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I’VE COVERED A LOT of people over the years who set out to change a system. Very few have tripped over an idea during date night and somehow kept going long enough to fix one.
That’s the part of Lucie Amundsen I keep coming back to as TEDxDuluth gears up for its February 6 gathering at the DECC. Her talk title alone tells you this won’t be one of those polished “here’s my five-step framework” affairs.
From Date Night to Doing Right: Accidentally Building an Ethical Egg Business.
That’s not branding. That’s confession.
Amundsen’s story starts where most good Midwestern stories start: two non-farmers, a slightly ridiculous idea, and a system that doesn’t work nearly as well as everyone pretends it does.
A lighthearted conversation between spouses turns into an unexpected plunge into agriculture. Then into Locally Laid, the first pasture-raised egg company in the Upper Midwest. Then into a reckoning with how food systems actually operate when you stop reading the label copy and start counting the chickens.
And somewhere along the way, Amundsen discovers a truth every real entrepreneur eventually learns, usually the hard way: you can’t Google your way out of lived experience.
Her favorite quote — delivered courtesy of her brother-in-law — says it plainly: “You just can’t Google that.”
That line alone could be carved into the lintel of half the startups I’ve watched flame out over the decades.
What makes Amundsen compelling — and why she belongs on the TEDxDuluth stage — isn’t that she built a company. Plenty of people do that. It’s that she stayed curious when the shine wore off. She kept asking questions when burnout crept in, when loss showed up uninvited, when doing the “right thing” turned out to be more expensive, more exhausting, and more lonely than doing the easy thing.
Her talk, by design, isn’t just about eggs. It’s about purpose. About what happens when you realize the rules you’re following were written for convenience, not fairness. About redesigning systems instead of complaining about them at the coffee shop and then going back to business as usual.
There’s humor in it — Amundsen leans into the chaos — but there’s also steel. Anyone who’s built something ethical inside a broken system develops that edge, whether they admit it or not.
This isn’t theoretical for her. Her book about Locally Laid, published by a Penguin Random House imprint, won the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award in 2016. That doesn’t happen unless you’ve told the truth clearly enough that strangers recognize themselves in it.
And then there’s the detail I love most, because it tells you everything you need to know about her wiring.
“In the section of my heart reserved for stout entrepreneurism,” Amundsen says, “sits a shirking pinto bean or maybe an eraser head.”
Anyone who’s actually been in the arena knows exactly what she means.
TEDxDuluth, like all TEDx events, is built around the idea that small ideas can have outsized impact. That a single story, told honestly, can reroute someone else’s thinking. It’s not about celebrity. It’s about resonance. That’s why these events work best when they lean into local voices with global relevance.
Amundsen fits that mold cleanly. Her story starts here, in the Upper Midwest, with land and weather and neighbors and moral math that doesn’t always add up neatly. But the questions she raises — about ethics, burnout, resilience, and choosing purpose over convenience — travel just fine.
I don’t expect her to sell anyone on a product that day. I expect her to do something harder: remind the room that meaningful change often begins by saying yes to an idea that feels wildly unreasonable at the time.
And then having the stubbornness to see it through. That’s not just a good talk. That’s a Northland story.
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