Kiriakou cameo practice
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The Kiriakou cameo practice is John Kiriakou's use of the Cameo personalised-video service to send messages to paying strangers, at a volume he describes as "probably 25 or 30 hours a week", 900 messages in March 2026 alone and, on his own July 2026 count, "about 1,950 cameos so far."

He estimates that about half of the requests are birthday wishes, roughly ten percent are pep talks, and that of the pep talks "three have come back to say that I somehow talked them out of committing suicide. I'm not really sure how I did that. But, you know, there are a lot of really hurting people out there."

The fifteen-year-old bulimic girl

One pep-talk recipient sounded, in Kiriakou's account, in such acute pain that he violated Cameo's rules on the recorded message itself: "We're not supposed to do this, but here's my phone number, call me." She called him within the hour, crying: fifteen years old, bulimic, parents who did not understand her, planning to kill herself. He talked her out of it. She has called him twice since, "usually for less than a minute or two, very respectful," just to hear a friendly voice on a down day.

Volume and consequence

By July 2026 John Kiriakou put his total at about 1,950 Cameo recordings, at a rate of twenty or thirty a day. Roughly half are birthday wishes and other occasion greetings; about ten per cent are pep talks.

Of the pep talks, three recipients later came back to tell him he had talked them out of killing themselves, "I'm not really sure how I did that," he says, "but, you know, there are a lot of really hurting people out there." In one case he broke the platform's rules on the recording itself, giving out his phone number to a caller who sounded to be in acute distress. She was fifteen, bulimic, and had been planning to kill herself; she has called twice since, briefly and respectfully, when she needed to hear a friendly voice.

Kiriakou connects this to a loss of his own. During COVID a close friend took his own life the day after a phone call in which he had sounded well; the note he left asked his sister to call Kiriakou and say he was sorry. "I will never forgive myself thinking that there was something I could have done." The experience is what he cites for the view that people in crisis reach for whatever channel they can find, and that if he happens to be the friendly voice available, he is happy to be it.

He describes Cameo as having "literally changed my life," and characterises its performers as "D-list celebrities, people most Americans have never heard of like me."

See also

- John Kiriakou
