How They Ruined California - Steve Hilton

26:40And as a part of that, there was a whole combination of things. and the big one that related to the point you make about shoplifting was a ballot initiative in 2014 called Proposition 47. And that was the one that famously is associated with Kamala Harris because she was state attorney general. But to be accurate and fair, it wasn't her thing. It was a ballot initiative that was put together by, you know, leftist activists supported by the then governor, Jerry Brown. Very strongly supported. And she said she was neutral, but actually, as Attorney General, she wasn't at all. The way the language was written on the ballot initiative was basically selling.

27:22It was literally called something insane, like, not the name of it, but the description and then all the marketing was the Safe Neighbourhoods and Schools Act. And that's where you got this thing, which is up to $950 a day, you could steal per day. And it would just be a misdemeanor, like a parking ticket, basically, not a felony, so no jail time. The goal was to stop people going to prison. That was the purpose of all of that. And then behind that was not just the original impetus, which was the Supreme Court ruling on overcrowding, but also the ideology, which is prison is bad because it's racist.

28:00So it goes back to the race woke thing, because, and you hear people talk like that today still, right, that we should shut all the prisons because it's racist. Why? Because there are disproportionate numbers of black people in prison, in jail, and especially young black men. And as the woke ideology states, any racial disparity is always the product of racism. Hence, the prisons are racist, so we have to shut the prisons. So you've had this, but that's the first thing that happened, which was Prop 47, and that had the legalized shoplifting effectively. And a bunch of other stuff as well. That was the main one.

28:41And of course, what does that do? All the people that need to steal to feel their drug habit and then you get this massive explosion of retail theft and car break-ins and car theft, all of that stuff just exploded. And there's nothing you could do because they said all you get is a, you know, just a sort of nothing of a sentence. It's basically legalized. And there are a whole bunch of other things. There's another one. in a way even more absurdly egregious, which was less discussed, which is Proposition Prop 57, which is two years later. And this one, Kamala Harris, I would argue, is more directly responsible for.

29:19And that one, again, driven by the desire to push this decarceration agenda, downgraded a whole bunch of other crimes so that they wouldn't get automatic prison time. And they claimed it was non-violent offences. They weren't touching violent offences. But if you look at the list of crimes that they downgraded that could no longer qualify for automatic prison time, literally one of them is domestic violence. Like it's in the name of the thing, but they said it was non-violence, so domestic violence, the rape of an unconscious woman, now downgraded, trafficking a child for sex, a whole bunch of child sex crimes.

30:04So that's what happened. And it's just gone on and on. And it was driven by this ideology of we can't have anyone in jail because jail is a racist. So when they said the rape of an unconscious woman, do they mean that So effectively, somebody who puts a drug in a woman's drink, she becomes unconscious, she then goes on and rapes her. That's not a jail sentence. Correct. Not automatic. Correct. I know, I know. And this is Kamala Harris pushed this. As state attorney general. She's more responsible for that than... I mean, in the whole sort of national conversation... And actually, that first one I mentioned, the$950 a day, That was mostly reversed last year in an initiative that was passed called Prop 36.

30:53That kind of reversed most of that. But the other stuff in Prop 57, they're downgrading all these unspeakable crimes that they wouldn't... You could still get a jail sentence, but not automatic. The Republicans in the state legislature have been battling for years, literally for years, to pick them off one by one, to try and reinstate them. And the definition is serious and violent offence. It's a definition in the legal thing that means that if it's in that category, if it's called a serious and violent crime, it automatically gets jailed. And you've literally, if you follow what goes on in the state legislature, the last two or three years, friends of mine in the state legislature, a woman called Shannon Grove particularly has been strong on this, has been year by year trying to get child sex trafficking upgraded to a serious and violent crime.

31:48And it was blocked by the Democrats time after time. One year, it completely failed. She had to come back the next year. It's insane. It is. And only in the end, and again, it happened, and there's about two or three of these examples. And I can't remember the exact details, but very variants of unspeakable disgust, the worst crimes involving children and sex, sex with a minor, you know, selling a child for sex. And they battled to actually turn, you know, give them the appropriate sentence. And it was only finally that Gavin Newsom, as the governor, was so embarrassed. He's running for president.

32:30I mean, just this year, had to step in. They voted it down. And Sharon, she was telling, Sharon was telling me stories about, she would have victims, victims in the, to the committees in the state legislature to give evidence, victims of child sex trafficking. And they wouldn't let them speak because they didn't want to hear it because they're so, and I think it really, actually, I'm really glad we got into this because to me, probably more than anything else, it just really captures the extent to which ideology has just taken over. ideology over all else. And it's this ideology of decarceration, criminal justice reform, prison is bad, can't send anyone to jail at all for anything.

33:14Francis Foster:It's crazy. And one of the other things I wanted to ask you about is, you mentioned President Trump. Obviously, in his second term, he is having a real go at dealing with illegal immigration. Yeah. And the bulk of that seems perfectly normal and reasonable and good and right. But there are some excesses and people are pointing out. There were, of course, protests here in LA. Yeah. Where do you come down on the way that the border and deportations and illegal immigrations are being handled? Well, let's just talk about the issue for a start. I mean, you've got... I mean, I hear this story the whole time.

33:51And I want to put a few things together. Going back to what I was saying earlier, it's unemployment rate, poverty rate, all of this. So you've got, there's a story that is told, which is, we need illegal immigration because we have a labor shortage and who's going to do these jobs? And that's particularly strong in California, some of the industries that, you know, like agriculture and construction and all of this. Well, I mean, all the time I come across stories. I was at the California State Fair in Sacramento, went up to a couple, as I do, just saying, hi, I'm Steve. I got into a conversation and it was a family.

34:28It was the mother and a couple with their three children. And we just started chatting. And I said, what do you do? He said, well, I work construction. Oh, I used to work construction. Why do you say? Well, I can't get a job anymore. Why not? Well, they don't want to employ people like me. And he didn't want to say it. And I said, what do you mean? He said, local people. And what he meant by that, and we got into it was, and the mother chimed in as well, and how you can't get a job, is now living with his mother, humiliated, right? He's a man, found a provider for his family, he's now ended up living with his mother.

35:01And the point they made was, because they want to hire illegal immigrants, because it's cheaper, they don't have to pay the right level. And then a really big one, which isn't talked about enough, and the mother chimed in with this. There's a video, by the way, You can watch the video. People can Google it on X, Steve Hilton, State Fair. You'll see the conversation. And the mother said, health and health care. They won't pay it. They're going to pay health care for illegal immigrants, which is a big cost for an employer. And then at that moment, you just see it all come together because you've got employers who are...

35:39It's basically a subsidy to employers, this whole thing. It's a scam. Because while all that is going on, and gavin newsom has been first introduced it and has increased it guess who does pay the health care for illegal immigrants the taxpayer because like he's giving free health care to illegal immigrants other states don't do that and it's a big amount of money it's like this budget year he just increased it from i think 9.4 billion to 12.1 12 billion dollars just for illegal immigrant healthcare, just for that. And so the whole system is broken. And then another thing, and you look at the welfare payments as well, and this idea that we don't have enough workers, and we have to import the workers.

36:23And that's why it's ridiculous, because part of the argument about the immigration enforcement, okay, you get the high profile incidents, but there's this thing people said, well, who's going to do the jobs if you do this? Well, I was at a dairy in Hillmar, in the top part of the Central Valley. It was the biggest cheese factory in the world. So one of the things I love about California, everywhere you go, it's like the biggest this in the world or the biggest cheese factory in the world. I was talking to some of the guys who work on the dairy and they don't make a ton of money. They make like 45, 50 grand.

36:58And they were saying, work full-time in the dairy. And they were saying their girlfriends make more money from welfare. So you've got this crazy system going on where people don't work, and you have people who do want to work who can't because of the legal immigration. So it's a mess. And the people who are losing out from all this are regular working-class people.

37:17Francis Foster:And by the way, this argument isn't true. Like, in the market economy, this is something Eric Weinstein mentioned in a private conversation we had. It's an obvious fact. In a market economy, other than some very niche areas, you can't have labor shortages that you have to fill with illegal immigration because all you have to do is raise the price to a normal wage and the local people, quote-unquote, are going to work. And also reduce the ability to live on... I mean, here's another one. I mean, I can't keep track of it all. It was someone who owns a hotel, owns a hotel, I think maybe two, near Sacramento.

37:53He'd hired someone from Afghanistan who was actually brought in by the US government. And the whole story was amazing. I mean, he was, this Afghan guy was, he hired him to drive the shuttle bus to take guests to him. It was an airport hotel. And he said the guy from Afghanistan was telling him about his experience. He'd been flown from Afghanistan by the US government, first to Virginia, then moved to Sacramento, to give in a house. They stocked his fridge. He didn't know which bit of the government. And the guy was told, we're going to send you groceries by delivery because you shouldn't go to the grocery store because Americans are racist and you shouldn't go shopping.

38:42Imagine that, the government saying. Anyway, he's there, he's working as the shuttle driver. He says to the guy after two days can i go uh can you pay me cash and he said why do you want to do that so well if i if i'm on payroll then i lose my benefits my welfare benefits what how what do you how much is that seven thousand dollars a month what 84 grand a year yes seven that's what he said so like when you are so it's just bull this whole thing the whole thing is bull so it needs fixing

39:15Francis Foster:but my question to you was about the way it is being fixed okay so first of all the you can't have this conversation without just pointing out the extraordinary success of the border thing like closing the border it's just an incredible example of when people say government doesn't work and go like incredible government action that it just basically stopped you know this flow of illegal immigration basically stopped to zero just with firm action that everyone said couldn't be done for decades and it's just done just because there's someone who's really committed to doing it and has a team that was well prepared and did it.

39:50So that's good news. Then you've got the problem of millions of people here and no one has an idea how many who are here illegally. And the whole argument is from the administration, which is the worst go first. We target criminals who are, of course, every illegal immigrant is a criminal in one sense, because they've broken the law by being illegally. But on top of that, another crime. And Tom Homan, who's runs, who's the Borders are, is a friend of mine. I've known him for years. And he points, he makes this argument, which is that the reason that we have these kind of tough confrontations and the kind of pictures and the video that cause people to be upset and sometimes have provoked protests and violent clashes or whatever, is entirely because we don't get cooperation from the local and state government where we're trying to find people.

40:47And here in California, it's a sanctuary state. It was a law that was passed in 2017, SB 54, that said you can't cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. So literally, you have someone in jail in custody in some sense in the system in California who's an illegal immigrant and has committed a violent crime or any kind of crime. And they actively refuse to tell that person, to tell ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that that person's there. So they could just hand them over and say, here's this person. So that means that they have to go into the community to find them where they're hiding out after they've been released or whatever.

41:30And that is what causes both the confrontation, but also non-criminal illegal immigrants to be swept up in the whole process. So their argument is, if we had proper cooperation, we wouldn't need any of this. That's the argument. I mean, look, I don't know. I mean, I actually, it's a federal issue. It's federal immigration. So it's not something that I spend too much time on other than to say, as governor, I think it's important to cooperate. It's federal. It's the law. Congress passed the law. They're just enforcing the law. I think there's, you know, this idea that we can just pick and choose just on a mass scale.

42:14Well, we're just not going to, we're just going to ignore that.

42:17Francis Foster:I guess the counter argument might be, I mean, we had Sam Harris on the show recently, and he talked about this in very different terms to you in terms of Ice Age and not identifying themselves, grabbing some guy off the street, you know, getting physical, all of this stuff. And then he also talked about the fact that there are people whose kids are American citizens, for example. These people are being... And look, voters will have different views on that. I'm just curious to know what your views are. But how many? A small number, I imagine. Like, I don't know, five, six? It's a tiny number. Yeah.

42:50I mean, nationally. I think the total number of American citizens or permanent residents that have been, according to the data, is about 170. It's a country of like 300 million or whatever. You know, like this is... And so, again, even that tiny number could be avoided if you had proper cooperation. And the people you're talking about are criminal. I mean, just look at the crimes that they've committed. These are sex offenders. This is what's amazing to me. You have people on the left who are now literally taking the side of rapists and wife... That famous guy, what's his name? Garcia, Diego, whatever.

43:27He became a sort of national case. I can't remember the name. He's a wife-beater. Domestic violence. And he's the hero. You have Democrat, US senators flying down to wherever it was to sort of hang out with him because they're on the side of the domestic violence perpetrators. It's just incredible. Why? Because they want to stick it to Trump. How does that make... I mean, that's what's ridiculous about this. And it could all be avoided if we just had a bit of common sense and cooperation. And they just don't want to do that. And even within the sanctuary state law in California, they keep saying you have these local leadership and sheriffs and whatever saying, we can't cooperate because it's the law.

44:12I've read the law. Even within the law that was passed in California, there's a long list of crimes where if the illegal immigrant is involved in one of these crimes, over 200, ranging from what you'd expect, an incredibly serious murder and whatever, to actually drug possession, illegal firearm possession. The word is in the bill, discretion. There's discretion to cooperate. If only they did that, so much of this could be avoided. You wouldn't need to do it that way. And you talk about the masks. Why do they wear masks? Because of the doxing. These are people with families. They're literally, they've been aggressive.

44:48You have very well financed illegal immigration groups that are actively targeting law enforcement, who are doing the job that they're enforcing the law that Congress passed. And they're being doxxed so that they're... And you have many stories of their families being threatened. And so that's why they wear masks. By the way, these people who are now passing laws, as they did in California, it is a little bit of an irony that, you know, after forcing us pointlessly to wear masks for these years, They literally now pass the law saying you're banning mask wearing. Well, I mean, nobody expects that side of the political spectrum to be entirely logical.

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46:16Francis Foster:All in a way that fits into real life, from your phone, tablet, or your computer. Clinical studies show that users lost twice as much weight as those using traditional diets alone, and 94 % maintained that weight loss more effectively over time. It's not about hacks, it's about fixing the deeper programming. Hypnosis-based programs reduced BMI and emotional eating significantly compared to standard diets. So what are you waiting for? Use our link in the description box and pinned comment and grab 15 % off your first subscription. but more importantly it seems that you're going to have to spend a lot of money aren't you in order to correct some of the problems that this state is facing if you think about i look at the number of mentally ill people on the streets of this city there is no way in any shape or form they should be on the streets and you can say they've got drug addictions and i'm sure many of them do but they also profoundly mentally ill we're talking schizophrenia or other types So they're going to need to be housed somewhere.

47:14And many of them, they can't afford to pay. So it's the state that's going to have to pay. You're looking at, you've already spoken about the fact that penitentiaries were full to overflowing. We're going to need to build more prisons here. That's part of my plan, exactly. So let's talk about that, because that's also going to cost money, if we're going to be honest. Yeah, but look at what they're spending money on. I mean, OK, they've doubled the budget of California in the last 10 years. It's gone from$160 billion to just over$320 billion. OK, where's that money going? Let's just narrowly look at the homeless issue.

47:44So this is, and the mental health costs associated with that. So their solution, I touched on it earlier, there's this thing they call permanent supportive housing. So they build apartment units for homeless people. Because it's the government, they layer on everything that you'd expect. So it's just unbelievable when you actually dig into it, how it's like Britain in the 1970s. The unions run this state. So you have massive, you know, crony deals with the unions. So these apartment units, I mentioned$700 ,000 earlier, in the San Francisco Bay Area, now they're costing a million dollars each. Now, you know, to build.

48:31That money is from the same pot, right? I've got a friend who builds apartments using this new technology, mass timber, where you can you put timber. It's a really amazing new building material and it's very innovative and it's whatever, building apartments. Without all the bullshit regulations, it's a quarter of the price. It costs four or five times as much to build anything in California as in neighboring states. So that's where the budget's going. So you look at the money. There was an audit done not that long ago,$24 billion on homelessness with no discernible impact. The problem just got worse.

49:07So the money is, it's not like we need to spend more money. We need to cut the budget of California, not spend more money. So there's two things I want to do is like reduce the budget because we got to cut taxes. That's the other thing. We have the highest taxes in the country for the worst outcomes. We've got to cut taxes for a start, and then we've got to spend the money where it needs to be, specifically on mental health. Let's look at that. So exactly as you say, a lot of the people are low income. So when you talk about mental health care, it's part of the health care system. And for low income people, that means it's Medicaid, which is Medi-Cal in California.

49:44And that is federally reimbursed. It's very connected to the federal health care system. Most of the money spent on that in California is actually federal money. And there's a massive scam that I don't even want to get into where it's classic California. They've got this medical provider tax that they've brought in, which increases the cost of everything in order that they can attract matching funds from the federal government. It's just unbelievable. And of course, their donors are the medical, the healthcare industry who benefit from it. Taxes go up, nothing gets better. But one thing that's amazing about Medicaid and mental health is that when the system was set up in the 60s, they put in place this thing called the IMD rule, Institutions of Mental Disease.

50:25And it's all based on that attitude of we can't have these big mental asylums, it's inhumane, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, all of that stuff. So there's a limit that was put in. To get Medicaid reimbursement from the federal government, you can't get it if your mental health institution has more than 16 beds. It's a very specific limit, 16 bed limit, which is insane. Imagine if hospitals had a 16-bed limit, how inefficient that would be. That's what we have for mental health, for reimbursement from Medicaid. So the first Trump administration put in place a waiver, so states could apply for a waiver, so they could ignore that limit.

51:03Other states have taken it up, California hasn't. So just, there's all these things you can do to make things work. It's just, there's no, the people in charge are clueless idiots who are just machine politicians who don't understand how anything works. They've no clue how to make anything happen. So within that massive budget, so I don't accept for a second that you need to spend more money. We need to spend less money. And then what's left after the reduction in spending so that we can cut taxes, you've got to spend it better in sensible ways where you actually put outcomes based on what you're spending.

51:40So you get results for it. You're not just putting it into this corrupt pot. There's so much corruption around this. I mean, I mentioned the unions. There's this whole scam, which is the unions filing lawsuits. That's the other massive problem in California. Not just over-regulation, over-litigation. There's something called SECRE, the California Environmental Quality Act. It's in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan, when he was governor. signed it. It's supposed to stop polluting factories, whatever. Nice. Environmental protection, we love it. Over the years, it's been expanded to cover everything. The courts expanded it, not the legislature, including housing.

52:1870 % and then they granted this thing called the private right of action. Anyone can file a lawsuit. It's a bit like that private attorney general thing where you can just get all these nuisance lawsuits. 70 % of lawsuits under secret are filed to block housing. Most of those lawsuits are filed by the unions. The unions use them as leverage to get what they call project labour agreements, where they get deals from and they negotiate. The two components of a project labour agreement are what they call skilled and trained workers and prevailing wage, both of which sound very innocuous. Skilled and trained is a euphemism for union members only.

52:58It's the closed shop, which we banned in England with Mrs. Thatcher back in the 80s. That still exists in California. It's amazing. And prevailing wage, and of course, it's much more expensive. I was talking to someone in the Central Valley. They're doing housing development, carpet fitters. You put the carpets in, you need to have union labor, mandatory. There weren't any union carpet fitters anywhere nearby. They had to bust them in from you know san francisco put them up in hotel i mean just mad right prevailing wage sounds very nice um this guy was telling me that he had a team of plumbers doing a job that was market rate uh 25 to 40 dollars an hour the same people on a prevailing wage job the other side of town 95 to 120 an hour and the same work which actually by the way they take they spend three times as long doing the prevailing wage things.

53:56They get more money. So there's just incredible amounts of cost inflation built into the system because for years, no one's taken a look at it. And it just goes on. They pass these laws. The unions run everything. So to your point about when you say you have to increase spending, no, you have to get into all this. We're spending money on apartment buildings that are four times what they should cost, public money. So there's plenty of money there. And also, but it's going to cost a lot more to build penitentiaries, Steve. To build and staff penitentiaries, that's going to cost a lot more. Well, they've shut four and there's a fifth that's about to close, Gavin.

54:38So I've pledged to reverse that. You need to increase prison capacity. But again, don't tell me you can't find money in the budget for that, for savings. I mean, the amount of bloat is just astronomical. And also, by the way, you can do, I mean, this is one of the things I tried to work on back in the day when I was in the UK government is payment by results, where you actually put contracts in place. We don't just hand out money. You get paid in exchange for results. And so for the prisons, what you want, the actual goal of it, of course, there's an accountability aspect. You've got to punish people, hold them accountable for their crimes.

55:15You've also got to rehabilitate them because nearly half of the crime is reoffending. So you want to reduce that. And that's how you reduce crime. and that reduces costs. So you can put, there's all sorts of things you could, it's just had common sense, practical people. I just want to tell a story, if I might, about the kind of that's been going on in California. And it's to do with the fires here in LA. And it's a little story, but I think it tells so much about the kind of people you've had in charge. It's Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, and a few months into the recovery from the wildfires this year.

55:48And there's all this you know, focus on permits and rebuilding and why isn't anything happening and it's all so slow. And I saw a post on social media from Mayor Karen Bass. It said, I have just signed an executive order streamlining permitting for rebuilding in LA. Great. It's four months too late, but whatever. I'll take it. And then it was above a clip from the press conference, a video clip. So I thought, okay, I'll watch what she actually said. What she actually said was, I remember it very precisely. I have just signed an executive order tasking agency heads with developing paths forward to streamlining permitting.

56:28And to me, that captures it all. These are bullshit people. They're process people. They don't know how to make anything work. They just spend money, spend money, nothing happens. And that's why you have this total mess on every front.

56:41Francis Foster:Steve, last time we had you on, one of the things we explored is you mentioned your time in the UK government and you talked about the challenges any leader of Britain has getting any of their policies implemented because of what we in Britain call the civil service. I imagine the institutional resistance to a guy like you in this state is going to make that pale in comparison. So you're going to have the entire institutionalized bureaucracy 100 % sticking sticks in the wheels of your yeah and and and lawsuits i mean that's what i'm really so how are you going to deal with that you've got to be prepared i mean i'm doing the work right now i'm going through it you know i've got a strong you know it's like running a campaign like this it's a startup you know we're trying to raise money there's no it's not you don't inherit any kind of party resources or infrastructure anything like that so it's not like we have unlimited far from it hardly any resources it's very much a shoestring operation, but I've got really good volunteers.

57:38I've got someone, you know, like great legal people work because I think the lawsuits are going to be a big part of it. You've got to be really clear about how you make things happen. And you've just got to be really well prepared. You've got to have on day one, think through how they're going to oppose it. But there's no substitute for just cutting their number. I mean, that's the conclusion I came to in the UK. There's just too many of them. And so that's where all the bloat is coming from. And you've just got to reduce it massively. I mean, here's an example. You just saw Gavin Newsom in the budget this year, where we had a deficit in California.

58:19So all this spending, and there's still a deficit, a deficit of$12 billion in the budget. States can't have a deficit. It has to be, you have to balance the books. And so$5 billion they did with accounting trades. um shuffling money to future years or whatever and then the seven billion he took from the rainy day fund which is supposed to be like a savings thing for something going badly wrong or when you're in recession seven billion dollars in the same budget that he was stealing from the savings that are supposed to be for something completely different he increased spending on the bureaucracy in california by the same and by seven is exactly the same number seven billion dollars increasing the number of bureaucrats and increasing their pay and pensions and all this.

59:03Why? Corruption. Because he's running...

59:05Francis Foster:Because they vote for him. And the union, the government unions, he wants their endorsement and their money when he runs for president. Right. And so you've just got to, I mean, you've just got to be direct about it and take it on. Well, speaking of Gavin Newsom, you mentioned him a number of times. He looks great. Great hair. Great hair. Well, I, as I say... No offense, mate. No, I'd say it's time for a governor with less hair. That is what we need in California. We've had enough of the hair. But Gavin Newsom, I mean, he strikes me, I don't agree with a lot of the things he says, he strikes me as a very capable politician.

59:41Francis Foster:What does America get if it has a President Newsom? I mean, the worst governor in America. Like a total failure on every front. I mean, everything is a disaster. And so his record, I think, is going to be totally disqualifying. He's got nothing to point to. Nothing. I just think that the more that that comes out, and the more details of that that come out, I don't think he's got a chance. Because people will just look at that and say, you know, that, I mean, remember that years ago, that classic ad on Michael Dukakis, about don't let Michael do, he ran in 1988. He was the governor of Massachusetts, and there's a very effective ad with just some, you know, filth and pollution in Boston Harbor or something, I can't remember.

1:00:21and it was just don't let Michael Dukakis do to America what he's done to Massachusetts. It was a killer. And I think there's just a lot of material from California. I agree with you. He's good at the politics but that only takes you so far. You've got an actual record and it's a total disaster. And I just think that he's been able to escape because he hasn't had real challenge to that. You know, he hasn't really been taken on in a debate or, you know, I mean, he's had a couple of debates, but not really with anyone who can really get into the record and expose the complete calamitous failure.

1:01:02So I think that, you know, Hill is obviously running, he's been running for 20 years, people say. It's all he's really been focused on. But I think it's just the scale of the failure. It's not just middling. We literally, the line I use all the time is, we're top of every list you want to be the bottom of, and bottom of every list you want to be the top of. It's a total failure. And so, I don't know, I can't see it. I just can't see the country voting for, you know, looking at what's happening in California. Yes, please, we'll have more of that.

1:01:36Francis Foster:Well, Steve, if you are successful in the election next year, it will be a political earthquake. I mean, there's no understating that. A Republican getting elected as governor of California would be quite incredible. So one of the reasons we were interested in having you on this early, just to watch the journey and see how that unfolds, that would be fascinating. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters, a lot of them are residents here in California in a second. Before we do, though, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I want to say something about how amazing it is, how amazing this country is, actually.

1:02:11You've been here too long, mate. No, no, no, I understand. I can sort of show up here and be in this position.

1:02:19Francis Foster:Yeah, I was thinking about that. It's actually amazing. And it's beautiful. You're a first generation American running for governor of California. We moved here in 2012, my wife, my two sons. And I taught at Stanford University and I started a business and hosted a show on TV and I'm running for governor, leading in the polls. It's amazing. And I love this country. And I became an American in 2021. Actually, I've taken a step further. I've renounced my UK citizenship, which I didn't realize this is a bureaucratic process you go through. You also have to pay. I didn't realize that. I've just paid the exit fee, which is£482.

1:02:57So I'm all in for California and America.

1:03:01Francis Foster:Steve Hilton, thank you very much for being here. Head on over to Substack, where Steve is going to answer your questions. What are California's greatest resources and how can executive policy immediately impact the employment of them without waiting on the legislature?