I work in the sports industry. We sell tickets, sponsorships, media rights. But what we’re actually creating is entertainment. That’s the core product. Everything else is a derivative.
Most content creators forget this.
They produce tips and tricks. How-tos. Educational content. And there’s a place for that (you’re reading one right now). But scroll through your feed. How much of what you’re actually consuming is educational? How much of it is making you feel something in the moment?
People don’t open TikTok to learn. They open it to feel.
The Hey Al Experiment
Yesterday, I rebooted an old concept I’d been sitting on for years. A short-form video series called “Hey Al.”
The premise: I have conversations with an AI assistant named Al (voiced by a cheerful feminine AI), and things go sideways. Al takes instructions literally. Al lacks the context that makes human requests make sense. Al is helpful to a fault, which is exactly what makes it funny.
It’s fictional comedy. Not a tutorial. Not tips. Not “5 ways to use AI better.”
The first episode (about having a productive day) went out yesterday and performed better than anything educational I’ve posted in months. Not because the production was better. Because people wanted to watch it. They wanted to see what Al would do next.
That’s entertainment.
The Content Creator Trap
Most of us creating content online default to education mode. It feels safer. It feels valuable. You’re giving people information they can use.
Businesses creating content tend to create announcements and ads – boring!
Information is abundant. Entertainment is scarce.
Scroll your own feed. Most of what stops you isn’t a tutorial. It’s something that made you feel curious or surprised. The educational content you actually consume is usually wrapped in entertainment. The YouTuber who makes you laugh while teaching. The thread that opens with a story before the lesson.
Give people what they want. They’re holding a device that used to be called a television. They want to be entertained.
AI-Assisted Production
The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m using AI to produce entertainment about AI.
For Hey Al, Claude Code helped me manage the production pipeline. Script development, extracting audio from video files, converting my voice recording to Al’s voice character, organizing the batch filming schedule.
These aren’t creative decisions. They’re boilerplate labor. The automation frees me to focus on what actually matters: making the joke land.
The ideal state is producing multiple episodes per day, batched and scheduled. We’re not there yet. But the direction is clear.
Quality vs. Quantity Is a False Dichotomy
The world is flooded with content. You’ve heard the advice: focus on quality, not quantity. Or: volume wins, ship more.
But it’s not actually a seesaw where you trade one for the other. Better tools give you better trade-offs on both.
Everything we produce today is higher quality than what was possible in the 1980s. Obviously. But it’s also faster to produce. Both lines went up, because the tools improved.
The bar is always rising. The low bar of yesterday is buried. But if you’re using modern tools, you’re not giving up quality for speed. You’re getting both.
The game isn’t quality or quantity. It’s using the right tools to stay ahead of the rising floor.
The Job
If you’re creating content, you’re in the entertainment business. Whether you like it or not. Whether you’re selling sports tickets or SaaS products or your own personal brand.
Education is a delivery mechanism. The wrapper matters.
Give people what they want. They want to feel something. They want to be entertained.
That’s the job.