Hello Substack readers!
Thanks for supporting Pesca Profundities all these years! A few of you have reached out to us to say that the support has been worth it, but now that the page as we know it has changed significantly (i.e., far fewer posts), you think your monetary contribution should be redirected elsewhere. Among the potential beneficiaries that have been mentioned: buying Haley Stevens singing lessons, or a new social media app called Pic Poc, which is entirely thieves and street urchins posting videos of Times Square tourists with bulging wallets in their back pockets. Fagin gets it.
It is unclear what this page will become. Right now, Mike is busy tucking his shirt in every day in a corporate capacity, but that doesn't mean these pages will go dark. We're still figuring out whether friends of The Gist, or The Gist List, will be posting here. And Mike likes to think he still has a few words left in him, so those might turn up here too, sometimes behind a paywall, whenever he's especially convinced of the monetizability of his prose.
So here’s what we (and by “we,” we mean the magnificently employable Kathleen) will be doing.
Any yearly subscriber who wants a refund —we hear you. Just reach out to kathleen@mikepesca.com, and we will issue a prorated refund (that is to say, rated by the pros as B- in customer service). This offer will be open for a month (or until Sept. 4), after which…
Kathleen will turn off auto-subscribe for all 200+ yearly subscribers remaining. She has to do this by hand, and the likely repetitive stress will result in a workman’s comp claim, but we’re not going to auto-enroll anyone in a non-existent Gist List. Why do it in this order? To torture Kathleen.1
If you are a monthly subscriber, you can do it yourself. Kathleen just doesn’t have the bandwidth—which is to say carpal tunnel width—to execute this transaction.
Additionally, a number of subscribers have asked, “What do I listen to now that The Gist is ending?” Answer: it’s not ending; it’s just being transformed into a 3-day-a-week celebration of the form, interspersed with new segments on Wednesdays. In any case, quite luckily, friend of The Gist, Eric Zorn, whose Picayune Sentinel is a giant of the Substack genre, was kind enough to collect all my alternative podcast recommendations (with links). I reserve the right to add a few more, possibly future products of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
The Good Fight (especially the Good Fight Club segments and anything with Ivan Krastev)
Yes, there's also The Daily, but listing The Daily is like listing The White Album as one of your Desert Island Discs. My two most frequently listened to podcasts are actually Substacks: Blocked and Reported and Ethan Strauss, but I don’t think of them as Gist substitutes, more like thought starters if you are of a Gisty mindset. And we hope you do retain that mindset, and continue to be Gisty in your thoughts and deeds even without quite so much Gist. To quote Creed, “teach them right and let them lead the way.” Great words, understood by true podcast aficionados and the Khmer Rouge child soldiers alike.
But really, there's another reason: if you do it in the opposite order, calculating refunds becomes difficult. Substack offers three cancellation options: a) cancel without a prorated refund, b) cancel with a prorated refund, or c) turn off auto-renewal. Once you choose one, the other buttons disappear.
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