Ep. 314 - JLTY Plus: CaliFailure Dreamin' with Fox News' Steve Hilton

[00:00:00] This is the FCB Podcast Network

[00:00:31] Well hey everybody, welcome to a very special episode of Just Let's Listen to Yourself with Kira Davis. I'm your host, Kira Davis, and this is a podcast where we take hot topics, hot fun issues, and we discuss the talking points on those topics and we draw those talking points all the way out to their logical conclusion. And today with me is a good friend of mine and someone that a lot of you admire. You guys write me about him all the time and I'll be talking to him about what you write about in just a moment. Oh, now I'm worried.

[00:01:01] Fox News' Steve Hilton and also the chair and CEO of Golden Together, an organization dedicated to improving life in California. Welcome to the show, Steve! It's fun to be on your show. I mean all these years you've been on my shows and I love this and I don't have to do any work. You're gonna drive the train or whatever the term is and it's all gonna be great.

[00:01:24] I'm glad. Well, I'll tell you what people ask me about you all the time. But before we get to that, as I sat down to do this interview with you, I just finished up doing Andrew Wilkow's show on SiriusXM and he was asking me about California, particularly about this situation with Karen Bass

[00:01:48] and the Pacific Palisades recovery and how there have only been four permits approved in the 75 days for rebuilding. Now, your new book, Califair, Califailure talks about just the tyranny of the bureaucracy in this state and how it has prevented growth and prosperity. And I think there is no

[00:02:13] greater example of that than what we are witnessing in Pacific Palisades right now. Is there a reason, Steve, why Karen Bass and Mayor Newsom can't lift the regulations to get this stuff done? It's actually beyond political. I think it goes to the heart of, you know, the starting point of Califailure in the book where I said, well, how do we get here? How do we get to a situation where everything is so messed up and like we're the worst performing state on all these things? And I don't

[00:02:42] want to go on about that now. I've been doing that on lots of interviews and we're, you know, this is, it's me and you, Kira. So this is not going to be the usual, you know. Yeah. But I, so I, the thing is I do, the starting point is one party rule, right? That's how, you know, that's the starting point. The other consequence of one party rule is it throws up these machine politicians who don't succeed because they've, they've got a vision or they've got clear

[00:03:10] convictions about what needs to be done. It's because they're operators within the political machine and they know how to, you know, make friends with the right people and the unions and the activists and the power brokers and that then they navigate the machine and you see them now put and after all these years of one party rule, it's really corrosive and corrupted. And so it throws up these real mediocrities who are just no, no good at anything, but except for playing the game.

[00:03:41] And you've got now we can see them, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Karen Bass, classic of the genre. They don't really believe in it. You know, they say stuff, right? They got the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they know the right things to say, and you can, but you could, but they don't really, they don't, they haven't got the right attitude.

[00:04:10] It's not like they're, they're burning passion to get something done. It's not about that. It's about themselves and just navigating the situation. And so I've seen it firsthand actually, because I have been inside of a government back in the day in England and, you know, worked for David Cameron. He was prime minister, our senior advisor. It's really hard actually, because there is all this bureaucracy that gets built up and some of it is necessary and we can complain about it. You've got to have

[00:04:37] something, but to plow through it, you've got to be kind of really aggressive and ask really like, like, actually like Elon Musk. We were just talking, you know, like, well, why, why is that happening? What's going on? Get him on the foot, you know, that private sector attitude, the business attitude, which is when, because this is what happens, right? When you're, when you're in a position like that, you've got all these people around you, advisors and bureaucrats and lawyers,

[00:05:05] and all these big, it's always big meetings. And you're sitting there and you have, I bet they had a meeting about the permits, more than one. And they're saying, yes, mayor, well, we're working as fast as we can. And we're going to do this, whatever. What you actually need in that moment is someone with a private sector mindset. When they hear the answer to say, what? That doesn't make sense. Why? Or sorry, that's not good enough. It has to be tomorrow. What's the reason? They said, well,

[00:05:33] that's not a good enough, you know, just really pushing. Well, wait a minute, Steve. Wait a minute. Karen, Mayor Bass said she did bring in a private contractor to the tune of $10 million for consultation to rebuild the Pacific Palisades. So I don't understand what you're complaining about. It's so exhausting. It's exhausting. It's exhausting. It's so bad. And here's another

[00:05:57] thing I found, I can't find it now, but I did retweet it. And it was so again, a classic, right? So she, this is like within the last week, last couple of days, Karen Bass put out a tweet, which said, we are streamlining. That was the word streamlining the process for whatever it was.

[00:06:22] That was what was written in the tweet. And then she posted a clip of herself making the announcement. I thought, okay, I'll watch what she, even in her own tweets, it contradicts what she wrote. If you actually watch the video, and this is the mindset I'm talking about, the mind, so the tweet says, we are streamlining the thing. And then she says, blah, blah, blah. And so we've, I've asked the,

[00:06:49] whatever agency to develop a strategy for implementing a stream like block, you know, like on and on, because she's not streamlining anything. She's just asked someone to think about a plan for maybe streamlining something next year. But the tweet says we are streamlining and they live in this crazy world where they, she probably thinks she has done the streamlining. Maybe she thinks that is what it is. There's no one in charge. There's no one in charge. I feel like we,

[00:07:17] I feel like we learned that during the fires. I want to, I want to ask you about, to comment on this thought that I, that I have about you and I, all we do is think about California's problems. So I've been thinking about this, but I, I, I've been watching Gavin's podcast, but it's very hard to do, by the way, I do. Right. It's very difficult, but I will tell you this. I know a lot of people have

[00:07:42] been concerned about the platform and how him using conservatives might go well for him, but I pay attention to what his fans are saying and they don't like it any more than we do. So I think it's a general failure all the way around besides that first Charlie Kirk sort of bomb drop. So I don't know, everybody might be happy to hear that, but nonetheless, one of the things we always ask ourselves and you, you talk about in your book, Cal failure, which is how did we get here? What is the problem? And

[00:08:09] Newsom is always out there bragging about our economy. We're the fifth largest economy. In fact, I just saw him talk to Ezra Klein, which was so ridiculous, but it was, it was just him talking about how great things are going in California and how we have the biggest tax sector and we have the biggest this. In the meantime, he is in DC begging for $40 billion in funding for the state

[00:08:34] to make up for whatever our shortfalls are. And Karen Bass is in Sacramento begging for $2 billion for wildfire recovery. It seems to me that part of our problem here, Steve, and we, and we see this during the elections when it takes us a month to count and everybody else can get in in a day or two. We're too important to the rest of the country. That's what I think because all of our money is flowing

[00:09:01] out and then back in. They hold our votes to the very end so that we can be the people who decide the popular vote. As California goes, so goes the rest of the nation. Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, Governor Newsom, Kamala Harris, we send all of the biggest politicians to DC. So I feel like maybe our political class feels like they can do anything because they're so important to the rest of the

[00:09:26] country. We're too important. Well, they, yeah, but they, no, I agree with that. I mean, and they, and they have this kind of sanctimoniousness about their whole, you know, it's narcissism as well. That's one of the themes in the book. I mean, I've got these nine pathologies that they have because they're pathological. These people, this is not normal, the way they behave. And, and they love this concept, just what you just said, but you hear all the time from them. We're leading, right?

[00:09:56] We're leading on this. We're leading on that. We're leading on climate, our world leading climate goals, and we're leading on equity or this or that, all the, whatever the thing is lead. They're in love with their own image as leading, right? Meanwhile, we literally last on every actual net in the real world. We have the highest poverty rate, the highest unemployment, now it's the second high, you know,

[00:10:23] for a lot of last year, the highest unemployment, the highest housing costs, the highest cost for gas, electricity, you know, the worst business climate. We're the last. We're not leading, we're last. But that doesn't matter because they have this, as long as it sounds, you know, they pat themselves on the back. So I think that is exactly right. And that's why they have this national perspective on things. But the other thing that's infuriating about what you just said is that they constantly

[00:10:51] are asking for more money. I was just talking to someone about NPR, who was, I was on some show earlier, it came up. Oh, was it Benny Johnson? Yes, Benny Johnson. That's right. Oh, that's right. Because we were talking about the, the NPR lady. She was in front of the committee. Right. Just hilarious. Absolutely brilliant. You know, that woman talking about how she read the reparations book, took a day off and then I couldn't remember anything about it. Let me just interrupt you there

[00:11:17] for a second and just say, like, I have never seen a more perfect sort of stereotype of a liberal white woman as I did with that woman. Incredible. Incredible. But the way that congressman took her apart is just perfect. So we're talking about that. Anyway, I was making the point that I listened to, I actually do genuinely listen to NPR every morning. Yeah. For a bit, you know, I like to hear what everyone's saying. And it's, it's incredible. Pretty much every single thing.

[00:11:45] I'm just going to repeat what I said earlier, but it's relevant to this point. Every single thing on NPR, national, local basically comes into one of two categories. First of all, they're still doing the kind of identity politics, woke bullshit, even though it just feels so dated now. It just feels so kind of, of a different age, you know, we've got rid of all that, but they're still, you know, like, as I said to, but you know, if there's a restaurant reviews, like the, you know, the lesbian chefs

[00:12:11] doing the whatever, you know, like, do you know what I mean? It's always got to have some identity politics angle, whatever the story. And then, and it's like a parody of itself. It's just a joke. But that's one category. The other category is more money. It's always more money, right? There's a problem with the schools, more money, housing, more money, Bay Area transportation, more resources needed, always more money. We, we pay the highest taxes in the country

[00:12:40] already. Like no one in the country pays more in tax than California. So where, why is it, why is it always more money? Where does the money go? It's just, well, I think it's very interesting because, um, a lot of people don't know, like, where does the money go? When we're talking about NPR, we're talking about public broadcasting. I talked about this. I've been filling in for Stacey Washington this week on Sirius XM. And last night I was talking about the funding structure for

[00:13:09] public broadcasting, and it's not what people think it is. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's a pyramid scheme. The CPB, Corporations for Public Broadcasting gets whatever 500 million a year from the government. And then they distribute that in the form of grants to PBS and NPR stations across the country. Then they have to use that money to purchase their broadcast time and their advertising from the

[00:13:33] federal organization, the CPB. It goes back to them. CPB gives them money. They give the money back. It's a, it's a Ponzi scheme. And then today we find out, I don't know if this is apropos of nothing or what, but the, the president of NPR, Catherine, whatever her face is, she sits on the board of signal. Did you know this? Amazing. No, I didn't. Somebody else on Twitter, it's running around X right now. You've probably been doing interviews all day and you haven't seen it yet, but you'll see it.

[00:14:03] She sits on the board. So I don't know if that means anything. All that to say, Steve, and I'll bring this full circle back to our topic that there's so the, the layers of correct corruption are so deep. Will Cal was asking me, how do you fix California? When are people going to be sick of things and vote a different way? And that's a really complicated question because there's so much, sometimes we're not voting for these things as I discovered on my podcast, but,

[00:14:32] but people look at us and they wonder, you've got so much corruption. It seems almost undefeatable. How do you begin to fix the place like California when the corruption is so deep? I feel, I don't feel like that. I feel very, you know, I don't want to be, I feel both optimistic, but realistic. So I don't want anyone to hear this and think, oh yeah, it's going to be great. It's

[00:14:57] obviously so terrible in California. They failed so catastrophically. It's obvious that we need to change or at least some balance in the mix, not just one party rule that, you know, we're going to elect a Republican. I don't think it's easy, but I don't think it's impossible either. I think that we can pull this off and I think this is the best shot we've got at least for two decades, because you've got all these factors, you know, even before, like in November,

[00:15:23] Trump did better than any Republican presidential candidate. Here's a way of thinking about it, right? It's not, people look at percentage of the vote and they see a big gap. Here's a way of thinking about it. The 2026 is a midterm election and you typically get a lower, quite a bit lower turnout and then it goes up and down, but it's lower than in a presidential election. However,

[00:15:45] if you look at the number of votes that Trump got Trump in California, it's easily enough to win in a midterm election. Now, of course, there's a massive question behind that. Like, can you get people who vote, you know, like they voted for Trump, right? Not even Republican. It was Trump. So that's like, doesn't automatically translate. But the reason I make the point is that when people

[00:16:12] say, oh, it's just so democratic, no, there are enough Republican voters in California already. They are there. There are enough. We've just got to get them to turn out. Now that I'm not saying that's easy, but I'm just saying the numbers are there. It's not as I hear people say, well, how are you going to get these Democrats to vote Republican and switch? I mean, it would be great. And I think we can, I'm already hearing in LA because of the fires, people who say to me personally, they've said,

[00:16:41] yeah, I mean, this is anecdotal, but you know, I'm a Democrat and never again, this is crazy, you know, or independent, which should be an easier move. You know, you're not one thing or other. So it would be, of course, we should try to persuade as many people to vote for us as possible, Democrats and independents. But I'm just saying, here's another way of thinking it. If every single person who voted for Trump votes for the next Republican governor candidate, the Republican will win.

[00:17:16] That's a really important thing to bear in mind. I love the way, I love that, the simplicity of that. Yeah. Well, people don't realize that we have a lot of registered, they're not just all here in Orange County where I'm at. We have a lot of registered Republicans in California, but don't you think part of the problem, Steve, is that, I mean, I've only been a Californian since 2009. That's when we moved here from the Midwest. But one thing when I got here that I would hear a lot of Republicans say is, well, Californians

[00:17:44] don't want to vote for a strong Republican or someone who's very conservative or too far right. And I always suspected it was the opposite. I always suspected people, Californians aren't looking for quote, Democrat light. They're looking for solutions. I agree with you. Yes. Yeah. And the best example of that, apart from Trump, we've just discussed is actually in Orange County is Huntington Beach, where you've got, and we know it well, right? So Tony Strickland,

[00:18:12] good friend of mine, people know he's just been elected to the state Senate four and a bit years ago. He, you know, he originally, he was based in Ventura County, moved down to Huntington Beach for family reasons that he's there. He wants to get involved. He puts together four candidates to run for the council in Huntington Beach. For people who don't know this story, it's an amazing story. And they call themselves the fab four. And they run on a platform, which is very, very, you know, straight down the line, common sense, conservative, not at all watered down.

[00:18:41] Right. And they win. And they get, they take control of the council. It was six, one Democrat, they went four, three Republican, they control, and then they get to work. And they do really, again, sensible, practical, conservative things on crime, cleaning up the homeless encampments, what's going on in the schools and the libraries, whatever. Voter ID, they do a ballot initiative, which passes, of course, then the Democrats try and undermine it, whatever. They got, you know,

[00:19:07] they went for it. They weren't, they were very, very clear. This time, in November, just now, they had a team of seven candidates. They literally called themselves the magnificent seven. That was the, they used that term. And they did. And there were all these pieces. And then Michael Gates was the city attorney, was constantly suing Newsom and Rob Bontor, you know, real fight. And they, they won seven zero. So you've gone from six, one Democrat to seven, zero Republican in four

[00:19:35] years. To me, that is okay. It's all you can say that's Orange County, but it was six, one Democrat. Right. So it shows you that if you fight, and you're clear, I think that the point is that, you know, I mean, you can get into the nuances of it. But I think on this basic everyday issues, right, what's going on in the schools, my taxes, what I get for them, the, if I run a business, the sort of nightmare bullshit bureaucracy, I have to deal with the crime, homelessness, you know,

[00:20:04] practical everyday things. I think people are absolutely ready for a really clear, strong, conservative message that is not at all watered down. Yeah, or Democrat like, I think that I agree with you that I mean, I've been here, a little bit less than you, we moved in 2012. My that's, you know, I haven't been engaged in directly in in in California politics in this in the same way,

[00:20:29] as I am now. But that has been my observation that there's been a sense that the only way you win in California is being different than the National Republican brand. And it has to blah, blah, blah, right? When I was running for school board, I got a lot of I mean, my, my, I hate to say it, sorry, OCGOP, but they were not helpful. I got a lot of pushback for year two, because I was running on a lot of the crazy stuff, you know, the, the trans issues and the COVID closures, and you know,

[00:20:58] the boys and the girls bathrooms with a lot of controversial stuff going on in my district, and still do we're being sued by DOE right now. So we still do. But I was told, yeah, you're too outspoken, you're too hard, right. And that is unattractive to voters. So now I lost. So maybe they were right. But I, I think there were other reasons for that as well. But I agree. I think people are hungry for leadership. If we saw anything with the Trump, and I love how you bring up the

[00:21:27] Huntington Beach idea, because people want to people love the idea of strategy and teams. You know, exactly right. Exactly. Which I feel very strongly about. But I just think that you've got, and I think that's the way we do it across statewide. I do too. I really feel strongly about that. I think that one thing that I think that President Trump has really helpfully done is

[00:21:52] entrench this idea, which is true to him, of common sense. Right. And, and, and it's not ideological. And he's not, I said this from the, you know, I basically came in at Fox right when he did. And so, and in fact, the premise of my show, The Next Revolution was to, you know, the populist, that's the other name, you know, the populist and all that. What's this new movement, Brexit, Trump, et cetera. Because I'd been writing about that and talking

[00:22:19] about that. And the thing I always said about Trump is he's not an ideologue. He's not, he's just a pragmatic problem solving business guy. That's, and he said, okay, how do we deal with this? Well, the answer to that is obviously this, it's just common sense. That's how he thinks about things. He's literally not sitting there thinking, what's the ideology of the Republic? What's the Republican thing? No, it's just like, okay, how do we solve this problem? How do we make this

[00:22:47] thing better? I think that, and it's incredibly helpful to the Republican party, I think. And that is how we do it in California. It's the same. Now, it just so happens to be the case that usually the answers to the problems tend to be like, I'm going to now quote Mrs. Thatcher. I can't, I'm not doing her accent, but she said. The Iron Lady. The Iron Lady. And she said, well, the thing is my dear, I think she put it like that. It turns out that the facts of life in the end are

[00:23:15] conservative or something like that. She has some very famous quote like that. Yes. And she's right. And it was just a way of saying, that's her way of saying it's like, yeah, it's just common sense. This is what works. And I think that's what we've had. No, I was just going to say, and that's what I think we've had way too much of the opposite in California, which is total ideologically driven nonsense that is just pure ideology that makes

[00:23:44] no sense at all. I mean, the ultimate, I mean, there's so many examples, but one of my favorites is the absolute nonsense of what they're doing to the oil and gas industry in California, shutting it down. So they look like they're waging war on fossil fuels. But in the meantime, importing the oil on these giant super tankers, they're literally increasing carbon emissions

[00:24:05] in the name of climate. It's just totally mind bogglingly stupid. I mean, it's just like insane. There's no way they didn't shut down. They didn't shut down the pipelines that we we also deliver gas and oil to other we deliver gas and oil to Vegas and Nevada. And they didn't shut down those were still those are still producing. So we send out the oil and gas that we can make. We send it out.

[00:24:33] Just it's that could be a whole different conversation. We do not have time for all of this. Someday we'll have to do just a complete bitch session where all we do is just unload all the craziness. I'm dying to know what what are the what are the people say? I want to get to this because I got to let you go really soon. But so one of the things that I get asked all the time, a lot of people know we're friends. I first was a guest on your show and we've

[00:24:59] gotten to know each other ever since. So people know that we're associated with and people love you, by the way, wherever I go, people like I just love Steve Hilton. I miss his show on Fox. Like, OK, whatever. But no, but but one thing people ask about me, Steve, is does Steve Hilton have plans to run for governor? I get asked that every day. OK, so you can say that Steve Hilton is very seriously considering it. That's why,

[00:25:25] in a way, he's been I'm now going to just be normal and say, yes, I'm very seriously considering it. And the thing is, Kira, I really only want to do it if going back to what we said earlier in a serious way that is that we can win. And so you've got to have a lot of elements in place. You've got to have policy platform. I've been working on that. You can see that reflected. The second part of the book, Caliphailia, is Califuture. There's like, here's what we can do to turn things around.

[00:25:54] So there's that. There's also the support and actually financial support is very important because you've got this big Democrat machine. The unions have got, you know, the unions spend one billion dollars a year on elections in California. Billion. It's insane. And so you've got this big machine. We need to be able to beat that. And so I'm just, you know, talking to people,

[00:26:19] working on that. Here's the way I, but we haven't got a lot of time to lose and it's going to be hard, like I said. So the way I'll leave it is to say Kamala Harris is also thinking about running, we're told. And she's, her latest version of that was to say that she will make a decision by the end of the summer. And I'm telling you today, I'm going to make a decision much, much sooner than that. All right. Fair enough. Well, we will leave it at that. Then I will say though, that I get a lot of

[00:26:49] positive comments from people who would be very excited to see a Steve Hilton gubernatorial campaign. So we will definitely, you will come back and you'll talk to us about it when you make a decision one way or the other. I'm sure. Whatever happens, I'm going to be fighting for a Republican to win whoever, whoever that is, whether that's me or anyone else. Always, always, because we've got a state to win. Before I let you go, I want you to tell people where they can find more out more

[00:27:16] about the book, but also Steve and not end us on a high note. What is California worth saving? Well, because, you know, there's a line in the book that I feel captures how I feel about it. When I say this, when I'm on the road and talking to people, which is actually when we save California and turn things around, just bring back common sense. And it's actually not just for us who live here and our friends and our neighbors and our family and whatever. It's actually more important

[00:27:44] than that because California means more than that. It's actually, and the line is California means to America what America means to the world. And what I mean by that is that we represent or should represent the best of America. It was an inspiration to me like years back in England before we even came here. I was in love with what my vision of the American dream and the best version of that. And also there's a, there's, there's a kind of edge to it, which I love, which I think of California

[00:28:13] as like the ultimate kind of rebel spirit, as well as the nice warm. There's a sort of warmth to it. The sunshine, the beaches. Yeah, it's really nice, slightly hippie-ish. I love that too. But there's also kind of rebel aspect like, no, we do our own thing. That's why what we've got going on right now is so un-Californian, this ridiculous nanny state bossiness, telling everyone what to do. Every single, you know, drive this car, use this, cook your food the way we tell you. It's just like,

[00:28:40] what are you talking about? That's not California. It's ridiculous. So I just think we need to get, you know, there's a very specific idea of California that I've, I've, I'm in love with, I feel strongly about, and I want to fight for. And so, you know, one way or the other, we're going to make it happen. That's my view. I feel the same way. Well, Steve's book is Cal of Failure. There is also a special on Fox Nation. If you are a subscriber,

[00:29:05] you can see yours truly in it as well. We, we went down, we had the love, the pleasure of going down to Venice beach to film, but I got out of the skid row filming. So that was, yeah, it's rough, but it's really worth the watch. So if you have a subscription, definitely do that. Follow Steve at Steve Hilton X on Twitter, Twitter X, Steve. I would, of course, I wish you the best of luck.

[00:29:31] And I can't wait for you to come back and tell us what is going on for the future because we definitely have a safe to say. All right. God bless you, Steve. We'll see you on the flip side. Thank you so much. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Bye.

[00:30:05] This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast network where real talk lives. Visit us online at FCB podcasts.com.