Miranda Devine (3:26)

And you mentioned Joe Biden. I mean he was part of that sort of crazy climate alarmist sort of regime. And part of that he was trying to not to ensure that gas prices didn't go up and fuel inflation. So what did he do with the petroleum reserve? Didn't he just drain it?

Doug Burgum (3:45)

He drained it in half. Which is again I, Joe Biden turned the Strategic Petroleum Reserve into his own personal political petroleum reserve.

Miranda Devine (3:53)

Right.

Doug Burgum (3:54)

Because the draining, most of that happened 400 million barrels taken out of it in the lead up to the midterms as a way to try to keep price down. But on the flip side, when he was on the way out the door, he was doing things like through executive orders saying you can't develop more offshore in the Gulf of America. I mean, and to me, again, we talk about America's balance sheet. If we've got $36.5 trillion of debt, everybody knows that. What are our assets? Nobody knows because we haven't been tracking them. We don't have the financial systems. But in part of Interior, we've got United USGS, the U.S. geological Survey. We're getting back to our roots. So it's not just drill, baby, drill. We're going to map, baby, map. And then we're going to mine, baby mine because we have to get going in the critical minerals and we're going to build, baby build like AI data centers. I mean those are all things we have to do. But when Joe Biden would write an executive order and it would be reported on in the mainstream media, they would never say, oh, he just wiped $10 trillion off the balance sheet. Because that kind of an action restricting that when you shut down coal, the, the coal assets in its raw form just on federal land We've got the new release of the new survey that just came out. It's $8 trillion is what it's worth. But if you just say, no, we're going to not touch that, we're going to touch this, you're effectively taking a resource away from the American people.

Miranda Devine (5:22)

So the, you're saying the asset sheet of America is incredibly valuable and could pay off the debt. So would you be willing to sell off some of that federal land to pay off the debt? Is that possible?

Doug Burgum (5:35)

Well, I think what we want to do is we want to get the highest return. We can and sustainably use these resources. Theodore Roosevelt, who put away much of this federal land because it's an enormous interior by itself, would be the largest balance sheet of any company in the world. If Department of the interior, 500 million acres of land, 700 million acres of subsurface, you know, 2.5 billion of undersea offshore rich with critical minerals and oil and gas resources. So that's, that's the balance sheet and we should be developing it responsibly because if, if, if Interior is the largest balance sheet in the world, which it is, and then you take a look at the revenue that's coming from those resources, it'll also be the worst performing, you know, hedge fund, private equity fund in the world because we're getting so little return for it. And part of that is just the regulation that, you know, choking the regulation that causes people, even if they want to develop oil and gas, they've been going to private lands or state lands as opposed to federal lands by design. I mean, by design, they were trying to stop mining in this country, stop harvesting trees in this country, stop oil and gas production on federal land. I mean, Joe Biden said it out loud, you know, no more drilling on federal land. I mean, he said it, but that's, that's craziness At a time when we need more energy and we specifically need more energy, we need more electricity to win the AI arms race.

Miranda Devine (7:07)

And locking up that land is no good for it. I mean, I know in California with the fires there, part of that is wilderness that's been locked up, not managed. The same thing happens in Australia, in Canada. How can you get around that?

Doug Burgum (7:22)

Well, precisely, and fabulous point, Rana, because it is the unmanaged thing. The fuel load buildup that's occurred in American forests can actually go back to the Clinton era, which is during. There was a famous effort by the beginning of the environmental extremist movement that said, oh, the spotted owl, the spotted owl. We can't cut any more trees because the spotted owl, and this was part of the weaponization of the Endangered Species Act. Right. And so by shutting down our forests, we killed our position in the timber milling position. We killed rural communities that were dependent on the timber industry. But the, the private sector folks, because if we would do a timber lease, they would write a check to the government, you know, to do that lease and an oil and gas lease, they pay us for the opportunity and then they pay us a royalty on top of it. So these are ongoing sustainable revenue. But then when they're in, in the forest, in the case of the forestry, they're clearing roads, they're doing the thinning, they're doing all the things to do to manage that forest. So then if there is a fire, it doesn't burn at the super mega heat fire that we have today and.

Miranda Devine (8:32)

Destroy all the forest and all the critters living it.

Doug Burgum (8:35)

Yeah, exactly.

Miranda Devine (8:35)

So it's not environmental.

Doug Burgum (8:36)

A forest that's clean can survive a fire because the healthy trees survive. And it can be positive. Controlled burns have a positive role. But these out of control, mega, super hot, mega fire, super hot fires, they do kill the forest. The. And now we are again burning, we're burning more timber every year in America than we harvest. And we're importing accidentally. Accidentally. Right, right. I mean, so uncontrolled fires consume more of our asset base.

Miranda Devine (9:05)

Right.

Doug Burgum (9:05)

So then we spend money to try to control or stop those fires as opposed to get paid money from the private sector. We being the citizens, the public owner, we, we should be receiving revenue as opposed to expending expenses, you know, fighting the fires. The amount of timber that we've stopped harvesting equals about the amount that we now import. So then we're also paying for imported timber. And if people do. Yes, completely crazy. And if we do care about CO2 releases when it burns, these are massive CO2 releases. That's how you release the CO2 from a tree, is you burn it. I mean, when you have a campfire or fire, you're releasing that, that carbon. And so the fires in California have released more CO2 than all of their efforts to control CO2.

Miranda Devine (9:50)

What a joke.

Doug Burgum (9:51)

Yeah, so it's like. It's not.

Miranda Devine (9:52)

So what can you do about that?

Doug Burgum (9:53)

Well, what we are doing is President Trump signed an executive order to bring together the five forest firefighting units. Four of those are with Interior and one was under U.S. forest Service. But those five separate groups across national parks, U.S. fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, And Forest Service, those five all operate independently. They got different pay levels. They're not well coordinated on use of aircraft. Some have different policies. Are we going to contain or are we going to suppress a fire? So all of this leads to bad outcomes because federal land ultimately has neighbors and it might be private or state. And so we'll have a state that's fighting a fire to put it out where the federal government is allowing it to burn.

Miranda Devine (10:36)

Right.

Doug Burgum (10:36)

So we need to have a unified approach. President Trump understands that. But then in the same way we're bringing back the coal industry, we're bringing back the timber industry, we're going to start permitting the timber industry, all of these things, to get more private activity, to maintain healthy forests, and to lower the amount of CO2 and reduce the amount of uncontrolled. Uncontrolled fires.

Miranda Devine (10:56)

Fantastic. Now, also, I know President Trump's very interested in rare earths, rare minerals, but particularly copper he's been talking about lately because we're so vulnerable to China because we don't produce any of our own. Is that something you're working on?

Doug Burgum (11:11)

Yes. And it's been very fun, both through Interior, through the Bureau of Land Management owns a tremendous amount of land in places like Nevada. 80% of Nevada is federal land. We've permitted three mines in Nevada in the last several months. Copper. Well, not copper. Some are uranium, some are rare earth minerals. Because we've taken the entire periodic table, we've mapped it and said, of all these elements on the, on the periodic table, including copper, where are we at risk to dependence on foreign suppliers? And the top 20 that are most critical for US defense and for US automaking and key industries. 85% of the processing is being done, in some cases by China, in some cases, 100%. Wow. So we are on a. We are on a mission over the next two years to try to dramatically reduce that. You know, ourselves developing in here, partnerships with allies. And you may have even seen, it was announced last week, the Department of Defense made a direct equity investment in a US Critical minerals mine and processing plant, Mountain Pass here in America. So this is a. We have to get. We have to be willing, in this case, like, to put our own capital, the federal government's capital to work, because China would just dump into our country anytime someone had a mine that started to show progress, and they would kill the market. And so there was no private capital flowing into the mining business for decades. And we're also streamlining the permitting. We did permit a mine in Arizona that had been trying to get a permit for 29 years.

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Miranda Devine (13:52)

You speak very much as a businessman still, which is a very refreshing thing in Washington. So what, what you, you'd been governor, of course, of North Dakota. So you understand politics, but what is it about Washington that makes it kind of resistant to normal business practices? You know, I'm thinking particularly of Elon Musk.

Doug Burgum (14:13)

Well, I would say, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I understand politics, but clearly. Well, you're very good at it. But I, well, clearly when I was leading North Dakota, I mean the whole concept there was to bring a business approach, approach to how we were doing it. And there's so much opportunity for improvement. And Elon understood this. I mean there's, and it's not like we've the 20 or 30% or two out of three federal employees, you know, ought to be axed because they're bad people or they didn't care about the whole thing. But you know, part of it is we're saddling all of them. And if you know, I not only from a business, but I came from the tech software business where specifically I was working in business solutions and to step in to the federal government now and take a look at the IT systems we have for basic business processes. I'm talking like HR payroll, I'm talking about, I'm not talking about advanced AI and things this where there's all kinds of applications that we can use to be more productive in government, just. But basic business applications allowing a team member to travel for federal work and then not have to manually enter their expenses into a system.

Miranda Devine (15:26)

Oh, wouldn't that Be nice.

Doug Burgum (15:27)

Yeah. No, I mean, and this is, this is like literally a problem that we solved coming up on over 35 years ago between the first credit cards and the first accounting systems where you can your credit. I mean, so these, these are things that I can't even believe when I hear about them. I'm like, how is it possible that 35 years after the private sector solved this, that we're still, we have, you know, thousands of employees spending two hours a week, you know, manually entering expenses. Yeah. So. So I think if you just business process improvement, you could take. It's not 20 or 30% of the team members in government are, are not doing their jobs. It's that 20 to 30% of every government employee is being consumed by some mind numbing, soul sucking work that none of us in the private sector have had to, ever had to do. I would like to relieve all of that and then you could take people off of that effort and put them towards the purposeful work that government can do. Because there are roles for government where you can make people join because they want to make a big difference. Take our national parks, take our wildlife refuges. But if we could have more biologists and more park rangers, more people on the front lines serving our citizens and less people in it, accounting, finance, hr. I mean, comms. I mean there's all these areas where we just have way too much overhead and way too much burden on the team members. So I get excited. We made great progress on that in North Dakota. And I get, maybe I'm one of the few, but I get excited about tackling those issues.

Miranda Devine (16:55)

But is it must be frustrating in Washington. I mean, it drove Elon mad in the end because Doge was such a great idea, but actually implementing it. And I know he said that you were one of the bright sparks that really got it and wanted to implement it well.

Doug Burgum (17:12)

And we are taking that approach. And so I think that there's a long lasting positive effect of what Elon did, which was to, you know, bring a sense of urgency and bring a sense of possibility that hey, big changes are possible and we have to look harder and really get into the, get into the data. Just in Interior alone, it sort of raised the question, well, how many grants and contracts are there within Interior? There's 36,000 grants and contracts and that that amount, you know, may have doubled during the Biden administration.

Miranda Devine (17:44)

Right.

Doug Burgum (17:44)

Where's the money going? Who's it going to? If it's going to an ngo, are we. How much of their revenue comes from the grant that we just gave them. So we just. I saw a report for the first time a couple of weeks ago because we kept asking these questions. We had to build the database, pull it in from. From different, you know, heterogeneous IT systems to try to get it into a spot where we could find out, where are the people? Where do they work? If they work for the Park Service, do they actually work in a park? And if we gave a grant, what percentage of their revenue is coming from us? And we discovered that there were some of these grant NGOs where we were 99% of their revenue.

Miranda Devine (18:22)

Wow. And were they doing, like. Is that wasted money?

Doug Burgum (18:25)

Well, I think they were doing what they said they were doing. But they also had 30% in overhead, which included lobbyists lobbying for a bigger Grant. You know, CEOs making $600,000 to give out grants that we could have, you know, a junior federal employee doing the same thing, or we could give the grant to a fishing. A state fish and wildlife department and let them decide, you know, where they want to deploy the dollar. So there's some overhead that gets built into these systems. That. Which we can. We can. We can uncover. Because in the private sector, if you're more than 80% of a subsidiary's revenue, you're a wholly owned subsidiary, and you have to roll it back up. So when I look at those NGOs, I'm like, well, their P and L is really our P and L. Right. Because we're all their revenue and they're doing all the expense. So maybe we should just roll them back into us.

Miranda Devine (19:15)

Let's go back to your childhood in very small town in North Dakota called Arthur. And tell us about your family, your grandfather and how he built a grain elevator, I think. Tell us about your family and how they. How they got to North Dakota, actually.

Doug Burgum (19:32)

Well, it's a. Thank you for asking that question. I love the way you say Arthur. It's never sounded better than when you said it just now, but a little community of about 300 folks, really out on the prairie. Gravel streets was there. The only paved street was the state highway that ran through town. And fantastic place to grow up where I learned a lot of the values about hard work and being outdoors. And it's a place where neighbors help neighbors. And it's a very rich agriculture, so deep connection to the land and then got exposed. My mom and dad were both hunters, and so, you know, so I, you know, sort of fell in love with the outdoors during that time as well. But if you go Back to the lineage. I mean, North Dakota, like Australia, is one of the most recently place, recently settled places on Earth. I mean, of course, we had the indigenous tribes that were in North Dakota, you know, and largely nomadic in North Dakota in the eastern part of the state, you know, which was, you know, like the Sioux that were hunting, etc. And then I had a. On my grandmother's side, I had a great grandmother that was the first college educated woman in Dakota Territory. She came up the Missouri river in the.

Miranda Devine (20:52)

Must have been a shock.

Doug Burgum (20:53)

It was, yeah. And fortunately she also wrote a lot of the. She kept detailed journals and wrote letters for editorials for east coast newspapers about life on the. On the frontier. And so most of North Dakota's early understanding was her prolific writings. Wow. And she's considered the, essentially the founder of the North Dakota Historical Society because she'd been sort of hanging on to stuff and understanding the, the shift because when she got there, her husband was a Civil War veteran. They were assigned to a fort. So they were out there at the beginning of what might be considered the Indian wars, but that was in 1870 time frame. And then my grandmother was born a couple years later, and she was the first non Native American person born in what's now Bismarck, North Dakota, it's now the capital. And then she, she went on to be in the first class at North Dakota State University. My grandmother had six. Six people, five guys and one because her mom, who'd gone to college at Oberlin in Ohio had said that, you know, you're going to go to college. And so that was. So that was on that side. And then my. This interesting pioneer family that was there during the time of Custer and Sitting Bull and I mean, all the, you know, direct interaction.

Miranda Devine (22:13)

That's the Bergams.

Doug Burgum (22:14)

Yeah, well, that was the Slaughter family, which was where my grandmother came from. And then the Bergham side was. They were a bunch of Welsh coal miners. And my great grandfather's wife died and he packed up his young children, including my grandfather, who was about 6 years old, and they moved from Wales to North Dakota. And then he met my grandmother, who was riding 20 miles twice a week each way to teach school at a rural schoolhouse.

Miranda Devine (22:46)

Wow.

Doug Burgum (22:46)

So fell in love with her. And then they, they were part of that era of home setting. So in the 19. In the 1880s and 1900s, that's when North Dakota was really being settled by immigrants, largely from Scandinavia and in Germany. And so they were, they fit into that thing. So they were, they were, you know, broke, hard Scrabble pioneers living on 160 acre tough luck steak. And then they decided to start a grain elevator. They founded a grain elevator. And they must have been. They must have been into innovation because there was no electricity at that time. And the elevator. Grain elevator, you have to elevate the grain. It takes, you know, you know, mechanical power to get that up there. So as electricity was coming along, they then were getting generators to help drive the. The elevator. And they said, hey, on certain times, like in the evening, we could be selling this to the people in town. So then they started the rural electric for two communities around there in 1915. So.

Miranda Devine (23:50)

So you've come full circle.

Doug Burgum (23:51)

Yeah. So they were. Yeah. So I had grandparents that were literally trying to bring the first electricity to a rural area. And now here I get to work on trying to bring electricity to the whole country to make sure we can win the AI arms race. And that was. That was my. And my grandmother lived to be 96 in that little town of Arthur. So I used to go to her place after school, you know, when I was in elementary school, I'd walk to her house and hang out with her. And she was also. She was a painter and a poet and a writer, and taught myself and my older siblings all how to play chess when I was 4 or 5 years old. So she must have been bored. She was, like. Had to, like, teach people that she could. Yeah. Play games with.

Miranda Devine (24:34)

She must have loved having you there.

Doug Burgum (24:35)

Yeah.

Miranda Devine (24:36)

And now when you were 12 years old, a tragedy ensued. Your father died.

Doug Burgum (24:41)

Yes.

Miranda Devine (24:42)

What impact did that have on you?

Doug Burgum (24:44)

Well, I would say it's been probably the single event that shaped me more than anything else because I had this incredible. When they were both alive, they were. You know, at that time, it was. I didn't realize it was unusual. I mean, both of my parents had a college education. Right. My dad had. They had met in college. My dad dropped out of law school after Pearl harbor, as many young men did, and then signed up for the Navy.

Miranda Devine (25:12)

Wow.

Doug Burgum (25:13)

And because of his college degree, they put college grads into this they called the 90 Day Wonder. But he went to the Great Lakes Training School and near Milwaukee, and 90 days later, he was a naval officer. I mean, this is a town where there's no river, no lake, no. No swimming pool. I mean, I don't. He'd never seen the ocean.

Miranda Devine (25:32)

Could he swim?

Doug Burgum (25:34)

That's not clear to me.

Miranda Devine (25:35)

Right.

Doug Burgum (25:35)

He could have. I don't know where he would have learned because there was no water. Growing up, he was born in Arthur, raised in Arthur. And, and that's where he was living. And so they, he ended up, you know, dropping out of college and then going to, going to war. Going to war. And then, and then as he was doing that, he proposed to my mom and she said yes. And then they didn't see each other for almost two and a half years because he was off in the Pacific. And, and they, so they, but he was on a destroyer and destroyers were the picket fence that protected the aircraft carriers. And if you studied naval history, you'd know how tragic that was for the folks. There was 151 destroyers at Okinawa and 129 of them got hit by.

Miranda Devine (26:20)

So it was a very dangerous post.

Doug Burgum (26:22)

Yeah. At the end of the war, when the Japanese had moved to the kamikaze strategy, they had to take out the destroyers to get to the aircraft carriers. And so the US has about 80,000 missing in action sailors and soldiers since the Revolutionary War. Half of those 40,000 of those are Pacific sailors whose ships went down and their bodies were never recovered.

Miranda Devine (26:47)

Right at the bottom of the ocean.

Doug Burgum (26:49)

Yeah.

Miranda Devine (26:49)

Right.

Doug Burgum (26:49)

And so he, so your father survived. He made it through that. He was on one of the, he was on one of the few ships that it had near misses, but it didn't have either, you know, light heavy casualties or in some cases the entire ship went down. So they were actually there on his 27th birthday in Tokyo Bay because the Wren they brought in, the USS Wren was, the ship that he was on was brought into the harbor alongside the Missouri and others because they, they had the fleet there as a show of strength as MacArthur was accepting the unconditional surrender on the deck of the, on the deck of the Missouri. They could watch it from, from their ship.

Miranda Devine (27:27)

History in the making.

Doug Burgum (27:28)

Yeah. So a joyful day. I'm sure for them. The war is over and I'm going home. And then they ended up moving back to Arthur and started raising a family.

Miranda Devine (27:36)

Wow. And so you, you were born there, had this idyllic childhood and then your dad.

Doug Burgum (27:43)

Yeah, well, he, he, he had brain, he got a brain tumor, probably related to chemicals he was exposed to during the war. And you know that. And this is in the, you know, 69 to 71. This is in a time frame when we didn't have really advanced, you know, brain surgery. Yeah. But he went through, he was, you know, brave and brave and courageous. Taught me a lot on how he dealt with that. But it was, was the one battle that he wasn't going to win. So I was a freshman in High school, when, when he passed. And then my mom, you know, had three kids and mortgage, so she went back to work. And so I, you know, understood. I went from this sort of, you know, happy, you know, two parent thing and never thinking about it to like, hey, you know, mom's got to work to make ends meet kind of time frame. But then I.

Miranda Devine (28:32)

So then I've got to help as well.

Doug Burgum (28:33)

Yeah. What's that? Yeah. So then. And, and so. And we all, we were all, you know, we all worked and we were, you know, on. So, you know, farming, ranching, working at the grain elevator, doing all of those things. And then when I was in college, I kept the entrepreneurial streak going and my favorite job was there. I'd started a construction company with some guys when I was in. In high school putting up steel bins. And so I had a little bit of the entrepreneur in Arthur. In Arthur. Yeah. And when I was in an elementary school, I'd actually tried to start a newspaper when I was a fourth grader. Didn't turn into the New York Post, but it was the only. Arthur did have a newspaper and some of the other neighboring towns did. So I was, you know, I had hired everybody to my siblings and my parents, and I was the editor.

Miranda Devine (29:18)

Did you pay them?

Doug Burgum (29:19)

I did. Well, I don't know if I paid them, but I. We did. We did have revenue from ads you could, you could get for one ad for 10 cents and three lines for 25 was kind of classified sort of stuff.

Miranda Devine (29:33)

And you were a chimney sweep as well?

Doug Burgum (29:34)

Yeah, and that was my favorite job. When I was a senior in college. I started a chimney sweep company during an energy crisis of all things. That's when people were starting to burn wood again because the, the, you know, the Carter.

Miranda Devine (29:47)

Jimmy Carter, was it.

Doug Burgum (29:48)

Yeah. And the opec, you know, embargo, all that stuff was going on and the price of oil doubled and people couldn't afford to heat their homes. A lot of people were using heating oil, which is petroleum product. So then people in North Dakota started heating their homes with wood that was taking off across the country. And when people start heating with wood, then you end up with chimney fires. And so I sort of saw an opportunity in that energy crisis to do that.

Miranda Devine (30:13)

It's the theme of your life.

Doug Burgum (30:14)

Yeah. And it was, it was a. There's an AP article I was fortunate to get into. I went undergraduate, North Dakota State, and then I learned during the spring of my senior year that there was actually a thing called an MBA program because I was undecided on what I wanted to do with my life. And an advisor, also a World War II veteran. He gave me a Forbes magazine that had a story about MBAs on the. On the COVID and it listed six graduate schools that were in there that were at the top. So it was, you know, Stanford, Wharton, Harvard, University of Chicago, Northwestern and Virginia, I think one, maybe even seven. Dartmouth was in there, too. Anyway, so I was like, well, these are the only ones. I'll just apply to those. I mean, I knew nothing. Yeah, I knew nothing about the whole process. And I'm pretty sure I would have gone 0 for 7. But at the last minute, I. There was an AP article that went out about my chimney sweeping, and it had a picture of me sitting on top of a chimney, black and white photo, high above the ground. It was about zero to zero degrees Fahrenheit. The steam's coming out, there's ice everywhere.

Miranda Devine (31:27)

You had to climb to the top.

Doug Burgum (31:28)

Yes, yes.

Miranda Devine (31:29)

And go down.

Doug Burgum (31:30)

No, you get to the top. And then you had a weight with a chimney brush that he would lower up and down. So anyway, and then I had, you know, I was wearing top hat and tails. That was part of the uniform, of course.

Miranda Devine (31:43)

Oh, is that. Was that. You made that up as part of the shtick?

Doug Burgum (31:46)

Well, yeah. I mean, that was like. That's the expectation. I mean, we had, you know, Dick Van Dyke and Mary Poppins. Everybody was expecting to have you show up that way.

Miranda Devine (31:55)

Jimmy.

Doug Burgum (31:56)

Jimmy and I. Yeah. And I had a. And the people would ask me if I would sing the Jim. Jim Ree song.

Miranda Devine (32:01)

Can you sing it?

Doug Burgum (32:02)

Well, I said I. I could, but I said, you have to pay to do that. They said, how much? And I said, I charge double for the whole job. And so they never. I never had to say which was my preference. They were. But I. In the article that I was being interviewed by this AP reporter, it asked me, like, why did you become a chimney sweep? And I, of course, said, well, I was looking for a job where I could move up fast and always stay in the black. And. And so there was. I think that that must have caught some admissions directors, because I took a photocopy of that, and early in the early days of photocopy, photocopy that put it on top of my applications for business school. And then I went. I swept the board and got into all of them because apparently everybody needed to have a chimney sweep in there in their incoming MBA class.

Miranda Devine (32:46)

And you ended up going to Stanford.

Doug Burgum (32:47)

Yeah. And that decision was made strictly by the brochures. Because I hadn't had an opportunity to visit campuses. I was, you know, working and doing all that, but I was the, the rest of them, most all of the rest, all had some winter scene that included snow and, and Stanford had palm trees and some other things. And so I.

Miranda Devine (33:06)

Nice change for North Dakota.

Doug Burgum (33:08)

Yeah. And I mistakenly thought it would be warm, but I went to, I went. You know how Mark Twain once famously said that my. The coldest summer, the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

Miranda Devine (33:21)

Yes.

Doug Burgum (33:21)

It was so true. I moved to the west and like thinking, hey, California. I got there and I rented an apartment that was uninsulated, didn't have heat. Yes. You know, the bathroom was in a separate building in the house. And I ended, I ended up, you know, having to buy a space heater and electric blanket, wear a stocking hat to make it through the winter.

Miranda Devine (33:38)

So it's like Australia, it's very cold.

Doug Burgum (33:41)

Yeah.

Miranda Devine (33:41)

And so you were successful, went to university, you had a good career at McKinsey. And then you did this amazing thing. You mortgaged some of your family farm to buy into this software company. So tell us about that because that ended up making you a fortune, making you a billionaire.

Doug Burgum (34:04)

Well, not a billionaire actually. Oh, well, the company was sold. The company was a million. I was, I was about a 10% off. So that's it. Yeah, but it was a great outcome for everybody involved.

Miranda Devine (34:15)

Like, why did you. That was a gamble, you know, to mortgage the farm to buy into this sort of fledgling software company. So. And it was the 80s, so that was sort of just the beginning of.

Doug Burgum (34:28)

Yeah, it was the very beginning of the PC software industry was just getting going. I mean that was, you know, three and a half years before Apple or Microsoft went public. I mean it was like they were, they were little, little companies and was.

Miranda Devine (34:40)

That your forte that you're.

Doug Burgum (34:42)

No, no, it wasn't. But I, but I was, as you said, I was working at McKinsey in Chicago and I was walking down the hallway and I went by one of the corner conference rooms and Adil Zainabhai, who was a year ahead of me when he went on to lead the DC office and be head of McKinsey India, brilliant guy, nicknamed Scratch. Scratch had a, he had an Apple ii computer with VisiCalc. And I had just spent two days and like two days and a night, you know, doing an all nighter for one of the partners with a physical spreadsheet with like an HP12C calculator and, oh, with drawing it all out Filling it out in that spreadsheet.

Miranda Devine (35:23)

I mean, that was what, like an Excel spreadsheet? Only on paper.

Doug Burgum (35:25)

But it was on paper. I didn't know that this thing was going to be.

Miranda Devine (35:29)

Yes.

Doug Burgum (35:29)

You know, that a computer was going to do this. And neither did anybody else at that point in time. If I had, I would have invented it, but I should have. But I was experiencing the whole frustration. Yeah. Of every time the partner before, he would, you know, at 5pm he'd be, hey, you're doing a great job. But I got five more questions. You know, what if this, I mean, what if the price went up? What if, what if demand went here? You know, what if a new competitor entry each time he said, what if? In my head, I was going two hours, Two hours. Because like, okay, and then there's enough of those. Just like, okay, I'm going to be staying overnight again. And he's like, great, have it on my desk in the morning, you know, kind of thing. So they were, that's the pace of that. That place was, was hardcore.

Miranda Devine (36:10)

Yeah.

Doug Burgum (36:10)

You know, driven a lot of brilliant people anyway. But then Scratch has got. He was, check this out. And he hits the thing. And I watched the spreadsheet recalculate in like a minute or two.

Miranda Devine (36:19)

Yeah.

Doug Burgum (36:19)

I'm like, that's. It just did in two minutes. Which took me two hours.

Miranda Devine (36:22)

Yes.

Doug Burgum (36:22)

That's going to change everything. And so from literally that moment on, I was like, I've got to figure out a way to get into the PC software.

Miranda Devine (36:28)

Right, right.

Doug Burgum (36:29)

And so that was. People said, oh, you're a visionary. You saw it for everybody else. I'm like, no, I'm like, I hit in the forehead with a two by four. You know, it's like, how could I not see that that was going to change? Yeah, because I knew how much we were charging clients for my time per hour. And I'm like, wow, and what did that thing cost? And Scratch, where'd you get that? Does the firm buy that? He goes, no, I bought it in a store. I mean, you know, from the Apple. Didn't have Apple stores, but they had Apple dealers, computer dealers. And he just bought it and then he was building the models and was going to give it to the client. I'm like, wow, that's great. So then the, the, the little bit of farmland that I had had been divided up between my older brother, my older sister and myself. So I had 160 acres of farmland, which is not enough to farm on, because dry land, wheat farming in North Dakota Even those days, you would have needed a thousand acres. And. And so I took a loan out against the. Against that farmland. And then that became the seed capital for this fledgling startup.

Miranda Devine (37:28)

Right.

Doug Burgum (37:29)

Great Plain Software.

Miranda Devine (37:30)

Great Plan software. And then 18 years later, you sold it to Microsoft for 1.1 billion.

Doug Burgum (37:37)

Yes.

Miranda Devine (37:37)

And what did you do to it in those 18 years? Did you build it up?

Doug Burgum (37:41)

Well, we started. We had. There was less than 10 of us. It was sort of like 10 kids that weren't really. There wasn't anybody that had experience. Experience in the. In that sense of either building a company or. Or building software because it was all new and there weren't a lot of role models to look at.

Miranda Devine (37:57)

And you quit McKinsey.

Doug Burgum (37:59)

Yeah, I quit McKinsey. Like, two months after I saw that VisiCalc, I was driving back to North Dakota. And part of it I realized, which is, wow, this is most. That era of the 1980s. Young people were leaving our state, our population was declining. We were one of the only states that had a lower population in the 80s, 80s than we had in the 1930s. We were. Because there was. There weren't jobs there. I mean, agriculture was in decline. The oil industry hadn't begun yet. The energy industries in North Dakota. So it was. People were like, this state is, you know, going down. And I'd gone to undergrad there, and I knew all these talented people and they were leaving to go to work for the, you know, IBM and the bunch, you know, which was the bunch was Burroughs, Unisys, ncr, Cray and Honeywell.

Miranda Devine (38:45)

Right.

Doug Burgum (38:46)

Those companies all had operations in Minnesota, including IBM and Rochester. So all the talent was leaving North Dakota and going down to the Twin Cities in Minnesota. And I was like, wow, you know, I know some of those people. I could get some of those people back and we could all be back in North Dakota and this would be. There's more kids coming out of school and grab the good ones before they leave. And so I understood that it was going to be based on access to talent as opposed to access to natural resources.

Miranda Devine (39:14)

Right. And then why did you do it in North Dakota and not just go to Twin Cities?

Doug Burgum (39:19)

Well, I wanted. I love North Dakota. And then the other thing that at that time was my mom was ill. My mom got cancer. And so part of it was like, hey, I could. I could do this for my home state.

Miranda Devine (39:29)

Yes.

Doug Burgum (39:30)

And I could be backed by friends and family. Yeah. And. And there was no. We didn't have to be close to a customer.

Miranda Devine (39:37)

No.

Doug Burgum (39:37)

Because in those days, we didn't have the Internet at all. But I mean we were shipping our product out with UPS or FedEx.

Miranda Devine (39:43)

Right.

Doug Burgum (39:43)

I mean so if you were a customer anywhere in the 50 states, I mean we could get it to you in two days.

Miranda Devine (39:47)

And, and were you in Fargo?

Doug Burgum (39:49)

We were in Fargo.

Miranda Devine (39:50)

Right. And do you know, just side by. I, when I was at university in Chicago, I had a, I was a, the Washington correspondent for WDAY in Fargo, North Dakota that many years ago. So.

Doug Burgum (40:03)

Yeah, yeah. Well I, I, I never went to Fargo though.

Miranda Devine (40:07)

I wish I had but I was there.

Doug Burgum (40:08)

Correspondent. Wday is still the, the primary station, is it the mainstay owned by the Marcille family. They own the news.

Miranda Devine (40:15)

All the people were lovely.

Doug Burgum (40:16)

Yeah, yeah, they're great.

Miranda Devine (40:18)

Always wanted to go.

Doug Burgum (40:19)

Yeah, it's a. Well, you'll have to go now. It's on the bucket list. It's on all, it's on all the lists for best place to start a business, best place for college kids, best place to raise a family, you know, happen.

Miranda Devine (40:31)

And you pioneered it.

Doug Burgum (40:32)

Really?

Miranda Devine (40:32)

You pioneered that.

Doug Burgum (40:33)

Well, we were, yeah, we certainly there's the next generation of, of entrepreneurs but I think we created a culture around innovation and startups that sort of permeated the market. And then we, but we were, but you asked about the thing. We started with less than 10. We grew to, by the time we got acquired we had 1200 people working in Fargo, 400 rest of North America and 400 rest of world were in about 20 different countries.

Miranda Devine (40:59)

Countries still quite small.

Doug Burgum (41:01)

Yes, but 2000 people.

Miranda Devine (41:02)

Right.

Doug Burgum (41:03)

You know, I mean from 10. Yeah. And from that was a, for the space that we were in, we were one of the largest in that mid market space. And so Microsoft saw us as a platform that allowed them to go globally around what's now Microsoft Business Solutions. So then I was, when we got acquired, that was the second largest campus in the world. I mean Redmond was number one, Fargo was number two. They didn't have any place else that had.

Miranda Devine (41:31)

Amazing.

Doug Burgum (41:33)

So then I stayed at Microsoft because we did an all stock deal. Stock for Stock, it was 1.1 share of Microsoft for one share of Great Plains. And all 2002 team members became Microsoft Team members retroactive to their original start date. So we were buying in versus selling out. So essentially overnight we were all stockholders. We were all stockholders and at the same level as if we did join Microsoft 20 years ago. And that was after we said no twice. We were a public company. We'd gone public and had a great, we were having a Great run as a public company, could have stayed public. So that's why we said no twice and then we said no, it's not going to work unless we have a deal structure that preserves the, the, not just the intellectual property but the team that has built that. And then we, So I stayed there for seven years as a corporate officer. And one interesting side note from that during the time one, I had a fantastic team and that included people that went on to be corporate officers at Microsoft in important roles like Jody Ucher. Tammy Reller became the Tammy Reller was the chief marketing officer for the whole company. Dave O' Hara just retired this year as the CFO for all the commercial business, 85% of the revenue.

Miranda Devine (42:51)

And they were all North Dakotans, they.

Doug Burgum (42:52)

Were all part of Great Plains. But then one person that we picked up after we joined Microsoft who worked for me for those seven years was Satya Nadella. Of course the current CEO. Right now he's the greatest of all time. I mean when he took over the company there was, they were, Microsoft was about 400 billion in market cap and now it's 3.5 trillion. So as a non founder, he's created more market value than any CEO I think in history.

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Miranda Devine (43:42)

Payment of $45 per three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com what role did your department play in renaming the Gulf of America?

Doug Burgum (43:58)

Well, of course the Department of Interior has got a huge breadth of responsibilities that cover, you know, land, minerals, irrigation water. U.S. fish and Wildlife are amazing national parks, which we haven't talked about, but 63 sort of crown jewel national parks or 400 historic sites, so all that. But we also have the US Geologic Survey which provides a tremendous amount of scientific data mapping where our minerals are. But they also have got a committee inside that group that is about place names, oh, geographic naming, where they do. If their name is going to be changed, it has to go through them. But President Trump did an executive order that empowered me as secretary to make that official to do that and how fun. And President Trump was asked Catherine and I if we wanted to go to the super bowl. And we're like, well, that would be a lot of fun, you know, and. But he wasn't leaving from Washington, D.C. he was going to leave from Palm beach because he was at Mar A Lago. At Mar a Lago, at the Southern White House. He was there. Well, part of the reason he wanted to fly from there to New Orleans was that Air Force One would be flying over the Gulf of America. So we had all the documentation ready. And then it's not just a simple piece of paper when the name actually changes. The US Geological Survey then populates information to our systems, which then are picked up by people like Apple Maps, Google Maps, and those around the world. And so we had to coordinate with the whole, both private and public sector mapping world and with the captain and crew of Air Force One to know when we're going to take off, when we're going to be over the Gulf.

Miranda Devine (45:37)

Oh, so you did it at that moment?

Doug Burgum (45:38)

We did it at that moment. And so then, of course, it's the first time I had been involved in renaming a major body of water. So it's moving back and forth up between. We hadn't taken off yet, but going up and talking to the captain and, you know, they go up the stairs. I say up, because in the 747, you go up the stairs and into the. Where the pilots are and make sure we're all coordinated. And then. And then the pilot made an announcement. So we were, we had the, the press in his. In his office. There's an office in Air Force One. The press was in there. He had the decoration. We're holding. Catherine was there. She wasn't expecting that that day. Thought we were going to the Super Bowl. But now she's. He's part of this press conference. The two of us are holding up the map. Oh, really? The map that's got golf of the first map that had Golf of America on it. And then he was just getting ready to sign, and then the plane started to tip a little bit, and the pilot came on and said, attention, everyone, if you please look out the right side of your window. You're now looking at the Gulf of America. And President Trump had the pen in his hand and, and he looked at me and he goes, he said, a pilot did quite well. He's got a great voice. I mean, he sounded very, very official. Like he'd, like, been renaming, you know, bodies of water as part of his career as Opposed to please, you know, remain seated. I mean, he was. So it was fun for the pilot to be able to do it. President Trump signed away, held it up, and. And that was the moment that it became the golf amazing history.

Miranda Devine (47:10)

And he has that map in his Oval Office.

Doug Burgum (47:14)

Yes, yeah.

Miranda Devine (47:14)

And of course, AP refused to go.

Doug Burgum (47:16)

Along with it, but. Yeah, yeah.

Miranda Devine (47:18)

Why did you go from this incredibly successful, interesting business career into politics as running for governor of North Dakota?

Doug Burgum (47:27)

Well, it wasn't that fast. I had kids back in North Dakota. And so then in 2007, I'm like, I'm going to step back from, you know, from, you know, traveling around the world and because I. That when I was leading business solutions, Microsoft corporate officer, and we'd grown from 40,000 people at Microsoft to 90,000, we doubled that income from 9 billion to 18 billion. I had people working in 120 countries. I mean, I was just on the road. My home games were in Seattle and my away games were the rest of the world. My family was in North Dakota. So I said I was going to retire. That turned out to be an epic fail because I had started within six months, a couple other businesses. Right. And one of those is software related. The other one was revitalizing downtown Fargo. So we've been involved in saving close to over 40 different historic buildings in downtown Fargo as part of that revitalization. But then on the software side, then with a nephew, we started a venture fund called Arthur Ventures to invest in cloud, mobile, B2B software companies. And that company lives on and is thriving now, based in Minneapolis. And I've no longer. No longer part of that. But that. That led to investments in companies like Atlassian from Australia. Success factors, Avalara. So I ended up being board chair of multiple other public companies.

Miranda Devine (48:50)

So did you have to go into politics to stop starting up all these businesses or, you know, to control your energy?

Doug Burgum (48:57)

Well, this. Yeah, this was a. I was working on philanthropy locally and I was helping out our. The rural school that I went to because they were behind in tech. And then I was like, hey, I'm gonna, you know, help just with the basics and, you know, computers and connectivity and software and, you know, the things that, that I never had an opportunity to have because there was not a computer in the high school that I went to. So I was like, trying to give back. And then I started asking questions about what does the state of North Dakota spend on computer on K12 across all these rural schools across the state and everything. And the answer was a billion dollars a year. So I was kind of shocked. I just had never thought about it. And I came home and said to Catherine, I said, you know, I said, we're not going to solve any of these problems with philanthropy because this is a drop in the bucket compared to what the government is spending, and maybe we should think about giving our time. And when she would tell the story, then she would be like, we have an amazing life. Why would I know? But there was a poll out that had, where I was down 69, 10, and it was five months to the primary. And so part of how she became first lady was I told her, you don't have to worry about being first lady because we don't have a chance. Yes.

Miranda Devine (50:16)

And then you won in a landslide.

Doug Burgum (50:18)

We did, yeah. Yeah.

Miranda Devine (50:20)

And then just fast forward, you were successful as a governor, everyone loved you, you had great high polls, and then you decide you want to become president. Why?

Doug Burgum (50:31)

Well, I, the. It was part of the decision to make that announcement was, you know, and fully understanding what a long, you know, we were long shot, unknown. But at the time, there was a lot of discussion going on, you know, on about. About policies that were. That weren't about the core things that I felt really drove the country forward. That was, you know, energy, the economy, national security, and, and with North Dakota being such an energy state and under. In such an ag state and being a border state, I mean, I really had built up a set of experiences and, and learning around the issues that were really facing our country. And at that time, there wasn't a big discussion about that. And some of the. So I said, hey, let's, let's jump in. And if you look at my initial announcement that I made, some of the things I said several years ago is the same stuff I'm talking about here at this conference. And so I feel like we were not really running against any other Republicans. It was more about trying to get the word out, because we were under assault in North Dakota as an energy resource state under the Biden administration. By the time I left, we were engaged in over 30 different legal battles with the federal government. So I was feeling it. And I'd been chair of Western governors and I knew that the other public land states that are large, you know, Alaska. Alaska had 68 executive orders by the Biden administration against it. We sanctioned Alaska, not we, the Biden administration sanctioned Alaska more than Iran. I mean, we were killing. Yeah, unbelievable. Killing that state. State and their economic future. Yeah. And, and, and in some ways the same, whether it was timber, mining, you know, the, which is really killing America, right? Yeah. Yes. Because Nevada, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, I mean, all of these states where I was friends with the governors were all going through the same thing. And I just said, you know, we need a voice.

Miranda Devine (52:31)

And what did Catherine, your wife, say about that?

Doug Burgum (52:36)

I think she understood it was the same, you know, sort of long odds. She jumped in. And I think part of.

Miranda Devine (52:41)

But she was a great first lady.

Doug Burgum (52:43)

She was an amazing first lady, but part of the reason she jumped in was because through her own personal experience, and if she was here, she would tell her own story beautifully. But she struggled with the disease of addiction for over two decades.

Miranda Devine (52:54)

It was alcohol, wasn't it?

Doug Burgum (52:55)

Yes. And then. And then. And at the end, I mean, it's a depressant. She was suicidal.

Miranda Devine (53:02)

Did you know?

Doug Burgum (53:02)

No. This is before we were together. But then she came, got into recovery. Then she spent the first 15 years in recovery not talking about it to anybody, not even her friends or family. Because of the shame and stigma associated.

Miranda Devine (53:19)

When you met, did she tell you about that?

Doug Burgum (53:21)

Yes. Yeah. And in the. And it was. And she was, you know, she was forthcoming as we got close in our relationship, but it was. It wasn't something that she was still talking about publicly. And then when we became governor and first lady, then it was like, what's your platform going to be? You know, the public is asking. And during her first interview, they. She said, well, the platform is, I'm going to eliminate the shame and stigma of addiction. They said, well, why did you pick that? And then she just. She told me, five minutes before the interview, she said, I'm. I'm telling my story, and I'm gonna start telling it. I'm gonna be a face and voice of recovery. And she just said, I struggled with this disease, and. And I'm, you know, been in recovery. And. And so I know that through her work called Recovery, we invented, had a big impact on policy in North Dakota around criminal justice reform. And, you know, how we thought about healthcare. It's a disease, not a moral failing.

Miranda Devine (54:18)

Yes.

Doug Burgum (54:18)

If you think it's a moral failing, then you can cure it with longer sentences.

Miranda Devine (54:21)

Yes.

Doug Burgum (54:22)

You know, that we've proven, you know, we've been doing. The war on drugs turns out to be a war not on the drug dealers. You know, it turns out to have been more war on. On the victims. The victims that were struggling with addiction. And. And it's still. We have a lot of issues in this country, and we talk about a lot of things, and we, you know, headline news, if, you know, we lose. The plane goes down, we lose, you know, you know, 80 people. It's headline news for a week, and people care about it. But we lose 300 people a day stuff still, you know, under Joe Biden, we were losing, you know, over 100,000 a year of known overdose deaths. Yeah. And about 80% of those were fentanyl, which then got me fired up about the border because we had North Dakota troops down at the border. So I spent more time at the border than the Kamala. The borders are. The borders are. Really. Yeah.

Miranda Devine (55:09)

Wow.

Doug Burgum (55:09)

Yeah.

Miranda Devine (55:10)

And look, this is the last question which I ask everybody. You are yourself, successful. You are around a lot of successful people. What are the secrets of a successful person?

Doug Burgum (55:21)

You think, Well, I think successful. Some people may immediately jump and think that that's about financial success, but that's not, of course, the only measure. They say, you know, it doesn't matter if you're the richest guy in the cemetery, you know, kind of thing, or you can't take it with you. But what. But I think that we all have an opportunity to make a difference in people's lives. And the values that helped me, that we've tried to instill in our kids starts with humility. And humility is key, because if you think you know everything, it's really hard to learn. And in a world where now we're entering a space where you can get any answer to any question anytime, any place, on any device, starting with the humility. Because humility drives curiosity, and curiosity leads to innovation, Innovation and new ideas. And then when you have that innovation, then you have to have the courage to. To take it. And a lot of people might have the first two. They're. They've got humility, and they have curiosity, but then they lack that willingness. Hey, I'm going to start a company. I'm going to take the leap. I'm going to make a difference. I'm going to try for a new job. I'm a run for governor. I mean, these are like, oh, I could, but I'm. You know what? I might lose. I mean, there's. Yes, but I mean, sometimes you have to have the courage to put yourself out there in the same way. You know, if I had not put myself out there as part of the presidential primary, I wouldn't be in a position, you know, today to be, you know, making a. You know, making a big difference in America's future right now and having an opportunity to work in this incredibly historic administration and have an opportunity to work for President Trump. I mean, that likely wouldn't have happened. I mean, you know, he spots talent.

Miranda Devine (57:03)

But yeah, you know, he loved you from day one.

Doug Burgum (57:07)

Yes, he did. But that was, and I, and I think he, I think he knew that I was aligned with him and he knew that I had, you know, voted for him in 16 and in 20 and was happily voting for him again this time. So we're, he was great for our state. When I was governor under Trump, that was a breeze at our back and you know, Biden was a wind in our face. I mean it was a, I had the same job but description. I had the same constitutional duties but my job changed completely when, when the Biden administration came in because they were trying to shut us down. But I would say again, so humility, curiosity, the courage. But then the last thing is then if you, you have those three good things are going to happen and then getting up every day with gratitude because gratitude is the, it's the mother of all the other values and understanding particularly as Americans, how fortunate we are and the resources we have. And, and I see that right now in this quote energy crisis we're in. We have the resources, we have the innovation. We have the ability to put energy together with the manufacturing intelligence which will transform every job, every company, every industry. It's going to be amazing in terms of what it can do for solving, transforming industries, improving productivity but solving health issues. I mean there's, you know, even someday maybe we'll have a, we'll understand, we'll have a cure for addiction. I mean it's like that, that could happen now with, with AI so life saving capability. But we have to say that we have to get out of our own way. That's part of what the Trump administration is doing with permitting is really like stop getting in the way of capital plus innovation, solving problems. That's one of the main drivers that we're doing. And I think the, I think the golden age of America is coming and I think we've got the right formula of capital infusion, deregulation and innovation coming together. And I'm grateful to have the opportunity to serve as part of, I think.

Miranda Devine (59:00)

We'Re all very lucky that you are serving. So thank you very much. Doug Burton.

Doug Burgum (59:03)

Thank you, Miranda.

Miranda Devine (59:05)

Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Miranda Devine, please like and subscribe to our channel so you don't miss any future episodes of Pod Force One.