I run two YouTube channels. One explains AI to lawyers in complete sentences. The other one is, to use the technical term, not that.
People assume the comedy channel is the hobby and the earnest one is the work. They have it backwards. The earnest channel is easy — I spent a legal career standing up in rooms and explaining complicated things to skeptical audiences; a camera is just a jury that can't interrupt. The comedy is the discipline. It's where I learn timing, compression, and the exact number of seconds an idea deserves, which is always fewer than I want to give it.
Eccentric, contained
The principle carries into everything on this site. There is a chaos mode hidden in these pages — a certain sequence of keys, known to anyone who owned a Nintendo, sets the cursor loose for ten seconds. It is exactly as stupid as it sounds. It is also contained: ten seconds, one element, Escape to cancel, and the reading columns never move.
That's the whole doctrine, and it's the difference between eccentric and stupid:
- Eccentric is a flight recorder painted orange with a joke inside.
- Stupid is the joke flying the plane.
Trial lawyers understand this instinctively. The best ones are performers with a governor bolted on — you get exactly one theatrical moment per trial, and you spend it where it moves the verdict. Comedy taught me the same economy from the other direction: the bit works because everything around it is straight.
So the channels stay separate, the chaos stays behind a cheat code, and the pressure valve keeps the rest of the operation boringly reliable. Every serious thing I've ever shipped had one. Yours should too.