Ted Rall is an American editorial cartoonist and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.[1] He is the co-host with John Kiriakou of Deprogram, a daily news-commentary podcast launched in September 2025 — “going every day starting next week at five o’clock on YouTube … far more of a news show, but it’s light at the same time.”[2][3][4]
Deprogram
Deprogram is one of two YouTube channels Kiriakou hosts. Asked in October 2025 to name them, he described the larger of the two as Deep Focus with John Kiriakou — long-form interview conversations — and the other as “The DeProgram Show. That’s with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall. We do that every morning and we talk about the day’s news.”[5] The five-o’clock evening slot announced at launch had by then moved to a weekday-morning broadcast.[2][5]
The show’s range is the day’s news rather than intelligence subjects alone. Discussing the possibility of a modern gold confiscation, Kiriakou cited a conversation with Rall the previous day about the fixed $35-an-ounce gold price of their childhoods under Richard Nixon, and the price’s float after Nixon lifted the peg.[6][7]
Fishback endorsement
A February 2026 post on Kiriakou’s account urging Florida Republicans to “consider James Fishback” for governor originated in a segment done live with Rall. Pressed on it, Kiriakou said the post was made by his assistant, that he deleted it, and that his on-air remark had been “a stupid thing to say” — he had seen only a clip of Fishback attacking AIPAC and knew nothing else about him.[8][9][10]
Central Asia trip
Kiriakou has described plans to travel with Rall to Central Asia, telling a viewer from Kyrgyzstan: “Ted Rall and I plan to visit Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and uh I think Kazakhstan.”[11]
The shows, as he lists them
Asked in June 2025 where people could follow his work, Kiriakou named four outlets: the podcast Deep Focus with John Kiriakou on YouTube; the podcast he co-hosts with Ted Rall, Deprogram, also on YouTube; a television programme on the online platform Unify TV called CIA Declassified, in which they “take declassified documents and tell the historic background stories”; and his Substack, where everything he writes and every appearance he makes is reposted.[12][13]
The daily show
By 2026 the programme was running five days a week — “Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time” — simulcast on YouTube and Rumble, with viewer questions taken live and super chats given priority.[14][15] Rall opens each episode with a news rundown and Kiriakou takes the items in turn; a large share of the running time is given over to answering questions from the audience.[16]
Borrowed lines
The working relationship shows up in the corpus in small procedural ways. On 3 March 2026, answering a viewer who asked for his assessment of Ali Khamenei, Kiriakou opened by attributing his own best formulation to Rall: “I stole one of your lines that really went over well,” having used it the previous night in an interview he could no longer identify.[17]
The line was the comparison between killing Khamenei and killing the Pope, and Kiriakou has continued to use it while continuing to say whose it is.[17]
The two also hold positions in common that predate the war — both, Kiriakou noted in the same broadcast, support Kurdish independence, a subject they had returned to “a minute here and a minute there for a long time.”[18]