"do i need to subscribe to my friend's substack newsletter"

"they've made it clear that my support as a paid subscriber is expected"

Last night I received a hot tip from friend of the BAT Chris Seiberling who sent me The Ethicist’s latest dilemma in The New York Times in which someone asks “Do I Need to Subscribe to my friend’s Substack Newsletter?”

And I’ll tell ya, i couldn’t sleep. It kept me up, this question. The gall of it, the temerity. The nerve.

An answer formed in my mind, but then I read the subhead:

They’ve made it clear that my support as a paid subscriber is expected.

That…complicates things. Below is what I believe to be a 100% ethical, moral, and correct response.

Note: I have not read the article itself, both out of principle and because I do not currently subscribe to the New York Times ($14.99 a month unless you ever want to eat yummy One-Pot Pasta With Ricotta and Lemon OR talk about the day’s crossword again, at which point the price soars to $32.99 / day).

Dear person who has the time to worry about supporting their friends’s substack,

My answer to you is simple:

As my Gold-tier sponsor likes to say, it Depends.

Below are a list of questions that’ll help guide you to the right answer.

Question one: Are you talking about Both Are True?

If you are asking about the newsletter Both Are True, a fantastic little comedy rag that critics in your paper of record are calling “a mold-breaking piece of cinematic wordcraft,” then the answer is:

YES DUDE YOU HAVE TO FUCKING PAY FOR BOTH ARE TRUE HOW COULD YOU EVEN DARE ASK SUCH A THING???

Wait though, there is one major exception to the rule here, and that brings us to question #2.

Question two: are you rich?

Now look, I’m not exactly known as being a ‘money guy.’ I believe buying a house is the biggest scam going, the one time i bought a few stocks (zoom), i sold them right before the pandemic, and i still regularly employ the ‘dollhair’ gambit when asked to pay my friends back the money i ‘owe’ them BUT I DO KNOW THIS:

If you’re rich, yes you do have to support your friend’s substack. How rich? I’ve made a chart.

I don’t make the rules, Scrooge McDuck, I just call em’ like i see em’.

Question Three: Did your friend break the ONLY rule of being a writer artist person?

Lucky for you though, your friend broke the ONLY rule of being a newsletter writer:

Never make anything clear about what you expect your friends to do about your Substack.

The entire

I send a lot of emails, lord knows, but rarely to the people in my actual IRL life unless they’re for improv shows and for those I employ a classic trick of sending the invite “by accident” to madonna and bcc’ing all my friends:

And then immediately following it up with this

A 1-2 punch is what we call this move in the biz!

Ugh I did not mean to copy that last part if anyone from Substack is reading this can you go into the back end and delete that image I’d do it myself if I could (feature request!!!)

i can barely ask my friends for a hug let alone financial support

I’ve had a ’to do’ on my list for several years now of emailing all the people who have supported my art and life in the past fifteen years but have not done so because I am a coward and that is terrifying.

The fact that this friend of yours made it clear that your support was expected means a) he’s an idiot (and yes, I do assume in this case its a man bc he’s an idiot) and b) he is probably not your friend and c) he is probably not a great artist.

Because the key to being an artist is dropping vague passive aggressive hints that your friends cannot use against you in the court of public opinion, e.g. “wow this friend I just met last night became a paid subscriber” or “man it is so cool when people I know support my writing - it’s so unexpected and cool. Anyways how’s the divorce?”

So that settles it for your case, but what about most of us who have artist friends that do not demand we pay but hint at it using the sneaky gollum like tactics above?

if you are not rich

get crafty

We all have subscription fatigue, yes, sure, of course, blah blah woe is us and our glut of screen splendor.

But like, maybe cancel your Netflix? The only thing Netflix puts out of any value whatsoever is I Think You Should Leave and a) you can steal someone’s pw for that and b) that show is literally telling you to stop using Netflix!

“Oh but netflix made it harder to steal passwords” shut up it just means you need to work harder. Maybe you have to sit outside your friend’s house so it looks like you guys live together, idk. Netflix blows though for real.

The big companies have all the money they do not need it. Your friend Steve who writes about miniature horses does.

other tips

If you are not a billionaire rich mcdonalds in your house, son is screwed up but will figure things out after playing baseball and hanging with the weird scientist that lives in his house which was always a thing for some reason in 90s movies about rich kids, here’s what you can do:

• tell them that you can’t pay for their shit right now

• share their stuff with everyone you know

• or, don’t share it but tell them that you shared it

• tell them that you really loved a piece they wrote

• or, if you didn’t, lie and tell them that you did

Substack writers are fragile. Our insides are covered in HANDLE WITH CARE stickers. When someone says, “I love your stuff,” it lets us live for another 47 hours without doubt, shame, or remorse.

If we can cobble together enough praise over a lifetime, we can live what doctors are calling ‘basically normal lives.’

But we need your help.

So don’t go all woe is me help me crying to the god damn Ethicist about your problems. This is not a problem, nor is it an ethical dilemma. Either support your friend with money or praise or false praise. It doesn’t matter because in this case, the truth doesn’t matter.

Effort does.

I’d be remiss now not to say

That we just launched the BATCAVE a cool paid subscriber community where you can cowrite with other people once a week. It’s great and I by no means demand that you join, but if you did I’d probably live for at least another few weeks in relative sanity.

Thank you also to Depend and Madonna for supporting me through it all.

Comments

Let’s plz talk about this - how do you all feel? What do you say to the ‘ethicist’