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.”[1]
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.”[1]
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.”[1] 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.[2]
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.”[2]
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.”[3] He accepted the point of the gesture without pretending to be above it: “So now I’m going to be all about Perplexity.”[3]
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.