LearningAug 2025

7 min

Ten million views and one student

Notes from making health and medicine explanations for a very large audience, and why I still write for one person.

The health and medicine material I made as a teaching fellow has been watched more times than I can meaningfully picture. The number is a bad guide to the craft. Everything that made those lessons work came from imagining a single person, mildly stuck, slightly embarrassed to be stuck, and short on time.

Scale rewards clarity and punishes cleverness. An explanation that flatters the explainer fails at volume; an explanation that respects the confusion travels. The best editing question I know is still: what does this sentence assume the listener already believes?

Write for one confused person and a million will follow.

This is also why I keep this site. Talks disappear, threads rot, and a citation needs somewhere stable to land. If something I said is worth quoting, it should live at an address I control, with a date on it.

Notes

Cite as: Vishal Punwani, “Ten million views and one student”, Aug 2025, vishalpunwani.com/writing/ten-million-views-and-one-student