Cameo is the app on which customers pay public figures to record short personalised videos, and which John Kiriakou joined in February 2026. He describes the premise without flattering himself about where he sits in it: “Cameo is an app where D-list celebrities are represented” — you like someone from a reality show, you hire them to wish your friend a happy birthday.[1][2]
Signing up
The company called him on a date he still remembers — 28 February 2026 — and asked whether he had heard of it. He had: his brother-in-law had bought his sister one a few years earlier, and it had been fun. Asked whether he wanted to join, his answer was “Sure, why not?”[2][3]
Setup took under five minutes — a short biography and a photograph. He was told to price himself at $50 and let the algorithm adjust it every fifteen minutes according to demand.[3]
The volume
“I did 900 cameos just in the month of March. I set this new record.” By late July he had done roughly 2,600, “and they just keep going.”[3][4]
About half are birthday wishes. Most of the remainder are requests for a story from the CIA. Fewer people ask for a prison story, “but I think frankly those are some of the better stories.” Around ten per cent are pep talks or requests for advice; roasts are also available.[4][5]
He is candid that the price is steep — “I wouldn’t spend $180 for John to say happy birthday, but a lot of people do” — and notes that booking one opens a channel: the customer may then text him, and he can text back, free.[5]
The three
Of the 2,600, about two hundred have been requests for advice or a pep talk. Three of those people texted him afterwards to say he had talked them out of killing themselves.[5][6]
One he describes in detail: a fifteen-year-old girl with bulimia, very low self-esteem and a difficult relationship with her parents, whose request message “just sounded to me to be so desperate.” He broke the platform’s rules on the recording itself: “Listen, we’re not supposed to do this, but here’s my phone number. I want you to call me right now.”[6]
She called. They spoke for some time, and he talked her out of it. She has called twice since, each time for under a minute — “she just needed to hear a friendly voice, you know, in the midst of a bad day.” His own verdict on it is understated: “I’m glad that I could be helpful.”[7]
The criticism
The visibility has cost him something. Kiriakou left a daily podcast he had been doing with a close friend, simply because there was too much else on — “I can’t do a podcast every single day.” The reaction surprised him: “I’m surprised at the viciousness of some of the comments… that I sold out, I abandoned my friends. It’s like, what are you talking about?”[8]
His defence is plainly financial and unembarrassed: “I’ve been poor for 19 years. I’m 62 years old in a couple of weeks. My parents both died in their 60s. I don’t know how much time I’m going to have. I have five kids. Two of them are in college right now. I need to make a couple of dollars.”[9]
The request he always refuses
Asked for the most confidential thing he learned at the CIA, Kiriakou answered that the question is not a novel one but his most routine piece of correspondence: “people ask me on Cameo all the time to tell them the deepest, darkest secret. I can’t.”[10]
Pressed repeatedly over the course of the same interview — including with the suggestion that he could disclose one and then talk his way out of it — his position did not move: “I could, but I won’t.” The reason he gives is the standing one: the material is “sources and methods”, and he distinguishes that category from the crimes he considers himself obliged to expose.[10][11]