This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Dr. Micah Weinberg, CEO at California Forward, a cross-sector civic leadership group committed to producing prosperity for all Californians in all of the state's regions and to improving government performance and accountability. In this episode, Dr. Weinberg talks about navigating regional challenges in order to drive change across different sectors, the importance of tackling local issues with scalable solutions, and how to actively engage today’s youth in the future of California.
This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Dr. Micah Weinberg, CEO at California Forward, a cross-sector civic leadership group committed to producing prosperity for all Californians in all of the state's regions and to improving government performance and accountability.
Dr. Weinberg’s current role focuses on increasing the dynamism, resilience and inclusiveness of communities in California and throughout the nation and world. This requires all people to have access to the building blocks of the California Dream including economic growth, health and well-being, affordable transportation, housing and lifelong education, and a healthy environment. Prior to joining California Forward, Dr. Weinberg was President of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at New America. His writing has appeared in diverse outlets from the New York Times to Policy Studies Journal, and he has appeared on Fox News and NPR.
In this episode, Dr. Weinberg talks about navigating regional challenges in order to drive change across different sectors, the importance of tackling local issues with scalable solutions, and how to actively engage today’s youth in the future of California.
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Guest Quote
“We'll say free market capitalism as if those things go together when in fact, basically what capital is used for is to distort the market in your favor when you acquire it, right? So we have to think very carefully about, are these markets in fact free? Is the market even the right framework we're thinking about? But people getting to do whatever they want with no regulations whatsoever is not even a market. You actually need a lot of interventions to prevent asymmetries of information and all these other kinds of aspects.” - Dr. Micah Weinberg
Episode Timestamps
(02:02) Dr. Weinberg’s role
(02:51) Navigating regional challenges
(05:17) Dr. Weinberg’s career path
(13:21) Driving change across different sectors
(14:30) The Economic Resilience Fund
(22:24) Philanthropy, private investment and government grants
(28:30) Engaging the youth in the future of their state
(36:36) Finding balance in the market
(41:38) Tackling local solutions and driving scalability
(44:31) Great places to look for thought leadership
Links
Phil Dillard: Hello, and welcome to Thruline to the Fourth Sector where we're exploring fourth sector capitalism and impact investing as an invitation to innovation and changing the world. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks. This episode features a conversation with Dr. Micah Weinberg, CEO at California Forward.
Prior to joining California Forward, Dr. Weinberg was President of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at New America. Dr. Weinberg's writing has appeared in diverse outlets from the New York times to the Policy Studies Journal. And he has appeared on Fox News and NPR. On this episode, Dr. Weinberg talks about navigating regional challenges in order to drive change across different sectors of California and how they're actively working to engage today's youth in the world of tomorrow. To learn more about Dr. Weinberg's work, visit californiaforward.org that's CAFWD.org. And to learn more about our work at Thruline Networks, you can visit thrulinenetworks.com, that's thrulinenetworks.com.
You can also find the links for both companies in the show notes. Now sit back and enjoy this conversation with Dr. Micah Weinberg, CEO at California Forward.
Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of through line to the fourth sector today, we have the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. Micah Weinberg, CEO of California Ford. How you doing today, Micah?
Micah Weinberg: I'm doing all right. Thanks for having me.
Phil Dillard: Really, really great to have you today. We've been looking forward to this conversation, so, uh, let's just kind of jump into it. I don't know how many people listening, know a lot about Cal for, but, um, having done some work with the organization in the past, I understand the breadth of the mission and the breadth of type of people you engage with. So when people ask you, what do you do? How do you describe
Micah Weinberg: your role? Sure. Yeah. It's broad, we're a movement to make the economy and government and California work for everyone in all the states regions. And, um, you know, this regional thing is a really big thing for us bringing together LA and the central valley and the inland empire. And not as like a, you know, set of, uh, combatants fighting over scarce resources. But people that are actually working together to try to create solutions that work for everyone.
Phil Dillard: And that's pretty difficult though. Right? Cause I mean, you look at California and I'm, I'm originally from Philadelphia, you look at the map and the, the breadth of California, you have like half a dozen states, at least in that space. Right. And just what you talked about LA versus the bay area versus the inland empire, very, very different, different places. How do you navigate the challenges between the different regions in just setting a frame for them to work together?
Micah Weinberg: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Sometimes we talk about what we do as introducing California to itself because yeah, it's big, but it is what it is. It's I'm not gonna be able to make it any smaller.
We have this group called the California stewardship network about 30 organizations from all over the state that have been meeting together. For, um, and working together for 12, 13 years at this point. And they are the partners, uh, with us in the California economic summit. So an awful lot of getting to know each other, an awful lot of working together. Um, and then over time, you know, uh, that ends up really coming to fruition.
Phil Dillard: And it builds a community, even as people come and go from different roles, whether they leave in the go federal or state, that sort of thing. Oh yeah,
Micah Weinberg: yeah, no, we have a whole mafia, but, uh, and it does come down to personal relationships, right. Particularly when you're talking about the kind of work that we do, where people get out of there, ideological comfort zones, we bring people together across parties and regions and different, uh, demographic communities. And you can only do that if you. Trust and like the people that you are doing it with,
Phil Dillard: right? Sure. Because you, you run into conflict, inherent conflict because of a number of different reasons and you gotta find a way to get through it. I'm guessing. Is that a big part of it? Yeah,
Micah Weinberg: absolutely. And everything in today's society. So we've got, I was just writing something about this over the weekend. It's our 10th California economic summit coming up on Monterey on November 9th and 10th. And we'd love to have all your listeners there. You know, our theme is 10 years together and you just have to be honest that over the course of the past 10 years, we've become less together as a society, uh, across a range of different areas, primarily partisan, right. But not just partisan. And so. You know, what we do, bringing people together is not common and not how people generally engage with the political process.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. That's great. And it's really, it sounds really well. I know it's really important and sounds really impactful. Very exciting to hear about 10 years together.
Now, I bet if people look at it now and they go, oh, that sounds obvious. It sounds like a great way that we should be doing, we should be reaching across the aisle or connecting people of different backgrounds. But I data, it was so. At the beginning. Can you take us back a little bit? Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you became the head of this organization and what helped you get here?
Sure.
Micah Weinberg: Okay. Let's see. To sum up. What I always really start with is I'm from, uh, Appalachian, Ohio, and I'm a professor's kid, but I grew up with coal miners kids, and that's an area that had its economic heyday, uh, over a hundred years ago. And it's been kind of downhill since then. I mean, it's a wonderful.
But just no money, no economic opportunity. And that just really grounded me in how much, how people do is a, is a, is a function of the, the places that they live in. Uh, you know, we talk an awful lot about like personal responsibility and so on, and obviously that's important, but you know, if you are from Athens county, even just where I'm from your outcomes.
Going to be very different in most cases versus if you're from Athen city and like a, a university kid. So that, I mean, I just wanna start with that because that's like what really developed a lot of my values around this. Um, and so, you know, I spent when got a political science PhD and have worked in regional economic development and public policy and healthcare policy and a variety of different things, but it's all in service of what I love about California forward and the work that we do, which is.
Actually recommitting to trying to make something work for everyone in society, you know, versus again, thinking about politics as sort of zero sum blood sport, or even think about politics as compromise, right? Like we take the craziest person from one side of the political spectrum and the craziest person from another side of the political spectrum and push them together on TV or in a legislative bill and hope that that works out.
That's not what fundamentally we're. We're about getting people out of their kind of default way of thinking about things so that we can be more creative and innovative versus just kind of taking, you know, their preexisting perspectives and hoping that we can, you know, smash 'em together in a way that works.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. That's an interesting description of compromise, right? Because you don't. You have to have connection, communication, and empathy with all different side sort of folks, but shouldn't be driven a lot by the extremes. There's something interesting else you said to me is like, I know a little bit about Appalachia.
I wonder being out here in California and saying some of the things you do, do you find that people are already making assumptions about you before you, before you?
Micah Weinberg: Yeah, I mean, they generally don't make that assumption. In fact, they generally are surprised to hear that. You know, part of my background, people make all sorts of assumptions about folks based on their demographic characteristics or their political science PhDs, or what have you.
I mean, that is what it is. Uh, and we can't ignore it, but we need to sort of transcend it as well.
Phil Dillard: Sure. And how do you find yourself leveraging that though for the empathy that's required to make some of these critical connections?
Micah Weinberg: Yeah, I mean, well, just for me personally, that's what I ground myself. But, you know, we do spend an awful lot of time at California forward.
We're an empathy tank, right? I mean, there's like think tanks and do tanks and, you know, I mean, we just, oh man, fingers crossed by the time this comes out, oh man, this really better have happened, but we're getting very close to passing a 600 million program called the community economic resilience fund, which is fundamentally about doing economic development in a fundamentally different way.
At the regional level, which is all sort of anchored in listening to other people, planning with them, having compassion, having empathy, and, and it can be done.
Phil Dillard: And that sounds like a major, major milestone in your past, you cited, you know, PhD think tanks, other things. Is there any one particular spot along the way that you think most prepared you to be able to drive towards the, these big accomplishments you've had in the past
Micah Weinberg: couple years?
Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I got into this almost by accident. I went and worked for a man named David Wilhelm who had been the head of the democratic national committee back in the 1990s, uh, after I graduated and I thought I was working, uh, at a political consulting firm and we did some fun stuff, wrote some speeches for Jesse Jackson and you know, some other stuff there, but he had been bitten by the economic development.
He's also from my small town in Appalachian, Ohio. And so I got kind of pulled into this area that I didn't necessarily expect to be working in. And then it's kind of ended up catapulting into this career. And so, you know, in some ways, Uh, we started a new market venture capital company. I don't know, to the extent that folks know about new market tax credits and other, you know, tools like that back in the very late 1990s.
So the first one in the nation, and it was great. I mean, it's good to have more money flowing specifically in this case to Appalachian Ohio, but what that didn't have that a lot of the sort of regional economic development models that I've been working on over the course of the past 25. Have had is more community engagement in, what do we want our like, region to actually be?
How do we build on our strengths versus like kind of the conventional economic development of like, what smokestack can we attract here? Or, you know, like how can we get this big box store on this side of a, um, you know, geo, uh, jurisdictional line to get the tax revenue and so on. So. Uh, the combination of money into these places, an agency for the people in these places is I think, you know, a good direction that, you know, I've been very lucky to have some very small piece
Phil Dillard: of sure.
Yeah. I mean, that's a really, uh, interesting, there's several really interesting components in that, right? The venture component of the new markets, venture capital. Work alongside of policy work, you and being practical. And I think the thing you said there that really stuck for me is like build on our strengths.
Right? Right. I've done lean innovation work and like every corner of the globe now at this point, and lots of people talk about being the next Silicon valley, as opposed to right. Being the best that they can be. Exactly. Do well there. And moving that into the, a newer future that's based on
Micah Weinberg: what you are.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's that? I mean, that's the key thing. Right? And so there, there has to be some educat. Around, what are the industry clusters in this area? What are the skill adjacencies that you, you know, people in this area have to the extent that we're wanting to evolve an economy, there's actually a decent amount of technical work, but it's comprehensible.
And so a lot of it is about educating the broader community about what the strengths are so that we can, you know, chart a path forward. That's more inclusive and equitable.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. And there are a number of. I would say inputs into the ecosystem. If you look at each region, however big you draw the circles around that region, there are federal dollars and state dollars that might be governmental dollars.
There might be private and public dollars. There might be all different ways to actually drive value into that part of the world. I guess the question I was thinking about shifting a little into a little more specifics, I'm trying to understand how you drive change for those you seek to serve and specifically like how you.
Between the government, the, for profit, the nonprofit influences to balance things out. It just
Micah Weinberg: a tricky dance. Yeah, absolutely. I'm I'm talking about a lot of this within the context of the community economic resilience fund, because that's just one very specific model mm-hmm but first off there's a lot of money to convene people because.
People are busy. And so you need to bring them together. You know, we have done a lot of like public meetings. Those are garbage, right? Like the way that we, you know, it's like, here's some plan that has already been, come up with. And are you upset about it? Yes. I'm upset about it. I'm Mr. Upset about it, right?
They're like these community Sheats and visioning exercises and so on, but they then don't often connect to anything, right. And so the thing that's exciting about not just this new government program to fund it, but the work that our partners have been doing in Fresno with the Fresno drive and inland empire growth and opportunity, and a bunch of these other processes is that you really take the time to kind of educate folks about what, what is, and then what the possibilities are, but then you need these organizations and we are one to help navigate across the different, uh, sectors.
I don't know, you know, I traveled a decent amount in China and they have this like extremely rigid. Like this area is working on these three sectors and all the money is gonna go into the and so on. And it's like, well, that might not be quite innovative enough. But in the United States, we tend to do a lot of kind of chickens running around with our heads cut off, uh, as it relates to this.
The federal money goes, one way the state money goes another way the private sector money goes another way. So having these tables and these intermediary organizations to actually kind of rationalize some of this and try to get us vaguely rowing in the same direction, mm-hmm, ends up being really useful.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. I could see that, right, because you don't want the central planning model. Right. Because we know that there are a number of reasons why it doesn't work, or at least it hasn't worked for us. Right. But we also don't want people, as you said, running around a bunch of different directions. Can we take a step back a little bit?
Sure. And tell, talk a little bit about the economic resilience fund, how that's structured and, and how it is intended to work to make, to affect change in this way. Yeah.
Micah Weinberg: So basically again, we've been doing a lot of these processes where you bring together the stakeholders and in particular, Um, you know, people, you know, community based organizations that have been excluded from these processes in the past, um, and you know, with a lot of the kind of more conventional stakeholders and, you know, you come up with a set of really informed community priorities.
But we've been doing this with philanthropic funding. So it's been kind of very generous from the perspective of philanthropies, but generally underfunded in terms of what you actually have to do. And then kind of bespoke, like each philanthropy wants to do its own version of this. Right. Mm-hmm um, and so having a program which has $50 million to do a series of regional convening, so that's real money.
that's a big piece of it. Right. And so right off the bat, we can talk more about what those actually look like, but there's actually money to do this at scale and over time and with the resources that you need to make it happen. But then there are 550 million earmarked to do the stuff that comes out of these convenings.
And that's a lot of the question it's like, do I have to sit at another table? Oh my God, could I possibly sit at another table? Tables are driving me crazy, but here there's, uh, a carrot right. Or 550 million carrots for people to figure this out at the regional level and then engage in these implementation projects that flow directly from.
The priorities that people have, uh, come up with at the regional level. And
Phil Dillard: where does the money come from
Micah Weinberg: that six months? Well, I mean, so technically this money comes from ARPA, right? So this is a state budget bill that was passed using federal funds. It is the bigger plan and this isn't like super secret.
Is basically everywhere else in the United States and in the world, does regional economic development sort of understands that the region, I mean, you can think about regions, a number of different ways. Regions are effectively reality regions are what is the level at which this economy is organized? So like the bay area, right.
And not everything makes sense to do at the bay area level, but a lot of things do make sense to do at the bay area level because that's the economic region. We really want to keep moving California in this direction. We have like a set of regional kind of government agencies that do land use and transportation.
We probably shouldn't go down that rabbit hole on this podcast. But we don't really do a lot of economic planning and implementation at the level of the economy in California. So we're really excited about this program, but it's really just a step in a direction that California needs to keep
Phil Dillard: going.
Interesting. You know, as you were saying that it got me thinking about a couple things, right. First I visualize these different regions. Like yesterday I was up near Stockton. So I, I was thinking in empire, then I was back down in the bay area. Think about the differences of those region. Weather wise, people wise, economically.
Right. And then I thought about when I was doing strategic consulting and, uh, budgeting for a fortune 50 corporation. When we looked at the different departments, people who were trying to get at money were had different rationale of why they would get at the money. Cause some would say we generate the most revenue and some Jay, we generate the stickiest relationships with customers and I would expect there is a, there's a similar sort.
Fight for capital because different regions have different, the different challenges there, and that your work with people at local levels helped people harmonize at least inside of a region, what they need and where they want to go. And maybe in between regions as well. Is there something in there that you have found.
That really helps people harmonize between the regions within or across
Micah Weinberg: regions across regions? Well, yeah, I mean, part of the trick here is not getting overly technocratic and utopian about this and not moving to a regional planning, you know, like, uh, controlled economy model mm-hmm and look, there are different things that exist at different, um, you know, levels.
So for example, transportation networks, So when you're looking at, you know, the Northern central valley, you know, places like Stockton and Sacramento and the bay area from a transportation network perspective, to a certain extent from a commute she perspective that is a Northern California mega region, right?
Mm-hmm . And so, you know, bringing people together across their shared interests, across whatever geography it is that, you know, you are looking. Is part of how you actually do that.
Phil Dillard: Got it. So it's kinda like zooming in and zooming out. Right? Right. Maybe at a very local level it's there are less things that are shared, but if you zoom out a little bit, there are interdependencies.
Yeah. That work between, so, and ultimately,
Micah Weinberg: like, I'm glad you brought up interdependency because we really, really, really, really. Really do not understand the extent to which we are all interdependent. Yeah. Um, and things like the pandemic should be making that more obvious, but then folks are thinking that they can make whatever decisions they want about their own health.
And you know, it, isn't going to be. You know, connected to all these other people, but it is right. And in California, we depend on other parts of the state for workforce and water and energy and separateness is an illusion, right? Yeah. Um, yet it is how, unfortunately we tend to approach. Public life.
Phil Dillard: Well, for me, which is part of what we're trying to address, right?
Yeah. Because we can be ruggedly independent in some ways and interdependent in, in others. Yeah. Because there's no one in America or a very, very few ones in America who actually go out and do everything for themselves. You know, get their own water, haul their own wood, share their own food. There is a, a very, very tiny percentage of Americans who actually do everything for themselves.
And they only can. And, and I'm, I would hypothesize they only can do that because other people are leaving them them alone. Yeah, no one's taking or damning off their water or poisoning their food. Right. So even in that rugged independence story, you still have to have your interdependent for people respecting your space and your privacy and your.
In order for that to actually
Micah Weinberg: work all these things are true. Yes. People should be independent. Yes. People are interdependent, but then we create these political parties that have blinders on. Right. Yeah. Of like, you know, I'm gonna like stick to just one part of the story. Right. Right. You know, when really, like, that's not.
You know, we have these goals that we need to accomplish. We need to deal with fires. We need to get broadband to people. We need to do all sorts of things, uh, in California. And we can think about these approaches as being like tools rather than being frameworks, right? Mm-hmm at, you know, a particular government program as a type of tool.
A public private partnership is another type of tool. Venture capital is another type of tool. And without getting like, again, overly technocratic and utopian about this, we can ask the question. Which tool actually does the job that we need to get done.
Phil Dillard: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And is that job to be done framework that we, I start with with the lean innovation approaches, right.
And say, okay, who starts local? Who knows best locally? Well, obviously the people who live and work and breathe there, know a whole lot about their local environments. People from outside can come in and help. There's a number of different ways to share information and best practices across, but no one. I love it.
The U the utopian ideal or no left or right. Person has what is, right, right. We don't wanna, we don't wanna wake people up or we don't wanna teach people or school people. We wanna, like, we need to work together with people and use the benefits of all our different ideas. Yeah. Which leads me to this, this question about how do you consider.
I don't even know the rightness of roles. It's the wrong way to say it, but philanthropy versus private investment versus government grants, and you, I'm sure you've wrestled with this sure. For ages. Right? How do you strike a balance or how do you even smell, smell the right balance? Cuz I feel like it's gotta be feel right.
And intuition with a little bit of
Micah Weinberg: pedagogy. Intuition is a big part of it. I mean, again, What tool is at hand. So I spent a lot of time studying economic development and one sort. Preconceived notion you could come in with is, oh, there's some perfect economic development program. And as soon as we figure out the perfect program, then we implement it everywhere and everybody's doing great.
And the truth is that that's not really how it works, that when you have a, a healthy community and a healthy community is an inclusive community, a healthy community is a community where. You know, people are linked across sectors where they see each other as having a shared destiny. They basically grab whatever tool is at hand, whether that tool is, you know, some philanthropic funding or, you know, federal funding or what have you.
But I think the key thing which you mentioned is. This kind of, you know, regional self-determination that it's not, you know, somebody coming in from elsewhere to impose a particular, you know, vision, but rather, you know, kind of putting these resources in service of, you know, the folks that are living in a particular place.
One of the things you find when you genuinely start interacting with the community and you give them enough information to have the context on what decisions are, you know, at. People in communities tend to be pretty pragmatic and I'll say pretty moderate, right? Like in California, there'll be a lot of people that like show up as representing the community and they'll have a really left perspective and that's fun, nothing wrong with a left perspective.
Mm-hmm , but it isn't necessarily representative of the small business owners and the neighborhood residents and all these people who live in a community regardless of their ethnicity. Right. When you take the time to engage with people, when you provide them the resources to, you know, participate in these decisions, you find they're pretty pragmatic and moderate about, you know, uh, what needs to be done.
Let's take a
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And now back to the interview, I'm sure in order to get some of things done, you had to do, you've accomplished. You've had to work with people who are very right in their, in their thinking. Right, right. And very saying, Hey, what, you know, what about me? I might be the minority in California, but then again, don't you care about minorities as me being, you know, a right leaning.
So, can you share like an example or, or an insight of times that that has worked really well, or maybe even like keys or tips for people to get outside of themselves or there ism so that they can listen to the other side? At California
Micah Weinberg: Ford, we have a leadership council mm-hmm and that leadership council runs from the former head of the California Republican party, a former Republican candidate for statewide office to people that would define themselves as socialists, but they all are temperamentally compassionate.
Right? Mm-hmm . And so the, you know, when you look at all of the different, you know, accomplishments that, you know, California Ford has had over the years, Whether it's this community economic resilience fund or the strong workforce program, doing a better job of connecting community colleges with employers or investments in broadband or investments in wildfire.
It's actually been a really great year for us in terms of, you know, things we've been able to get done. That's a function of having very carefully built a community that is again, temperamentally, compassionate. This leadership council, while ideologically diverse, you can find a bunch of moderates who are assholes that doesn't actually help you.
Right. In part, because you aren't getting the broad range of like different tools you could bring to bear in the different situations. But again, because, you know, just because somebody might have middle of the road views, Doesn't mean that they actually believe in collaboration and, and some of the rest of these things.
So in a lot of ways, everything we've accomplished at the, at, you know, California forward through our leadership council is a reflection of carefully putting together a community of people with this kind of perspective. That's
Phil Dillard: really good to hear. Uh, and one more, one more, as long as I'm providing some
Micah Weinberg: hope, keep going.
So that's also true of the California economic summit more generally. Right? And so there we organize. In essentially policy verticals and we're working on broadband and wildfires and housing and, you know, a variety of other issues. We're very careful to set these tables in a particular way so that they have, you know, inside actors that are the decision makers and various different agencies aligning with people that are, you know, from different regions of the.
That we have different regions of the state represented and that we really work on bringing in people with the lived experiences that are relevant as essentially consumers and users, uh, of these services. And so I'll just, you know, conclude quickly. We have a young, uh, leaders advisory council. Um, so group of folks, you know, 16 to 24, then we pollinate into these different policy working groups to make sure that it isn't.
The, you know, agency heads and the EDC, you know, president, but that we're having a variety of different perspectives. That includes people, you know, that are really on the receiving end of a lot of these policies.
Phil Dillard: So, I mean, that sounds like a really strong and diverse structure designed to capture and engage the people at multiple levels, which I think is brilliant.
Now, hearing it come from you after looking at it, I get how that layers and I think it matters a lot. What do you say to people? I'm aspiring entrepreneur I'm I might be younger. I might just say. Policy doesn't doesn't matter to me. Eh, I hear, I want a one-handed economist, right? right. Cause, cause these always economists who have the other hand, I don't know how to make sense of that.
I don't know if it's worth my time to engage and do that. What would you say to those, to those folks about why they should engage with something like the young leaders advisory council or the economic summit? Yeah,
Micah Weinberg: very practically. You're probably gonna have to care about policy in some area. Right. Are you a healthcare entrepreneur?
There's a lot of healthcare policy folks. Right. Are you, uh, interested in housing? Are you interested? There are very few areas. Where you don't, you know, do you need to care about privacy policy? Right. And the reason why I would suggest getting involved with organizations like California Ford, participating in our economic summit and so on is that you generally have to have.
Kind of a sense of how the broader like policy and civic life picture works. You can't necessarily only know just a couple of things about one particular policy area, cuz you can end up getting blindsided by something you didn't really think about. It's just a very practical thing for uh, young entrepreneur to be involved in.
People are like, oh, you know, if only we let the free market work in, uh, housing or like the problem is that we let the free market work in housing. All of. Domains. There is so much intersection between the policy and the markets aspect of them. They don't exist independent of each other. And so you really do need to understand kind of both sides of,
Phil Dillard: of that coin.
And it sounds like if you're not engaged, you're just kind of, you're almost say diluting yourself. Right. You're you're, you're almost turning a blind eye to something that you need to pay attention to and you could get blind blindsided by something. Yeah, that was, that was well intended. Maybe that you could add value to.
I mean, or at the very least you could understand, and you're not sitting back there throwing stones at day or being the angry, upset person when something gets read out to you, as opposed to being part of. And being engaged in it. So I think it's, I think it buoys everyone. Like if you talk personal responsibility, then you know, to really understand the breadth of the, of the challenge and the, and then the level, which you need to engage with it.
Yeah. We've talked a lot about things that are working. How do you know when something is not working? How do you know in the, in the world of dealing with policy and government, I talk about the pivot, right? In lean. We say, if I test some hype, do some to test some assumptions and I invalidate hypotheses, I know then that some of those hypotheses are wrong.
I'm gonna try something else. Not necessarily easiest thing to do in, in policy, uh, and government.
Micah Weinberg: Yeah. I mean, that's the problem, right? I mean, the, we have a sort of ridiculous government system in California, right? I mean, there are so many examples of it, but we have 10 separately elected, constitutional officers.
You know, that is a bad idea. Mm. And unfortunately, no amount of our having known this, because what it means is that again, it's like chickens running around with their heads cut off. Right. Mm-hmm um, where, you know, people don't report up to the governor and like, you know, you would think if the governor got recalled, the Lieutenant governor would become the governor, but it doesn't work that way.
And they're actually separately elected. And like, you know, it's, mm-hmm, , it's not a good system. And the challenge becomes that politics. Hard policy is hard. Public life is hard not to say that like entrepreneurship isn't, but the timelines on which things operate and the amount of inertia necessary to overcome to make these pivots that you might even have everybody agreeing on is pretty high.
And so people get engaged and then they get frustrated or they get engaged. And then, you know, there's. Uh, draw to, you know, some narrow ideological community, you know, mm-hmm, you get you end up like thinking, well, only if, if, if we could just win one more election or if we could get rid of this politician, I don't like, or what have you, that would fix things, but it, like, it doesn't actually work that way, but it is exhausting to do it this way.
Right. I mean, it is, it's exhausting to stay in collaboration. It's exhausting to, you know, do this and it's not. So many of the signals in our society are telling us right now that we should be doing, you know. Mm. Um, but for that reason, that's why the California economic summit and the process set up by the California economic resilience fund and everything we do at California Ford and the stewardship network, all this stuff like.
Is so important right now mm-hmm um, because society is a little afraid at the edges to put it mildly, you know, having these tables and these events and everything that you know, is a recommitment to getting to know other people, getting to understand their perspectives and seeing what piece of the solution do you hold?
What piece of the solution did they hold? Right? Is yeah, not, not, uh, not super popular, right.
Phil Dillard: It's not, but it's essential. I think the interesting thing that we're finding is for the impact entrepreneur, for the aspiring mission driven entrepreneur, for the people who wanted to wanna address some of the, the challenges that are identified by UN sustainable development goals and the like there's an ecosystem approach.
That's required. You're right. You're not looking for a great game where you pivot, pivot, pivot through great games and you find one and off you go, right. Or I don't like this market. I'm gonna move to move to another one. A lot of the impact folks are trying to deliver are either place based or community based or a solution based that there's only a certain number of places that you can do this.
So you have to figure out how to make that go. And I guess what I'm hearing from you is that the people should gear themselves up for a different challenge. And maybe that they. Seek allies and allies in some of these organizations, allies. And some of these I came out with this hypothesis is that the fourth sector needs relationship with the traditional public sector, private sector and nonprofit sector.
Yeah. To actually know how to effectively navigate and then move it entrepreneur speed to disrupt and create change. And yeah, we're trying to figure out how to test that.
Micah Weinberg: Yeah. I mean, it definitely, you know, the, because of the kind of calcification of our government system and, you know, a lot of our policies, we desperately need these, uh, civic entrepreneurs, you know, and these impact entrepreneurs to be doing these things on a, on a more rapid timeline.
And, you know, often at a scale that's gonna have a real impact for folks, you know, whether it's, you know, figuring out how to monetize, uh, and appropriate. You know, like ecosystem services. I mean, there're like a bunch of different things, right? That there are market based solutions that will help us optimize different aspects of our society.
You gotta learn a bit, little bit more about how these things are connected together as you, uh, you know, make your way in the world.
Phil Dillard: Right. Because I mean that if I'm hearing you right. I'm reading between the lines a little bit, like I was trained as university of Chicago, MBA finance, MBA, right. We're.
Look at the data, the invisible hand, free markets and that sort of thing, but show me a market that's really, really free. Right. That's really free of outside influence or really, really challenging to get to the, to the idea. So, right.
Micah Weinberg: It's and what do we mean by that? Anyway? I mean, I, you know, one of the things that I like talk about a lot is we'll say free market capitalism as if those things go together.
When in fact, basically what capital is used for is to distort the market in your favor when you acquire it. Right? And so we have to think very carefully about. Are these markets in fact, free is the market even the right framework for thinking about it. Mm-hmm but people getting to do whatever they want with no, like, like regulations whatsoever is not even a market.
You actually need a lot of interventions to prevent asymmetries of information and all these other, you know, kind of aspect mm-hmm . And first off, a lot of people understand that and aren't represented by, you know, these kind of ideolog. Extremes, but then two, a lot more people can understand it with a little bit more education about how these things actually come together.
Um,
Phil Dillard: and there needs to be a balance in the, if there's extreme, free market versus fully a hundred percent regulated. How do you find that balance? And those, those might not be just the two extremes, right? There's, there's probably multi, multiple multiples variables towards finding balance for a certain market at a certain period of time.
And that's probably not static. And it seems like this sort of collaboration can help one get there. Cuz we would say the right amount of policy here, the right amount of self-determination from organizations here, the right amount of community input here in some balance you get there. Are there other factors?
Is that a, is that a good way to, to
Micah Weinberg: describe it? Yeah. I mean. Again, balance has gotten a bad name because the way we use balance in society again, is like taking the craziest person from the right and the craziest person from the left. And now we're having a balanced conversation with two totally unbalanced people in it.
Right, right. Again, like balance is less about, um, you know, where one's coming from on the ideological spectrum and. About an approach, right? Mm-hmm like do whatever it is that our preconceived notions might be. Whether our training is, you know, university, Chicago MBA, or, you know, community college, like, do we have an approach which is balanced?
Do we have an approach which is compassionate? Do we have an approach, which is open-minded and that is, uh, Very difficult to, to get to these days, but nevertheless, we are, uh, doubling down on it.
Phil Dillard: Sure. And in that approach, is there, uh, is there a process or a tool or a framework or a methodology that you kind of would recommend to, to folks or something?
Micah Weinberg: Yeah, I mean, so, you know, we think an awful lot about, um, Collective action. And I, and I think that it's less about some like rigid set of steps in a, in a particular playbook because the, you know, civic problems tend to be, you know, kind of complicated and you have to, you know, purpose build a lot of your processes in order to respond to them.
So you kind of have to zoom more up to the level of values, like the value of inclusion. Like no matter how I do this, I will involve people whose lives will be directly impacted by the decisions that are being made here. Right. Mm-hmm um, no matter how I do this, I will commit to understanding what the evidence, you know, has to say about, you know, past interventions in these particular areas.
So it's more a set of kind of principles about how to do the work then like, oh, I have this nine step perfect process that, you know, if you go through that, then you'll, you'll get where you need to, you
Phil Dillard: need to. Right. Sure. And despite the differences of the people in the different regions, the, the values as an anchor shared values as an anchor has been, has been something you've been, been able to use effectively.
Micah Weinberg: Yeah, absolutely. And, and what what's interesting to me is that a lot of times when you get down to these. Um, like an actual thing you're actually working on like broadband again, the argument's about it should be 100% government, or it should be 100% like private industry, like breakdown and the people that understand it are a little bit more practical about, okay, well, you know, how do we regulate this?
How do we do that? And I don't always know, you know, we don't like put people's like little R D after their names. Like, I don't always know who I'm talking to, what, where they're coming from. Like from a partisan perspective, I'm just listening to what does this person have to say, which is relevant to this issue.
And sometimes you're gonna get in big fights. Right. So in the broadband, you know, situation, we allied with a lot of business groups, the California hospital association, and so on to build, uh, or we will be building a statewide, open access, middle mile network owned by the state, which is only one piece of it.
You can then tier off of that with various, you know, private providers. But, you know, the private providers that currently own the middle mile network and are essentially, you know, monopolies or oligopolies in so many of these areas, we're not excited about it. And so, you know, sometimes you have to agree to disagree and fight it out.
But the key thing is then being flexible about the next time around, you know, these people might be on your side, right. Versus getting like really rigid. These are the people who are my allies all the time and whatever they say I'm going to do. Mm-hmm versus like, you know, holding more lightly, uh, who are the right set of people to move this particular priority forward.
And
Phil Dillard: that probably goes back to your earlier comment about relationship, because if you're in relationship with somebody and you have a dispute with them, you've prob hopefully built up a decent amount of good will or your. They're at it, their mentality or someone that's something else. And you go, ah, you know, this isn't working right now, but we'll, I, I don't agree with you on this one or I agree to disagree and, and I'll give you the ball and you run with it and we'll see how it goes.
I mean, there's a little bit of that that you create from the Goodwill, from relationship to make that work. Is that fair? Absolutely. Interesting. So I've attempted a couple times to ask you about people or organizations in specifics that really stand out. But it's, it's hard because I'm sure that there are so many that you work with and you've noted a couple.
So I do wanna ask though about scalability and thought leadership. and you talk about the, the broadband solution and it is, that's something that that's gotta be scalable across the state, or at least the, the framework for it has to be scalable across the big and, and diverse state state. And I'm just kind of curious about how you tackle local solutions or local engagement and drive something to scale in a way that works for everyone.
It sounds that's not intended to be as big a question as it sounds, but really. Wrestling with that, with the, the balance of Federation versus distribution in
Micah Weinberg: a concept like that. Yeah. I mean, so again, I mean, we've been talking a lot about the community economic resilience fund, so I'll just kind of keep it in that context.
You need to make sure that for scalability. These need to plug into something, right? So there are billions and billions and tens of billions of dollars that are flowing through their workforce development systems and the transportation networks and what have you. And so for these things to really scale, they need to be to a certain site.
Extent systematized and made fair across the various different regions, but then they need to actually plug into something, uh, versus like, you know, I mean, these conversations are inherently valuable and it's good to get people together and talk and so on. And I don't need to sell that short at all. But when these priorities that we come up with collectively then have first off at 550 million pot of money to, you know, just, I.
But then are connected to, um, decisions around other state funds, other federal funds, other private sector, investment decisions. That's when it really becomes real. And that's when it really becomes scalable. And so being really, you know, I mean, and, you know, folks are gonna have to ask what tables do I sit at?
Um, you know, where do I lean in and, and put my, you know, time and energy and, you know, I would. Just like in any other element of, you know, your business life, do your due diligence, right? Mm-hmm does this organization have, um, you know, significant accomplishments in a particular area? You know, does it have values that align with your own?
Um, but cuz you know, there's a lot of, I mean, people get convened to death. Um, and there's a, you know, we could go, we could go to a conference every single day. Right. But you need to just, just as with, uh, you know, business partnership, you know, do your due diligence on, um, on these different tables and whether these efforts are connected to things that are meaningful.
That's a good tip. I
Phil Dillard: know we could keep going for some period of time, but okay. We're about out of time. So, um, I have one last question that kind of builds on that, and it's nice that you landed there because I was saying, I was thinking, you know what? There's a lot of people say, okay, great. I need to do this, but it's another thing added to my plate.
Um, You know, can you gimme some tips of how, of how I can, how I can hack that. Right. How I, you know, where would you start with some people or who would you trust to help people, whether it's thought leaderships or think tanks or, um, you know, review sites? Are there any good places? Yeah.
Micah Weinberg: You know, I mean, I'll just say, yeah.
I mean, we really value the, you know, partners in our California stewardship network mm-hmm and so, um, you know, for the bay area specifically, The Silicon valley leadership group is a great group. The bay council is a great group, Sam Cita, and some of these other, you know, groups. And they, they have generally a business orientation to public policy.
And they'll often have, I mean, you know, to the extent that this is valuable, like young leaders, groups and, and stuff like that. So, you know, those are really good places to start. And I know everybody like wants something new, right? Like it has to be on clubhouse or now it doesn't have to be on clubhouse cuz that's already old.
I mean, like, just like in any other area, expertise is a thing. I would actually be a little wary of new things in this area. Um, because it is an area where. You know, there's just a lot of like knowledge. Um, and so, you know, getting interacting with some of these established institutions that have more of like a business framework is a, is a pretty good place to start super.
Okay. And come to the California economic summit in Monterey on the ninth and 10th of November. It's
Phil Dillard: a great place to be anytime, but both the venue and the event I'm sure will be really worth it. I hope to be there. I awesome. Tend to be there and I hope to encourage other folks to come. Great. So, um, yeah, I feel like we just got started and I could talk for another 45 minutes, but really appreciate you making the time.
And thanks again. Do you have any, any parting shots for the, just, just
Micah Weinberg: thanks for having.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, thanks for making the time. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. All right. And everybody we'll catch you again. And the next time, in the next episode of through line to the fourth sector, talk to you soon.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Thruline to the Fourth Sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a rating. And tell a friend to learn more about the four sector of economy. Visit thrulinenetworks.com. That's T H R U L I N E networks.com. Thanks again, and we hope to have you with us in the next episode.