PARK RAPIDS, Minn. — Like many youngsters growing up in northern Minnesota, TJ Erickson (Timothy James, in case you’re wondering) started fishing at an early age in his hometown of Roseau.

At first, his dad was always there, and then with advancing independence as he aged, Erickson was one of those kids you see either walking or riding a bike toward a local fishing spot, toting a fishing pole in one hand and a tackle box in the other.

“We grew up on the Roseau River,” Erickson said. “That was right in my backyard, and so from the time my parents would let me walk down to the Roseau Dam by myself, I would go down there and be casting.”

Some 25 or so years later, he still often fishes by himself, but his audience is slightly changed from just his parents waiting at home, or friends who would later join him in a 12-foot boat.

“All summer long, we’d fish that same stretch of river; we would just never get bored of it,” Erickson recalled. “We’d probably get the same pike, day-in, day-out, but we would do that almost every day, all summer long.”

Desire to film

These days, through technological advancements that were just emerging when he first picked up a fishing rod, Erickson has a virtual audience of almost 25,000 subscribers — and thousands of others who visit occasionally — who regularly check out his YouTube channel, where he shares his fishing adventures and knowledge.

It’s an interesting progression for someone who decided on a college because it was located in an area that had good duck hunting.

Erickson graduated from Roseau High School in 2010. In addition to his passion for fishing and hunting, he played hockey and baseball, and then played baseball at Itasca Community College (now Minnesota North College-Itasca) in Grand Rapids, Minn. At the end of two years, he got an opportunity to continue playing baseball at Mayville State University in Mayville, N.D.

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“The coach said, ‘We’ve got a good education program, and we’ve got good duck hunting,’ ” Erickson said. “And I said, ‘All right, I’m there.’ ”

It was during that time that Erickson bought his first video camera. “I’ve always had the desire to film,” he said. “When I was hunting ducks, I would have a GoPro. I never did anything with that footage, though. … I just liked it and wanted to capture those memories.”

He did, however, have in mind that he wanted hunting and/or fishing to have a role in his life that was more than a hobby.

“My original plan,” he said, “was that I was thinking I was going to teach in Roseau and guide on Lake of the Woods.” But then he and his wife, Alyssa, both were offered teaching jobs in Park Rapids, solidly located in Minnesota’s “Lakes Country,” where they were hoping to live.

Exploring new water

Arriving in a new area with perhaps hundreds of fishing waters to explore within an hour’s drive, Erickson started to explore new lakes. He also took the next step to expand his interest in video from simply capturing footage to learning how to process and edit. And for that, he spent a lot of time watching instructional videos … on YouTube.

In 2019, Erickson launched his fishing guide business and also posted his first YouTube video. Looking back, he says he still had a lot to learn about both guiding and video production, but both efforts improved with time.

A turning point, of sorts, materialized a couple of years later when forward-facing sonar technology was emerging. “I wanted to learn more about this whole Garmin LiveScope thing, or this forward-facing sonar, and I didn’t see a lot out there on the internet, on social media, on YouTube,” Erickson said. “I told my wife I thought there was an opportunity to help people learn about that, so I put out a couple of videos.

“Honestly, a lot of what I was hoping for was just to get some publicity for my guide service, so I could, you know, get my name out there. And that worked very well. I got a lot of business from that, and it got to a point where I was actually too busy to take all the trips, which was an awesome problem.”

Both efforts kept growing for a couple of years until Erickson decided to stop guiding and concentrate on his YouTube productions. Today, he has more than 25,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel (and 15,000-plus followers on Instagram). He has posted more than 160 videos that have attracted nearly 7 million views. One of those early productions on forward-facing sonar use has attracted nearly 300,000 views alone.

Variety of topics

Erickson’s programming covers a variety of fishing topics, including outfitting a boat, where to fish, bait, tips for early ice fishing, and a friendly competition called the Walleye Cup between Erickson and friends Nick Lindner and Brett McComas.

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An elementary school physical education teacher, Erickson credits his background as part of the formula for producing video content that people look forward to watching. Catching fish on camera provides the entertainment, but “a lot of my programs are very educational,” he said.

Comments on his YouTube channel reflect that. Relating to a program released last year on early ice fishing for walleyes, one viewer wrote: “These videos are very helpful. I don’t have a lot of time to scout and move around with 4 kids, so any video that helps me narrow down where to go is extremely helpful. Thanks for the great tips!”

And from the same program: “Awesome video, so much info, a true treasure. Thank you.”

Assessing where he’s at today, Erickson says it’s kind of surreal to have earned the following he has while doing something he truly enjoys. “It’s really kind of cool to see how many people that, I hope, have been positively impacted, might have gotten a little nugget of something that has made their fishing experience more enjoyable, or helped them catch more fish,” he said.

But there’s not much time to reflect and relax. Winter is coming soon, and Erickson is already well into planning his next programs to film when the ice is ready.

Online

Find TJ Erickson’s videos at youtube.com/@tjericksonfishing.

The Second World War was won on the home front as well as the battlefield. As early as 1942, the British government pledged itself, as soon as the Nazis were defeated, to slaying “Five Giants on the road to reconstruction”: Disease, Want, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. This pledge boosted morale and provided the template for the postwar welfare state. A “revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching,” wrote William Beveridge, the Liberal grandee who wrote the government report that identified the giants.

Today we are involved in another war and another revolution: an undeclared war against the “axis of autocracy,” led by Russia and China, and a revolution driven by technological innovation. The Five Giants that Beveridge identified have largely been vanquished: Life expectancy across the West is about 20 years longer than it was in 1942. But new giants have emerged: giants that are more subtle than the old giants but no less fearsome. These giants explain why the West is gripped by such a sense of malaise despite relentless material progress and why its citizens’ confidence in the future is fading.

What are these new giants, and how can we defeat them?

Loneliness

More than a quarter of U.S. households consist of one person living alone: cat ladies and cave men. Many workers, particularly in the just-in-time economy, work alone as well as live alone. A quarter of U.S. 40-year-olds have never married, up from just 6% in 1970. Social isolation is bad for individuals, increasing the chances of premature death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but it is also bad for the species. The German fertility rate is just 1.35 children per woman and the South Korean rate is 0.7.

Addiction

Addiction is a growing problem thanks not only to a new generation of super drugs, such as fentanyl, but also to the skill of supposedly respectable companies in encouraging addictive behavior. Food companies are some of the leading culprits here, engineering their products with an irresistible blend of sugar, salt and fat. More than two in five Americans are obese. Digital companies design clever algorithms to keep us clicking and scrolling. Hence our third giant.

Distraction

The internet has become a distraction machine: Headlines blare, emails drop, special offers ping. But it is only one of many: 24-hour news programs feature “crawlers” that provide yet more information. Cars come with all-enveloping entertainment systems. Young people who were brought up in this buzzing new world find it difficult to concentrate for any length of time or perform complicated tasks. The so-called Flynn effect, whereby average IQ had been rising relentlessly for decades, has been showing signs of reversal since the turn of the century.

Lies

Lies are on the march as never before, thanks to a combination of technological innovation and information warfare. The internet giants are the first big broadcasters to be exempt from strict standards of truth or balance in what they publish. Hostile powers, particularly Russia, are using this free-for-all to inject lies, designed to inflame antagonisms or simply muddy the waters, into the bloodstream of democracy. This is eroding the bedrock of liberal democracy, informed debate.

Complexity

Complexity smothers everything, like Japanese knotweed. Passwords get convoluted. Forms get longer. Government departments get ever more Kafkaesque. Moses’ Ten Commandments have become Ten Billion Commandments, many of them contradictory. Complexity is deeply inegalitarian, acting as a tax on people with low IQs while creating jobs for lawyers; it’s also deeply anti-progress. Scientists devote their lives to making grant applications, or sitting on grant committees, while building companies devote more time to regulations than to pouring concrete.

These five giants support each other. Addiction holds hands with both Distraction and Loneliness, for example: Young people (particularly men) who are addicted to their screens retreat from society into the land of the infinite scroll. Collectively, they create a general sense of a world spinning out of control. We must slay our giants to restore a sense of agency and progress.

Governments need to fight on as many fronts as possible: Departments of agriculture need to think about their role in promoting addictive foodstuffs just as departments of education need to think about opening children’s eyes to information manipulation.

Four policies could produce outsized benefits:

Re-introduce national service

Offer school-leavers a choice between military service or voluntary service. National service would help to address both the division of society into social groups that have little to do with each other and the rising epidemic of loneliness. More than a million British 18- to 24-year-olds are neither in work nor in education, disconnected from society and wasting their lives in electronic distraction. Far-seeing (and Russia-facing) countries such as Sweden and Finland have already reintroduced national service.

Prioritize reading

Reading is the antidote to distraction because it obliges people to focus on a single text for a sustained period. (The great Austrian writer Stephan Zweig defined a book as a “handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.”) Yet reading is a dying habit. Just 30% of Britons aged 8-18 say that they enjoy reading in their spare time, a 36% decrease since the reading survey began in 2005. Countries everywhere should do everything they can to reverse these trends, from pro-reading campaigns to a renewed focus on the written text in schools.

Tackle complexity

Governments should put their own houses in order by reducing their own addiction to complexity. This will involve taking on interest groups that thrive on complexity such as lawyers and bureaucratic jobs-worths. They should also force private sector companies to prioritize simplicity over complexity and intelligibility over gobbledygook. Governments have occasionally embraced this cause. Cass Sunstein put the reduction of “sludge” in the form of bureaucratic complexity at the heart of his work as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009-12. But complexity-busting needs to be a permanent government priority rather than an episodic enthusiasm.

Crack the whip at digital companies

Wherever you look — at the epidemic of lies or addiction or distraction — the digital companies are at the heart of it. The companies must be forced to deal with the social pollution that we are causing. Start by  repealing Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act which grants them limited federal immunity for what they publish online. They also need to be encouraged to side with the bright side rather than the dark side. AI gives us a great opportunity to tackle the giant Complexity. Algorithms can be adjusted to encourage concentration as well as distraction.

The public sector across the world can often seem bloated and inert. But that is not because it is populated entirely by jobsworths. It is because it is disconnected from the new challenges that trouble the world. Give the state sector a new set of giants to tackle — giants that touch and trouble us all — and it may well surprise us with its energy and zeal.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

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Pioneer Press staffers who cover the Vikings take a stab at predicting Sunday’s game against visiting Washington:

Dane Mizutani

Commanders 23, Vikings 13: Not sure we can pick the Vikings to win any game the rest of the way with how bad it’s gotten. At least they’ll score a touchdown this weekend.

Jace Frederick

Commanders 24, Vikings 21: Neither team should really want to win at this point, but Minnesota desperately needs a shred of offensive competence. Should find it against Washington’s defense.

John Shipley

Vikings 19, Commanders 17: This appears to be a reprieve for Minnesota, a home game against a team worse than they are. It’s hard to imagine either J.J. McCarthy or Max Brosmer playing well enough to capitalize, but if Jayden Daniels (elbow) remains sidelined, the Vikings’ defense should win this game.

Charley Walters

Vikings 21, Commanders 20: The Vikings are 4-8, Commanders 3-9. Sunday’s game has about the same appeal as an August preseason game.

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There was a lot of talk this week about the culture that Kevin O’Connell has worked hard to build in Minnesota.

It’s what the Vikings hired him in to do, and while O’Connell has championed the transformation in good times, he has done so with an understanding that the biggest test for the culture would come in bad times.

This recent stretch of futility might as well be the MCAT.

This is the first time the Vikings have vastly underperformed with O’Connell leading the charge. This was a roster designed to compete for the Super Bowl. It might actually be competing for a Top 5 pick in the 2026 NFL Draft by the end of this month.

The playoffs odds went out the window for the Vikings following last Sunday’s 26-0 loss to the Seattle Seahawks.

It’s left the Vikings playing for nothing more than pride when they host the Washington Commanders on Sunday afternoon at U.S. Bank Stadium.

“We need to all respond the right way together,” O’Connell said. “We’ve got the leadership to do it.”

That statement starts and stops with Justin Jefferson.

As much as O’Connell deserves credit for the culture he has built, Jefferson could easily burn it to the ground if that’s what he wanted to do. That’s the hardest part about the buzzword so commonly used in sports: It doesn’t matter how good the culture is; it can never supersede the superstar.

The fact that Jefferson has continued to buy what O’Connell is selling amid the worst stretch of his career speaks volumes about who he is as a person. He’s everything the Vikings could ever hope for when it comes to their face of the franchise. That’s largely because of the way he carries himself on and off the field.

“He obviously wants to win,” O’Connell said. “He’s as competitive as anybody I’ve ever been around.”

That competitiveness hasn’t come at a cost, however, as Jefferson has never once gone out of his way to place blame on anybody else. But the frustration momentarily got the best of him when he declined comment after the Vikings were shut out by the Seahawks. Maybe because he didn’t want to say anything he knew he would regret. He was back at the podium this week vowing to keep it pushing.

“This season isn’t over,” Jefferson said. “I will never sit there and give up on this team and quit.”

That mentality is something the Vikings shouldn’t take granted. Especially considering that they have employed their fair share of outspoken superstars of the past couple of decades. It’s not hard to imagine Randy Moss or Stefon Diggs going nuclear right now if they were in Jefferson’s shoes.

It’s clear the Vikings miscalculated by thinking J.J. McCarthy was ready to pick up where Sam Darnold left off. Instead, the 10th overall pick in the 2024 draft has proven to be a project, forced to re-learn the fundamentals of playing the position.

Not ideal for Jefferson considering he’s in the prime of his career and should be operating at the peak of his powers. This is a guy who has been on a trajectory that was pretty unprecedented since he was a rookie. He could potentially flirt with Jerry Rice’s seemingly untouchable records if he manages to stay healthy deep into his 30s.

Now he’s on pace for the lowest output of his career.

“You have to have a lot of patience,” Jefferson said. “We’re 4-8. That’s definitely difficult to go through. It’s definitely not exciting to lose games.”

A few minutes later, Jefferson was given yet another chance to roll McCarthy under the bus. He wouldn’t.

“I can’t say enough about him,” the young quarterback said. “You see a lot of receivers around the league be a Me Guy, and he’s not a Me Guy at all.”

That’s why the culture works for the Vikings. It’s as simple as that. All of the effort that O’Connell has put into building it wouldn’t mean anything if the team’s best player wasn’t serving as the foundation.

“It’s all about us sticking together and not really listening to the outside noise,” Jefferson said. “We’ve just got to lean on each other, focus up, execute our plays, and figure out what we need to do to have a different outcome.”

As he finished up his chat with reporters this week, Jefferson tried to push the narrative forward, saying this minor setback for the Vikings will eventually pave the way for a major comeback.

“There are going to be better times,” he said. “There’s going to be a time where people cut on that TV and they’re talking all about us and they jump on our bandwagon.”

There’s nothing about Jefferson that suggests he won’t be around to see it through, and for that, the Vikings should consider themselves lucky.

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