Joe Rogan
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Joe Rogan hosts the biggest podcast in the world, and in October 2025, John Kiriakou finally sat across from him.

The taping

Kiriakou flew to Texas for the October 9 taping, going on from one to four with release expected the next day. The protocol surprised him: "You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement before you go on the show. So I couldn't bring anybody with me." Security was serious, the studio sits near where Alex Jones broadcasts, and one of Jones's reporters had been murdered a few blocks away that June.

He was driven to the airport early that morning by Jeff Fahey, the star of the film Kiriakou appeared in, and by Tyrel Ventura, Jesse Ventura's son.

Rogan arrived about ten minutes late, blaming traffic, and they went straight in. Kiriakou's read: "nice guy, very down to earth, very normal, friendly, average." The very first thing Rogan asked as he walked into the studio: "Hey, do you know my friend Mike Baker?", the ex-CIA regular whose firing story Kiriakou's own audience had begged him to tell Rogan.

The question survived into the recording itself, which opens on it. Episode #2392 was released the following day and runs two and a half hours; its first exchange is Rogan putting to Kiriakou that he had replaced Baker, and Kiriakou answering that Baker is a great guy who "was the real deal" and does not talk about his work much, and that he had replaced him in Athens after Baker had done a great deal of preliminary legwork there.

One exchange during the taping had an immediate sequel. Kiriakou complained that ChatGPT had lied about him, inventing a University of Maryland degree and a graduate school in Belgium he had never heard of, and that when he told the model it was wrong it told him he was wrong; Rogan replied that the studio uses Perplexity, which advertises on the show but is also what they use themselves. Kiriakou said he would switch, and at around ten the following night the chief executive of Perplexity emailed him a lifetime subscription.

Kiriakou on Rogan

Kiriakou pushes back on the standard framing: Rogan is "unfairly characterized as a right-winger." He doesn't think Rogan is compromised or a bad person, and notes he treats working comics at his club unusually well. Long before appearing, Kiriakou used the show as a reference point: it was to Rogan that Mark Zuckerberg admitted Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election at the FBI's behest.

Who gets on the show

Asked by a listener whether he would ever appear on the show alongside Mike Baker, Kiriakou said probably not, and gave a reason that was not personal animus: he now has a manager who represents high-level people and who tells him he is more sought after than Baker is, so there is no reason to legitimize him. On another figure included in the same question he was categorical about Rogan's side of it: the show will not have him on, "period. It will never happen," Rogan and his people having been crystal clear that the man is not taken seriously.

Kiriakou places the appearance in a sequence rather than treating it as a summit. He did Patrick Bet-David, then Rogan, then Diary of a CEO, and describes each show as building on the ones before it, carrying him to audiences that had never heard of him, in particular young people who were too young to remember the events he was convicted over.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Mike Baker
- Patrick Bet-David
- Jeff Fahey
- FBI
