Asked in December 2025 what he was working on, John Kiriakou gave an inventory that ended with travel.
The tours
He was going to start a speaking tour in February, he said — a nationwide speaking tour. He had done one in the United Kingdom at the beginning of that year, in January and February, all around England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland. [1]
So he was, he said, busier than he could maintain — adding immediately that it was a good busy. [1]
What else was in the inventory
The tours were one item among several. He listed three podcasts: the daily programme he does with Ted Rall live from nine to ten every morning on Rumble and YouTube; a twice-weekly deeper look at the news, which he said had taken off and was approaching a hundred thousand subscribers having started only that March; and Dead Drop, launched two months earlier on Apple Podcasts and then Spotify, which he said was in the top two per cent of all podcasts worldwide. [2] [3] [4]
On the books: Remains of the Day, a guide to Washington’s historic cemeteries, was due from Simon and Schuster on March 24; he had just sent his ninth book, Whispers in the Dirt, a guide to the mafia graves of New York City, to the publisher; and he intended to do another three after that. [5]
What he credits
Asked what he attributes the growth to, Kiriakou pointed first to an algorithm — a year earlier, he says, he seems to have hit the YouTube algorithm just right, and went from videos getting five hundred or a thousand views to two shorts in a single week that got thirty million and thirty-eight million. He does not know how or why; it just happened. [6] Pressed on whether it was really the stories or the hard work, he offered one other thing he hopes played a role, and said it is the thing he is most proud of: it has cost him a lot, but he always tells the truth, and he thinks people have come to respect it. [7]