The Perplexity subscription
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The Perplexity subscription is a free lifetime account John Kiriakou says he was sent unsolicited by the company's chief executive, days after he complained about a competing product on Joe Rogan's podcast. He told the story on DeProgram on 5 November 2025, prefacing it as "apropos of nothing, but I thought people would get a kick out of it."

The machine that argued back

The complaint that started it concerned invented biography. "When I was on Rogan a couple of weeks ago, we somehow got on to the topic of AI, and I said I didn't like ChatGPT because it lied about me. It just made up that I went to the University of Maryland and to some grad school in Belgium that I've never heard of."

What he found notable was not the error but the refusal to concede it. "I told ChatGPT, you're wrong. And it says, no, you're wrong." The exchange sits alongside his broader objection to the industry's preferred vocabulary, that a machine stating falsehoods is not hallucinating.

Rogan's answer

Rogan, in Kiriakou's account, responded with a product recommendation and a disclosure attached to it: "Oh, we use Perplexity here. They are advertisers on the show, but for our own use here at the studio, we use Perplexity." Kiriakou's reply was immediate, "I'm going to start using Perplexity", and, on the podcast, that was the end of it.

The email at ten o'clock

The consequence arrived weeks later and unbidden. "Last night around like 10 o'clock, the CEO of Perplexity sent me an email with a lifetime subscription to Perplexity."

Kiriakou quoted the message: "Thank you for the conversation you had about Perplexity. Here's a link, it's for Perplexity employees. It's a free lifetime subscription to Perplexity." He accepted the point of the gesture without pretending to be above it: "So now I'm going to be all about Perplexity."

The episode is a small, unusually legible instance of a pattern Kiriakou has described elsewhere in his post-agency life, that a remark made on a large enough platform produces offers, invitations and gifts from parties he has never met, and that the offers arrive faster than any of them can be assessed.

See also

- Joe Rogan
- John Kiriakou
