My “Brown M&M” for Podcast Guest Pitches
You may have heard this famous story from the 1980s. While on tour, the rock band Van Halen included an interesting line item in their rider:
M & M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)
A rider, if you don’t know, is basically a contract for a stage performance. It’s not that they hated brown M&Ms, or that they were divas. As David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography, Crazy from the Heat, they had a lot of important safety clauses in there as well. Van Halen’s was one of the first highly technical shows in the industry, and a lot could go wrong.
The M&Ms clause made sure a venue read the entire rider:
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening. This is a pretty great test, and I’ve decided to implement it for podcast guest pitches.
Podcast Guest Pitches are Getting Worse
Almost a year ago, I wrote about how AI is making podcast pitches worse. Shockingly, this hasn’t gotten through to the biggest offenders: guest pitching agencies. In the intervening time, they seem to have degraded even more, following an all-too-common format:
Hey Joe!
I loved your recent episode about [COMPLETELY AI GENERATED SUMMARY].
It reminded me of [CLIENT NAME] who [SOMETHING THAT MAY OR MAY NOT BE RELATED TO EPISODE].
...
I've attached their one-sheet. When can we get them onto the show?
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Now, I’ve offered a TON of advice on how to improve guest pitches, but what if you’re the podcaster that’s getting pitched? How can you separate the wheat from the chaff?
I have a form that goes to Notion, where I can quickly evaluate guests. But I also have a specific question I’m looking for.
How I’m Checking Podcast Guest Pitches
Something you should know: I get a lot of pitches; 4-8 per day on average. That’s because there are actually two places where I accept guest pitches:
It’s also important to me that I read every pitch. For all the bad ones I get, I’ve had some fantastic guests come through cold pitching. So in both places, I have my “Brown M&Ms” clause:
Guests MUST propose a specific time-saving process, system, or automation when pitching!
This makes it really easy for me to scan through a pitch to know if they took the time to read the directions and learn about the show. If they don’t include a specific time-saving process, system, or automation, it’s an easy rejection.
This is much better than my previous screener of, “which episode made you want to reach out?” In the age of AI summaries, it’s become a largely useless question. I also say I’m not interested in founder stories, but that still requires parsing the pitch to see if they’re pitching their story, or if they’re just including biographical info.
Once I apply this quick test, evaluation becomes much easier.
Next Steps
If Van Halen saw brown M&Ms in their green room, they knew their next step was to do a full walkthrough of all the tech again to make sure there were no issues. If a guest fails my test, I just reject them. But if they pass, it’s time for the actual work.
I start with Deep Research through ChatGPT. I have a pretty thorough prompt that I’m constantly iterating on, but one crucial line in the prompt is this:
Verify they can speak to the topic they’re pitching. I want you to be very skeptical here. This has yielded great results, where ChatGPT will tell me why it thinks the guest can talk about the topic, but also what to be careful of. I’ll usually make a decision shortly after this — once I verify the research ChatGPT did. The test, combined with this research, allows me to make a decision quickly and book better, more qualified guests.
What’s Your Brown M&Ms?
This screening process saves me hours each week and reduces the friction in evaluating cold pitches.
As you think about your podcast process (or really, any screening process), I encourage you to think about what your “Brown M&Ms” test is.
