Steve Hilton talks California’s future and his plan to shake up state government

You've said you want to abolish the DMV. How would that make things better for Californians? I'm a great believer in learning from places that do things well, benchmarking, as you would call it in business. And so most states don't have a DMV. We're very unusual in having a self-standing bureaucracy like this. Of course, it drives people crazy. It's one of the most hated parts of the government in California. And it represents, I think, exactly what we need to move away from, this bloated, inefficient, government service that treats people with complete contempt as if everyone's got hours to spend hanging around the DMV being treated like by bureaucrats I mean that's that's what is the DMV um and it's it's a symbol of the government as a whole and that's why I think people are so um excited to hear that actually we don't have to put up with that we don't have to live like that most states don't have that about 40 or so states don't have a DMV or self-standing bureaucracy to do those functions and so what I want to do is make sure that we look we learn from which states are doing it best and and follow that model and some of the functions can be if you look around both other states and around the world um look you've got Estonia for example like decades ago moved most of their government functions entirely online and so I think that We're way behind the curve in doing things in an efficient and consumer-friendly manner. We've got great innovation, led from California, in terms of what happens in the world outside of government. It's only when it comes to government, it seems, that we put up with these antiquated bureaucratic systems. And I think that we need to change. And we need to have the government providing services in as cost-effective and delightful way as many of us are used to in the rest of our lives what states specifically have a better system like are there specific examples all of them but is there is there like one in particular and what what metric no that's a benchmarking exercise so we'll be going through and getting you know looking at consumer reviews and seeing what people think I mean that's that's the whole point is to see is to learn what's working really well somewhere else what's what can we learn from the people and the places who do it best got it so you haven't done that benchmarking work yet you would plan to do that when you get into office yeah we we're a campaign we don't have um we have a very small team we're like a startup and so in a lot of areas actually that's exactly how i would want to go about it which is to learn from places uh that are doing things really well um giving people better services for less money you said you wanted to scrap all of california's climate policies because they're not working as intended and i wonder they're increasing carbon emissions yeah so i think that climate policies that increase carbon emissions as well as crushing working people in small businesses with the highest cost for energy in the country it doesn't make sense so we need to we need to get a get things straightened out here we need to be doing things that are actually effective in fighting climate change and reducing carbon emissions while reducing costs for people. And that's why I've got plans that I've laid out, for example, to massively expand the climate change mitigation component of the current climate change strategy of the state, which uses, for example, investment in what you might call organic CO2 reduction, for example, tree planting, restoration of wetlands and other ecosystems. It's a far better way of doing it. You actually save more CO2 that way, And you don't end up hurting people with these incredible costs, say, with forest management, where because we've had, you know, really bad or non-existent forest management in this, particularly in the Sierras, you've had these wildfires burning out of control that actually produce more CO2 than, I mean, there was a study done in 2019. The wildfires that year produced more CO2 than the previous, I think it was 17 or 20 years of climate policy in California actually saved. So I think what we've got to do is go beyond the kind of superficial assertions that we've got this fantastic climate policy that's fighting climate change and we're leading the world. We're not. We're actually doing things that don't, in fact, help the fight against climate change as much as other options would. but in the process we're crippling people with costs so i think we just need some much more you know common sense um effective policies here rather than things that sound good but when you dig into them don't work