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.[1] 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.”[2] 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.[3]
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.[4]
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.”[5] 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.[6]
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.[7]
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.[8][9]
Kiriakou on Rogan
Kiriakou pushes back on the standard framing: Rogan is “unfairly characterized as a right-winger.”[10] He doesn’t think Rogan is compromised or a bad person — and notes he treats working comics at his club unusually well.[11] 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.[12]
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.[13][14] 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.[15]
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.[16]