PBD Interview: Steve Hilton - How California Became America’s BIGGEST Political Failure

Patrick Bet-David sits down with Steve Hilton to discuss California’s economic decline, Gavin Newsom’s leadership failures, the state’s $425 billion in alleged fraud and waste, businesses fleeing California, high taxes, the housing crisis, teachers unions, energy policy, the high-speed rail disaster, and whether Republicans can win back the state. ------ 🗳️ SUPPORT STEVE HILTON FOR GOVERNOR: https://bit.ly/4tO8ECG 💬 TEXT US: Text “VAULT” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates on speakers at The Vault Conference 2026! 🦁 THE VAULT 2026: AUG 31ST TO SEPT 1ST: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mZdLhD⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4mZdLhD Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj 🇰 KALSHI: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  My handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here.

• 0:17Patrick Bet-David?

  You are a one of one?

• 0:18Speaker 02

  My son's right about that.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  I don't think I've ever said this before.

• 0:25Patrick Bet-David?

  She is, she is, and a couple of other people are as well. Okay, so today we have a special guest, who is trying to do the impossible. I would say you're trying to do the impossible. The reason why I say that is because California politics is so controlled by so many different people, but take somebody with courage who is willing to go and drive some conservative, common sense ideas to people in California who've been devastated the last four to eight years, who love their state, who don't want to leave, who want to see this place become the state everybody would flock to instead of now looking at the numbers back to back to back the last six years. Number one state in America for negative net migration. They had so many different issues, most expensive homes. Average home in California right now is what $906,000, number one in homelessness,

• 1:07Patrick Bet-David?

  13% in population, but 28% in population of homelessness. You can go highest prices of gas, so many different things. And then comes a guy like you that wants to run for governor of the state of California, and it's great to have you here with us.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Fantastic to be here.

• 1:20Patrick Bet-David?

  The one and only Steve Hilton. Yes, great to have you here. So I got, before we get into the story, I want to ask you a very open ended question.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Who runs California? Is it the governor? Is it the unions? Is it the money, the billionaires? Is it the NGOs? Who runs, who's the most powerful institution or individual in California when it comes onto politics?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  What a great question. I'm going to answer it with this story, which is almost the reason that I'm doing this. Like, it's the closest thing to an actual moment when I thought, I'm going to go for it. So, um, many people know me from Fox News. I hosted a show there for many years. But most of my career before then was in business. And I worked a little bit in the government as well in the UK before moving here with my wife and my two sons in 2012. I was senior advisor to David Cameron in 10 Downing Street, responsible for implementing our policy reform program along with many other people in the team there. So. Well, the reason I'm saying that is most of my career has actually been doing things, like trying to make change happen in the private sector and government.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  And so over the years of being on TV, it was an amazing opportunity. I loved it, but I had an itch to get back to doing stuff. And so a few years ago, I got back involved in policy and politics in California. And the first issue I looked at was housing. You just mentioned it. Housing costs actually is the number one reason people are leaving the state. It's just impossible. You know, like hardly anyone can even imagine owning a home now in California.

• 2:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Nine hundred and six thousand dollars.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  It's something like, you know, and we have the lowest homeownership in the country. Anyway, so I started working on the issue.

• 2:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Really learning about what's been driving it and so on. And it took me to trying to get an initiative qualified for the ballot that would address two of the big drivers of this insane cost. One of them is a hidden tax on housing called impact fees. The development impact.

• 3:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Pull that up, Rob.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  The second is something that's talked about a lot, which is, by the way, this really does answer your question, so just.

• 3:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Please, I'm with you.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  I'm getting there. Something called CEQA, the C E Q A, the California Environmental Quality Act, passed in nineteen seventy. And it was all about, when it started out, regulating pollution from big factories and so on. But over the years, it's basically turned into a nightmare that blocks anything and holds up everything. And one of the main problems with CEQA, this law, is that they've given this what they call a private right of action. It means that anyone can file a lawsuit to enforce this environmental law. Normally with stuff like that, it's the DA or the Attorney General. You've got this private right of action. Anyone can file a lawsuit.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Seventy percent of sequel lawsuits are used to block housing. Most of those are filed by unions in order to negotiate with developers what they call project labor agreements, where you have union workers only, or what they call prevailing wage, which is two or three times higher than market rate wages, etc.

• 4:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  So the second component of this ballot initiative was ending this private right of action. So at a stroke, you stop all these nuisance lawsuits that block housing. Didn't raise the money to get it on the ballot. Then I started engaging with Sacramento. I thought, maybe we can make it happen through the regular political process. And that's when I ran into the answer to your question, who runs California. I started having meetings with legislators. One particular person, they said, you've got to talk to this person, they're really good on housing, you work with them, you're going to make some progress. We had a great meeting. This person, really, the Democrat member of the state legislature. Said, your plan is fantastic, if we make this happen, it's transformational, that was the word.

• 5:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  I said, great, let's work together on it. I'm a Republican, this person was a Democrat.

• 5:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Is this a heavyweight? Is this a heavyweight person?

• 5:20Speaker 03

  No, you wouldn't have heard their name. And I'm not going to say their name, because actually it was a private meeting.

• 5:24Patrick Bet-David?

  But privately, is it a heavyweight person? Not publicly? Because there's a lot of heavyweight private people.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  It's a midwife, I'm going to say midwife.

• 5:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, fair.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  But a legislator, an elected, but anyway. I said, let's work together. Well, I couldn't support you publicly.

• 5:35Patrick Bet-David?

  She's telling you this.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Why not? Well, the unions would hate it. I said, yeah, but you just told me it'd be transformational. We were in an office overlooking the state capitol, like this with their arm. Like this. Well, the unions run this place. That's an elected member of the legislature, saying the unions run this place. And you just think, what is this? It's ridiculous. And that's the most clear answer to your question, the unions. And when people ask me, how did California get like this? How did we go from having the most amazing opportunities anywhere, not just in America, but in the world? If we agree that America is the greatest nation on earth, which is what I think,

• 6:22Speaker 03

  California is the greatest state. There's something I always say, which is California means to America what America means to the world. It represents everything that's amazing about our country. Ambition and opportunity and energy and hustle and all those things. And yet it's been crushed, that spirit's been crushed over the years. And people say, well, how did it get? I wrote a book last year, it came out last year just before my campaign called Califilia, reversing the ruin of America's worst-run state. I tried to trace it back. And my conclusion was it all started when the unions were given collective bargaining rights and over the years built up this incredible power, this lock on policy. It's the government unions, not just government unions, non-government unions as well. And so they do run.

• 7:05Patrick Bet-David?

  So unions run California?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Basically.

• 7:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Give me a specific three unions. Is one gonna be the teachers' union?

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Teachers' union, which means that now the educa... So let's look at the outcomes. We spend nearly the most of any state, Newsom brags about it, he just did his budget last week, $28,000 per student per year, one of the highest in the country, for the worst results, pretty much. We have now 47% meet basics, of K-12 students meet basic standards in English. With math, it's 35%. 65% don't meet the standards. When you look at Latino and black kids, it's even worse. Most money, worse results. Why? Because the teacher unions have a lock on anything to do with education and they've completely distorted the system so it's not about education, it's about indoctrination. And that's not some exaggeration.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  You go to their conferences and you see what their sessions are about and their training and all the stuff they're pumping out. It's... It's ideological indoctrination, it's colonialism and gender extremism, all this stuff. Meanwhile, the kids don't get taught to read. You've got techniques for teaching kids to read that work, that we've seen work elsewhere. The debate over that was settled decades ago. Phonics, it's a technique for teaching kids to read, barely used in California public schools. Because the teachers don't like it because they think it's racist or something. You know, it really is. It's not every single thing, but the best answer to your question is the unions.

• 8:34Patrick Bet-David?

  So, okay, if we say unions, right, and teachers' unions, number one, you've got a couple of other unions there as well.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  It was a big driver of the budget crisis.

• 8:42Patrick Bet-David?

  For sure, but one of the biggest things that helped, if you look at the five monumental moments in Trump winning in 2024. One is Bobby Kennedy joining his camp, massive, will never forget, Arizona, he walks out with Charlie Kirk, Tony K, USA, that's one, right? You can see the event at Butler, that was definitely number one, okay? And then you have to put, and as much as this may seem like a small one, is when Sean O'Brien, the president of Teamsters, came out and spoke at the convention, and he was gonna talk something, and then they said, "No, we need you to submit your PowerPoint to proven," and he called Susie Wallace, "I'm not speaking," he says, "Just call the president." The president said, "I don't care what you say." He even said something, "I don't give a what you say, just say whatever you want to say."

• 9:26Patrick Bet-David?

  And he got up, gave a speech, bashed a couple capitalists, got off the stage. But it was the first time in 120-something years that a Democrat didn't, the union didn't support the Democratic Party. So for you to win in a state like California, what are you doing to win over the union? How do you do that? Do you go and sit in front of these guys and try to get, or is it an impossible thing to do in the state of California?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Well, you look at the, there's, you know, of course, two categories, the government unions, non-government unions. And in terms of the lock on power, well, one way of thinking about it is using Gavin Newsom as a proxy for Democrat politicians. Remember, it's 16 years now of one-party control, 16 years, continuous. All the statewide offices, two-thirds majority in both chambers of the legislature, all the big cities and the counties, state Supreme Court, 6-1 Democrat.

• 10:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Isn't a representative even more than two-thirds? It's like a...

• 10:20Speaker 03

  In the legislature.

• 10:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Isn't it forty, forty-three to nine?

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's more, but I mean, at least the two-thirds of what gives you.

• 10:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Minimum, to be able to do whatever they're gonna do.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Exactly, so they call it super majority. So sixteen years of that, in those sixteen years, Gavin Newsom's been, you know, eight years as lieutenant governor, eight years as governor, you look at his donations as a kind of proxy for Democrat politicians and the categories. Number one category of donors to Gavin Newsom, government unions. Uh, non-government unions, number three. And so they control the politicians and that, that's representative of the ones in the legislature or the other Democrat politicians. So they drive it and it's the government unions that are the biggest. And that drives the budget crisis because you get over the years, all these, it's not the only reason, they've just massively increased spending, they've doubled spending in the last ten years. The size of the budget in California's nearly doubled.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  But the unions, of course, you're getting these luxury pensions and healthcare deals and all these things. Okay, here's another thing that I get on the road the whole time. We're doing town halls up and down the state, hundreds of people coming out, bigger and bigger crowds. A question I get nearly all the time from parents, we pay all these taxes and yet we're being asked to pay for school supplies, to chip in as parents, to buy books or paper pens. But we pay the highest taxes in the country, what's going on? What's going on is that nineteen point one percent, I think, of, of school district's budget goes straight out the door to pensions, nearly a fifth before spent, before anything is spent. So the, the government unions are definitely the bigger problem, no question.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  You look at the prison officers, for example, another huge donor, the Corrections Union. I mean, they've got this massive prison closure program in California, which is a whole story in itself. A big part of the story on, on crime is that, because they've released tens of thousands of dangerous, violent criminals into the community.

• 12:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Would any of these guys ever support you?

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Well, not the, well, I don't think on the government side, but, but the point I was gonna make about prisons is, basically, they've cut the number of prisons and reduced the prison population nearly by half, but the budget's doubled, it's classic California, but the, the non-government.

• 12:35Patrick Bet-David?

  The budget has doubled, but the amount of people is split.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically, so it's, it's classic. If you look at the non-government unions that, for example, involved in construction, I think that's where you're right, there should be an alliance because all my career, every, you know, when I was on Fox, the theme of my show was, I called it positive populism. I wrote a book, Positive Populism, about how we need to, you know, the ideas that drove that populist movement, Trump, and you can see on the left as well, lifting up workers, working people who've been left behind by the policies we've seen before, 100%, that's where I'm coming from. And a lot of my, the whole themes of my campaign, $3 gas, cut

• 13:21Speaker 03

  your electric bill in half, your first 100 grand tax-free, a home you can afford to buy, very much with workers in mind, workers and small business, that's really who are, if there's one group, of course you want to help everybody, but that's really the focus. So I agree with you and-

• 13:37Patrick Bet-David?

  I think you got to flip though, I think, I think so, because here's, here's the challenge, right? So-

• 13:41Speaker 03

  But the government unions, I think, they're part, it's their machine. They've built this political machine, they've got huge amounts of money-

• 13:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  A billion dollars a year, an election cycle spent by the government unions, it's crazy.

• 13:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you see the clip, Rob, of, who was the fellow, the African-American fellow in the chamber that twice got up and got kicked out of the, when, when Trump was giving the speech, you know which one I'm talking about, where he was holding signs, Elon Musk is a racist, or he's this, what is his name? He's got a unique name. He said something, Al Green, yeah, Al-

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 14:14Patrick Bet-David?

  You know what Al Green said yesterday about Trump? The first time he met Trump, what he told him, did you, did you hear this, Rob? Can you type in Al Green, first time meeting Trump? Al Green, first time meeting Trump. He's telling this story, the guy asked him a question, maybe it's the lady, I just saw what he said. So what was your reaction the first time you met Trump? He said something very interesting. I wish, I wish I saved this, that could have been it, Rob, that could have been it. Go a little bit lower, zoom in a little bit for some, yeah, this is it. Watch what he says here, go for it. Turn on the audio.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Have you ever met the president in person?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Yes, I've met him.

• 14:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Watch this.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  And what is that meeting like?

• 14:50Speaker 05

  Well, let me tell you, I'm glad you mentioned it. The president that I met, first time we met was right here in Houston, Texas.

• 14:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Watch this.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  When he landed. And he left, he deplaned from Airport One. And he and I talked to each other. He took my hand. Pass your hand over. Show you how the president. He took my hand and said.

• 15:09Patrick Bet-David?

  You're gonna like.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  You're gonna really like me.

• 15:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  Those were his words.

• 15:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  Very personable. Very personable guy.

• 15:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, you can pause it right there. So, so you know, you know why I wanted to play this clip? Here's why I wanted to play this clip. There's something unique about him that I don't know why. He's convinced he can flip everybody.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Whether it's him growing up, early on in church, he used to go to Norman Vincent Peale's church. I don't know if you're familiar with Norman Vincent Peale. You know, the guy that wrote the book, Power of Positive Thinking, which is a book everybody needs to. It's one of the first 50 books I've read in my life. He would go, so the idea was, positive thinking. I can convert him. I can convert him. I can convert him. You have that level of optimism. There's something very unique about your energy and your personality, which is attractive. So to me, it's, you know, what, what, what are you, what is your?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:02Patrick Bet-David?

  What is your strategy to go talk to these guys? That there's a 99% chance they're gonna say, screw you, Steve. We hate your type. You're a Republican. You're the enemy. You're a conservative. For you to say, look, you may not like me on all my policies, but I think you're gonna like me because I want to make the state better.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  But that is how I am. Um, I get along with. I do get along with people. I mean, that's exactly why I'm very interested. That's how I think. And I think it's obvious to me. I mean, let's just go back to the workers' point and unions as a focus. Like, it's so obvious that these 16 years of Democrat policies, even if they think, yeah, the Democrats, they're my guys, have just been a disaster for the average working person in California. More for them than anyone else. The rich people can kind of deal with it. And of course, they're leaving now as well, of course, because of this ridiculous insane billionaires tax. I'm sure we'll get into that, but for regular working people. I mean, look at the gas, you know, it's exactly those people who are being hurt the most.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Who does gas price, who's hurt most by these insane gas prices?

• 17:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Low, middle income families.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Regular driving their trucks.

• 17:07Patrick Bet-David?

  That's right.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Two, three, four, five hours a day for work. That's who really is suffering. And that's the point I make the whole time. And I find, and when, when I'm in those communities and we do events there and I go to, and I, I love doing events and meeting, you know, restaurant owners and bars and just regular places like that. And it's blue collar workers, often the, I mean, we were just chatting before the show about, you know, who comes up to you and who says hi. It's often workers.

• 17:33Patrick Bet-David?

  See, I think, I think California needs a guy like you that's optimistic, that gets out there. But I, I, I'll tell you this one part because as the audience in California is watching, I call out California all the time. And the reason why I call out California is listen, you want change, get behind somebody, do the work. You gotta go do the door knocking, find a candidate, support him financially, support him with your community, support him with, hey, I like this guy, I support this guy, go put your name out there. There's been a lot of guys that have endorsed you. I think the president endorsed you.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:59Patrick Bet-David?

  I think Peter Thiel endorsed you. I want to say Joe Lonsdale from Palantir, whom he, we've had on endorsed you. There's been a number of people that have come out that have said they want you to be the governor of the state of California. But I want to talk about this and I think the audience is going to like this. You said you want to lower taxes for those making under a hundred thousand dollars to zero. Okay. So I want to read some of these numbers up. State income taxes, which is a good amount to zero. So I looked up with Rob and I, what percentage of Californians make less than a hundred thousand dollars? That's about 70 to 75% make under a hundred thousand dollars. And I said, tell me how much revenue.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:37Patrick Bet-David?

  The government collects from these folks, which is. Mainly the seventeen and seventy to seventy-five percent that make a less than a hundred thousand. It's about twelve and a half billion to twenty-five billion dollars. Low, high end on how much income revenue they collect. So your policy will eliminate that. By the way, that's not controversial policy because Katie Porter duplicated you.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 18:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Other people want to do the idea that you impose. Let's go to the next one. Then you want to lower the thirteen point three to fourteen point four that they have right now to seven and a half flat tax.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Flat tax.

• 19:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Which is a flat tax that you're introducing, which a lot of, you know, people that are independent libertarians, Republicans would say, hey, we love the idea of a flat tax, right? Milton Friedman, this has been talked about. If you cut the tax, uh, flat tax, you end up taking the revenue that they're collecting, about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and twenty-nine billion dollars of revenue from income tax. They lose another sixty-five billion dollars.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's our number.

• 19:28Patrick Bet-David?

  So if we go and we eliminate under a hundred thousand and then you lower the thirteen three to seven and a half, you lose another sixty to sixty-five billion dollars. So now you got seventy-five billion dollars of revenue that's gone, give or take. Where are you going to take the seventy-five billion dollars away?

• 19:46Speaker 03

  It's interesting because our number was sixty. I, I did some, um, basic costings, or it's just like that with, um, I was for a while when we moved here, uh, twenty twelve, I was at Stanford. Teaching at Stanford for a couple of years and, and I was also fellow at the Hoover Institution. So I worked with some of the people I knew there, some of the economists to do a basic costing. And our number was, I think, sixty-five billion for the whole package. So.

• 20:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Was that ten years ago?

• 20:10Speaker 03

  It was last year.

• 20:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, it's last year. So if you do less than a hundred thousand.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  So that's, that, you're right, it's a big, it's a big number. And the other, the other way of looking at it was, I remember when we did the math, this is last year. We have, we haven't actually updated it for this year's budget, but when I, because I didn't want to say something crazy and unrealistic. Of course, yeah.

• 20:27Patrick Bet-David?

  But by the way, this is a great idea, but where does that money come?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  So let me just get, so we had a, we had a revenue reduction of eighteen point five percent. That was, that was at the time when we did that costing for last year's numbers, that was roughly what it was. And, and here's the way I put it, this is not some crazy thing. This is taking the budget back just a couple of years to roughly what it was before the pandemic. Remember they've nearly doubled the budget. The budget this year that, that Newsom submitted, three hundred and fifty billion dollars.

• 20:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you go to California budget last 10 years?

• 21:01Speaker 03

  It was 180 billion not that long ago. It depends where you look at it. There's the um.

• 21:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, there you go. So it went from 2017, 2018, 124 to 250 billion.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  That's the general fund and then there's these other, the total budget includes these special funds, bond and things like that. So you get 350 billion is the total. So I think the comparison is 180 to three and nearly doubled. 180 billion to 350 billion.

• 21:23Patrick Bet-David?

  What should he put there so we can look at that instead of saying general fund?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Total budget.

• 21:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Put total budget, Rob. Total budget.

• 21:32Speaker 06

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• 24:04Patrick Bet-David?

  There you go. So three hundred fifty billion is what they proposed this year. And you go to twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, hundred seventy-seven billion, exactly doubled in less than ten years.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Right. And everything's worse. I mean, really, that's not an exaggeration. It's some political statement. Everything's worse. You mentioned homelessness. You could run down the list. I mean, I don't even want to do it now because I want to get to this point about the budget. In other words, it's just bringing it back to some level of sanity. So there's a general point that they've doubled the budget and everything's worse. Surely, we can do better. Getting specific about it, the first place you look, of course, is this phrase that's become very well-known, rightly so, fraud, waste, and abuse. When you get specific. So at the beginning of this year, I set up something, basically, as part of our campaign. It's a volunteer thing. It's not an official. I'm not elected yet.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Cal DOGE, California Department of Government Efficiency, borrowing the name.

• 25:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Mosley Trump.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Exactly. So we set that up. There you are. And so. We've done a number of fraud reports. And there's a couple of specific ones we can get into. But I'll start with the total. We made an estimate, our fourth fraud report was an estimate of the total fraud, waste and abuse in the last five years. We looked at it over five years because these programs often have that kind of lengthy characteristic to them. Our estimate, based on published data, so a combination of things like the state auditor report that says $24 billion of homelessness spending was wasted, medical error rates, et cetera, et cetera. We looked at all this published data.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Our estimate for the total is $425 billion in the last five years.

• 25:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Eighty billion a year, eighty-five billion a year.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, roughly, exactly. About twenty percent of the budget. And so.

• 25:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  That's where you start. But of course, here's another example. One of the things on the debates, you may have seen, some of these exchanges, I've called for freeze, for suspending the gas tax and over time, reducing it. We have the highest gas tax in the country, the worst roads in the country, another classic.

• 26:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Seventy-one cents.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Another, the sixty-three, it's just gone from sixty-one to sixty-three, the gas tax.

• 26:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Gas tax in California.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you type in top ten highest gas taxes in America by state?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  So.

• 26:29Patrick Bet-David?

  It's amazing what California.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Javier Becerra.

• 26:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Who looks like he's going to be my opponent in the general election.

• 26:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Seventy-one cents.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Oh, that must be including something.

• 26:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah. Trust me, I'm trying to help Californians so much that I follow the numbers super closely.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Why would I think sixty-one to sixty-three?

• 26:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, it's better, it's higher now, so it'd raise in the last twenty-four hours.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Certainly the highest. He always says this, Steve, if you cut the gas tax, how are you going to pay for roads? Because that's where it's supposed to go. Well, first of all, we have the highest gas tax and the worst roads on one, some of the measures. On one measure, we're forty-ninth out of fifty on roads, there's another way we're fiftieth. I was talking to a contractor, I talked to business owners the whole time. She, this lady runs a big company doing public works, construction, builds, literally builds roads. She told me, and they operate in multiple states, it costs four times as much to build the exact piece of road in California as in Texas. Four times as much. So that's not what you would call, so when you look at this, the $425 billion number

• 27:34Speaker 03

  for fraud, waste and abuse, that's specific programs where you can literally find things that shouldn't be spent at all. For example, oh, this, actually, this connects to the gas tax. There's a program that's been running for over 10 years, started in 2015. It actually gets money from the, not necessarily the gas tax, but the cap and trade system for part of their climate policy, some climate change mitigation fund or whatever. But it's basically from what you pay for gas. And it's, this program was supposed to install solar panels on low-income apartment buildings. $100 million every year since 2015, so $1 billion total been spent.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  We looked at where that money's gone. Of that $1 billion, actual spending on solar panels, 72 million. 928 million going to these nonprofits, this, this one, exactly. Going to, you know, Democrat nonprofits, environmental justice campaigns, all this bullshit. And so that's an example of out and out, that just shouldn't happen, just stop it, stop spending that money. The roads is not even included in that $425 billion total. The $425 billion estimate over five years, roughly 85 billion a year, is things like this. The fact that the roads are four times more expensive to build, that's not even included in that. Why is it four times more expensive?

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Because they layer on all this nonsense. For example, what we mentioned earlier, it's public works, it's public money, so you have to do prevailing wage, union members only, community workforce agreements, where you have to hire, endless nonsense, environmental reviews, audits, inspections. This is what's going on. The amount of bloat and nonsense people have to deal with on a small scale. I met a lady, she runs a small independent winery in wine country, Sonoma, I think it was either Sonoma or Napa. She told me she just wanted to expand her patio.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  For more guests.

• 29:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  From thirty to fifty guests.

• 29:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  It took her six years, a million dollars. Fees, permits, environmental reports she had to pay for, all this. That story is typical. I tell that story to other business owners. Oh, yeah, I've got one like that. That just, everything is layered on to make it so expensive. And so that's why that budget is so high. Because everything costs so much because of this insane overregulation. And a lot of it is driven. I mean, if, if, if you ask me that, where's the real cost and hassle of doing anything in California comes from, come from? Basically, over the years, I've been studying it now and traveling the state and meeting businesses and, and, and regular people. It's really, there are three underlying drivers.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  The unions, we've mentioned them. The, uh, the second one is litigation, lawyers. Endless lawsuit costs. Huge litigation. Everything's a lawsuit. Like, there's an estimate that insurance policies, for example, that's one of the big issues, one of the most, you know, annoying things for people. You can't get insurance, so it's so expensive.

• 30:47Patrick Bet-David?

  The Fair Act, or you sound like the insurance, homeowners insurance leaving.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Regular homeowners, they've left the state.

• 30:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  But one of the reasons is you've got this massive insurance, uh, litigation risk. It's called the tort tax. Some people refer to it. Um, an estimate of three thousand to fifteen thousand, just the cost of litigation that the insurance companies have to deal with.

• 31:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Um, and then. What do you mean by this tort tax? So insurance companies are having to pay this?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, it's, it's a.

• 31:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Zoom in.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  It's a, it's known as that. It's a, exactly.

• 31:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Tort tax is a term used to describe how excessive litigation and legal system abuse infiltrate insurance premiums, raising costs. So insurance companies are already adding this as a cost that they're probably gonna get sued.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:26Patrick Bet-David?

  And so because of that, they raise their rates to be able to profit, or else what's the point of being the state of California?

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Yes, and look, but everyone has. I was at a small manufacturing place. He was saying they have to put aside millions of dollars a year for, for lawsuits. I mean, endless lawsuits, there's, um. Oh my goodness, I don't know. I wanted to do the sort of headlines and then get maybe dive into it. So the three big drivers of all the cost and nightmare of doing anything in California is unions, lawyers, trial lawyers and all of this litigation. And then the third is the climate agenda, as they call it. The climate stuff is really driving a lot of this. The obsession with meeting this net zero 2045 goal, totally arbitrary, actually makes no difference to the actual climate. It's not, you know what I mean? So.

• 32:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I mean, the report came out this last week that Trump tweeted saying that was all BS. I don't know if you saw that or not.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  I didn't.

• 32:20Patrick Bet-David?

  You didn't see this? Oh, you're gonna have to see this to be able to use it while you're out there. Rob, do you have the story of what you showed it a couple of days ago on the podcast? I think you had the tweet. Yeah, Trump literally came out and the claims of the RCP 8.5. If you want to go back, you just had it right there, Rob. Go back to all right there. Fact check. There was a tweet that came out about this, that climate change, they got the numbers wrong and they were claiming that it was all this, that we have to be worried about.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Oh, I did see a report of that. Yeah, I just didn't see what the president said.

• 32:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, the president tweeted about it, says we were right all along.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Well, even the thing about this is that.

• 32:58Patrick Bet-David?

  After 15 years of Democrats promising climate change is going to destroy the planet of the United States, top climate committee just admitted that its own projections of RCP 8.5 were wrong, wrong, wrong, far too long. Climate activism has been used by Democrats to scare Americans, push horrible energy policies and fund billions into their bogus research programs.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  So, look, and the reason it's so important to focus on this subject, again, these are examples of the bigger picture. They layer this climate stuff into everything. So we just talked earlier about housing costs. Gavin Newsom pitched these two pieces of legislation last year, AB 130, AB 131, as we're now solving the housing crisis, we're going to have abundance with housing. Fantastic. We're going to build more housing. And the centerpiece of it was exemptions from that environmental law I mentioned, CEQA, for housing. Except you only get the exemptions if you use union labor. So already you're adding back in a whole bunch of cost from that. And the second thing.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  It's that because they've got the part of the climate story is that they don't want sprawl, as they call it, because if you have sprawl and people drive more, that's bad for climate. So they've got this mechanism, this regulatory mechanism called V M T, vehicle miles traveled. It's a calculation that's put into permitting for projects.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  If you want to build, and this is in the new legislation that Newsom touted as the solution to the housing crisis. They put in a V M T charge that goes, it's an actual cost that's paid, basically a tax. If you want to build a new single family home,

• 34:39Speaker 03

  the cost of the V M T that they will put in, the developer pays it, obviously then goes to the price, the purchase price, three hundred and twenty five thousand dollars over twenty years. Just for this, extra. And so like the climate stuff is just embedded in every, obviously in obvious ways like gas prices. And of course, gas prices affect, and diesel affects business, you know, delivery costs, all of that. That's why groceries are the highest in the country. Electric bills, more than double the national average. With gas prices, we're the highest in the country, higher than Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, even though we have abundant oil reserves.

• 35:19Patrick Bet-David?

  And can you?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Electric bills, we're the second highest, only to Hawaii. We have gas-fired power stations in California, natural gas-fired power stations that are deliberately being run at ten to fifteen percent of their capacity, because they're only being used as backup for wind and solar. So we've basically got these, this infrastructure for energy that we're not using. And we, and we have abundant natural gas in California that is just being kept in the ground. And we're now importing nearly eighty percent of the crude oil we use and ninety percent of the natural gas.

• 35:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Where from? Where are we importing?

• 35:56Speaker 03

  I can tell you, I was just at a refinery. So for crude oil, it's coming mainly from Iraq.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  And South America, the Amazon rainforest.

• 36:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Ecuador.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  We're in Ecuador and Brazil.

• 36:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  So we, we, just when, when Newsom was in Brazil for the climate conference, the, the latest data came out, we're now buying half the oil that's being drilled in the Amazon. Cause it's heavy and the refineries, it's, it's a particular kind of crude oil that fits the refinery that's like California, it's heavier. So we, so in the name of climate change, California is driving an expansion of oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest. So that's the crude oil. The refined gasoline is worse than just the crude oil, because they've shut down the refineries because there's not enough business for them and because of the cost of doing anything. We're now importing not just crude oil, but refined finished gasoline.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  We use about 800,000 barrels a day in California. We're, we're now only refining about 550,000, the rest is being imported. That's coming from mainly India and South Korea. Where does India get its oil? Russia. So in the name of climate change, California is now funding Putin's war machine. It's just insane.

• 37:15Patrick Bet-David?

  That, that.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  By the way, here's another thing. This oil and gas, whether it's crude oil and finished gasoline, that's being shipped halfway across the world, those ships run on bunker fuel. It's the most polluting form of transportation you can imagine, the dirtiest form. Spewing out carbon emissions, these ships, when we could be sending it in a nice clean pipeline, a couple of hundred miles from Kern County near Bakersfield, where Bakersfield is, where I literally was there last night, I was in Bakersfield last night, the heart of our oil industry.

• 37:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Padre's Hotel, were you at?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  I didn't stay the night because there was a flight to come here, but, but the, so instead of taking it in a nice pipeline to the refineries in Long Beach or wherever, in a ship 7,500 miles across the ocean, spewing out carbon emissions, to make all that insanity work, here's another, there's a, the regulatory agency for, for a lot of this stuff is called CARB, the California Air Resources Board. They're insane about making businesses report on their carbon emissions through the supply chain, like you've got to account for your carbon emissions, except for this, they only count the carbon emissions for these ships bringing the oil, once they're 12 miles off the coast of California.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Then that so seven thousand five hundred miles, ignore it, twelve miles, that's when they start counting the carbon, I just, it's crazy. They are actually increasing carbon emissions in the name of climate.

• 38:41Patrick Bet-David?

  What are you gonna do the day, say you become the governor, what are you doing the day you get, you become the governor with.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  So it's gonna be a very busy first day, because one of the things that that I think, well, there's many things I'm doing differently in this, but one of them is being really well prepared, because I do actually understand how policy works, how government works, I've got experience of that, and I'm a businesslike person, I wouldn't be practical, specifically on this one, here's a good example, and it goes back to what you're saying, what we're discussing about the legislature and the supermajority and what can you get done, because there's all these democrats controlling the legislature, there's a huge amount you can do just through your control of the executive branch and these regulatory agencies, opening up oil production is a good example, so the way that they've shut down oil and gas production

• 39:27Speaker 03

  in California is not actually the legislature, it's through an agency called Calgem, the California Department of Geological and Energy Management, and they have refused to issue permits, and I've seen that, I've been to the oil fields, you've got these, just like that, that you're looking out there, and much bigger, as far as you can see, oil wells, and they just refuse to issue permits for maintenance, you need a permit for everything, if you wanna do routine maintenance for expanding an existing well that's maybe running out of oil, you do, I think they call it sidetracking, you can expand it and get the output up from five barrels a day to a hundred or whatever, or drilling new wells in existing fields,

• 40:12Speaker 03

  this is not drilling an oil well in the middle of Yosemite National Park, this is literally, like, as far as you can see, oil wells, there's a concrete pad, ready for some new wells to be drilled, in the middle of the oil field, and they're saying no, so actually, that's something where you could turn that around, I don't wanna say overnight, but you put in new people, I'll be ready to go with the new people, you're gonna appoint to this agency.

• 40:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Any names, any names of people that.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  We're just, we're gathering the names now, I have, I have named someone who I would appoint to be the Natural Resources Secretary that sits above all of this, a guy called John Duarte, who was a member of Congress and very. Thoughtful on water, poll... Because these resource issues are real drivers of the problem in California. The fact that we're killing our ag industry by refusing to give farmers the water that they need. This issue of oil and gas. So that comes under natural resources. So we're going to have someone who believes in actually, you know, producing in abundance what we have. This is the point about California. We've got everything we need. We have incredible natural resources, human resources, in terms of the energy and hustle

• 41:22Speaker 03

  of our people. And it's all been crushed by this bloated nanny state bureaucratic government.

• 41:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, what, you know, some people may say, well, look, you're, you're a Brit, you're from UK, are you running because...

• 41:34Speaker 03

  I'm American now, I hope you know.

• 41:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Your UK is the equivalent of California and London is the equivalent of LA. Do they have a lot of things in common? What patterns do you see is the California on track to be what happens to UK?

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 41:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, share that with us. What perspective do you have?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  It's very interesting. So a very serious venture capital guy sent me a report, must have been about six months ago, on the UK. And he literally just put on the email, "Remind you of anywhere." And this report was going through just how impossible it is to do anything in the UK, to build housing, to increase energy infrastructure, to build any kind of infrastructure. And it just went through the incredible bloat, the regulatory bloat, the process taking so long for anything. It's exactly where we've got to in California. And that's why we have this situation where, right now, you've got these two things going on. So Gavin Newsom's response to anything, when he's challenged on everything going wrong

• 42:36Speaker 03

  in California, his go-to responses, "Well, we're the fourth biggest economy in the world, so things must be great." That's true statistically. We are the fourth biggest. But remember, well, that's just the total GDP. That's driven mainly by two things. We've got a small number of giant tech companies that are great, and I want, of course, I want every business to thrive in California. So I'm a huge supporter of our tech industry, like all our other industries. That's great that we've got these companies, generate a huge amount of revenue, but not many jobs.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  And then the second component that driven up the GDP number is that includes the government. So all this increase in government spending, that increases your GDP. But it's not a healthy way to increase your economy. So at the same time as having the fourth biggest economy, we are, we have the highest poverty rate of any state tied with Louisiana.

• 43:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Twenty eight percent of US homelessness is in California. Poverty rate is massive.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Poverty rate is the highest in the country tied with Louisiana. Unemployment fifty with the highest in the country of all fifty states. I think the District of Columbia is slightly higher, but in terms of states, we have the highest unemployment rate. So that's not a healthy economy. I mean, most of the jobs that have been created since the pandemic, I believe the net job creation in the private sector is almost zero in California. It's government and stuff like that, healthcare. And so you've got a really unhealthy economy because it's just so impossible to do anything. And that's exactly what you're seeing in Europe and in the UK. And one of the things I say, I mean, I became, we moved here 2012. I became a citizen 2021.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  And if you look at what's going on in the UK, I've now renounced my UK citizenship. I just want to be clear that I'm all in for this country and California. But I actually truly feel this on an emotional level. I don't want to see California, the way I put it, I'm fighting to make sure this state that I love does not turn into the country I left.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  That is a really bad, and that is the path we're on, no question.

• 44:42Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you see happening right now with UK? Go specifically to UK.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Well, I haven't spent much time, but what I really don't understand.

• 44:49Patrick Bet-David?

  You were heavily involved, you were there with Cameron. So you saw the invasion when it was coming in. It went from one point six million to two point seven million. Cause I think Cameron went and went, 2010.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Twenty ten, exactly.

• 45:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Twenty ten, and then it skyrocketed. So what patterns did you see? What mistakes did you see they were making? Is it just too tolerant?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Really fell out because, because he, we, I was very much part of the, I was senior advisor. I was the guy. And everything is smaller, more of a shoestring in British politics. So there's not much money there. And I basically did a number of jobs, the strategy, policy, communications, the whole thing.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  And we had a commitment, I think I'm getting this right, in going into that 2010 election. This was his, he particularly, it was his idea, actually, to say this, make this commitment, net migration into the UK to bring it under a hundred thousand a year. That was, that was the pledge that we made, and it was David Cameron's idea. I think that's right. Net migration under a hundred thousand a year. And one of the main reasons that we, yeah, we are never achieved the pledge, yeah. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  So, one of the reasons that that was never met, and it was very clearly explained to me, we had a, you know, this was a policy commitment, so of course, you're there, once he became Prime Minister, you're in ten Downing Street, you're really focused on delivering your promises. One of the things we kept, why, you know, we said this, is it happening, making, you know, checking on progress. On this particular one, I remember a meeting where the officials, the bureaucrats came in and said, look, basically said, you're never going to achieve this target as long as you're in the EU. Impossible, because of the free migration rules within the EU. Never going to be delivered. It's one of the reasons that I was in favor of Brexit. That's when we really fell out.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  I'd left the UK by then, we moved here in 2012. Brexit was in 2016. That was one of the main reasons. Because he'd made this commitment, and his own government officials said, you can't meet this commitment as long as Britain remains in the EU. Now, the really crazy thing, which I just don't understand, I haven't, I wasn't there. 2016, Brexit was voted on. A few years later, three years later, finally they did the deal, they left, under Boris Johnson eventually. But it seems to me that immigration just went up.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  The central argument of the Brexit campaign.

• 47:32Patrick Bet-David?

  It was a failure.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Massive. Well, the first stage of failure was when the UK was part of the EU. It was a failure and the government officials really looking at the issue of immigration said you're never gonna meet the target when, once, as long as you're in the EU. Then the UK left the EU, Brexit. And the main, I mean, there's lots of arguments for Brexit, but if you really ask people who are involved there and whatever, the biggest one was immigration controlling our borders. That was really, if there's one thing that Brexit was about, it was that. And yet, since Brexit, the problem, I think it's accelerated.

• 48:17Speaker 06

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• 50:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Pierce Armour yesterday tweeted saying, "Our net migration is the lowest it's been in years." I don't know if you saw that.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  I didn't see that.

• 50:49Patrick Bet-David?

  He tweeted yesterday saying, "Our net migration has been the lowest in years, and we're still got some work to do." Go right there. Go four hours ago, Rob? Go, go, yeah. "Net migration has fallen 82% in the last five years. I promise you to restore the control of our borders. My government is delivering. I know there's more to do. We're introducing scale-based migration systems that rewards contribution and ends our resilience on cheap overseas workers."

• 51:12Speaker 03

  That's exactly what the conservatives used to say. I mean, that exact message. But they didn't deliver it. Johnson, they have those prime ministers that lasted about five minutes.

• 51:21Patrick Bet-David?

  You've been in a space of knowing you want to get things done, and it's hard to go through the gridlock of...

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, and this is one of the things...

• 51:29Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you do that then in California?

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Well, because I've seen how it worked. I mean, I'll give you a specific story of... That really opened my eyes. I mean, it's a silly story, but it kind of showed me. So one of the projects that I led,

• 51:44Speaker 03

  initiated and led, was, we called it the Red Tape Challenge or something like that, to reduce bureaucracy in the UK. This is going back, must have been, when was it, 2010? You know, around that, the first, I was only there for two years.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  There we are. So I'm saying, look at that. This is ancient history, but there we are. Steve Hilton was the primary architect of the Red Tape Challenge. Right, so the idea was to... It's actually, the technical term for it now, you would say is reverse sunsetting. Where, we all know about sunsetting regulations. You pass something, you say, this only lasts for five years. Unless we renew it, it expires. I wanted to have a concept of reverse sunsetting, where we just take the whole stock of regulations that are on the books, and change the default. So instead of saying, we're gonna get rid of this one and get rid of that, you basically say, we're gonna get rid of all of it. Let's choose the regulations that we wanna keep. That was the concept. I remember, we had input from the public. We crowdsourced some stuff, whatever. And then we started having the meetings with the official,

• 52:45Speaker 03

  the bureaucrats and the civil servants. And we divided up the whole regulatory code into different sections, like about 29 different categories. The first set that we looked at, consumer protection. I remember, we had this big meeting. They all come in the room. Dozens of different government officials, leading the different bits of the relevant departments. And there's a lot of paperwork on there. You go through the packet. And I remember, I just went, I just didn't wanna just go in order. I went into the middle, picked something at random. And it was color-coded. And I can't remember which way around, red, green. And most was one color. And I said, oh, that's great. So that's what we're getting rid of?

• 53:30Speaker 03

  No, no, that's what we have to keep. Okay? That's not the point of this exercise, but still. Let's look at one of these. It was men's pajamas. Just randomly, I just... Why do we have to keep that, whatever? There's the guy around the table, who was head of the, whatever, apparel division. We have a 40-minute discussion. About the regulations on men's pyjamas.

• 53:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop it.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  And then at the end, this is, I'm not making up, says, well, I don't want to mock the voice. He said, if anything, the public interest demands that we level up regulations from a gender equality perspective. Because the regulations for women's pyjamas were actually lower than for, you just think, I can't believe it. We spent forty minutes talking about one thing out of thousands. And it's at that point I realised, you can't do it this way. You'll never beat them at that kind of game of process and paperwork, because they are better at it.

• 54:30Patrick Bet-David?

  So how do you beat them?

• 54:30Speaker 03

  There's more of them. They wait you out. And I'll tell you another story that fits with this. Before the 2010 election, when we came into, before David Canberra became Prime Minister, you know, London's a small town, everyone's very centralised, everyone knows each other. And we had a lot of friends overlapping with the former Labour government of Tony Blair. Tony Blair, who really was a reformer.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  And we ended up having a meeting a couple of months before the election, myself and Tony Blair. And he said this incredibly interesting thing, and he'd been out of power for seven years by then, I think, or something like that. Maybe a bit less. And he said, look, there's this one thing you need to understand. All these senior officials around you, number two, they're very smart, very good people. But you've got to understand that they believe that it is their patriotic duty to stop you from doing whatever you want to do. Because they see themselves as the guardians of the national interest.

• 55:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  And, and their job is to stop these idiot here today, gone tomorrow politicians from doing their thing. He said, you've got to understand this. I didn't understand that till too late. And putting those two things together and looking at California today, the only answer actually is to massively reduce the size of these bureaus and just the because if there's fewer people doing less, there's less capacity.

• 56:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Easier said than done. I mean, the Doge idea was an idea that everybody supported until they tried to implement and then they stopped it four or five months later.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, but looking at California, you've got a couple of things. First of all, it's in a sense more manageable because it's you can get your arms around it to a certain extent.

• 56:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Some would even say it's harder because you've got forty-three to nine on represent. Like, how are you going to pass it when they got control on the majority on both sides?

• 56:24Speaker 03

  The governor sets the budget, right? That's the first, that's the main policymaking vehicle.

• 56:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Who do you need to approve the budget?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  The legislature, you work with the legislature, you have a line item veto. Yes, they can overturn a veto, two-thirds majority. Yeah, I know, but you write the budget, you submit the budget, that's the first move. A lot of that will be right at the beginning in January next year. Yes, you negotiate, of course, but let me just get to the point that you run the executive branch. You run these agencies, you appoint people to them, and you can direct their work through executive orders. It's true that a lot of it is set up through legislation. You can't just delete legislation you don't like. But actually, when you look at some of these bureaucracies, that's why you've got to do the preparation work.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Many of them have way exceeded what they were set up to do by the law in California. So you look at the CARB, the Air, I mentioned them, they're driving a lot of this climate stuff, the EV stuff and mandates for everything, the vehicle miles traveled, a lot of that is going. There's a way of looking at it that the most destructive agency has been this one, CARB, the Air Resources Board. That, it's been around for long before climate was the big driving ideological thing for the left. And so we just made an announcement, so I go back to Cal Doge. I spoke about the fraud reports that we've done, we've done five different fraud reports. We also didn't, we've only done one now, but we're going to be doing more of them, what I call bloat reports, where we're looking at the structure of the government.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  The first one we did was Nearly two weeks ago now, looking at the regulation of electricity in California. We have four separate agencies regulating electricity. Public Utilities Commission, the Energy Commission, something called CAISO, the Independent Service Operator, and CARB, the Air Resources Board. If you look at it on a per capita basis, California has thirty-five times the number of bureaucrats regulating electricity as other states, thirty-five times the number, just the numbers of people. The cost of that is one point two billion dollars before you even generate any electricity. So, we, obviously, there's massive scope to merge them, that's what we've proposed,

• 58:40Speaker 03

  to massively scale back these agencies. You can zero out their budgets or reduce them to very little. Yes, they can override that with a veto in the legislature. There hasn't been an override of a governor's veto since the nineteen eighties in California. It's actually kind of a tough thing to do, because as the governor, you've got the platform. They then have to defend it. And so, if you're really aggressive and you're well-prepared, and I'm both of those things, I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I think the real learning point for me from what happened in the UK was, you've got to be ferocious about this.

• 59:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I think when I went to Brazil and I was with Javier Yair Bolsonaro and his family, and we did a three-hour interview. At the end of the interview, they came in, tapped on his back, they said, "You're getting arrested." He had to finish the interview because he was getting arrested. Rob, you remember this, when we were in, where were we at in Brazil? What city? Brasilia. Brasilia, right in the headquarters, you know, where all the politicians are. They build the city like a communist city, so nobody wanted to go there, miles away from everybody else. But the thing that we looked at there is, how much the other side, with this guy named Alexandre de Moraes, who was like the most powerful guy in Brazil, he's like the Supreme Court god that everybody fears, you've seen his face, you know who he is, they control

• 59:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Senate, they control House, and he couldn't do nothing, okay? And they fought very hard. So, you're going into a market... Where you will be facing a lot of challenges and you're gonna need some people that are gonna wanna have massive change in the state. Right now, the polls, if we look at the polls, as of right now, I think you're at 21 points is where we have, when you look at the polls, I think you're at 21.

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, 22, 23, something like that.

• 1:00:25Patrick Bet-David?

  22 is where you're at as of right now. Then you got Becerra 21, then Steyer 15, then Bianco 5, and you got, you know, the rest of the camp, Katie Porter. But the reality of it is, if one of these guys drops out, you're all of a sudden second by, you know, if you go to Kalshi's report, Kalshi gives a completely different number if you go to Kalshi.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, for the winner.

• 1:00:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Kalshi, Javier's at 65, Steyer's at 23.7, and you're at 9.4%. And, you know, Vegas doesn't lose money. And that's $35 million of money that's been wagered.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Patrick Bet-David?

  So you need some major, major, like Spencer Pratt, word got out that Jeannie Buss is supporting him. This person is supporting, oh my God, all these different people that are supporting him. Have you gotten some weird calls? Has Arnold called you? Have you spoken to some of these guys?

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  I know Arnold well. I've known him for years, yeah.

• 1:01:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Have you had a conversation with him recently?

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Not recently, but we will. We know each other well, and I know his team very well.

• 1:01:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you have a relationship with Newsom as well?

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  I do know Kevin, yeah. No, I don't think it's a very cordial one anymore because I've been, you know, holding him responsible.

• 1:01:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Was it at one point cordial?

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Well, here's, the thing is that we, yeah, because we had some friends in common. Those first two years that we were here, I taught at Stanford, and we had some very good friends there, who, friends of the Newsoms from a family point of view. So that's how I know them. And that's long before I had anything to do with California politics, when he wasn't governor then. So I think that what you're describing is exactly right. Here's how I see it. Right now, we've got this governor's race, which is because of this top-two system, which means that the top-two candidates go forward regardless of party. It makes the whole thing kind of unclear and messy.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  And the entire conversation, not the entire, but a lot of the conversation, is actually about math and who's in the top-two and is it going to be two Democrats, is it going to be two Republicans, rather than the merits and the ideas and all of that. Once we're in the general election scenario, which we will be in a couple of weeks. Yep. And it does look like, I mean, I don't take anything for granted, I'm working even harder these last two weeks than the last year. But, you know, we're feeling confident, but, you know, still got to win it, people have to vote. But let's just assume I'm in the top-two and there's one other Democrat, looks like it's going to be Javier Becerra. Then it's a very different contest, then it's a real, you've got a clarity there.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  What are we going to do? Are we going to keep going with this, another four years of the same direction? And by the way, there's no one who, Javier Becerra, who's their leading candidate right now, he's kind of the living embodiment of more of the same Democrat machine. He's 36 years a career politician. I mean, he's done nothing else. He's a creature of the machine.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  In the LA mayoral race, you're already at that stage, this kind of gladiatorial contest, because Spencer, it's just Spencer against Karen Bass, basically. Nitia Raman is really imploding. And so there's a clarity there in LA, which we don't yet have in the governor's race, but soon we will. And I'm very confident that we'll get, you know, you're already seeing it, people who've never supported, I mean, Sergey Bryton is a good example. He's supporting me, he's also supported, and there's a lot of people who, in California...

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Have bought this narrative that a Republican can't win. So the best shot is a less crazy Democrat. And that's why there was a lot of support in the business community for this guy, Matt Mahan, who's the mayor of San Jose. But he's gone nowhere. And so I'm feeling confident that once it's me against Becerra, or even more so, me against Tom Steyer, you're going to see a lot of support. Because so many people are not Republicans, they say, we can't go on like this. I'm definitely seeing that in L.A.

• 1:04:28Patrick Bet-David?

  How many big?

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  For myself, you know, Hollywood people.

• 1:04:30Patrick Bet-David?

  How many Hollywood people are calling you and saying, look?

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  A lot, a lot.

• 1:04:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Big names?

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:36Patrick Bet-David?

  That would be seen as a liberal?

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:39Patrick Bet-David?

  And they're saying they would like to support?

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  And some have, I mean, some have co-hosted events for me.

• 1:04:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Such as?

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Well, I don't want to, look, they-

• 1:04:47Patrick Bet-David?

  They said co-hosted event is a public name, so it's not, it's not, it's a public name or private?

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Okay, Larry David's wife.

• 1:04:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  Ashley David, you know, Larry David is not by anyone's-

• 1:04:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Standard of conservatives.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:04:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  And there was, and you know, so she, absolutely, there you are, Ashley. And so, and there are others who I don't want to say because they haven't got to that point of saying it publicly.

• 1:05:14Patrick Bet-David?

  But they've called you and spoken to you?

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, and we've had meetings and I feel, and in the sports world as well, actually. And I feel very confident that once we're past the primary and it really is that clear choice, that it's going to be a whole different situation. And the whole thing that I'm saying is, I'm not an ideologue. I'm not a tribal kind of person, going back to where we started. I really am open, happy to sit down with anyone, work with anyone. It's just, I mean, it's an overused phrase, it really is just common sense. Let's just stop doing stupid things that make everything so expensive and so difficult.

• 1:05:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you, did you have a, like, when's the last time you had a conversation with Newsom?

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  We had a very brief conversation. I remember it actually.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  At the the second presidential debate in 2024. It was held at the Reagan Library. And they sent and the Biden people sent him in as a surrogate.

• 1:06:12Patrick Bet-David?

  I was there. It was a and he was going talking to everybody.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:06:14Patrick Bet-David?

  He was talking.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  That's all right. Well, he was literally going on on just just off the off to the side. We were both with Hannity that night. And so we had a quick conversation then.

• 1:06:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you whisper to him that you may run? Did anybody know?

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  We didn't. We didn't. I actually, I think we we actually ended up. I was still then working on the housing policy that we spoke about earlier. And if I can, if I'm right, I think we had a brief conversation about that. And then he connected me to one of his team members to maybe follow up on that and so on.

• 1:06:44Patrick Bet-David?

  How dismal you think his track record's been since he's been governor?

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Well, you just have to look at the facts. I mean, it's that we are the we are the worst performing state on every measure that matters. Like truly, we've.

• 1:06:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Under him.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you look at the. How else can you describe it? I mean, poverty, unemployment, cost of living, and then, you know, more qualitative measures. So US News and World Report ranks California 50th out of 50 states for opportunity. Think about that opportunity. I mean, that's supposed to be the definition.

• 1:07:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Last place for.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Last place. Wallet Hub 50th out of 50 for affordability. Chief Executive Magazine, they do an annual survey. California 50th out of 50. I think it's now 10 or 11 years in a row. It's just insane. Rhodes, I mentioned 50. It's not just that we're doing badly. We're the worst performer of all 50 states on almost everything that matters at the same time as they've doubled the budget. It's insane how badly that it's covered up because, of course, we're still an amazing state. I love California. We've got the most incredible advantages. Natural beauty, amazing people, diverse cities, great. It's a wonderful place to be, but it's a very tough place to be if you're a regular

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  working class Californian, if you're running a small business. That's why so much of what I'm talking about is very practical stuff to help. The first hundred grand tax free. There's a, it just seems like a small thing, but it's a big deal to small business owners. Remember I used to, you know, I started a couple of restaurants in London. Restaurant owners particularly hate some of this stuff. Eight hundred dollars a year they charge you just for existing. Every business in California has to pay a registration fee of eight hundred dollars a year. Now, that may not sound like a lot if you're, of course, and it isn't a lot if you're Anthropic or Google or whatever, but if you're a small business and you're not making any money, you're just getting going, it's actually really tough. It's

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  simple things like that that we just need to do to make life less of a struggle for everybody.

• 1:08:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, what happened recently, this is like a few days ago with Javier Becerra's strategic Dana Williamson, who used to be the previous chief of staff, I believe, for Newsom, just got three felonies. This is just a few days ago.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is a really.

• 1:09:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Big scandal.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  It is a big scandal. I mean, it's little, here's, here's what happened. Becerra was appointed, he was the California Attorney General. He was appointed by Biden to be Health Secretary, HHS, at the beginning of the Biden term. Becerra wanted to take his chief of staff, a guy called Sean McCluskey, with him to DC. He was gonna be too, he was gonna, the salary wasn't high enough and there was, this guy wanted to come back and forth to his family. And so they wanted more money for this guy to be able to go with Becerra. The salary was the salary, whatever the federal salary is. So they cook up this

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  scheme to take ten grand a month from Becerra's California campaign account, transfer it to a consulting firm run by this person Dana Williamson, and then that money, that ten grand, goes straight out the door to the guy's wife, to Sean McCluskey's wife. So it's like a backhanded way of topping up his pay. That's against California campaign finance law because the you can't use campaign money for anything other than campaign expenses. And it's against federal law because you can't get income from another source. Now, the argument from Becerra is he didn't know about any of this.

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

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• 1:12:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Can we see what she looks like? Can you go a little bit lower? Now, do you think he knew about this?

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  I

• 1:13:04Patrick Bet-David?

  What are the chances he knew about this?

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  I can't believe that he didn't know. I mean, look, his argument is, I'm not in the indictment. I'm not in the federal indictment. And the federal indictment says he didn't know. Katie Porter, who's been very aggressive on this and some of the other Democrat candidates, is saying, it's ridiculous. And just because you haven't been indicted yet, doesn't mean you won't be. And just on a human level, feels to me, impossible to believe that he didn't know. The whole point of the scheme was to enable him to take his chief of staff with him to Washington. That's the whole reason for doing it.

• 1:13:41Patrick Bet-David?

  So he knew?

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Well, I've, who knows? I mean, he's saying he didn't.

• 1:13:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Is that it, Rob? That clip right there between the two of them?

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Yes, that's the one.

• 1:13:50Patrick Bet-David?

  I wouldn't mind seeing it, but I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of ads that's going to come on first. Within three, two, one, there's an ad. Yeah. So, um, so if something like this is tied to him, how big of a scandal would this be for him?

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  Well, this is what a lot of the Democrat rivals have been saying. What, you're going to nominate this guy who then could be indicted in the middle of his campaign? For governor.

• 1:14:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you go to the part where Katie Porter's calling him out? Fast forward a little bit to where Katie Porter

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  So my, my line is more of a political. I say, look, you shouldn't be in this race. You should be preparing your criminal defense.

• 1:14:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Is this it? Go for it. Press play. Respectfully, Mr. Becerra, you

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  Your quote at the end drifted off a little bit from the words. What the quote was, was that you had not been mentioned in the charging documents, that is, in the indictment of Dana Williamson, your long-term chief of staff, Sean McCluskey or Greg Campbell. But as you know, that does not preclude, because you are also a trained attorney, you know that does not preclude an indictment from being issued against you. We do not know what Dana Williamson said about your involvement and the government will have the ability to reveal that later. Right, in the same way I did it when I was Attorney General. We established a bureau that dealt with Medi-Cal fraud, working with the federal government.

• 1:15:20Speaker 05

  Unfortunately, Trump is a problem, because Trump took a trillion dollars out of the healthcare system, out of the Medicare, or the, excuse me, Medicaid and the Medi-Cal system. Trump is now trying to deprive California of another billion dollars in healthcare for Medi-Cal. He doesn't have the right to do that.

• 1:15:37Patrick Bet-David?

  He's not answering the question, he just went to a different place.

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So that's their, that's their argument. And it's not just Katie, it's also Antonio Varego, so the former mayor of LA, making that argument very strongly, like, this guy could be indicted. It's a massive risk to have him as your candidate. That's their argument.

• 1:15:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, it was overnight when he all of a sudden spiked up.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, when Swalwell dropped out.

• 1:15:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, when Swalwell dropped.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  Everyone was surprised, no one expected it.

• 1:16:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so the worry today Democrats have in California is, holy shit.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:16:05Patrick Bet-David?

  If something happens here, is it Katie? Because they're worried about Katie, she's a wild card.

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  Well, she seems to be fading.

• 1:16:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it going to be Steyer?

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  It looks like Steyer is the, I mean, look at the data, I mean, it's me and Becerra, on most of the polls, me and Becerra at the top, then there's a gap, then it's Tom Steyer, then there's another gap, it's everyone else. There was one poll last week, which I take very seriously, it's that one, there's the second one there, Emerson College, which had basically a three-way tie at the top. Myself, Becerra and Steyer, all roughly the same. And so, yeah, you see it there, 2019, 18. So...

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Most of the polls are not that. Most of them show this gap between myself and Becerra and Sty, but Sty is definitely number two and Katie Porter is well below. So I don't know. I mean, look, things have changed very quickly. It feels like we're less than two weeks to the election. Voting's already started. It feels very unlikely to me that Katie Porter's gonna pop back up.

• 1:17:09Patrick Bet-David?

  It would be catastrophic for Democrats if she does. It would be phenomenal for you if she pops up. You would love a Katie Porter opposition. It would be great for TV because to me, she's gifted. She's a natural villain to the core. She's so phenomenal. I mean, she will get a job the day she doesn't make it to The View, and she'll bring the type of views to The View they haven't seen for a long time. I think she is that talented. Natural. By the way, what do you say about Chad Bianco? Because I have a lot of friends from Kern County, a guy named Ricky Aguilar, and who's spoken to Chad Bianco, and they've had different conversations. And a lot of Californians love Chad Bianco because he has got more. He's an OG Californian, so people will say, Steve's not a Californian.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Well, no, he's not an OG. He's an immigrant as well.

• 1:17:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Where did he come from?

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  I think he's from Utah, is it?

• 1:17:57Patrick Bet-David?

  How long has he been in California?

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Longer than me, a lot longer. No, that's fair enough.

• 1:18:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah. So, hey, you know, he is in the system. He has done this. He has done that. But it's at a phase right now where he's kind of calling you out a little bit. You're not really saying much about him. But what do you say about Chad Bianco? Because I think he's got a lot of respect from a certain audience in California.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's an election. We're winning. At this point, it's not about, I've nothing against Chad personally. We have perfectly good personal relationship. And it's just a simple point now. We're less than two weeks to the election. The time for a kind of debate over who'd be better and who's got, on most policies, we completely agree, to be honest. And you can see that in the debates. And you'd expect that in a way. But it's beyond that now. It's like, we've got to be real about this situation.

• 1:18:52Speaker 03

  If that other poll is correct, the Emerson poll, or let's say it's closer to that reality, which is a three-way tie, then there is a very real possibility of the outcome of this primary being two Democrats, Per Sarah and Steyer. That is not, that is not an impossibility. I don't think it's likely, it's not the most likely outcome, but it's certainly not impossible. And so that's why I'm going all out, you know, we've got to get a, if you have two Democrats in the top two, imagine that in California, no chance for change, they'll be outbidding each other on the left to pander to the unions and the activists, right, be going further and further left.

• 1:19:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you suggesting Bianco drop out?

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 1:19:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Have you spoken to him?

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  I've tried, yeah, no, well, I've, I've reached out to him and, and we were gonna meet and then it didn't come together. I, look, I, I wrote a piece for the California Post about this just two days ago. It seems to me he's not in that place. That's of course his right, but we've just got to be real here. There isn't, just like we said, it doesn't look as if Katie Porter's gonna get there, up, up into the top two, same with Chad. So, and whatever, what reason for that, and doesn't matter, we are where we are.

• 1:20:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Could Sliwa drop out at the end, Rob, or no, in New York? Do you remember when it was him, Cuomo and Mamdani, did Sliwa ever drop out? Do you remember that?

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 1:20:17Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't think he dropped out, I think he went to the very end. He didn't. He didn't, he was offered 10 million to withdraw, well, that's the story that he told, I remember that, yeah. So, he didn't drop out, and obviously we know who ended up winning, which is Mamdani.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:30Patrick Bet-David?

  So in this case, it'll be interesting, because the president has already endorsed you, right?

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  He has, yeah.

• 1:20:34Patrick Bet-David?

  He has. How recent was the endorsement from the president?

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  That was Easter Monday, I remember it very, it was a very, a very memorable day for me, yeah.

• 1:20:41Patrick Bet-David?

  And I'm sure in the next, you know, two weeks, he's probably gonna make some more noise and put you out there as well, because we saw the president's endorsement two nights ago was 37-0. So he's got a pretty good track record still today, and no matter how much people say about him, when he endorses somebody, he carries a lot of weight. So, that'd be interesting to see. So he said two weeks, today's what, today's May 22nd or 23rd? What is today's date, Rob?

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  May 21st. 21st.

• 1:21:07Patrick Bet-David?

  So if it's the 21st today, the day is what, June 2nd? June 2nd, yeah. That you guys are voting, yeah. And then you're going?

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  Well, voting's now.

• 1:21:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Right, it is. And then you got 166 days to the whole shebang if you're in it.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, look, I'm feeling confident. And it's, you know, it's a weird thing for me to, I hate talking like this because I just feel, I've never run for office before. I have this, this, I don't quite understand how, and it's funny, people coming up to you, I voted for you. It's an amazing, it's a real, it's very humbling, truly. I know it's a cliche, a little bit of a pompous thing to say, but that's truly how I feel about it. And a strong sense of responsibility. People put a lot of faith in you. But that question of, okay, yeah, if these polls are coming out and I'm leading in the polls, great. How that turns into actual votes is something that, you know, I, I just don't take for granted at all. So we're going to be fighting very hard.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Keep raising money, keep getting our message out, right until the end. But it's, it's close now.

• 1:22:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Here's a question for you. Here's a question for you. So 441 businesses have left. Relocated since 2018.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  There's got to be many more than that.

• 1:22:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, that's the number of big businesses. Fox Business 2026 reported on this. Net domestic loss, 3 million people net since 2010 to 24. And then we know they lost another trillion dollars that left with the new wealth tax that they have in place. Here's an idea for you. Sergey Brin endorsed you, right? He's a, he's a guy that came out and he's worth a couple hundred billion dollars. I think he moved in Miami, bought a 200 million dollar property. He's building something for himself. Ken Griffin left Illinois. He came down here, Mamdani, tried to dox him with his property that he lives in. There's a lot of weird things that's going on. We saw now Mamdani's trying to beg people to come back. We're seeing the mayor of Seattle, Rob, if I'm not mistaken. She is now worried about Seattle leaving, Starbucks leaving. Hey, can you please come back?

• 1:22:58Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think about hosting an event in the state of California? And here's the event.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Patrick Bet-David?

  The event is calling some of these businesses that have left.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:23:07Patrick Bet-David?

  And bringing them back for an event in California. Cause I lived in California 24 years, five years down, five years here. I lived in Glendale, California. I went to Glendale High School, class of 96. So I lived there since 1990. I'm an OGLA guy. But imagine if you run an event and you say Sergey Brin, all these business, they're in Texas, they're in Florida, they're in Tennessee, they're in Nevada, all of them, Mark Wahlberg, who's down here right now, who is an LA guy, he moved to Vegas. And you ask these guys, and these are conversations you have before, and say, "What can we do to bring you back?" So if an event like that took place.

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Where you are now bringing customers back.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Patrick Bet-David?

  All the people in California that are worried about the big business owners leaving, now they're gonna say, "Maybe this is the guy that can do something with that."

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  I love that. And that's how I feel. Like, when I think about the campaign and the story of what we need to do to bring California back, there's different levels of it, different ways you look at it. For example, there's the campaign, there's the simple promises and commitments you make that are gonna help people in their practical, when their daily life. That's the campaign. I call it CalAffordable. $3 gas, cut your electric bill in half, etc., right? Then you look at, as we talked about earlier, what are the underlying policy drivers that you gotta deal with in terms of the chaos and cost? Climate, extremism, litigation, unions, we talked about that.

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  But actually, when you think, well, what's the mission? What's the really, what's the central mission? That's gotta happen, that's gotta be achieved if we're gonna turn things around. It actually is this point about the business climate. Because without that, we don't have anything. That's the underlying.

• 1:25:05Patrick Bet-David?

  If you can bring customers back.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. And if we make it really clear that we are now not...

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  We are not just not hostile to businesses, we are now, but we are positively gonna roll out the red carpet. We want you back. We wanna make your life easier. What can I do to help? That's how I see my role as governor, is being there to help business create jobs and wealth and opportunity. In California, that's actually the central mission. Everything else will flow from that. Because if you do the things that will make California, once again, the best place to start and grow a business, then all those other things will happen. So I love that. I hadn't actually, and I've got some very serious conversations going on.

• 1:25:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Visual, just think about that event visually.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is beautiful. I love that.

• 1:25:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Pick a great location, pick a great spot, they're all sitting there, and they're talking, these are all, you put them expats, I don't know where you want it, you gotta find a unique thing to put, like, ex-Californians who left, and they're in different spaces, that who love Rogan, Musk, you know, you got Sergey, you got all these guys.

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Patrick Bet-David?

  If it gets to that point, because if you can, if you can convince people who left, those are the biggest stories. Because let's talk about the wealth tax, right? Hey, let's tax these billionaires. We're in Aspen, and all of a sudden, I get a story comes out saying, they need this 882,000 signatures to be able to pass on a 5% wealth tax. I'm like, of course they're gonna get the signatures. What do you mean? Because it's only 200 billionaires. Of course they're gonna come up with this. So guess what ends up happening? They get 1 and 1/2 million plus signatures on a 5% tax. So that's gonna be on it for people to vote, and then one by one by one, people like Bryn and others are leaving saying, you're not gonna tax me on this, I'm outta here, right?

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Patrick Bet-David?

  And then yesterday, Jeff Bezos is doing an interview with Sorkin, which by the way, I thought this was a phenomenal, phenomenal interview. If you haven't watched his whole thing, you ought to put it on the list of things to watch the next couple of days. Here's what he had to say about taxes. Go ahead, Rob.

• 1:27:10Speaker 05

  And Elizabeth Warren has made this point repeatedly, I think she's made a reference to you and others, are able to pay a lower tax rate, even though you're paying an enormous sum in taxes, a lower tax rate than maybe I am, for example. These people sometimes say that, you know, I don't pay taxes. It's not true. I pay

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  Billions of dollars in taxes. And it's a perfect, again, if people want me to pay more billions. Right. Then let's have that debate. But don't pretend, you know, that this, that that's going to solve the problem. You could, you could double the taxes I pay and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you. This is, so you can't connect those two things, not logically. You know, there, there, there are more examples. Why is rent expensive? Why is rent so expensive? I recently saw somebody blamed it on Airbnb. Okay. Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent. In fact, it's been almost, no, let me finish here, one sec. It's already been outlawed. Right. In New York City and rents are still very high.

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  So we know Airbnb isn't causing high rents. What's really causing high rent is government intervention. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:28:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Thoughts on what he had to say?

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  Well, 100% correct. And we are the proof of that in California because we have taxed the rich in California. That's one of the reasons that our fiscal situation is such a mess in California with massive volatility in, in state revenue and year to year because so much of it is dependent on the stock market because so much of it is dependent on the wealthy. I mean, the number is something like the top 1% of California earners pay about 50% of the, of the income, of the income tax. And so that's already happening in California. And as we said earlier, they've doubled the budget. Look what happened to school results.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  I mean, he's bragging Newsom about $28,000 per student per year for the, for the public schools and the results are terrible. So that's exactly right. It's not, and, and we've been through all the reasons. And Bezos is right that the drivers of these costs. In California, certainly on housing, is all these endless regulations and concessions to the groups that control the Democrat politicians, the unions, the climate activists, that's the lawyers, that's how we've got to this point.

• 1:29:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I mean, look, when you're seeing, he continues to say the top 1% pays 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pays 3%, and he should, I think that should be even zero. Rob, if you go to that one, on percent taxes, yeah, there's another clip, it's not going to be a quarrel, there's one that you have to find, Rob, where he says the, go to the one with Mamdani, see if it's that one, go back and see if it's the Mamdani one.

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

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• 1:31:10Speaker 04

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• 1:32:09Speaker 05

  Millions of dollars in taxes. And it's a perfect... Again, if people want me to pay more billions...

• 1:32:15Patrick Bet-David?

  There was a part that he specifically says. Go to his account. Go to Bezos' ex-account. Just tap in Jeff Bezos. Go to his account.

• 1:32:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Because I think this is becoming more and more logical. Second one. There you go.

• 1:32:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Go a little bit lower. Go lower, lower, lower. He writes it in the account, in the video. That's it. So he puts, yes, do you not... Okay, press this one. See if it's the same one or if it's a different one.

• 1:32:42Speaker 05

  Start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes. Why is somebody... At all. Why is some... Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?

• 1:32:57Speaker 05

  That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:33:01Speaker 05

  And so... And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes. It's only 3%. We can find 3%. So we don't have... It's a small amount of money for the government. You know, that... And really, it's... And the more I thought about it, to me, it's kind of absurd that we're doing this. You know, we shouldn't be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her and a... We'll talk about...

• 1:33:36Patrick Bet-David?

  This aligns with what you're saying. No taxes under $100,000.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  Right, right. Because look at California's tax schedule, right? Where you look at the rates. It's insane. You start paying... I think that his numbers are right. You start at 72 grand of income.

• 1:33:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  You're starting to pay in California 9.3% state income tax. That is higher than the top rate in most states of America. At seventy-two grand, I think it kicks in.

• 1:34:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  It's just insane.

• 1:34:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Nine-three on seventy, so I'm paying seven thousand dollars on seventy-two K. I could have kept that money. Car payment, food, gas, whatever it is that stays with me.

• 1:34:17Speaker 03

  It's really bad.

• 1:34:17Patrick Bet-David?

  It's a common sense idea that you have. So, by the way, what do you stand with the, you know, the rail, the high-speed rail that he was supposed to build?

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  I was just there. I lost track of the days, two days ago. We just stood in front of, literally a bridge to nowhere. If you, I drive up and down the Central Valley all the time. It's the ninety-nine highway or the five freeway. It's mostly in the middle, the ninety-nine. And we haven't put it out yet, so you won't find this, but the, the infrastructure they've built is just, you could see up and down.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  It's, here are the numbers. So, they said that it would be open by twenty-twenty. Two and a half hours, San Francisco to LA. And total cost of thirty billion. Here's the latest, they laughably call it a business plan. This was just published like two weeks ago by the High-Speed Rail Authority. Budget from thirty billion to two-hundred-and-thirty-one billion, the budget. The plan is now, from San Francisco to Merced, which is at the top of the, you go inland, top of the Central Valley. That's on the existing trains, not high-speed. Then you get on the high-speed train at Merced, and you go down to Bakersfield, high-speed train. Then, Bakersfield to LA, bus.

• 1:35:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop.

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  Bus.

• 1:35:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Who, who?

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  That's the, that's the business plan.

• 1:35:47Patrick Bet-David?

  There is no way that's what they're saying.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  That's the plan.

• 1:35:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Four to two-hundred-and-thirty-one billion?

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:35:51Patrick Bet-David?

  So, they went from the two and a half hours to me having to have multiple stops before I go to San Francisco?

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  And like I point out, the two and a half hours, sometimes you'll do that just from Baker, if you're driving, Bakersfield to LA can take that long.

• 1:36:03Patrick Bet-David?

  There is no way that's what they're saying.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  That is.

• 1:36:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Rob, zoom in, let me see. The revised draft plan outlines a commitment of full non-stop, high-speed connection between LA and Bay Area by twenty-thirty-nine. Construction span, one-hundred-and-ninety miles. No, go a little bit lower, because I'm trying to see, is there a stop? Future long-term extensions connect North Sacramento, East Sacramento?

• 1:36:24Patrick Bet-David?

  There is no way they're telling you to go, come back with a bus and then go to...

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  That's the thing, if you look up bus, there's a whole...

• 1:36:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Caltrans consider 140 mile an hour bus, that's a different story, Rob.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  That's a different story.

• 1:36:38Patrick Bet-David?

  If that is true, that is pathetic.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  It is true.

• 1:36:42Patrick Bet-David?

  That is absolutely pathetic if that's what they're saying.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  It was older, this is the business plan, this was a couple of years, a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:36:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  So, it's insane.

• 1:36:55Patrick Bet-David?

  What would you do?

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  And also another thing, bullshit, sorry, I mean, the things he says, so he did a press conference,

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  I don't know when it was, a couple of months ago. He's trying to sort of, because obviously the only thing he cares about, Newsom, is running for president. That's very obvious. And so he's trying to clean it all up. So they did a event there where he stood in front of trains, just some engines, to make it look as if he was doing something with actual trains. And he was trying to announce that they were doing laying of tracks. Because one of the points that we make is that this is, you know, like, more than a decade into it, two decades, nearly.

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  And there's no track been laid. They've built a bunch of stuff, but no tracks. And he was trying to announce that he was doing tracks. But even then, he actually, if you look at his words, he didn't say "we're laying tracks", he said "we are entering the track-laying phase". There's gaslighting over this, it's just, there we are, look, a critical step in the track-laying stage. They're not actually laying tracks, this is how they do, and it's just insane. And by the way, they're still pretending this is realistic and gonna happen, and we are still paying for it. So, earlier I mentioned the cap-and-trade thing, cap-and-trade scheme, which is one big component of the high gas prices.

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  On top of the gas tax, there's this thing called cap-and-invest, which is the carbon-trading ridiculous bureaucratic scheme. It's basically a tax on energy production and use.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  One quarter of that goes to high-speed rail.

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  So we're still paying for it. I mean, the federal bit has been ended.

• 1:38:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Good idea, bad idea.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  The high-speed rail?

• 1:38:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  High-speed rail is, in other places, works well. In Europe, it works really well. I've used it a lot. It doesn't work, it doesn't make sense in California because of the way that we've developed in California. Because you could take a train from, let's say, let's say it all worked fine. You have San Francisco to LA. Well, where, when you get to LA, what do you do? Let's say it's Union Station, which is, you know, over downtown LA. It's like another forty-five minutes to get to.

• 1:39:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Anywhere.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  The west side or whatever. So what, what, what do you do then? We're just not, it's not how Califor-- this is what I really, it's a really good example of what's gone wrong in California, which is they've been trying to impose ideological blueprints on practical life as it's lived. They, they have this ideology, which is they want everyone in trains, public transportation, cycling, walking. Let's be more like Europe. That's what, because of climate, that's why I say the climate stuff is a real driver. Let's be more like Europe. Let's have density. That's not how California was built. And whether you like it or not, the way that California was developed was outwards.

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  And that's a part of the beauty of California life. A single-family home, you have a yard, the kids can play outside, enjoy the weather. That's just how we grew. And so this doesn't, this model of public transit doesn't work in California. You just have to, you'd have to sort of completely redo. No, in certain cities, San Francisco, very dense. You get, it works there. But even then, how do people get around in San Francisco? I mean, yeah, there's the Mooney and the, whatever, but people, now you've got Waymo. And you've got so many, you know, it just doesn't make sense in terms of, of how people are gonna, even on their original estimate.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  I looked into it for my book. When they actually sold high-speed rail, they did sell it as a getting cars off the road idea. Who's doing this drive? I mean, people fly.

• 1:40:58Patrick Bet-David?

  That's crazy to even think about. I mean, I know Palmdale, I know Bakersfield, I know Fresno, I know all these streets, all these cities. I've driven all over this place because I was selling insurance for 20 years.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:09Patrick Bet-David?

  And, you know, so.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  Also, here's another thing, just really annoying. So you look at that map there, the bit that goes down to Anaheim, which is a fantasy. This is just insane. They can't even build the... Okay, if you look at that map, the easiest bit from Maced to Bakersfield through the Central Line, totally flat, nothing, you know, that's taken forever and nothing's happened.

• 1:41:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Let alone in the city.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Right. Or through, that's why they're doing the bus. Because from Bakersfield to, you know, the other side, you've got big mountains there. That's hard engineering-wise, which they haven't figured out. And then the Anaheim bit, which is just a fantasy, the other week, they published an environmental impact report. Here's a really good example of the bloat and nonsense in California. They published an environmental impact report for this leg of the thing from LA to Anaheim that no one thinks is gonna happen. The summary of the environmental impact report, just for that, was 100 pages. Someone's paying for that, like some consult... Well, we're paying for it. That's what I mean.

• 1:42:18Speaker 03

  There's no check or control on this bloat in the government. They keep... Because they don't have people who think like that. They don't have business-minded people who look at all this and say, "What are you doing? Why are we commissioning an environmental impact report for something that everyone knows is never gonna happen?"

• 1:42:36Patrick Bet-David?

  I want to show you something, and I want to wrap up on this. Here's a clip from Newsom, okay? And he says some things that a lot of people have been taking in a weird way. I want to see how you interpret this. He says he has a secret plan to break the glass. Rob, if you want to play this clip for the audience to see. And I don't know if he's talking about you, I don't know if he's talking about, you know, whatever, because, look, a candidate running Republican, that smile that he has, he looks like he's up to something. Go ahead, Rob.

• 1:43:04Speaker 05

  But you spoke about accountability. Do you think Democrats will hold you accountable for standing by this principle of neutrality by withholding your endorsement in this non-possible scenario where you're up against take the ticket? Yeah, look, my focus has been making sure that doesn't happen, and I've exercised, not just a focus, but I've exercised through... Some action efforts to uh to encourage that doesn't happen by making my case and um and will continue to make my case. I do not see that scenario taking place. I've said this before, so I'll repeat it. I don't anticipate this need to be the case, but there is a break the glass scenario. And I there's many people that have a deep understanding of what it would look like if Democrats were locked out.

• 1:43:48Speaker 05

  And we're gonna do everything to make sure that doesn't happen.

• 1:43:51Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think he means by that?

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  I think what he means is that um because remember it's all about him. It's only about him. It's only about his presidential ambitions. It's the only thing he cares about. I think what he wants is two Democrats in the top two. Because if there's if I'm in the top two, he knows that the rest of this campaign, a big part of it will be a prosecution of his record. Because that's the whole argument.

• 1:44:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Going into election.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, we so he's. All this stuff that we're talking about will be even louder volume because I will be there saying, we can't go on like this. This is insane. We are done with this. We cannot have another four years of this.

• 1:44:39Speaker 03

  Whereas if it's two Democrats, none of that, his record won't be an issue. It'll be like, you know, are we gonna have single payer healthcare? Are we gonna tax? How much are we gonna tax the rich, etcetera? The other point is this, if I'm in the top two, if there's a Republican in the top two, then there's a chance, of course, that I'll win. I believe I can win. We haven't really talked about my path to victory, but I I can see it. Because and it starts with the fact that you've now got a majority, a clear majority of Californians who think it's time for change. Who who think the state's on the wrong track. That's the starting point. And then if you look at the numbers of votes that you need, even President Trump in California, without campaigning there in 2024, got more votes in California than I would need to win in a midterm year.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  And there's there's other things, the fact that we've got voter ID on the ballot in November in California. That's gonna bring out a lot of Republican voters and so on. So I can see a path to victory, and that's Newsom's worst nightmare. Imagine if if this is the scenario in early 2027, just as he's launching his presidential campaign.

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  You've got a Republican taking over as governor. He's just lost California to Republicans. That is it. And, and as I'm cleaning up the mess that he's left behind, I will be exposing what he's done in the process of cleaning it up, which will be a disaster for his presidential campaign. So he wants to avoid that at all costs. What he wants is Steyer Besseram. So I think what's going on here is that he is raising the specter of two Republicans in order to continue to give Republicans hope that that can happen. In other words, encouraging Republicans to try and get to Republican voters, to try and get two Republicans in the top two

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  by voting, by continuing to vote for Chad Bianco. I think that's what's going on here.

• 1:46:31Patrick Bet-David?

  So you're, okay, got it. So the more Bianco goes up, you go down, then the top two will become Democrats.

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:46:39Patrick Bet-David?

  That's their strategy.

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  Yes. Because he's desperate to see two Democrats.

• 1:46:45Patrick Bet-David?

  What, what do you know about Steyer? Because he also came out of nowhere.

• 1:46:48Speaker 03

  What I know is-

• 1:46:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Billionaire Steyer, you know?

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  The billionaire climate. Here's a couple of things. First of all, we talk about costs and he keeps going on about affordability.

• 1:46:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  Most of the climate stuff that I'm talking about that's given us this insane gas prices, electric bills and so on, housing costs. It goes back to a piece of legislation passed in 2006, AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act. A lot of this framework was set up then. The cap and trade system, all of this. In 2010, four years after it was passed, there was a ballot initiative to overturn it. And the main funder of that ballot initiative, the opposition to it, was Tom Steyer.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  So we could have avoided all this pain and cost, but it was Tom Steyer who defeated that initiative. So he's honestly, you could, there's a way you could put it, which is, he is personally responsible for this insane level of cost of everything in California. The other thing we know about him is how obsessed he is with trying to get elected to something. In this campaign for governor, the numbers are published all the time. Here's the latest, here's how much he's spent. One hundred and ninety-three million dollars.

• 1:48:06Patrick Bet-David?

  In this?

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  Yes, since like when he entered the race, I don't know, November.

• 1:48:10Patrick Bet-David?

  In this?

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  Yes, one hundred and ninety-three million, that's his latest filing. Okay, one hundred and ninety-two point four.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

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• 1:49:33Speaker 06

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• 1:50:19Speaker 04

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:50:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh my god.

• 1:50:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  So far. Not even, you haven't even got to the primary.

• 1:50:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh my goodness. And, I mean, listen, fire your marketing team. Hundred and ninety-two million dollars? Spencer Pratt could have done it for you for three hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:51:05Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:51:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh my god. Hundred and ninety-two million dollars. And where is he at on the polls?

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  He's, he's third.

• 1:51:14Patrick Bet-David?

  You're two, he's three.

• 1:51:16Speaker 03

  That's, look at the, look at that one. This is, they're mostly like this one that you're just seeing there.

• 1:51:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. Got it. So he's three. And Bianco's at 10 for this one.

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Man, if you're gross, what a disappointment. One percent. Like, literally, nobody wants him. Nobody. At one point, he was so famous, popular, you know, he would walk around.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  I like it, by the way.

• 1:51:36Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you like about him?

• 1:51:37Speaker 03

  I just like it. I look, I get on with it, most people. But there's something, I like Antonio. He's, um, I think his heart's in the right place. He's definitely challenged the Democrat orthodoxy in a lot of issues. He challenged the teacher unions on education. He's actually the only one who's really called out the climate stuff. He's talked about opening up oil production.

• 1:51:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Why is he doing so bad?

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  I don't know, it's interesting, because you know, you'd think he's run, you know,

• 1:52:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Mayor of LA, yeah, it's a heavyweight.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  I don't know. I truly don't know. But I like him.

• 1:52:10Patrick Bet-David?

  All right, sounds good. I think there was some strategy endorsement there for Villagrosa. You like him and we'll see what happened there. But final thoughts here for Californians. If they want to support, what can they do? How can they support you if they want to help?

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  So first, vote. You've got to vote. I mean, none of this stuff will happen unless we vote for it. And I think one of the big things that we have to have to make this change in California is belief that it's possible. Because I think people have got conditioned to this idea that, well, a Republican can't win. And so you're stuck with this choice of putting up with the insanity or leaving the state. And that's a terrible choice. It's a ridiculous choice. And that idea that things can't change. I mean, I say this sometimes as a new American citizen. It's a very un-American attitude. That you just can't, it can't be done. Of course it can be done. It's obvious that it needs to be done.

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  It's obvious that we need change, that we need balance. But you've got to vote for it. And one of the reasons I've been so, you know, I've been campaigning so hard and up and down the state for a year now, working really hard, is just to give that sense of energy and belief. And so number one is vote, vote, vote. And tell all your friends, we've got to do this and come out of this primary with energy. And we always need money. Look, we don't have stier money. We don't have any of that. We're very frugal. It's a lean startup kind of deal. But we're spending a little bit on advertising and we've got to get that message out because, you know, if the truth is somewhere between those polls, then it's it's still too close for comfort. And you could end up with this two Democrat scenario,

• 1:53:51Speaker 03

  which is a disaster for California and for the country. Because we can't have our biggest state, our most beautiful, amazing state that's generated so much incredible. Innovation and leadership for America from Hollywood to tech to our great farming industry, life sciences, biotech, you know, just so much that comes out of California. And imagine how great it would be for our country if we have a California that is firing on all cylinders again.

• 1:54:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. What most people don't know since the last hundred years, I just pulled it up with the team, what percentage of the last hundred years in the state of California, the governor was a Republican versus a Democrat?

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  I don't know the answer.

• 1:54:32Patrick Bet-David?

  You know, sixty-one percent?

• 1:54:33Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:54:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Republican, only thirty-nine percent Democrat.

• 1:54:36Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 1:54:37Patrick Bet-David?

  And if you look at all time, Republican twenty to seventeen, I think it's time for California to go back to what it is to your original Republican governor days. We had an Armenian governor, Duke Median. I don't know if you knew that or not.

• 1:54:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Duke Median, yeah.

• 1:54:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, he was a, he was a governor.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  Well, Glendale, very big.

• 1:54:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Massive, massive Armenian. And by the way, there's some crazy Armenians that aren't leftists, joined the trans LGBTQ camp, but there's a lot of Armenians to the core that raise their kids in a conservative way.

• 1:55:06Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:55:07Patrick Bet-David?

  And I hope they get behind you.

• 1:55:08Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:55:09Patrick Bet-David?

  And folks, if you want to support, I saw the number, thirty thousand plus donors already, right?

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  No, no, no. Oh, no, sixty-five thousand.

• 1:55:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Sixty-five thousand, okay. The report here says thirty. Sixty-five thousand plus donors.

• 1:55:20Speaker 03

  And probably more. I mean, it's, that's one of the most beautiful things. I've never run for anything before, and we've gone from nothing to a really-

• 1:55:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Sixty-five thousand from nothing to it.

• 1:55:28Speaker 03

  That was the last number that we put out.

• 1:55:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Great.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Go visit the site, stevehiltonforgovernor.com. And if you enjoyed what was talked about today and you want to see more support, share this message with others, share the link with others, give financially, knock on doors, talk about it at dinners, talk to your friends, talk to your peers, get the message out there. Steve, excited to see what happens with you the next two weeks.

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  Thank you, man.

• 1:55:54Patrick Bet-David?

  You're obviously doing the work and I wish you nothing but the best.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  Really wonderful to be with you. Thank you.

• 1:55:58Patrick Bet-David?

  And I look forward to that event you do.

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  Yes, that's great.

• 1:56:00Patrick Bet-David?

  For people from California.

• 1:56:01Speaker 03

  Well, you'll be there, right?

• 1:56:02Patrick Bet-David?

  I look forward to you doing that event. I think it's a massive publicity stunt for everybody to say, are these people really talking about bringing their money back? I think that would be massive and a lot of Californians would support it.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:56:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Great having you on, sir. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye, bye-bye.

• 1:56:19Speaker 06

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• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger: Fresh for Everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.

• 1:57:20Speaker 04

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:57:49Speaker 00

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