All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Tue, 06 May 2025
(0:00) David Friedberg introduces Secretary Doug Burgum (2:11) Burgum's background and how it led to his role in the administration (10:56) The state of American energy and how we got here (22:32) America's energy emergency: AI, unlocking potential, China, increasing national risk tolerance (34:22) Burgum's National Balance Sheet idea: How it could help reduce national debt (42:25) Mining, overseeing the EPA, aligning agencies with outcomes Follow Secretary Burgum: https://x.com/SecretaryBurgum Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Chapter 1: What is Doug Burgum's background and how did he become Secretary of the Interior?
I think that was another epic discussion. Welcome to the all-in interview here today with Secretary Doug Burgum, the 55th Secretary of the Interior of the United States of America. We are here in beautiful Sabine Pass in Louisiana today at the Chenier LNG facility. It's been an amazing tour this afternoon. It's a little bit windy, but it's still a beautiful afternoon.
Thanks for joining me today, Doug.
David, it's great to be with you. Thank you for coming down and seeing this amazing facility.
So we just took a great tour here. Why were you here today and what are we checking out?
Chapter 2: How did the shale revolution transform US energy independence?
Well, I think President Trump, one of his core goals, if we talk about energy dominance, which is beyond energy independence, it's not just a slogan. It's really about how do we have the power to power AI in America? How do we power the remanufacturing in America? And then how do we sell energy to our friends and allies so that they don't have to buy it from our adversaries?
And what you and I had a chance to see today is the largest LNG export facility in America, the second largest in the world.
Yeah, I was struck. I didn't really realize how quickly this facility grew up just about a dozen years ago. There was nothing really going on here. And now it's the second largest export facility of methane in the world. And methane is seeing a massive surgence around the world because it has a lower carbon footprint. There's demand. It's transportable.
So there's a lot of reasons why there's a massive growing market for liquefied natural gas or methane.
Absolutely. And part of the amazing energy transformation that I think is not fully appreciated by most Americans is when this plant began in the early 2000s, it was meant to be an LNG import facility. America was running out of oil and gas. And they said, wait, we got to be ready to start importing it just to meet our needs.
Well, along comes the shale gas revolution, again, driven by technology, that technology of horizontal drilling, that ability to, you know, fractionate rock and get oil and gas out of places that people thought was just impossible that we would ever be retrieving. Those resources from those hard rock shale locations.
And so then this thing, after the financial crisis, turned around and began its life as an export facility. And now, as you say, the only one larger in the world is in the Middle East.
So I want to go back a little bit and how you ended up in the seat, how you ended up. not just being the Secretary of the Interior, but you're also the chair of the National Energy Dominance Council. I really want to talk about the importance. I talk about it on the podcast a lot, about the importance of growing energy production in this country.
But you're a tech entrepreneur who is from North Dakota, became governor of the state. And I'd love for you to just do your highlights, how you ended up there, what you did with respect to energy, and also how that translated into a surplus of jobs
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Chapter 3: Why is energy security crucial for national prosperity and peace?
And they won't listen to any conversation about the pragmatism of energy security and the importance energy plays in prosperity, taking people out of poverty, raising them up, raising living standards and giving access to things around the world that every individual wants, which is more prosperity.
And one statistic I always quote is that if you go back 500 plus years, you can see and there's all these studies that have tried to understand energy production versus GDP, which translates to prosperity per capita. And there's a linear relationship. The more energy that's produced, the higher the GDP per capita. And that's what we see around the world in developing markets today.
So I guess maybe you could just take a moment to talk to those folks, share a little bit about your perspective of the relationship between taking care of the environment and the planet and the importance of energy demand and energy security before we get into the things that are going on.
Well, I think you're spot on. I mean, human flourishing depends on everyone. And I think if you're talking about access for everyone, you just take a look. I mean, we could have as many as 800 million people on the planet, shy of a billion, that don't have access to electricity. And they need more energy. Now with AI coming, the demand for power is going to go up.
The demand for advanced manufacturing. So we're not in any kind of energy transition. We're in an area where we need energy addition. And if we want human flourishing, if we want to reach our planet's fullest potential, and if we want to take care of our environment, which we can do all these things at the same time. Even that requires energy.
I mean, if you're worried about water sources, well, desalination, which we can do, requires a lot of energy. Transportation of goods requires energy. So whether it's the clothes on your back, the food on your table, the transportation drive, there's an energy component to all of that. And electrifying stuff doesn't change. It just changes the source of it. We still need to create the electricity.
So I feel like that if anybody is concerned about the environment, they should want to have, It... every ounce of a liquid fuel and every electron produced in the United States. Because if you compare us to any other country, we produce it cleaner, safer, smarter, and healthier than anyone else.
And I learned in North Dakota over those eight years as governor, where we were always on the top of the list of cleanest water, cleanest air, best soil health, all of these things that we were able to achieve. And we were going up the charts in terms of energy production. These things go hand in hand. It's not either or, it's a plus when you can do both.
And we were just talking to this crew on board the ship we just visited. They're on their way to Taiwan and they go to Japan. And so if we can produce liquid methane in this country with a lower carbon footprint, then that methane might be produced elsewhere, which is the case. We have cleaner methods for production and that demand exists regardless of whether or not the United States produces it.
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Chapter 4: How does China's energy expansion impact global competitiveness?
It's nothing short of that.
So let's talk about the energy demand equation. The U.S. is forecasted to increase its electricity production capacity from 1 to 2 terawatts by 2040, 15 years from now. During that same period of time, China is going to go from 3 to 8 terawatts.
And that China forecast, by the way, excludes any of the Gen 4 nuclear reactors, the new hydroelectric facilities, and the new thorium, or if that ever scales, that they're considering rolling out in addition to what they've already planned to roll out. So in the next 15 years, China is adding five Americas in electricity production capacity.
And if everything gets automated, factories are automated, AI becomes the great accelerant of the global economy. China is hugely advantaged relative to where we sit today. What do we need to do about it?
Well, if you were to ask me what's the thing that keeps me awake at night, this is the issue. And it's so thrilling and refreshing that you understand the scale, the magnitude, and the importance of the AI arms race, which is really driven by access to electricity. And China last year... brought on 94 and a half gigawatts of coal powered electricity. One gigawatt is Denver.
So they brought on 94 Denver's just last year. That's more than all we have today for all of California and all of New York is less than 94. So they added a New York and a California worth of electricity last year, just from coal. They're still getting 60% of their baseload from coal and people, people may, they stop listening when they hear the word coal, but coal is,
From an electricity standpoint, thermal coal is fantastic base load. It has all the characteristics to allow you to maintain amperage and voltage to keep a system going. And I think we just saw in Spain, they were celebrating on April 12th of this past month that they'd shut down their last coal plant.
And then a week after that, they were celebrating the fact that they had their first day of 100% renewables on their system. And then the next week, they were a global news story because people were trapped in subways. All airline flights canceled. Hospitals were panicking with a lack of power because they had a rolling blackout and grid failure because it justifies physics.
You can't run an electrical grid with just intermittent power. You cannot run with something that is based in intermittent is the definition of solar or wind because the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow every day and you can have it. And so in America, we became dangerously close to that right now. We've got parts of our country that are at risk for those same kind of
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges facing US energy capacity expansion?
I do agree with you. I'll be declarative on this because a lot of people ask me. I started a company called the Climate Corporation. We talked a lot about climate change. I believe deeply in a lot of this climate science. But I also believe more deeply that innovation will solve a lot of the challenges that may arise. And there's a whole series of solutions that are developing.
And we can talk a little bit about some of those longer term solutions that ultimately yield to unlimited, free, scalable energy production. And when that happens, you know, all bets are off. And we have line of sight to that.
Yeah, and some of that could be coming in the next decade. It doesn't help us today because today we've got to shore it up. And I think one thing that, you know, having spent 30 years in tech, we never used more than 1% of the nation's electrical production. And it was because computers were getting more... You mean tech? Yeah, tech.
The tech industry.
The tech industry. We used 1% and no one paid any attention. And the tech industry didn't pay any attention to power generation because they didn't have to because PCs got more efficient, software got more efficient. And then America was rich. Everyone was buying appliances that were more efficient. So there wasn't ever really a demand curve on electricity.
But then today with AI, the demand curve is just flying in the face. And when I was at Sarah Week, which is the biggest – energy conclave. When I was speaking to the group, I said, there's something different here this year. And what's different is the five biggest tech companies in America showed up at that conference with $300 billion of CapEx.
You know, the big ones have got 75 billion a piece, you know, for the top ones on that chart. And I'll reflect back to not that long ago, a couple decades ago, I was a corporate officer at Microsoft for seven years. I never went to a CapEx meeting. Somebody said, well, weren't you invited? I said, no, there were no CapEx meetings. You know, we hired salespeople and software developers.
And if we needed an office in Singapore or Munich, we rented it, leased it. And so there was no CapEx. And now they showed up at that conference and I had to speak to all the executives and said, look, these guys aren't here trying to sell you software. They're your biggest customers. They need power and they will do anything.
And the regulated power providers and some in the industry just have never seen a demand curve. So it's like a collision between high tech and the power generation in America. And coming from that, we've got to figure out a way to break through this.
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Chapter 6: How is the National Energy Dominance Council addressing energy demand challenges?
Does that include nuclear? Some of the reactors shut down to their plant?
Yeah, we got to keep everything going. We got to go fast on the small modular nuclear. But again, that's really kind of in the 2030s. So that's in our next, it's in the important, but it's a little less urgent. We need to fast track all that stuff long term. That's where the solutions will likely lie.
But in between now 2025 and 2030, a lot of it's going to come back to LNG because the fastest thing we can get online for more electricity generation is LNG power plants.
LNG power plants. So that's number one. I mean, just to frame things up for folks, you know, you mentioned the city of Denver utilizes about a one gigawatt of electricity, a standard Gen 2 scaled nuclear reactor facilities producing about a gigawatt. And these small modular reactors, these SMRs, as they're called, that China now has demonstrated five megawatts.
They can be small, they can be located in an office complex or... in a downtown area of the city, and they're designed to have redundant systems for safety and not having meltdowns and so on. Talk a little bit about the opportunity for nuclear, you know, you're saying the 2030s, meanwhile China's got several hundred that they're in construction on. There's clearly technology available today.
Uranium is not hard to get. We have a lot of it. Thorium is not hard to get. We have an incredible amount of thorium. Those are the two fuel sources. Why can't we move faster with nuclear? What's the hold back? And why is the U.S. so different than China in being able to scale up nuclear?
A big difference is, again, back to the regulatory environment. I mean, the regulatory environment on nuclear has been so burdensome in terms of adding to the cost and the timeframe of bringing it on.
And then when that cost was put onto a utility and then utility felt they had to put that back on the rate, on the rate payers, their consumer customers, there was in some ways a revolt that it wasn't safety related. It was like, oh, you want nuclear, but now my electricity is going to cost twice as much. I'm not for that.
So we have to be able to get that regulatory regime down and allow them to go faster. And of course, on the SMRs, once that design gets approved, we should be able to have essentially like a manufacturing where we regulate the design, the design is proven and proved out.
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