North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum joined me this morning. The audio and transcript are below. The three articles I referenced are Ambassador O’Brien’s new essay for Foreign Affairs “The Return of Peace Through Strength,” the piece by Admiral Mike Studeman (USN, Ret.) for “War On The Rocks”: “China Is Battening Down for the Storm Over Taiwan,” and Sir Niall Ferguson’s essay for The Free Press: “We’re All Soviets Now.”

Audio:

06-19hhs-burgum

Transcript:

HH: I’m pleased to welcome back North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. Governor Burgum, welcome back. How is that Achille’s healing?

DB: Well, thank you, Hugh. I’m doing great, and great to be with you on your show.

HH: So Governor, when I moderated the debate in November with NBC and Salem, I asked the candidates, neither the former President nor you were on the stage, and I regret that. But I asked the candidates who were there three questions, and they were China, China, and China. So I’m starting with China with you. I spent yesterday reading Ambassador O’Brien’s new essay in Foreign Affairs, The Return of Peace Through Strength, Admiral Studeman’s (retired), he’s a former head of office of naval intelligence, his article, From War On The Rocks, China Is Battening Down For Storm Over Taiwan, and then Niall Ferguson’s essay yesterday in the Free Press, We’re All Soviets Now. I’m depressed. Did Joe Biden forfeit in the conflict with China over the last three years? I mean, are we irreversibly behind the ChiComs now?

DB: Well, it sure feels that way to me, because I, just in, at a basic level, that Joe Biden doesn’t understand how deterrence work. I mean, he’s greenlighted activity by all of our adversaries, and whether that’s the two proxy wars we’re in with Iran and Russia right now. Then, we’re in this cyber war with Iran, Russia, North Korea and others, because we’re under, states like North Dakota are under attack every day from those countries. But we’re in this cold war with China. And in a cold war with China, you need deterrence, and Joe Biden is not a deterrent. Joe Biden just keep greenlighting stuff, and he’s not supporting our allies. Our allies see that, and so our allies have to hedge their bets that America is not going to be there. And so he’s weakening our whole ally defense network that we have. And then of course, the worst of all this is when he had an opportunity during the cold war with China, and he’s sending his cabinet leaders to China regularly. And when they’re there, they’re talking about CO2 emissions. And he’s not, we have a big stick that we can carry. Teddy Roosevelt – walk softly, carry a big stick. Our big stick is the U.S. economy, it’s U.S. energy, and it’s U.S. food production. China imports 11 million barrels of oil a day. They’re the most energy-dependent country in the world. They have to import calories every day to feed their population. They’ve got huge security risks. If you don’t have energy and food security, you have security risks. And as far as, I’ve never seen an article that we’ve ever talked to them about either one of those things. And we’re over there doing things that actually supporting them. We’re saying look, we’re going to buy batteries from you. We’re going to get rare earth minerals from you. We’re going to increase our dependence on you for our energy needs. I mean, we’re, they should be dependent on us, and we’re having a strategy around the Biden energy policy that puts us on dependence on them. It’s completely backwards, Hugh.

HH: You spend a lot of time with Former President Trump. I think he’s going to win, Governor. Do you talk with him about China? Does he think he can restore deterrence with Xi Jinping and the ChiComs?

DB: Well, I’ll tell you, I can’t speak for President Trump, but I can tell you what I do know, is that President Trump himself is a deterrent, because people understand that he is strong where Biden is weak. I mean, Biden invites wars through weakness, and Trump is an actual, literal deterrent. Trump is like adding, you know, pick a number. Our deterrents cost hundreds of billions of dollars. You elect President Trump, and it’s like adding to our Defense budget, because our enemies would actually go wow, this guy might actually take action to stop us. So you know, and Biden, of course, he’s doing the opposite – releasing billions and tens of billions of dollars to people like Iran, Swiss cheese sanctions on Iran so that Iran can increase their production, and you want to talk about China? Who are they selling, who are Iran and Russia selling their increased oil production to? They’re selling to China. And so he’s basically helping all of the bad guys help each other. It’s costing, I mean, it’s literally 180 degrees opposite what I believe President Trump will do the first day he’s back in office.

HH: Now Governor Burgum, this story in the Financial Times this morning has your name on it. The headline says it all. Silicon Valley Steps Up Staff Screening Over Chinese Espionage Threat. You went to Stanford, got your MBA. You started your own company in North Dakota, and the ChiComs stole all your stuff. I mean, this is like you know this. You lived this.

DB: Well, I did, Hugh, and I didn’t live it yesterday. I’ve shared it with you before, but 1989, I was a kid. We were a young software entrepreneur. We were selling our products only in U.S. and Canada. We were trying to expand overseas. The first country we looked at is Australia. I was in Australia in 1989. On my way back home, I thought, hey, I’ll stop in China and see if there’s an opportunity here. It was a long way away, but it’s a big country. Maybe they’ll need some software. And I’m there, and they said hey, they’re selling U.S. software in a street market. And so I go down there, and I of course expected to see some of the big names of the time like Lotus 1-2-3 and other products that maybe stolen there. But as a joke, I said do you have Great Plains software? And they said right over here in a street market for a buck a disk. They were selling, you know, for a dollars, they were selling a $5,000 dollars module of our software. I mean, general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, a buck each. $25,000 dollars of software for $5 bucks. So they have stolen every piece of software that I’ve ever made, and my software career continued right up to the day before I was, became governor of North Dakota back after the 2016 Election. So I watched these guys steal everything. And at every company I’ve ever been involved with, multiple companies selling software around the world, China just steals our IP. And so it is not a surprise to me. And now with the threat of TikTok, which we’ve banned in North Dakota on all state devices several years ago, it’s even worse, because obviously, they’re using it. They changed their algorithm. They dial it up, and I think there’s a direct connection between TikTok and what you see on our campuses today, because the multiple amount of information that’s pro-Hamas on TikTok versus that would support Israel is just dramatically unbalanced. And it’s influencing a generation of our young people.

HH: Now you know, the left-wing attacks Donald Trump, because he’s on TikTok right now like they are. Well, we’re not going to unilaterally disarm in this election before, we being Republicans. I hope he uses TikTok and then cuts it off on January 20th and bans it. Governor, if I can switch subjects with you, I want to talk about the border. Joe Biden declared an amnesty for millions of people yesterday. At least 10 million people have crossed the Southern Border under Joe Biden. How worried are you about domestic terrorists hiding among those 10 million? It doesn’t have to be many. It could be 20 out of 10 million I don’t know how we find the needles in the haystack, but how worried are you about that?

DB: Well, I’m very worried, Hugh, and you’re right. I mean, it was 20 people that were behind 9/11 executing that across four different attack vectors on one day. So it is a huge threat. And of course, the thing that’s disturbing to me as someone who understands and believes in states’ rights, I mean, the federal government’s got limited scope of authority, and the rest is deferred to the states and the people as you know. But one of the things the federal government is supposed to do is national security, which includes border security. And they’re not doing it. And I’ve been down to the border more than Vice President Harris, more than Biden has been down there, because we’ve had, during Biden’s time in office, we’ve had North Dakota National Guard troops deployed at the border. And as commander-in-chief, I’m down there, and I’m not down there like Gavin Newsom doing selfie videos. I’m down there talking to our troops that are doing the work. And one of the things that our troops are doing, they were in charge for a year of flying night missions trying to stop the cartels. We were flying Lakota helicopters from the San Diego coast all the way over to the Gulf Coast. And there are so many gaps in the border where the bad guys take down our surveillance. We don’t have people, and then we don’t even have video of it. And so these are the, you know, we’ve got the thing they call the gotaways, which the Customs and Border of the Biden administration puts that number out there with the millions of gotaways, but there’s another thing, which is the unknown gotaways. They disable the cameras. There’s a blind spot. And they surge people across when we’re not looking. We don’t know how many people have come across. If you’re a bad guy, if you’ve got terrorists, they keep talking about the number of apprehended terrorists that have gone up, and it’s gone up hugely under Biden. Well, those are the dumb ones. Those are the people that are coming across where they can get caught. The smart terrorists, which there’s I’m sure plenty of them, are coming across places where we don’t even have eyes. So we literally do not know how many people have come into the country. We know people have come from 140 countries. We know that there are hundreds of people on the terrorist watch list. But Hugh, we do not know. The possibility of a 9/11 event occurring on our soil with people that have come in under Joe Biden has increased dramatically. There’s just no doubt about it.

HH: All right, Governor, I want to switch to Israel, because the headline in the Times of Israel this morning is that the United States has paused 50 F-15s. Prime Minister Netanyahu went on video yesterday and complained that we are not, Israel is not getting the weapons we promised them. And the White House responded by having a fit and cancelling meetings with Israelis. What do you make of what Joe Biden has done to Israel? And what would the Trump policy be as you understand it towards Israel? Will he return to no daylight and back to the Abraham Accords?

DB: Well, nobody’s been stronger supporting Israel than President Trump. We all know that. And it’s like even, you mention cancelling the meetings tomorrow. The meetings tomorrow, it’s the second time they’ve been cancelled. And these meetings are for our intelligence experts to meet with Israeli experts to talk about the fact that Iran is moving further and further, closer and closer towards having a nuclear weapon, which is, that seems like an existential threat. That is an issue that is, for the very threat of Israel itself if Iran has a nuclear weapon. And so I, again, feel like the Biden administration, when they’re doing some of the stuff, they’re negotiating for the terrorists. People get upset when I say that. But if you were negotiating on behalf of Israel, you would say hey, we can have a ceasefire, Hamas, and you can have it tomorrow. All you have to do is release all the hostages. That has never been said by the Biden administration. Instead, they draw a red line in the sand for Israel, as opposed to drawing a red line in the sand for Hamas. They propose peace talks, and then they propose that Hamas is going to have a seat at the table like they’re a democrat country, like somehow, they’ve got a standing the same as a country with democratically-elected leaders. It’s a terrorist organization. We have, we in the United States, it’s a basic thing. We say we don’t negotiate with terrorists. The Biden administration keeps negotiating for the terrorists.

HH: Governor, yesterday, I watched President Biden. I played the entire audio, all 12 minutes of it, when he declared amnesty. It’s very unnerving. The President is infirm. Do you think he’s infirm?

DB: Yes. And I’ve had an opportunity to see that firsthand. I feel that just watching the videos like what you showed yesterday, it’s been a decline. But I had an opportunity to see him when the governors were at the White House in February. And you know, my conclusion, having spent, you know, 20-plus years in the corporate sector, there isn’t a board of directors in America, if you said hey, we’ve got to renew a four-year contract with our CEO, and this guy was applying for CEO, there’s not a board in the country that would sign Joe Biden up to be their CEO for the next four years.

HH: Excellent point. Governor, can you stand by for one second? I want to ask you about AI during the break. We’ll play it tomorrow morning and put it in our podcast today. Stand by, Governor, for just a couple of seconds…

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HH: I am back now with Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota. Governor, I don’t know what’s true. I’ve heard that you’re going to be the vice presidential selection. It doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other. I’m going to be for Donald Trump and his vice presidential selection. You’d be a great one. If you are the VP, and he turns to you and says, Doug, would you figure out what we need to do about AI? We need it, but we don’t need it out of control. How would you go about putting out a regulatory scheme for AI that protects Americans but harnesses the energy of the Silicon Valley that you know so well?

DB: Well, Hugh, the first thing for us with AI is we need to understand this is a fundamental-based technology that’s going to affect every job, every company, and every industry. And that means communications industry, transportation, educational, health care, you name it, legal profession. But it’s going to affect Defense industries as well. If we’re not leading in AI as a country, we will lose cold wars, we’ll lose hot wars. We’ll lose it all. So step one is forget regulation. We have got to put our pedal down, and we have got to lead in AI. It turns out that AI requires one thing. AI requires a lot of baseload electricity. It requires a lot of power. A search on some of the latest large language models that are available today that are just remarkable and can speak 26 languages and write code, you know, create original artwork and music, all of those things, it’s like a search like that could take ten times more power than a traditional Bing or Google search. We do not have enough baseload electricity in our country. Our grid is not stable enough The Biden administration is artificially driving up the demand for electricity through all of their EV mandates and their, whether it’s federal buildings have got to go all-electric, all the things they’re doing are driving it up artificially through subsidies, costing Americans trillions of dollars. But then, there’s real demand. I was in the tech industry for 30 years. We always, because of gains in efficiency, never took more than 1% of the nation’s electrical power for all the computing that was going on. Well, now with AI, we’ve moved towards 2%, and we could go to 10% by 2030. So you’re going to have the first time in 25 years real increases in demand for electricity at a time when the Biden administration is doing everything they can to actually destabilize the grid and shut down baseload in favor of all intermittent, which is their solar-wind initiatives. And you can can’t build on that.

HH: So Governor, the key question. If we brought in Palmer Luckey of Anduril and the heads of Palantir and Vannevar and Joe Lonsdale, who’s been on this show, you can talk to them, right? You understand their language. Are they worried about baseload electricity? Is that their concern? Or are they worried about the FTC screwing up their ability to develop? We’ve got like two minutes.

DB: They are absolutely saying it doesn’t matter what the regulations are. If we don’t have enough power, we’re not going to have AI, period, in our country. And so if you’re going to see Silicon Valley coming over and supporting President Trump. Some of the names of the people that you mentioned, I’ve talked to. And they’re all coming over, because there’s got to be an energy policy that supports us getting behind AI. From a regulatory standpoint, we’ve got to have some guardrails. But we’ve got to have a light touch. We can’t go and put some stuff up there that builds the walls guarding around the people that are leading now, because this is a base technology that’s going to lead to 10,000 new software companies or more. Just like base technologies like operating systems and databases led to a flourishing of innovation, the way we beat China is that we actually let the innovation flourish in our country. They’re going to try to control it. It’s going to hurt them. It’s, at a fundamental level, AI is a productivity tool. It’s like software is the greatest tool ever to expand human capability. AI is that on steroids. A country like ours that’s got 10 million jobs open in the country, AI helps us. It helps us increase our GDP. It helps us have the strongest economy. It helps us stabilize the world. China will have a tough time following us. They have high, high unemployment.

HH: Governor, thank you so much. We are out of time. I appreciate that. That was optimism. I appreciate it. Governor Doug Burgum, thank you.

End of interview.