My Viral Poolside Rant
Blogger turning vblogger and learning the ranter ropes
For years I’ve felt a hankering to grab my smartphone, flip the video feature into selfie mode, start ranting on various topics, then uploading to social media. But every time I made my move, a little voice inside said “not now…” and I listened, knowing that barely audible whispers are more meaningful than the loudest of shouts — until only about six weeks ago.
Thinking about writing a follow up blog after my fessing up to wrongly predicting a Harris win, I gathered my thoughts one random weekday afternoon, spontaneously lifted my phone, stood there in my bedroom — with the worst backdrop and lighting conditions — and pontificated for a couple minutes about why I was incorrect, and riffed on implicit bias:
Although stiff and awkward to the point one commenter called me “creepy,” the TikTok post to date has 2,107 views, 68 likes, 21 comments, and was favorited 1 time. In broad social media terms these metrics are miniscule, a mere scintilla of interest and response, but compared to years of blogging here on Medium, oh dear reader, they are exponentially large.
Stretching the analogy of the evolution of prokaryotic to eukaryotic life on Earth taking a thousand million years only to be triggered by a single complex mutation, my social media ranting, dormant for decades, has exploded with similarly long-awaited and sudden frenzy. The resulting onslaught of ranting has been one of my most thrilling creative phases.
Starting on TikTok from scratch less than two months ago, I’ve since been followed by more than 8.7K people, and have gotten over 141.5K likes, with tens of thousands of comments and shares. Sure, high school kids have gotten 10M+ views and millions of likes by sharing reels of setting their farts on fire, but for a bald guy ranting in his kitchen this seems a big win.
Impulsive and chaotic to the point of being clinically diagnosed with ADHD (isn’t everyone these days?), my traditional approach to sharing ideas has been to jot a few points down, and then bang on my keyboard, write and edit a blog post soon as I can, and then share. Reach and engagement have varied by topic and the whims of the algorithm, but been consistent.
Suffice to say that my most popular post to date is actually my first, “The Story of My Sexless Marriage” currently at about 17.7K views, 2.3K likes, and 29 comments. My next one is “Mastering the Male Multiple Orgasm” at about 14.6K views, 322 likes, and 1 cray comment. The rest rapidly plummet in metrics, proving the obvious: sex sells, even if writing doesn’t.
Compare that with a handful of my TikTok rants, and the obvious screams. An early, clumsy rant I made advocating for support of the Kurdish people has reached an astonishing 488.5K views, 43.9K likes, 3.5K comments, and been favorited 4.5K times — orders of magnitude more than anything I’ve ever written (my Kurd videos in total cracking well over a million views).
What I discovered in only a few weeks is I can get 100x the reach and engagement of a blog that would take me hours, all from spewing a 1 minute rant, spending only 10 minutes more captioning and uploading. In other words, I’m getting, on average, 1000x to 10000x the eyeball ROI of my rant videos compared to comparable effort made attacking my keyboard.
Now allow me to point out that I’m not a metrics whore — as an introverted artist quite the opposite. I get intrinsic joy from writing, confirmed by years of enthusiastically doing so with minimal feedback and monetary reward. That said, though, my new-found ability to spontaneously share a few thoughts and get hundreds of responses in twenty minutes is alluring.
The astronomical reach and engagement also beg the question of actually connecting with people — and learning from their feedback. My rants, for example, have taught me how to further refine my approach to ranting, along the way toughening my skin to criticism, while imploring me to pay attention and often change my mind about how best to tell a good story.
Most thrilling is how I’ve started incorporating both modalities to storytelling into my everyday creative life. Some ideas start as a rant and wind up as a more elaborate blog, while many a rant has originated as a blog, and percolated back into my consciousness for whatever reason at whatever moment to become a rant (which finally sees real light of day).
Also fascinating is the random-nonrandomness of rants that go viral, and how the different social media platforms distribute identical content. A particular rant on TikTok, say, will generate 500 views in a few hours, while the exact same reel, posted five minutes later with the exact same identifying hashtags, will get 50 views or less. Talk about arbitrary!
And yet, a few viral rants suggest method to the madness, figured out retroactively but meaningfully. A great example is a poolside rant from last weekend, one of a half dozen recorded and shared in quick succession. The batch generated, on average, several hundred views each, except for this “Gratitude” rant that is at an impressive 42.6K views on TikTok, and more…
Here’s what seems to have resonated: 1) I open with quick reference to headline news — the disastrous LA fires — then hint at the possibility of an imminent Earthquake; 2) I time stamp the date, suggesting something momentous; 3) I pan to a sunny poolside view in the middle of winter; and then 4) point out nobody is there, and talk about taking things for granted.
Again, I’m not about the metrics — instead fascinated by how people engage with content, and by extension what I do to sometimes engage them, and sometimes not. My intent here isn’t to copy some formula and emulate it to generate the most attention, but to refine and hopefully expand my own approach to telling stories, including what and how I present in real time.
What makes this new process even more fun for me is the improvisational component, which is foundational. All of my rants are ad-libbed, with zero written notes. My approach is always the same: get inspired by an idea about whatever topic, stew on it for ten seconds to a few minutes, frame a general approach, and then hit RECORD and spontaneously let it loose.
About 70–80% of my rants are single take, which is ideal in terms of capturing the immediacy of the moment. My ex-life partner sent me a tripod a few weeks ago, her way of suggesting I take a more “professional” approach than standing or walking while holding the camera in my face, gesturing with my free hand. But I love the raw, gonzo quality — and results.
The past few weeks have become a whirlwind creative renaissance, busting open a dam that’s been eager to break for years. A zealous side to myself is finally free, mirroring and boosting the more hidden shadow that’s been hammering on keyboards for decades. Rather than feud, my two sides now embrace each other for my holistic self-expression, each better for it.
Will I continue these now-daily rants? Like Sam Jackson says in Pulp Fiction: “Most definitely!” I have a feeling they’re the most meaningful thing I’ve done since completing my first published book, and in many ways enhance not only my blogging, but my novel writing, presentation skills, and even my interpersonal relationships. Got vblogging? Give it a try!
