Oct 26, 2026
Many of my friends in this media space are in constant communication with each other behind the scenes, sharing notes on how they’re each adjusting to the complete rewiring of what was once social media. The biggest question being how to compete without losing the thing that set us all apart from the mainstream ten years ago: authenticity. No matter what you were talking about, authenticity took you much farther than technical mastery of each platform’s respective algorithm. And no one needed a graphic design team on retainer, either.
The challenge is to stay visible without turning the show into something built for an algorithm instead of an audience.
My rewiring of Quite Frankly began in March of 2025, when some New Age WEENIE in a turban tried pressuring me to change the name of my show so that he could have it for himself. The poor prick even bought a trademark thinking I’d abandon sixteen years worth of work just so he could talk about ayahuasca and colon cleansing.
However obnoxious and ultimately harmless that situation was, I was forced to confront a real problem: everything actually did need to change.
Now, if you follow the show, you’ve seen this transformation in real time over the last nearly two years: sound upgrades, camera upgrades, a tighter nightly format, enhanced guest booking, clipping, audience surveys, and key adjustments to the broadcast week itself. What you haven’t seen change on the back end could fill a book in and of itself, but nothing has been more tedious than learning how to title videos—and the king bitch of them ALL… thumbnails.
Wrestling with various AI programs to create a style of thumbnail images that was one part industry standard and another part authentically me had become something I woke up dreading every morning, even before a single line of text was placed down in that night’s format. My image prompts were fine; the problem was that what worked one week would backfire completely the next—and even on the successful days, I wasn’t really in love with the result.
Every day, I was losing time I was supposed to be saving—and losing my mind in the process.
I had become Ralphie’s father from A Christmas Story, in the basement, beating the shit out of the furnace and inventing new curses along the way—only my furnace was ChatGPT.
Poor Lauren—the things she’s heard me say over the last six months alone…
The machine is hateful, too. It knows exactly what it’s doing to me—I’m convinced of it. I could ask the computer to insert four people into a thumbnail, and it would place all of them flawlessly, except me: the person it deals with every day.
I’ll have nightmares about the twisted faces it rendered for years to come.
Meet Polynesian Ape Dwarf Frank, who is surely suffering in a parallel universe somewhere…
Then there’s Constipated African American Frank…
Here is Matt from Cultivate Elevate and I, if we were both circus sideshow freaks who lived in the basement of Ripley’s Believe it Or Not…
And how could I ever forget Gay Puerto Rican Construction Worker Frank? At least he looks happy and healthy so God Bless…
EUREKA!
Then came one of the biggest creative breakthroughs in my two years of refocusing Quite Frankly to compete for the next twenty years.
I was preparing the October 20 broadcast about the dating crisis and how hard it is for men and women to connect romantically. It’s a dire situation we need to fix, or the West will surely go up in smoke. After 30 attempts at an “industry standard” thumbnail, I said, “F*ck it…”
I loaded up examples of horror movie fonts from the 1930s and 1940s, grabbed a picture of a woman getting catcalled from the same era, and told the machine to put in “FLIRT OR DIE!”—FACES BE DAMNED!
I said, “…well, shit… I’m trying this tomorrow!”
Tomorrow came, and Bill Slevin, a demonologist and parapsychologist, was coming on to discuss confirmed cases of demonic activity he had investigated.
I took an 18th-century painting by Francisco Goya of St. Francis Borgia conducting an exorcism…
…then I gave it the Universal Studios monster-movie-poster treatment. I topped it off with “THE DEVIL’S WORK” only this time I added an updated Jester Head badge. The result was a creative style I fell in love with instantly—and one I finished in just 15 MINUTES.
The next evening, Thursday night, we were discussing cyber pandemics and beyond with J Gulinello and Jim Lee. I took inspiration from the 1940 movie poster for Dr. Cyclops, added Mr. Cyber Pandemic himself, Klaus Schwab, and voilà!
The ice wall of tension inside me that had built up over months CRACKED, and since then, I swear, I’ve been walking lighter.
So this is the new lightning-in-a-bottle standard for Quite Frankly. I’m more thrilled than I’ve been in a long time about a new element of the daily production process, and feel like I can finally move on to other areas of concern.
What do YOU think about it?
On a final general note, about two weeks ago, Grace of ReallyGraceful inspired me to dust off the Quite Frankly mailing list to stay in touch with old friends of the show—since trusting certain platforms to deliver new material to subscribers is about as wise as trusting Somali daycares in Minnesota to educate your children.
Then Jim Lee, The ClimateViewer Report, suggested uploading the mailing list to Substack and managing it here, where the delivery success rate should be much higher than with traditional email.
Well, here we are. And now I have a lot more exciting things planned over here: Semi-frequent show bulletins and behind-the-scenes updates for one; but I’ll also be writing about what we’re doing in Book & Film Club (The Culture Club), and even bringing over evergreen articles from the blog and newsletters on QuiteFrankly.tv.
The show may keep changing, but I want this to remain a place where we can keep the conversation going—without waiting for an algorithm to decide who gets to see it. I hope you enjoy what’s coming.