I received an email the other day. It was sent to my Substack email address, and was titled “last post thoughts”. It read as follows:
“hi John,
gotta say, enjoyed the last post. the mix of archive nitpicking and
personal notes was kinda brilliant and felt very real.
I dont have a formal pitch, just curious.would you ever profile a relevant expert in a future piece?
if yes, id love to point you toward someone who’d fit the tone and add
real value. fwiw, cheers — [name removed]”1
I mean, you might think I’m oversuspicious. But I detect just a smidge of AI writing in the above post, I don’t know about you.
Not that we need it, but there is proof. This email was sent by someone – or something – using an email address @podpitchplus.com. And what is PodPitch, exactly?
“Stop wasting time with one-off emails to podcasts. PodPitch is the first and only software that finds, writes, and sends pitches to podcast hosts from your actual email address. Whether or not you’re already pitching podcasts, PodPitch will make sure you get podcast bookings – guaranteed.”
Brilliant work, well done. I mean, I don’t run a podcast, sure, but maybe a “relevant expert” could be profiled in my newsletter, yeah?
Well, except that PodPitch couldn’t figure out August’s newsletter was the last one. But that’s a detail.
Yes, I removed the name. Yes, I’m too nice. ↩