Elevating self-help

I’ll listen to any interview featuring Balaji Srinivasan. I’ve been a huge fan of his since I first came across this video that merged my interest in political philosophy and technology. I couldn’t imagine at the time that a Silicon Valley tech guy would be referencing Albert Hirschman at a Y Combinator event. But there he was.

In any case, he gave another great interview that was released this week on David Perell’s podcast.

He had many interesting insights throughout, as he always does, and one that stood out to me in particular was a prediction that the future of news would be skewed to a greater extent in favour of “news you can use”. That is, actionable information that levels you up as a person.

He didn’t use the words but this sounds to me like self-help, a genre that is often disparaged but which, as Balaji points out, is far more valuable to readers than stories covering either celebrities or foreign wars.

I like the idea of elevating the status of self-help, and look forward to a future where the median media company looks more like a productivity blog than a political twitter feed.