The Diary of a CEO — January 2026 Kiriakou interview is the long-form podcast appearance by John Kiriakou on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO that, in Kiriakou’s own account, produced the pivot he calls his Gen Z breakout.[1] Kiriakou describes the interview itself as “the standard long-form podcast interview” he had already given many times to Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, only “a little bit more philosophical.” He recorded it, boarded a plane and flew home; the shorts came later.[2]
The UT Austin sophomore’s shorts
A University of Texas at Austin sophomore took the Bartlett interview and cut it into TikTok shorts — “sped up my voice, slowed down my voice, shot lasers out of my eyes” — and, in Kiriakou’s telling, “it went completely crazy.”[3] While Kiriakou was on a paid contract in Dubai, his niece called: “Uncle John, you’re exploding on TikTok — I don’t know why, but it’s huge.” At 2:30 the following morning local time, the Creative Artists Agency — “the biggest talent agency in the world” — reached him and said “tell me you’re not represented.” He wasn’t. They signed him on the call.[4]
The interview itself
Kiriakou’s assessment of the host is unusually warm. Steven Bartlett, he says, is incredibly bright and asked such insightful questions that the conversation was “much more philosophical than a normal, you know, John telling stories kind of podcast” — questions he had never been asked to answer before.[5][6]
The edit
The student who cut it up was, in the fuller tellings, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, and the method was consistent: each short was one story, Kiriakou’s voice pitched up into an Alvin and the Chipmunks register with the punchline dropped into an ogre’s voice, and laser beams shooting out of his eyes.[7][6][8]
He has described a moment of hesitation about it. “For a second I thought, should I be offended — that they’re turning this into something so light-hearted? I was talking about serious issues here. Torture.” The hummus material, he notes, was about a torture technique. He decided otherwise: “now, I’ve got a sense of humour too. I’m going with it.” His verdict on the result is that it led more people to the actual message, “and that’s exactly what has happened.”[8]
What followed
The scale of the change is measured, in his telling, in interruptions: he cannot walk twenty-five feet down the street without being stopped for a selfie, and he always says yes. On one flight from Miami to Washington he was stopped five times in the airport and twice on the plane.[9] Out of it came representation by a major talent agency, invitations to speak, new publishing deals, Hollywood representation and corporate spokesman offers — “my whole life has changed in the last eight weeks.”[9][10] Cameo approached him, he says, literally the next day.[11]
Why he thinks it landed with Gen Z
Kiriakou attributes the traction to a generational appetite for a truth-teller with no personal agenda: “Gen Z trusts me because I’m a truth-teller — I don’t have any personal agenda, none. I think that for the most part, mainstream media lies to us every single day.” His prescription to the audience is not a subscription but a discipline: sample twenty-five outlets across the ideological range — the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, BBC, Times of London, AP, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Al Monitor — and reason your way to the fact pattern yourself.[12][13][14]