Former Vice President Kamala Harris said she regrets not going on Joe Rogan’s podcast during her 2024 presidential campaign and wanted to do it, but contended that there were “games being played.”
“I wanted to do Joe Rogan’s show,” Harris said on Thursday’s episode of “The Diary of a CEO.” “And there was a lot of games being played, but I wanted to do Joe Rogan’s show.”
She later added, “I definitely regret that we didn’t do it.”
Rogan, a supporter of President Donald Trump whose podcast is especially popular among right-leaning young men, has been credited with helping Trump win back the presidency. He has interviewed an array of celebrities and politicians, including Elon Musk, Bill Burr, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and more. But his show has also been criticized as a platform for misinformation, like anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
In the 2025 book “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote that Rogan had promised Harris a spot on his podcast, only to give it to Trump.
Rogan pushed back on that claim in February, saying on his podcast that Harris and her team had never committed to an appearance and that, at one point, they wanted Rogan to interview the vice president in Washington instead of having her travel to the podcaster’s studio in Austin, Texas.
Trump’s three-hour interview on Rogan’s podcast was conducted in his studio in Austin, and the two discussed everything from extraterrestrial life to Trump’s days on reality TV. The interview has 60 million views on YouTube.
Harris, who was promoting her new book “107 Days: A Memoir of a Campaign That Made History” on “The Diary of a CEO,” said that “at that point in the campaign,” turning down the podcast appearance wasn’t about who was traveling where.
“I could care less about that,” Harris said. “Pride is not associated with it.”
She said “a lot of people” told her not to appear on Rogan’s podcast because he would support Trump and it wouldn’t be a “productive piece” for her.
Harris said her perspective was that even if Rogan did have a bias for Trump, she could make her case to his audience, just like she did in her Fox News interview. But she repeated that there were “a lot of games being played” around scheduling, and that ultimately, “it didn’t happen.”
“I don’t have anything against, certainly not against the people who turn on to Joe Rogan, and would love to be able to talk with them in a direct manner,” Harris said.
The former vice president admitted that she isn’t sure if appearing on Rogan’s podcast would have made any difference in the election outcome.
“The issue was really about what’s the trade-off in terms of votes and where I spend my time,” Harris said. “Do I spend my time traveling for five hours and back versus being, for that period of time, in a swing state? And that was the trade-off.”