Joe Rogan Experience #2542 — Steve Hilton

When Steve Hilton first walked into Joe Rogan's LA studio in 2014, he had no idea what a podcast was. He thought it was a radio show. After ten minutes, he wondered when the next guest would arrive. After an hour, he was stunned. Now, twelve years later, Hilton is back—not as a Stanford lecturer or former Downing Street advisor, but as the Republican candidate for governor of California, running against former Biden health secretary Xavier Becerra.

The Toxic Machine of Public Life

Hilton describes his journey from private citizen to candidate as a crash course in how the internet warps political reality. Rogan warns him that most of the negative engagement he sees online is not even real. He cites a forensic analysis by cybersecurity expert Dan Woods suggesting that as much as 80% of Twitter activity may originate from bots—not the 5% Twitter claimed in its pre-acquisition filings. Rogan explains that bot farms, now supercharged by AI, can manufacture attacks against any candidate on demand. "You could hire a company and this company has bots that will go out there and promote that Steve Hilton's a cunt," Rogan says. "They will put it everywhere."