Sharing a laugh. I get a lot of these emails, but this is the first one where the fake "we actually listened to the podcast, honest (🤞)" section is actually plausible. I wonder if they had an LLM analyze some of the referenced episode? The real tell is the third paragraph, where they nail that ours is indeed a pro-agile show.

Invite them to the podcast but only if they promise to exclusively talk about Siberian winters

if I had to do it quick I would index all episode's title and description from the rss feed, do RAG on the top N episodes that match a search based on the guest's profile and use those to generate the email.

Yeah our descriptions are great</s>

I had a guy try to connect with me on LinkedIn recently who is part of the larger Clojure community. The service he offered was something that anyone who knows anything about me would know I don’t want or need, but he claimed to know who I was and cited a non-existent (presumably LLM hallucinated) paper as an example of work he respected from me. This timeline is a pox.

I love getting mails describing and praising products I haven't touched in years as the intro to offer/sell me something

We've got both kinds of software, chaos and order!

Yeah that bit is almost accidentally relevant. Maybe the "just Siberian winters" thing might play.

Somewhere in here is a concept for an Eric André style interview with a completely normal agile coach who does not expect INTERCAL. Him also being called Ivan is just the icing on the cake.

Yeah I think I actually will write that email.

This is the email Ivan (Reese née Gekht) sent to Steve to take control of the podcast

@Ezhik they followed up, so I went for it. Thank you for the powerful idea.