can really pinpoint and succeed for a localized case first and then expand it.
And one of the experiences I had at Google was working at Google+, our efforts to try to launch a social network. And we were doing that because Google needed a social network, not because the world needed Google+. And you get these incentives that are not aligned when you are concentrated on these really big tech companies on the coasts. I think the more dispersed you can get it, the better off you are, but the ecosystem has to be there.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: So you’d moved out to California without any idea that you would be moving back to Minnesota. But you and your wife had retained a connection, not just to your family back in the state but also through the Silicon North Stars program that you and Mary created. What can you tell me about that program?
Steve Grove: Yes, this is a lot of fun. The story I tell in the book is really the genesis of that program, which is that my wife and I were trying to have kids. We were struggling to do so. We were on an IVF journey and it wasn’t successful for some time. It ended up being successful; we had twins. But during that time we were like, “We want to work with young people. What can we do?”
And we thought about the idea of bringing some young Minnesotans out to Silicon Valley for a week-long tech camp. We started talking with some partners in Minnesota and eventually landed on this idea. It brought every year about sixteen young people, all of them from underserved communities, to come to the Valley and visit Google and YouTube and Uber and Lyft and Facebook and a whole host of companies and meet people similar to their background who were working there. And then we put them through a startup bootcamp, and they had to generate answers to big questions and pitch their ideas to funders. And these were all students heading into ninth grade, so it was a unique and important inflection point. And it was a great connection to back home. And I think it was, for us, a chance to try to give back in some way and engage with young people that felt really meaningful.
And gosh, we learned a lot and have continued to learn a lot. The program still exists today. We don’t send them to the Valley anymore. We keep them here in Minnesota because there’s lots of tech companies to engage with here. But the stories of these kids… They’ve ended up at Stanford and Pomona, they’ve gone on to start their own companies. And to get to play a small part in that has been pretty fun.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: In 2006, you had volunteered for Tim Walz’s first congressional campaign, which is when he won election the first time as the US representative from Minnesota’s First District, which runs across a lot of the southern border of the state with Iowa. And then in 2018, when you moved back to the state, you got involved with his first gubernatorial campaign, which he also won. And then shortly after that, he asked you to be Commissioner of the Department of Employment and Economic Development, or DEED. Why don’t you tell me about the job first and then tell me about Tim Walz and what attracted you to him as a politician?
Steve Grove: Yes. Well, the job I ended up doing for the Governor was running our workforce development and economic development departments for the state. It was the jobs commissioner job, and the role was to come in and try to attract more companies to come build their businesses here, and to help companies that are here thrive and grow more effectively. My background in Silicon Valley meant that he was excited for me to come in and try to build our startup ecosystem further. We focused on a lot of programs there: angel tax credits and Launch Minnesota, a program that we launched to help more startups get off the ground here.
But of course, a year into the job, it changed pretty considerably because the pandemic hit. And my department also looked after unemployment insurance and small business assistance, and so my job really shifted considerably from being the jobs commissioner to being another pandemic mitigation leader alongside our health commissioner, Jan Malcolm, and the Governor.
So I was the front person for all of our engagement with businesses and what the regulations would be, and how we would try to stem the flow of COVID. And then of course, getting $15 billion of unemployment insurance out the door was our biggest and most important task — not a program that I came into government thinking much about, but suddenly was what I thought about every minute of every day. I feel very fortunate to be a part of a team that got that done.
So that was a job in terms of why I took it. I was interested in government. I always thought maybe that would be an interesting tour to take. And I was drawn to Governor Walz as a leader back when he ran when he was a teacher — as you mentioned, when he was first running for Congress. He was a very authentic candidate, very much in it for the right reasons, it seemed to me. And he just sort of drew great people to him and had longstanding levels of success and tenure at his staff. And I think the fact that he was willing to think about someone outside of the government to come in and be part of his administration — I had no government experience — meant that maybe I might be able to do some good. And so it was a chance worth taking.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: There were about 1,400 employees that you oversaw, is that correct?
Steve Grove: Yes.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: How did that compare with the size of the groups you had managed in the past?
Steve Grove: Oh, it was ten times. I think the team I led at Google when I left was maybe a hundred or so. It’s funny because you go into these jobs and no one’s really qualified to lead a government bureaucracy unless you’ve done it before, in terms of just experience. But one of the cases I make in the book, and why the word “reinvention” is in the title, is I think sometimes if you haven’t done something before, you bring a fresh pair of eyes to it. And that can be a superpower. I was very careful to not go in and start telling everybody that the government was going to be run like Google. I think that can be a pretty big mistake. At the same time, I found that people were willing to give me a far wider lane to try new things. They expected that I would come at it with a different pair of eyes.
I tried to talk to a lot of good people who’d done this before, get some good advice on where to focus. One of the early things that we really focused a lot on was just the culture and inner workings of the agency to make it run a little bit better. We built an innovation lab to try to reboot some new thinking inside of government.
One of the things you realize when you go in is there’s a hesitation among most governments to try new things, because if you screw up you get in really big trouble. The very first day that I got my government one-on-one was memorable because the state’s ethics lawyer had a presentation up on the board, and the very first slide was a picture of a goldfish in a bowl. And she says, “This is your life now. Everyone’s watching and anything you say could end up on the front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune.” So that starts you off thinking, “Gosh, don’t screw it up.”
I argue in the book that if we’re going to reimagine our country’s institutions and make them actually work for people, we have to find ways that innovation happens not only in times of crisis — because you want government employees who are trying new things the same way that you want that in your business sector. So that was the rub, and that’s what I tried to bring to the job.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: There was a term you used in bureaucracy that I had not come across before: “weebies”?
Steve Grove: Yes. I don’t know if it’s a Minnesota thing or what, but I got some advice early: “Watch out for the weebies.” And they’re the people who will say, “We be here before you got here and we be here when you’re gone.” It basically refers to civil servants who don’t want anything to do with the political appointee coming in and trying to shake things up.
I found that when I worked with people who had been there longer, you actually could unlock some innovation and good ideas rather than treating them as the enemy. But these jobs are challenging. Some of the reputations are deserved. But I found — maybe it’s just because I was there doing a crisis — a lot of innovation inside of state government. In Minnesota, there’s a long history of trying to make a government that works for people. And the pandemic I think lifted that up in some powerful ways. In other ways, it exposed a lot of cracks. So the book is not a Pollyanna-ish vision of Minnesota’s political system, but I hope one that lifts up and that might be a place where we can reimagine our institutions for the better.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: There have been a number of interesting studies lately regarding the attempt to bring tech, or at least some Silicon Valley business practices and outlook, to the work of government and bureaucracy. Of course, there’s Jennifer Pahlka (who’s also a fellow at Niskanen), who with her book Recoding America was talking about what it was like to start the US Digital Service. There’s also the book Unit X by Christopher Kirchhoff and Raj Shah, which was about trying to bring Silicon Valley software and best practices to the Department of Defense.
And then of course in real time we’ve seen Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which I think most people would now judge to be a failure — but one that began from a Silicon Valley kind of mindset that government is the problem and getting rid of most bureaucrats is the way to go. I wonder what kind of perspective you have on DOGE, frankly, given the work that you did coming from Silicon Valley to a big state government bureaucracy.
Steve Grove: I have followed Jennifer Pahlka’s work, and I’m a fan of a lot of her prescriptions. I think it’s pretty powerful, and I’ve heard her here and elsewhere talk about them. I think that government does need to think more with the agile mindset and with the focus more on software development that is not only outsourced in waterfall but is inside the beast and is a part of how it rolls. I think that’s a really important shift that we need to make, a paradigm shift in our systems.
DOGE… Look, we should want to have an efficient government. I don’t think the goal or intent of having an efficient government is a bad one. Everyone can agree on that. I just think that the way that has been done has demonized our public servants and our institutions in ways that doesn’t make them trustworthy.
If you look at the challenge we face in this country, it’s this declining trust across all the major spectrums of institutions today — you talk about this a lot in the podcast — whether it’s government, military, media, what have you. And so if you’re going to rebuild trust, I don’t think tearing apart institutions is the right way to do it. I would argue one of the most important things we can do for trust in our country is rebuilding them.
So I might have enjoyed having it been called the Department of Government Innovation more than efficiency, and find ways to unlock good ideas and thoughtfulness around efficiency from within rather than from the top down. It’s just harder to do it in that way. I make the argument in the book that if you’re going to reboot government in a more powerful way, starting local has a lot better shot than starting national. It’s just so polarized at that level. The impacts are so ethereal at times that they don’t feel as tangible and proximate.
I found a lot of innovations out of government when I was there. It’s again, state government, but I saw government employees figure out how to use the Minnesota lottery system to disperse checks for small business loans. I found an employment insurance system that figured out how to alternate days based on last name, shift content to new servers, reimagine how we detected for fraud when those programs had to expand. So it’s not that the government doesn’t need efficiency or that there aren’t redundancies — there are. But I don’t think the trust that we need in our institutions is going to grow by just demonizing them and taking them apart whole cloth. I think you need to focus on innovation as well.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: You mentioned Jim Hegman, who was I guess in charge of your unemployment insurance division. And it seemed that with you working together with him, Minnesota was actually able to be a leader among states in getting its checks out the door and just running an effective and efficient operation in terms of its unemployment insurance. What would you attribute Jim Hegman’s success to in that field?
Steve Grove: Well, Jim is a great character in the book because to me, he’s much like many Google engineers I would meet: super thoughtful, very analytical, but with a heart of gold. And he really wanted to make our employment insurance system work. For one, he had three decades of experience running the program, and just knowing the inner workings of bureaucracy makes you better at it. I think there’s this screed against experience or entrenchment, but at times having those decades of experience can really help when crisis hits.
I remember coming to him when the crisis first hit, and I had all these ideas about “Let’s create a chatbot that can help people understand how to navigate the system.” I had all these tech ideas. And he was like, “Look, those sound interesting. But at the end of the day, I have a team that is really good at customer service. I know what people will trust, and I think we have to do this, this, and this.” And he went through a whole list of things we had to do to reimagine the system that were quite thoughtful and quite well-prepared.
Uniquely in Minnesota, we’ve been used to — because of the weather here — flexing the system to get big during the winter and flexing it down when it gets warm outside and people are working. So there’s a little bit of muscle memory here that he was able to bring to the role about flexing up the system. But the scale at which we had to do it was really new and impressive. And so yes, we were the first state in the country to get all three of those new government programs out the door. And I think it was a testament to a combination of his experience and I’d say insight.
Many of the things that we did to our employment insurance system during that crisis we probably could have done in a regular time period as well, but the risks were too great. And so crisis made it possible where suddenly the risks that you take to innovate feel lower — because if you fail, it’s even worse. But in a normal time when there’s not a crisis, the calculation is different. So I was impressed by Jim, impressed by the system, and it was enriching to see someone really reimagine the system at a time when it needed it.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I was reminded, in reading your account of your encounters with the bureaucracy, of an interview that came out in Fast Company a few months ago with one of the DOGE staffers. His name could have been Sahil Lavingia, but I could be messing that up. But anyway, he was actually fairly candid in this interview. He said the VA was not what he’d expected. The people were not incompetent. They didn’t hate their jobs, they loved their jobs. They actually came to government with a sense of mission. Certainly compared to Silicon Valley, the government bureaucracy makes decisions a lot more slowly than a startup would, but it largely functions.
And he said ultimately the government works. “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” And for this honesty, of course, he got fired from DOGE. But the idea that Silicon Valley has that there are just a whole bunch of time-servers in the bureaucracy and a whole bunch of unessential drones, and the efficient executive can just go through and fire half the workforce and it will function better than it did before — that just does not seem to be the case.
Steve Grove: No, it doesn’t. I think what is true is that your system creates the bureaucracy that needs to serve it. And so if we want to change your bureaucracy, change the system, change the ways in which government delivers service. You might get a different bureaucracy or change the culture around them. But there’s reasons why government employees feel risk averse. There’s reasons why innovation doesn’t happen. And there’s all kinds of room for eliminating redundancies. But I think if you can empower some of the people inside of an institution to be a part of that journey, you’re going to be better off versus coming in from the top down with no buy-in from the people that are there. You’re not going to get change to happen longer-term.
And we see that in the Strib too. When we came into this newspaper, trying to reimagine it for the future, I didn’t come in thinking that “I’m the Google guy. I’m going to come in with all the perfect new search engine optimizations, and we’ll figure out how to save the Minnesota Star Tribune.” We had to do it together and have had to do it together. You’ve got to find champions internally to be a part of that process.
And I think what’s challenging in a political context is that political leaders want quick wins. They want to come in and kill USAID or cut the Department of Education — just boom, boom, boom. I think that’s just kind of the political life cycle, and the approach of this current administration has led to those sorts of moves — where, in fact, if you want to really create change in institutions long term, you’ve got to have some degree of buy-in and collaboration. And that’s what feels like it’s been missing. And it’s a bummer that someone who would lift up that as a potential path would get fired for saying so, because he probably was onto something when he shared those thoughts.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Yes, absolutely. You’ve mentioned that you were running a large part of the COVID response through your position. You also were in charge of what was called the Safe Reopening Group, which you yourself called “a deeply uncomfortable exercise in social engineering.” And your book opens with the description of you getting yelled at by twenty-five angry small business owners in Eveleth, Minnesota. And of course one thinks of the New York Post headline that came out during this time: “Minn. grandma issues warning after getting jailed over Walz’s COVID lockdown: ‘You do not want tyranny at this level.’” So what can you tell me about that whole experience and what you feel that Minnesota got right and wrong during its response?
Steve Grove: Gosh. Well, at the time — I can’t speak for other states, but I do know that every single state in the country was trying to figure out what the playbook would be, because there wasn’t really a national plan, at least early. We had these fifty different science experiments taking place in fifty different states about how you were going to control for the pandemic. And very quickly, the Governor and his chief of staff, Chris Schmitter, put together a bunch of different work groups to figure out how we were going to tackle this.
And one of them I was asked to lead, which was called the Safe Reopening group. And the whole premise was that after the initial shutdown of almost everything in the economy — which almost every state did, as we were just initially shocked by what was happening — how do you begin to reopen parts of the economy in ways that are safe? And the exercise was deeply uncomfortable because it got into the absolute minutia of different industry sectors, different social settings, what the regulations might be, where masks would be required, where social distancing would be required, what percentage capacity a restaurant could host internally.
And we all remember these days and would love to forget them. But that didn’t just happen with the Governor making some plans on a whiteboard. He asked a group of us to get together and present options. And so in those conversations, I would represent the view of the economy and what was happening and what might happen if we did this, that, and the other. And I spent my days talking to business owners across the state — like the town hall we did in Eveleth that you mentioned that I opened the book with — and then my evenings talking with health officials trying to translate back and forth between these two groups what might work. And it was incredibly challenging and incredibly stressful. Health officials were of course incentivized to be more restrictive, and I was incentivized to push for more liberal policies. And then the Governor would hear us all out, we’d present some options, and he would decide. And I will say as a leader he was very open to both viewpoints and needed to hear both viewpoints.
Your question of how well Minnesota got done with the pandemic… I think on most national metrics, we were in the top ten states in terms of pandemic administration. Certainly in terms of the benefits we got out the door, our department was, as I mentioned before, first in the nation to get a lot of those benefits out. In terms of long-term effects from a health perspective, again, I would say we landed in some of the top tens. But no one here spiked any footballs. We didn’t get everything right. No one did. The playbook was being written as we went. And as more data came out, we tried to base our conversations on the data.
And every day at 2:00 PM, we would do press conferences with the whole state watching, just walking through what we knew and didn’t. And that level of transparency and trust that we built with Minnesota is part of why the Governor won a second term. Even though the state was quite divided on it, they at least knew we were giving it our best and trying to share what we knew. And you learn a lot in those crises. I wouldn’t want to do it over again. But I certainly felt like we were giving our best go of trying to get it right with a lot of new data coming in.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I think the layperson’s feeling about government response to the pandemic is that there was a sort of spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, you would shut everything down and impose a quarantine, and that would crater the economy — but on the other hand, very few lives would be lost to the pandemic. Or at the other end of that spectrum, you could just keep everything open and let it rip, but you could have a significant number of casualties. Did it feel that way to people actually working in the government or is that just a kind of view from the outside?
Steve Grove: I think it’s the view from the outside, and it’s unfortunately largely incorrect. When you let it rip, you have hospitals that are just overflowing and can’t bear the capacity. I think the “let it rip” strategy was true nowhere. But I think somewhere in the middle, the details start to matter, and that’s when the conflicts come. Is the restaurant percentage at 50 or 75 or how big of a gathering can take place?
And I remember for us, we were three months into all this, and then George Floyd was murdered. Suddenly you had protesters outside gathering in massive numbers, protesting the death of George Floyd. And suddenly all of our arguments about social distancing and gatherings felt a little quaint, because it was like this is a movement that’s happening before our very eyes. And so we were learning as we went.
But I do think it is a spectrum. I don’t think it’s just one end or the other. And I think we learned a lot from that. I think maybe sometimes governments got a little bit too mired in the details and could have been a little broader and simpler in our guidance.
But the challenge for us here was that the urban-rural divide was really strong. In rural Minnesota, their line to us was, “Look, social distancing is how we live all the time. It’s just sparser out here, so you don’t have to have the same restrictions for Greater Minnesota.” I think in some other future version of this, we might have had different restrictions based on density of population, but it was so complex at the time that we didn’t. And I think that’s part of what drove the divisions between urban and rural Minnesota a little deeper at this time, because it was different out in rural Minnesota compared to the Twin Cities.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: So let’s talk about the politics of the state. As I had mentioned, I had talked to Lori Sturdevant about the moderate or even progressive tradition of Republicanism that had long been present in Minnesota. In some ways, that was an inheritance from the New England Puritans who came west, bringing their particular culture with them as they went. In some ways it was a legacy of German and Scandinavian immigration, and in some ways it was a consequence of Minnesota being a cold northern state and people having to rely on each other.
And in some ways, it was also a result of some of the developments that both you and David Leonhardt wrote about in his great book, Ours Was the Shining Future. The Minnesota model, for example, for urban-rural connections, going back to the Farmer-Labor Party in the first half of the twentieth century, which as you say was the most successful third party in American political history until it eventually merged with the Democrats in 1944 — so that Minnesota’s Democratic Party is really technically the DFL. And then there were also episodes like Carl Skoglund and the Teamsters’ trucker strike of 1934 that had a big and long-lasting impact.
Steve Grove: You’re talking about David Leonhardt?
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Yes, David Leonhardt. It’s a great, great book. But I guess the question is: How much of that moderate Republican tradition still survives in Minnesota? Because one can also think of Michelle Bachmann getting elected in the Sixth District, representing the northern and western suburbs of the Twin Cities. She was in some ways a Tea Party prototype for Trumpism that, we’ve seen now. There also is a kind of anti-establishment rejection of traditional politics. We saw that too in Jesse Ventura’s election as governor with first the Reform and then the Independent Party in the period from ’99 to ’03. So how would you characterize Minnesota’s politics as you’ve come to understand it, and how has it changed from maybe what it was ten or twenty years ago?
Steve Grove: Well, it is changing rapidly. This is a state that has had a centrist viewpoint for some time and has been viewed as a purple state for a while. Yet the reality is the state hasn’t elected a statewide Republican to office in twenty years. It has politically eked out a blue lean in most elections statewide for the better part of a couple of decades. So that’s the reality we face today.
Of course, the unique part about Minnesota for some time was that there were counties outside of the Twin Cities, in what we call Greater Minnesota, that leaned blue. The Iron Range in particular — an area where there was a deep history of labor movements that led to the formation of the DFL. Paul Wellstone really shored up that during his time in office. They were blue, but they’re no longer reliably blue; in fact, most of them are red. And so you tend to see the patterns of the country with urban blue and rural red now being reflected in Minnesota a little bit more than in the past.
As for the statewide Republican Party, it’s unique here. Because while there is certainly a strong Trump movement in the state and those who have followed that lean of the party, there are others who are of that Durenberger model that you mentioned before with Lori Sturdevant that view a more moderate Republican Party as powerful.
I think the party’s trying to figure that out for itself right now. You’ve got candidates who will enjoy the endorsement of Donald Trump but put forward a more moderate political stance. And I think they’re trying to figure out what’s going to sing in Minnesota. Because this is a state that just kind of prides itself on its centrism. And for a party to be too far to the right or too far to the left makes it challenging.
On the other side of the factor there, you have the Democratic Party in our state which is really struggling between a more socialist, Democratic Socialists of America wing and a more centrist, moderate Democratic wing here too. And you see that reflected right now in our mayor’s race for Minneapolis, where we have a situation somewhat similar to New York with a candidate that’s from the DSA and then the incumbent Mayor Frey, and they’re grappling with which end of the spectrum they want to land on. So it’s a very much a dynamic moment for the party here.
We have this proud tradition of being a state that is held together by a sense of identity. Minnesota is the state with the highest state pride in the entire country, by most recent surveys, alongside Michigan. And people do feel a sense of pride and statewide unity, at least in theory. But our politics is trying to figure out how you carry that forward. And the exceptionalism that Minnesotans feel here I think has been a little bit dinged over the past few years, and we’re grappling with that.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I think pride is a bit of a hard concept to measure. But it’s certainly true that Minnesota does have the highest election turnout of any state. I believe something like 70% of the people raised there stay there, which is somewhat of an exception to the tendency of the Midwest to drain population. So these things are true.
Steve Grove: They are, yes. There’s a joke here that if you want to make a friend in Minnesota, go to kindergarten here — because everyone kind of sticks around. I certainly found that true a little bit.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: So if I were to think of Tim Walz, the word cloud of my thoughts about him would probably have the biggest word be “exasperation.” Because Tim Walz, by all accounts — and certainly your book confirms this — was a very competent and reasonably popular governor of the state. As you say, he got through the pandemic, which was a very trying time for governors, and he was still re-elected by a pretty big margin.
I was not one of the people who wanted him to be picked as the vice president nominee precisely because Minnesota is not a swing state. It has not voted for a Republican president since I think 1972. And in that sense, he wasn’t somebody who brought a different constituency to the ticket. It’s also, how do I put this? — a very middle-class state, I guess I would say. It also is one of the most educated states. These are not the constituencies that Democrats need to win over. They need to win over working-class voters and rural voters.
It’s true that Tim Walz did seem like somebody who could speak to rural voters, who had come from that background, who could talk like that. I think that’s true. But I also remember a piece in Politico in October of last year headlined, “These Rural Voters Picked Tim Walz Six Times. And They’re Done.” And their argument was that Walz, when he was a representative, had been much more of a conservative Democrat. He had supported the Keystone XL Pipeline. He had a rating from the NRA. When he became governor, he became significantly more progressive, which I guess is what you would expect.
But in this time when college-educated voters are drifting further to the cultural left, and rural and non-college-educated voters are drifting further to the right, this is aggravating the demographic that already works against the Democrats. This is part of why they have their lowest approval rating in history right now, even as we’re speaking, even as Donald Trump and the Republicans are also losing popularity. So maybe give me a counter-argument, if you can, about why Tim Walz might have been the right guy for the moment, might still be the right guy for the future. And he is campaigning on this One Minnesota idea of uniting your rural and urban populations — might he at some point be able to do that further down the road?
Steve Grove: Well, “One Minnesota” was a winning campaign slogan twice over for our governor. And I think it spoke to some of the things we’ve talked about already here: the sense of Minnesota pride and unity that has uniquely stitched the state together in ways that maybe aren’t true elsewhere. We have some great infrastructure history on that front. We have a great history of coming together across counties here that we can explore.
But I think the reality is the national political conversation has not somehow happened only outside Minnesota. The political dynamics have changed here just as they have elsewhere. And so it is much harder for any Democrat to win in a rural county and rural districts than it once was. I think the context has just changed. It has been eight years of governance, and of course the events on the ground of COVID and George Floyd’s murder here were huge political shifts and moments of exploration for our state that we’ve all been grappling with.
And in terms of the vice-presidential campaign, that was a unique 110 days in our history. And I think he was chosen for the reasons he was chosen and gave it his best swing — but a unique political dynamic there, and one that of course served a presidential campaign of Harris ultimately.
So I don’t know… I would say that Minnesota is unique in the sense that it is a place that has an identity that does seem to traverse both urban-rural pockets, and has a chance of policies working both in cities and outside. But it takes something unique, I think, at this moment to really make that case. And I would argue that starting local is the best place to do it. And that’s why I really argue for that as an antidote to some of these challenges that we face that have caused divisions that feel somewhat newer to our state.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I guess I’m still trying to get at what might rehabilitate the Democratic brand. One of the factors that Donald Trump is weaponizing against the Democrats right now is crime and urban disorder. And I certainly feel this, coming to you from Washington DC where there are nationalized guardsmen in the streets. But a lot of the way that people will talk about crime on the Democratic side is almost using a passive voice: “Minneapolis went up in flames,” or “half a billion dollars’ worth of damage took place during the riots or uprisings.” There’s a sense that Democrats haven’t really recovered the sense of individual agency or responsibility that maybe they had at the time of Bill Clinton and then have been moving away from ever since. Do you have any perspective on that?
Steve Grove: I think the language that we use matters, for sure. And I think ceding the territory from Democrats to Republicans on public safety was not a great move. You look at the “Defund the Police” movement here that was so unsuccessfully branded and put forward in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis… That spread more broadly throughout the country, and it was obviously not a winning campaign strategy. I think the incentives behind it might have been well-placed in terms of a more robust approach to community safety that isn’t just about law enforcement. But how you talk to people matters. If you think of Maslow’s hierarchy, people have got to feel safe to begin with, in the first place.
And there I think not only of innovation in the public sector, but also in the private sector. One of the people I read about in the book is a guy named Jazz Hampton, who focused his career on shifting from being a lawyer into a startup founder that created an app called TurnSignl. That dials in a lawyer on demand, allowing anybody being pulled over by a police officer to have a consultation in real time about what’s happening in order to deescalate the tension.
So we need solutions to these problems that aren’t just coming from government and political leaders or a particular party, but from society itself. And some of those types of initiatives I think might get us in a better place than simply looking for government to figure out all these pieces.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And I believe Jazz Hampton is running for mayor of Minneapolis right now.
Steve Grove: Yes.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And his TurnSignl app idea came about largely in response to the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile, which I think people across the spectrum agreed was an absolute tragedy. It was driven largely by, one hates to say it, the underlying fear of guns which affects so much of American life in this country: civilians afraid of being shot by the police, police being afraid of being shot by civilians, such that every traffic stop is a potentially lethal confrontation.
Steve Grove: That’s right.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I do wish Jazz Hampton luck with his app, which I think has had some positive impacts.
Steve Grove: It has, yes.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I also think it’s important to point out here that Minneapolis’ police chief, Medaria Arradondo, had campaigned vigorously against the Question 2 ballot measure in 2021 to in effect abolish the Minneapolis Police Department, and that ballot measure was rejected.
Steve Grove: It was. I think this was a political climate in a city grappling with a lot at one time. And so in that moment, a lot of ideas were put forward. I’m glad that that result took place and that we did not abolish the police department here. I think that was the wrong step, and I think that’s part of what propelled Mayor Frey to a second term based on the political dynamics there. But yes, I think it’s a region here grappling with how to reimagine our future.
I guess the point I’m making in the book, too, is that the Midwest is worth looking at when you’re trying to look at the whole of the rest of the country. This is oftentimes viewed as “flyover country.” But man, there is a lot happening here that I think has something to say about where the country is headed. And I hope that Minnesota is the kind of place that can tackle some of these problems in a really thoughtful way. They can draw upon its centrist past to get some solutions that actually work and that people can look to as a model once again. But it’s going to take some work.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I can’t resist taking another poke at Tim Walz here. Again, one of the reasons that I thought Josh Shapiro might have had a stronger case as vice president was that the problems that Democrats are experiencing right now stem in part not just from their cultural problems, but from the way that they’re seen as not being effective managers of government, able to deliver benefits to the people in a way that they once could.
It’s often pointed out that during the New Deal years, incredible feats were accomplished, whether it was building the Hoover Dam, or putting together the TVA, or creating huge bureaucracies in this time in a way that would be almost inconceivable nowadays. One thinks of the signal failure of broadband rural internet funding in the Inflation Reduction Act: $42 billion allocated, zero hookups achieved.
Some of these failures are present in Minneapolis. I believe the Green Line extension has gone way over budget and is at least a decade behind schedule without any kind of notable progress. But on the other hand, given that one of the main complaints right now is the high price of housing, I did think that Minneapolis took a significant step forward in 2019 when, if I’m remembering correctly, they actually abolished single-family zoning throughout the city. Is that correct?
Steve Grove: It is. It was called the 2040 Plan, and it’s had its ups and downs. But it was meant to be, I think, very much in line with the Abundance movement which you’ve talked about a lot in this podcast: trying to get some of these restrictions out of the way so that we can build and house our neighbors more effectively. Oftentimes Minnesota has a unique culture in the sense that we’ve got a really strong environmental movement, and rightfully so; this is a state with tremendous natural resources, whether you’re talking about the Iron Range or the Boundary Waters and beyond. And then you’ve got the need to have an economy that can grow, and we are stagnating on that front in the sense that we don’t have enough people here for the jobs that we have. And so migration is always a challenge, and therefore the infrastructure has to grow to accommodate it, and this is one of the central tensions of our economy right now. And yes, at the city level, we’re trying to figure it out, and at state level too. We made some progress, like the 2040 Plan that you mentioned. But in other areas, we’ve got a ways to go.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: As I mentioned at the start of the podcast, you are the CEO and Publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, which used to be the Minneapolis Star Tribune but has been renamed. And it seems to me that you are… First of all, I should say that you don’t have anything to do with editorial content. That’s not your job. But it seems that you are trying to re-envision journalism in some ways. Can you tell me about your overview, about your approach?
Steve Grove: Yes. We are at a unique juncture here. This is a newspaper that’s been on for 157 years and has outperformed most of its regional peers, in large part because the print market has been so solid here. But that is of course, eroding quite fast. We lose about 20% of our print subscribers year over year at this point.
I had never imagined myself as a newspaper publisher. But Glenn Taylor, the owner of this newspaper, wanted to bring in a fresh pair of eyes and thought someone from outside the industry might give it a fresh look and wanted to invest in re-imagining it.
I’ve been here two and a half years, and I’m enjoying a chance to reimagine this institution that I hope might help pull our state together more effectively too. We’ve expanded to be the Minnesota Star Tribune, as you mentioned. We’ve hired over a dozen reporters outside the Twin Cities. That statewide view of what’s happening here, we hope, gives a better narrative for our state and where it’s headed. We’ve really tried to innovate in areas where we have a bespoke value proposition to an audience that will pay. We launched, just last week, Strib Varsity, a massive effort around high school sports, for example. And we reimagine our whole digital platform to cater towards a digital subscription offering.
And so it is a unique journey. It’s one that we feel a lot of purpose in. News here faces the same struggles it does everywhere. We’ve lost about two-thirds of the journalists in Minnesota over the last ten years given the economic challenges we face. So there’s nothing here that makes us too special other than the fact that we do have an owner who’s investing in us, in a state that seems to prize good journalism. You mentioned voter participation being high. We’re also a state that donates a lot, that volunteers a lot. So there’s a sort of “we can do it” nature here that I hope translates into success for our news organization. But it’s going to take some hard work, and we’re on our way.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I on the one hand have kind of an instinctive reaction against the idea of moving newspapers into being digital video platforms, because I have such bad memories of Chris Hughes’ attempt to transform The New Republic into “a vertically integrated digital platform.” But on the other hand, I was also interested to see that the Star Tribune has, I believe, the largest news desk in the Midwest…
Steve Grove: A hundred reporters, yes.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: It seems that on the one hand you’re doing something quite futuristic, but on the other hand really trying to stay true to the journalistic origins of your enterprise.
Steve Grove: We are. This is an organization that’s won seven Pulitzer Prizes and has done that on the backs of some great reporting. We’ve just hired a brand-new editor in Kathleen Hennessey from the New York Times, which we’re really excited about. You’ve got to provide journalism that’s worth paying for, at the end of the day. Otherwise people will just settle for free news because it’s good enough. And so the quality has to be high.
When we’re looking at the data, which we’re doing now more than ever before, we see that what converts subscribers to want to buy a new subscription is engagement: deeper stories, things that go into the depths of a topic that they care a lot about. But just being a generalized local news organization that people feel loyalty to because of where they live is a little challenging. I think in a digital environment, you have to target specific audiences with a specific value proposition.
So the high school sports effort I mentioned, is an effort there. We’re going deep on the outdoors because this is the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” and people love being outside. And we’re going deep in other areas too. So we’re trying to do that in a way that makes this description worth it and also brings some joy. We’re going to do great investigative reporting, but we also want to have the best State Fair food bot you’ve ever seen and help people use our large language models to navigate which State Fair food they should eat this week. So we’re trying to cover a spectrum of things here, and we’re being given a shot to do it, which is pretty exciting.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: How would you respond to the often-heard conservative charge that the reason the media has lost public trust is that it has become too ideological, it has hired too many people coming out of radically-oriented journalism schools or wherever, and it’s too oriented toward social justice ideas rather than the needs of the community?
Steve Grove: I would say that people still desire to read and understand the truth in their media experiences. We as an organization have been rated time and again by third parties as having an objective newsroom. I think one of the challenges is that the opinion pages and the news pages are indecipherable for some people. That kind of media literacy of what the opinion page is versus the news page kind of goes away in a digital environment because the physicality of it isn’t so crisp as you see in a paper. So that’s a challenge. We’ve seen our own readership shift to the left by third-party surveys over time, over the last ten years in particular, which is concerning.
So I think some of it is boogeyman behavior by the right to say that the media is all left-leaning liberals. But I do think, on the other hand, we have to work harder to make sure we hire people from all sorts of backgrounds. There’s a subjectivity to the art of journalism, to be sure, and whether it’s hiring columnists or reporters, we need to think of our objective reporting as a skill to be maintained. We continually bring in trainers to our newsroom to look at issues around objectivity and fairness. We continue to cultivate that sense within our reporters, because it’s important and we want to get it right. And if we’re going to grow and survive in the state, we can’t just be a paper for one end of the political spectrum or the other.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Two more questions. One, I would be irresponsible if I didn’t ask this… I think a lot of people are going to read this book and come away thinking, “Did he really plant poison ivy in his backyard?”
Steve Grove: We did, we actually did, yes. My son was just fascinated by poison plants. We didn’t plant it all over the place. It was in a contained pot. But he really wanted to see if we could grow it, and he did. And we had it for a year in this pot. We don’t anymore, thank God. But that was a fascination we decided to pursue because he was interested in it.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: There were no unfortunate incidents associated with this, I hope. The other question is… I’m sure that a lot of people you talk to in Minnesota, especially, are going to wonder if this book is in some ways a platform presaging a future political career. Obviously politics, and getting into politics, have too many different variables attached to them, so I won’t ask you that question. But what I will ask you is, given the experiences you’ve had, that you do write about in your memoir, what do you think is needed in politics, particularly at this moment of intense political polarization?
Steve Grove: I quite enjoyed public service, and I could see doing it again in some flavor or another. I don’t have any particular plans on that front. But I would say, in general, that I think we need more people from the outside of the system to go in and give it a shot. This is as our Founders intended, that people would shift between sectors and try new things. And I think often you get folks in these political roles who’ve been there for a long time, or they’re career politicians or what have you, and I think fresh faces can help. I think that’s needed.
I think new ideas are needed, quite frankly. I think that the system we have in our politics today is set up to solve challenges that may have existed long ago, and that new challenges require new systems. And so no matter who’s doing the job, having people in there who are willing to look at things a little bit differently, and a public who will tolerate change politically and change in terms of how our government works, is really important.
And I would say to reach a vital center — the title of your podcast — to get to that place where we feel a little bit more at home with one another, we have to reimagine our institutions in a pretty fundamental way. And I try to make that case in the book about some ways we might do that. And whether that’s media or government or tech, I think there’s a path forward, but it’s probably strongest when you go local.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I think you make a strong case for that in your book, Steve. Thank you again so much for joining me today. And congratulations again on your new book — your first book — How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention. Thanks again, Steve.
Steve Grove: Thanks, Geoff.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our Technical Director, Kristie Eshelman, our Sound Engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC.
