Fictitious flattery

New trend in cold outbound: ridiculously over-the-top flattery.

Since publishing my book, I’ve started getting cold outbound emails that are not the usual lazy, generic nonsense.

They are telling me I’m brilliant.

They are specific.

They reference actual ideas from the book.

They flatter the exact thing I hoped the book would do.

And they do it in that very polished voice that makes you pause for half a second and think: “Wait… did they actually read it?”

Spoiler: Nope, definitely not.

People can now generate incredibly specific praise at scale with LLMs. Praise that feels researched. Praise that feels personal. Praise that hits the exact ego button it was designed to hit.

The upside is that I can post it here as a “couldn’t have said it better myself” description of what I hoped my book would be.

So thank you, suspiciously flattering cold email, for the free marketing copy.