#427 Steve Hilton - California Is Broken — Here's How to Fix It

Steve Hilton.

Fantastic to be with you.

Thank you.

Steve, I want to start off this interview in a way I don't normally, but I was listening to one of your recent speeches and you had a quote that you made, which I want to quote to you and I want to understand what you mean by it.

And you said, California means to America what America means to the world.

What does that mean?

Yeah.

It's something I say a lot.

I wrote it in my book, um, uh, last year, Califalia reversing the ruin of America's worst run state.

And what I mean by is what I felt when I moved to California, 2012, um, with my wife and my two sons, not necessarily intending to stay here forever, but immediately I just fell in love with California and got a sense of the, the, the energy, the ambition, the optimism, the sense of possibility.

And there's something that I feel like California really represents.

It's a term I use a lot, which is the rebel spirit.

Like, there's a reason that California in the, you know, decades and more than a century since its existence has just had such an outstandingly big impact on the world with these industries that have been created here, that have completely transformed the world, going right back to Hollywood, technology, the defense industry, our world-leading ag industry, just one after another.

Now we have AI.

There's just something about California that to me represents, when we think of America, the best values, the best characteristics of America in the positive sense, that sense of of drive and energy and optimism and a positive outlook and ambition.

That's California more than anywhere else.

Now, as well as that, I would say that spirit and that energy is being crushed right now in California by what we've got, which is now 16 years of one party rule that's ended up with this massive bloated nanny state bureaucracy that is crushing the soul and the spirit of California.

So I think that's the ideal situation version of california but it's definitely not what we have today

so you lived in california with your family for about 15 years how would you say the state has changed since you've been there

it's just become look i'll give you the word that i get from most people i've been campaigning now for governor uh since the end of april last year i was traveling the state for years before that i had a california-based policy organization trying to develop concrete solutions to our problems so i've been really um all over the state in a way that most people don't see.

It's a huge place.

It's 40 million people.

It's the fourth biggest economy in the world, the biggest state by population in America.

Just it's a massive place.

And since the campaign started, we've been doing town halls, hundreds and hundreds of them up and down the state.