McKenzie County Farmer - Latest News

Editor’s Note: Co-owner of The Farmer and Flag Family Media “What’s On Your Mind?” Radio Host, Scott Hennen, recently sat down with Paul Palandjian who shared his thoughts on North Dakota. Below is the full interview.

You know what's great about the USA and America is the states created the federal government, and we often forget that in the Constitution, and there are states that are probusiness.

There are states that are anti-business. Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, was here not long ago, and he said, you have the most business-friendly state in the entire 50 states.

Some people hear that, and they think, oh, that's just because you've got corporate welfare, and you give money to robber barons and stuff. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What it means is you can move faster here.

Hashtag speed kills. I've written columns about this. Speed kills, and North Dakota is right now at the tip of the spear in many things, because we are business-friendly, because our elected leaders do anything.

They'll walk on broken glass if it's about helping North Dakota, making North Dakota better, bringing kids and grandkids back. And I can't think of anyone who got that better than Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful, who spent an inordinate amount of time in North Dakota, as did our next guest, who's the CEO and general partner of O'Leary Ventures, and that's a good thing, a really good thing that gives us enormous opportunity, because Kevin O'Leary and Paul Polangin, who's joining us here in a moment, could be anywhere, literally, on Earth. Could be in Abu Dhabi, could be in Alberta, Canada, could be in West Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, but they spent a lot of time right here.

Why, is the question to that, and that's our first question for our guest, Paul Polangin. Paul, thank you for joining us. How are you? I'm great, great to be with you, Scott.

Great to be with you as well, and had the pleasure of meeting you when Kevin has been here before, and I'm always impressed of the amount of time you spend here. Why do you and Kevin O'Leary spend as much time in North Dakota as you do? Well, you know, there's business reasons for that, and then there's cultural and personal reasons for that. You know, first and foremost, we got to know North Dakota almost serendipitously through a small investment we made through Shark Tank, PRX Fitness, which then went on to have great success and build a manufacturing plant in North Dakota.

That drew Kevin to North Dakota, and it was kind of when he first put boots on the ground on a follow-up for Shark Tank that he started to learn about the state, met leadership, and came away from it with an aha moment of the opportunities are boundless here from a business perspective. But then, as we all know, opportunities are a dime a dozen. At the end of the day, leadership matters, business policy matters, but the culture of the people probably matters most, and what we've been most impressed by is that there's kind of a preserved sense of lost Americana that comes out in the culture of the North Dakota people.

It's a culture of hard work. It's a culture of integrity and honesty and many of the things that ultimately we see are lost in the major cities and on the coasts. So we think the heartland is where it's at, as you said earlier.
North Dakota is just the tip of the spear, and then there are many fundamental superpowers that the state has that make it poised to capitalize on what we think are five decades of megatrend that's going to unfold in the years to come. So tell me about the superpowers. What are our superpowers that attract you and others to invest here? Well, this is known to your audience, but you know, 44 million acres, 39 million of which are ag, the state is relatively flat.

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