For most of my life, I separated entertainment and education into mutually exclusive categories.

The entertainment category contained TV shows I grew up watching like How I Met Your Mother, Hell’s Kitchen and Pokémon. Shows that while funny, didn’t really stimulate my brain all that much. Songs, plays and comics also found themselves strictly in the entertainment category.

On the other hand, the education category was largely dominated by difficult books. Stuff like math textbooks, physics handouts or huge works of history. Stuff that while packed full of knowledge, were mind-numbingly boring.

But of course, the domains of entertainment and education can intersect in wonderful ways. One of the greatest gifts I’ve received in my life is the gift of enjoying literature. Books have made me weep with sorrow, laugh with delight and fume in anger, all while having my worldview changed in miraculous ways – arguably the greatest form of education.

This symbiosis between entertainment and education was also recently illustrated in a podcast conversation I enjoyed between Yuval Noah Harari and Tim Ferriss as they discussed the Netflix show Black Mirror:

Yuval: I think that Black Mirror, at least some of the episodes in Black Mirror, are some of the best discussions that I’ve seen of certain dangerous tendencies in current technology. Some episodes are just fun. San Junipero, I think it’s an extremely good episode, but it describes the reality, which is so far away from us that it’s not really relevant to any of the discussions here.

But if you look at Nosedive, and maybe the Chinese got the idea for their social quality system from Nosedive, but it’s such a powerful and important episode.

And so television, while still being the source of some pretty trashy shows, can also be a powerful means of discovering fresh worlds and new ideas. There’s a certain degree of engagement enabled by music, lighting and actors that books cannot replicate, giving TV the potential to showcase ideas in a unique light.

Thus, I’m pretty excited about the future of content creators. The potential for this entertainment-education symbiosis to engage, entertain and educate a huge audience is pretty amazing.