Learning By Doing, Doing By Sharing
How I went multichannel after blogging for years
I delight in hearing my own voice and I want to share exactly that. How I have gone multichannel, especially since December toward the close of 2024, when I pretty much spontaneously grabbed my phone, stood awkwardly in my kitchen, did a video selfie, of me ranting about my failed prediction for the presidential election.
This was a monumental moment for me because I felt a compulsion to do this for years to the point where I picked up the phone, started on a rant and just felt fake about it. It seemed disingenuous. I’ve always self-identified as a writer. I grew up reading William Gibson science fiction, Thomas Pynchon encyclopedic novels, William S. Burroughs freaky kind of stuff. And I always self-identified as someone who wanted to become that kind of writer. A little bit elliptical, a little bit removed from things giving me that bird’s eye view by ironically enough or paradoxically lying under a rock, quiet, removed from things, writing, thinking, analyzing, sharing with the world. Kind of Dostoyevsky in the basement. And that stuck with me emotionally.
So as I accidentally got married, which will be another fun podcast I’ll do soon, circumstances thereof, and then had to support a family and plummeted headlong into the career world. I kept writing. I kept writing in a business sense. I started writing business blogs for various industry publications in healthcare, technology, communications. So I kept typing, but I always knew in the back of my mind and at the tip of my fingers that I wanted to dive back into the writing literary pool.
About two years ago or so, I teamed back up with an illustrator friend of mine with whom I wrote a screenplay all the way back in my early agency days. with the idea that Santa Claus turns into a superhero. He’s caught delivering presents beneath the tree. The kid doesn’t even care it’s Santa Claus just wants his superhero video game present and then Santa falls into a slump until he’s rescued by his loyal elf who recommends that Santa become a superhero. Super Santa!
We wrote that screenplay. before we started work at our office in Orange County, California, as I say, all the way back in 2008. And screenplays are a dime a dozen. A waiter in a restaurant will have a screenplay that he can’t wait to show you, and the line is long. And unless you’re an industry insider, it’s next to impossible, especially these days, to break in. So not surprisingly, we had trouble getting that script to move in Hollywood. But we were excited about it. The concept was cool. And as I’m mentioning, going back full circle here, about two years ago or so, the idea got into my head that the screenplay that we had written 15 years prior would lend itself quite well to a book, and not a kid’s book, but an adult book. A little bit of Bad Santa meeting Elf, meeting all the humoristic portrayals of the downside or the negative side of Christmas, what it would mean, and we went for it. And this triggered in me a long dormant hunger for realizing my dream to become that kind of writer. And off we went to the races.
You can find the book on Amazon called Super Santa. We have the big second edition, is a sprawling 550 page book with 181 illustrations. If you can believe that, believe it, check it out. And then for this second edition, two years in, we broke the book up into three parts, which match the three parts of the big saga. Those are also available on Amazon.
But what I’m getting to hear for this post is, how this triggered my hunger for writing. And concurrently with this writing, I’ve been blogging crazy on Medium. You can of course find me Mookie Spitz on Medium, where I have pretty much an eyebrow raising, a bushy caterpillar eyebrow raising. If you’ve seen pictures of me, it’s quite shocking. A Bushy Eyebrow Raising 430+ blog posts. So one way or another, after this and that obstacle, I’ve jumped into this persona of being a writer. Published book, I’ve got my own ISBN number, I’ve got megabytes of prose, cranked on subjects ranging from politics to relationships to personal reminiscences all out there getting eaten by the AI bots. I hope they enjoy it.
Who knows what kind of queries on chat GPT my goofy content becomes a response to? I tend to be Pollyanna about AI, that’s a whole separate blog post, a whole separate podcast rant. Sarah Silverman and company have a point about suing these mega zillion valued tech companies, taking their content, eating it up, spewing it back out with no royalties. I get it. I find it flattering at this point. Maybe if I’d be in their shoes and I’d be doing my own heavy duty monetization, I would be upset too. But for now I see the inevitability of it and I’m pretty much bring it on. Anyway, I digress…
So there I was in my kitchen, remember? December, end of last year. I have a book written. I’ve got hundreds of blog posts out there, probably a couple hundred more in the business community. And what next? And maybe I had to get it out of my system. Maybe I had this idea of myself that had to be released and I finally released it. It became its own catharsis. And in parallel, just to note, I’ve been working on a science fiction novel first in a series, which I can’t wait to also bloviate about…
So I’ve been typing, typing, writing, writing, writing. And this other light bulb went on in another side of my big bald head. And that was to rant on video. And I started to do this. Now, this, I have to say, has been an incredible epiphany and milestone for me creatively. One video rant led to another. I realized that all of my writing after all these years had accrued so many stories, so many perspectives that were just brewing, that I couldn’t wait to translate them in one to two to three minute bursts on video, challenging me to be succinct, challenging me to perform these ideas in a format that would be digestible to the scrolling social media audience.
What a transformation! From December into January of this year and now February, it’s been only about two and a half months that I’ve been doing this. And especially on TikTok, you can see me, Mookie writer on TikTok. I have accrued over 15,000 followers and have engendered over 225,000 likes. My videos have been viewed millions of times. And before I sound like I’m gloating, which in ways I am at least that that sequestered writer. getting 30, 40, 100 people on average to read my blogs. I am excited about this, but within the framework of perspective. If you do look online, which you probably do, popular videos on these channels, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, get millions of views and engagements, and often the content is just garbage, people setting their farts on fire and these staged husband and wife arguments and jokes. It’s quite stupid in my opinion, but you know, it’s got its own kind of creativity and obviously it’s appeasing the social media audience.
What I’m getting at here is I think I’ve done pretty well for a bald guy, bloviating, ranting in his kitchen, taking walks out on the patio, sharing what’s been brewing in my brain for years in this more prose textual format. I’ve also been responding to and sharing thoughts about our crazy political and cultural times. And these things have also been resonating. And I have learned so much — you really can only learn by doing and that’s the oldest cliche in the book, but it’s so demonstrably true in this case.
For example, I posted a video advocating for the Kurdish people. I have a friend who is Kurdish and pretty much as an experiment, I posted that America could and should continue to support the Kurdish people in the Middle East. They share our American values. They treat women with equality. They respect other ethnic and religious minorities. There’s tons of overlap between this sprawling population numbering anywhere from 30 to 50 million people across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Most people don’t even know that this Kurdish pseudo state exists right in the middle of the Middle East…
Anyway, I thought that I would advocate for them, that I would say rah rah, know, especially now that Syria has imploded. The need for this kind of sensibility in that hot zone has never been more urgent. The plight of the Kurdish people is acute now that the ethnic minority, especially in Syria, is under threat, et cetera, et cetera.
So I posted a video from my kitchen. At this point in my adventures online in social media, I didn’t even know how to use the captioning tool properly. So I’m standing there, it’s still awkward. It looks like I’m reading a script, but I do all of these impromptu and ad hoc, just like I’m rambling on now. And the captions were even wrong. “Kurds” is spelled it C-U-R-D-S, for example, and I didn’t know how to edit it or change it. I didn’t know what I’m doing. And I just post it with hashtag Kurd, Kurdistan, Kurds, Kurdie. That video where I’m half-assed, I have no idea what I’m doing. Single take, first take in my kitchen, captioned in 30 seconds, unedited, uploaded to TikTok. Currently that sloppy video is at over 550,000 views with tens of thousands of likes and comments and reshares. I was like, what the actual hell? That was my first experience with a viral piece of content.
I’ve had a blog post or two go semi-viral on Medium. There’s the story of my sexless marriage, which I’ll be happy to bloviate on as well soon. Got as many as 18,000-19,000 reads, which is quite good for a blog. That was actually my first blog, Beginner’s Luck. And I’ve had other posts that have been “popular” — but the return on investment of standing in my kitchen and just bloviating for literally a minute or two, often first take, improvised, and then just captioning and uploading, 10 minutes, and I’m not kidding. I have an idea, I run in there, I put on a polo shirt, I record it, 10 minutes of my time, maybe 15, will get me hundreds of hours of viewing time across the world compared to slaving over a blog post, let alone a novel, a book, where how many people are actually gonna read this thing? What’s my level of engagement out there in the world?
This is my biggest takeaway and it’s screamingly obvious based on what we’ve all heard and known about the power of social media. good and bad, whether it’s air quote destroying democracy, triggering genocide, or on the flip side creating these overnight sensations. The power of social media has been self evident for a long time, but I never dipped my toes into it. I never really tried it myself personally.
And boom! Over 550,000 views of my bald head advocating for this ethnic group in the Middle East? Wow! And that got me thinking about making an impact with audiences. My next most popular video is now cracking half a million views more recent. I figured out how to caption. I have done hundreds of personal video rants like I’ve been describing taking walks on my patio I had a trip to Vietnam over the winter break where I was doing this constantly So I have literally hundreds of these videos only in the past couple months and I’ve been getting I think better at it. I come across more naturally In my early videos, I’m kind of looking to the side and, now I’m just letting it loose. I’ve built muscle memory and confidence and I think it shows. I was getting feedback that I was talking too slowly, but you know you can always speed this stuff up manually. So I learned the software. I got editing software to speed up the videos a little bit. I learned the captioning features to change the font, and size and edit the errors and add punctuation is important. Not a big deal, but I’ve been polishing the David statue in all of its various parts, so to speak, and I’ve landed in my own rhythm, my own style of ranting, and I think it shows.
The next generation of these was epitomized by a rant I did basically stating that mass deportations suggested and now at least we’re in the beginning of being implemented by the current presidential administration are stupid. Mass deportations are just a bad idea for a number of reasons, all of which I cite in this video. Video is only about two and a half minutes long. It’s captioned well. My presence is confident. I have learned the ropes and this is cracking half a million views now also.
So I have two big communities of admirers, at least on TikTok. Also, by the way, I learned about the different platforms and why TikTok really is superior to Instagram and in ways YouTube, but that’s a whole separate story. Anyway, I have learned how to create the content, I’ve also learned how to distribute it, and I have learned that a key part of making an impact is not only designing your content for a particular audience, but reaching out to that audience in a way that you’re addressing their concerns, their needs, so that they rally behind you. No one’s doing anyone a favor engaging and sharing content. But when they see content that makes an emotional impact and makes a statement on their behest, then they like it, they comment, and then they share. And in that sharing, I think, more than anything else, you create a viral sensation. I am learning and I am stunned. Again, this is all pretty obvious. There’s not a single thing that I haven’t said that hasn’t been ingrained in the zeitgeist. I’m a marketing and PR and advertising person in the agency world. So I knew all this going back before most people did because I was tracking the social media platforms before they were even really popular for the sake of advertising. I get it.
But I think the theme of this rant more than anything else is the learning by doing. You can’t learn unless you do. And I’ve been doing, I’ve been putting myself out there in ways I never thought I could, in ways I thought I should, but never did. And boom, it’s happening. And I am taking this in and it’s been transformative.
So in summary, I am a writer. The writing I’ve learned how to do like the DNA of communication. If you look back technologically, how we’ve been communicating, the first technology was basically scrawling on the ground and on the walls and caves that we found in France, right? The cave paintings, the cave scrolls. And then we flipped to glyphs and symbols, and then an alphabet, and then the printing press, and then radio, and then television, and then computers, and social media, and mobile, and here we are. Soon AI will be doing it for us. But the point here is that communication is essentially peer-to-peer. It’s one person to another. If you’re sitting in the cave by the fire, you can see each other, you can talk to each other, you can smell each other. But there’s no permanence to that. And there’s no growth aside to just word of mouth that evolves and is transferred generation to generation. But to capture that communication and that meaning, the syntax and the semantics, we’ve been developing all these technologies.
Grand irony, if not paradox of all this, is that it’s coming full circle. And I bring this up because my own communication is coming full circle. Just like our species has gone from chatting in a cave to this trajectory that I’ve described, all the way to phones and mobile technology and video, which in a sense reproduce that original communication because now we’re seeing each other, we’re talking to each other, we are circumventing all of these technological scaffold components, if you will, the scaffolding of building this tower to recapitulate how people communicate with each other, which is peer to peer. So now we have live video, we have Zoom calls, and I think that that makes sense.
That’s where we’re headed. When you read about or investigate any AI predictions, the AI bot is not gonna be alphanumeric. You’re not gonna type messages. You’re going to speak them. And eventually there’s probably gonna be a visual avatar of your own personal bot. So technology is heading toward mimicking and reinforcing and hopefully enhancing without inhibiting too much are peer to peer, one person to another direct communication in the same physical space in real time.
Now I brought up this whole trajectory of technology and communication because of my own trajectory with technology and communication. See what I did there? So my cave paintings and scrolls were my blogs typing away, slaving over a blog for two hours to eight hours, sometimes more posting it on Medium and my own website and maybe on average 30, 40, 50 people will read it, and on Subtack. And maybe it might be a hit, a few hundred, a few thousand might read it, a few more might comment, but those were relatively rare.
And now I stand in my kitchen and I rant for one, two, three minutes. And within minutes, I have hundreds of viewers on TikTok and people are responding. And sometimes these go viral too, but these go crazy viral. It’s not like maxing out at 18,000 views of my sexless marriage story. I’ve got half a million views on these topics.
So what an evolution, what an eye-opening jaw-dropping switcheroo from introverted writer guy frantically typing in a room to a guy whose bald head is now literally on tens of thousands of phones with millions of impressions with thousands of likes and comments!
No, I’m not a superstar. By any stretch I’m still a “micro-influencer.” Once again, I’m not intending to gloat and in comparison to most folks on social media doing this professionally, I’m not even scratching the surface. But the point I’m getting at is my own personal awakening and revolution in a sense from feeling that communication was in this written format. That’s the only way it could be authoritative and really reflect the depth of my thinking.
But I think that’s bullshit. I think it’s terrific that I’ve been writing and I plan on continuing to do that. This week, I hope to publish my second novel. So of course, I’ll keep writing. I still self-identify with myself as a writer, but it has been such an awakening, this social media ranting, that I’m still stupefied by two things. One, why it took me so long, and two, just how much I love it.
And as another point, it just hit me, the realization in a self-referential kind of way, is that my next step after ranting on video was to rant on podcasts. I learned that technology. I learned the app to record and I got that. Then the app to upload and distribute and I learned the editing software, remedial editing software. My great Chicago buddy Howie created a little zing track, an EDM zing track for the beginning. I learned how to edit that in. This is remedial stuff but there’s a learning curve to everything.
So now I’m doing these podcasts and going all the way back to Bill Burr as I mentioned, he uses these two podcasts a week to just move the muscles in his face. It’s like exercise. You need to let it out. You need to communicate. You need to practice your craft. His craft is bloviating and you just need to keep it moving.
And here is the last little gem that I have learned, which I intuitively sensed, but this is the most important aspect of this entire rant, which is learning by doing, and the importance of doing. If you are that thing, if you are a writer, if you’re a podcaster, if you’re a ranter, if you’re a communicator, if you’re a comic, if you’re anything on the planet, then you need to do that thing.
It’s so easy to overthink, to speculate. There was younger guy who creeped into the jacuzzi here in the Orange County little pool and gym area that I share with my son right now. And he was going on and on how he really wants to do sports podcasting, but he can’t really afford the fancy mic and he got into an argument with his girlfriend and da da da da da…
Right now I’m recording this on my phone with a little app. And you don’t need a microphone and you don’t need a sound studio. You just need the wherewithal and intention and drive to keep cranking content. If you want to be that thing, then you need to do that thing. You don’t make excuses. You just do it. And you reach a point, that Malcolm Gladwell tipping point, where you love what you do and you love it so much that you’re hungry for it. You can’t wait to wake up and do it.
I’ve reached that point just since December where not only do I wake up hungry to start typing on that keyboard, but hungry to start ranting in my kitchen and on the patio, recording and captioning and uploading video. I’m now hungry to interview folks on podcasts and record my own solo podcasts nd just keep cranking this stuff out.
I am hungry for this stuff and I can’t get enough of it and I think I’m getting better and I think I might have a proclivity for it — but more than anything else it’s that desire, it’s the exercise, it’s the building of that muscle memory and it is just driving forward with the enthusiasm to communicate and share. So there you have it, that in a nutshell, which is the name of one of my favorite YouTube science channels, Kurzgesagt. I’ll leave you with that little nugget. Can’t even spell it. K-U-R-Z-G-E-S-A-G-T? They really need a rebrand, I think, but wonderful science channel with the spirit of capturing things in a nutshell.
What I want to communicate is just the joy of communicating. This eye-opening experience in learning by doing and the realization that if you are doing, you just need to throw it out there. You never know, one of your many videos will go viral and you never know who is listening. And at the very least, it gives one’s life a sense of purpose if one’s purpose is centered on creativity, expression. and endless bloviating. Bring it!
