The washed-out road to the airport
==================================

The washed-out road to the airport is John Kiriakou's account of the drive that got him off the Baja peninsula in time to record the Joe Rogan podcast in October 2025.

Who was driving

The two men who took him were both on the film. "Jeff Fahey is the star of the movie that I was in, and is an easily recognisable face if you just Google Jeff Fahey. He and Tyrel Ventura, Jesse's son, drove me to the airport early one morning to go to do the Joe Rogan show."

What the hurricane left

Kiriakou could not recall the storm's name, "hurricane Loretta or whatever the heck it was, I don't remember", but he was precise about the result. "It had come through and it washed out the road. And so they were like, you know, buddy, you may not make it. We're not sure we can make it."

The warning proved conservative. "We didn't go 100 feet and the road just didn't exist. It had just washed away."

What followed was not a detour so much as an improvisation across open desert. "And we had to drive up this dune, over cactuses, and animals are just jumping out of the way."

The arithmetic

"And it took us, to go the 35 miles took us almost two hours. And then those poor guys had to drive back."

The comparison came from Fahey, who had a recent basis for it. "Jeff said to me: I was just in Afghanistan six weeks ago, and the roads aren't this bad in Afghanistan."

Kiriakou agreed, with a chronological caveat drawn from his own service: "I said, I know. I've been a million times in Afghanistan." The roads there, he added, "used to be" that bad, "before 2005 they were." But this, he concluded, "was bad."

What it was for

The punchline of the whole sequence, delivered immediately afterwards, is not about the road at all. "Anyway, the important thing is: I got to be in a real Hollywood movie, Ted. Like a real honest-to-God Hollywood movie."

The two-hour crossing of a destroyed road, in other words, is offered as the price of admission to a life he plainly did not expect to have at sixty, and the same journey delivered him to the largest podcast audience in the world.

See also

- Jeff Fahey
- Joe Rogan
- Kiriakou's acting career
- Tyrell Vanto
