Interview with Brad Berens, Ph.D., Principal, Big Digital Idea Consulting, Inc.

Brad Berens, an award-winning teacher of Shakespeare, an author of a science fiction book called Red Cross turned Hollywood story analyst at studios, agencies and production houses like Dreamworks, New Regency, CAA and Mirage wanted nothing more than to teach kids about Shakespeare for the rest of his life. He created websites for his students which turned into textbooks used all over the world and forever altered his path. Listen in to the brilliant Brad Beren’s as he walks us through the #HoShiMo’s that transformed his life.

Podcast Transcript:

Julie Roehm: 00:00 Hello everybody and welcome back to The Conversational. I am here today with a guy who I have actually known a really long time and I'm excited to bring him here because he's one of the reasons that my podcast is what it is today and I'll share a little bit more about what I mean about that. But without further ado, I have Mr. Brad Berens with me.

Brad Berens: 00:21 Hi Julie.

Julie Roehm: 00:22 Hello, Brad. So let me tell you about Brad outside of the little bit of he and I are friends. He has been everywhere in his career. His career is actually fascinating. He talks about it being, storytelling is an organizing theme. So currently he's the chief strategy officer at the USC Annenberg center for the digital future and principal at big digital idea consulting, which is a boutique advisory firm. He also serves on the boards of the Ascendent Network, Glasswing Ventures, Ad Fontes Media and more.

Julie Roehm: 00:55 He has a long tenure as the global chief content officer for DMG events, digital portfolio. For those of you who are like, "What is that?" If you've ever been to an ad tech or an iMedia conference in the marketing world, that's part of that. He was the digital editor at internet service provider, EarthLink. And fascinatingly enough, he spent several years as a Hollywood story analyst at studios, agencies and production houses like Dreamworks, New Regency, CAA and Mirage.

Julie Roehm: 01:27 But even more interestingly, he started his career as an award winning teacher of Shakespeare and writing at UC Berkeley. And of course as all good Shakespearian and people who write and read would do, he wrote his own science fiction book called Red Cross, which I didn't actually even know and I've known you forever.

Julie Roehm: 01:49 So anyway, that is probably a good intro for a little bit of the background about you. But I was just talking with Brad and just reminiscing about how we met and Brad was sharing that it was actually on a phone call and I always think about us meeting together in person at one of the iMedia events.

Brad Berens: 02:08 It was a phone call about a marketing event. So that helped. And it's somewhat unnerving to hear you describe me that way because I sound profoundly schizophrenia.

Julie Roehm: 02:20 I think it's not schizophrenic. I think it makes you sound, first of all brilliant. I always introduce you as one of the smartest people I know. Certainly in the digital marketing arena. It's the my go to for sure.

Brad Berens: 02:31 Well, thank you.

Julie Roehm: 02:32 But secondarily the roots of it and I would love to... I of course now I want to go back and do childhood. How did you get into Shakespeare and writing, and then how did that morph into all this sort of profound digital thought leadership kind of thing?

Brad Berens: 02:50 It's a wonderful question. I wish that there was a logical answer to it. Shakespeare happened to me around the 10th grade, and I had a unusual response to it, which was we're reading Romeo and Juliet, an incredibly brilliant teacher named Phil Holmes was my English teacher. And where most of my compatriots... I went to an all boys school. So Romeo and Juliet with no Juliets in the room is a little bit vexing. But there I am and I'm reading this, and at the same time I had a spear carrying role in a production of Twelfth Night at one of the other local schools. And I just loved it.

Julie Roehm: 03:28 Where was this? Where were you?

Brad Berens: 03:29 I grew up in Los Angeles.

Julie Roehm: 03:31 In L.A.

Brad Berens: 03:31 And I went to a private school at the time was called the Harvard School. It's now called Harvard-Westlake. And it was a recovering military academy. Thank heavens I was there after. Otherwise I would have been drummed out very quickly, I'm sure. And that was the Shakespeare thing, that moment in 10th grade where I'm like, "Holy moly, this stuff is really interesting."

Brad Berens: 03:53 And I was blessed that a friend of mine who has much more sticktuitiveness than I do. A guy named Matt Henderson, who to this day is a Shakespearian actor. And he and I, we were all in, we were watching movies, we're going to theater. And so that was the beginning. And then it became my passion as an undergraduate at Brown. And then I went to graduate school. I got a doctorate in English at UC Berkeley where I really straddled... I'm often between categories in my life, and in that case I was sort of half a stage historian thinking really hard about how these things were functional pieces of theater and half doing literary studies.

Julie Roehm: 04:37 And so when you graduated, so did you do... So first of all you or at UC Berkeley, you got your Master's and your doctorate there?

Brad Berens: 04:42 I skipped the Master's entirely.

Julie Roehm: 04:42 And went right onto your doctorate?

Brad Berens: 04:43 Yeah. So Doctorate at Berkeley.

Julie Roehm: 04:47 So you went right to doctorate. And then what did you, or I guess, what were you hoping to do when you graduated and what did you actually do?

Brad Berens: 04:55 Ah yes, you've narrowed in on the first holy shit moment. So I go to graduate school to get a doctorate. It's like going to law school. You do it in order to become a lawyer, you go to graduate school in English in order to become a scholar or a professor, I wanted nothing more than to teach kids about Shakespeare for the rest of my life. I didn't really care where I did it. In life, you're a who, you're a what, or you're a where. You can only go through one door at a time and you have to pick your door and your door is going to be in one of those flavors. At that time I was a what. I wanted to teach Shakespeare, and I had a lot to say. I wrote articles, I gave talks all over the world. Actually, one of the sort of clear indications of where I would wind up was that I started hand building websites for my students to say, "Here are the course materials. Here's the syllabus."

Julie Roehm: 05:52 How did you learn how to... How did you like go from understanding Shakespeare to learning how to-

Brad Berens: 05:58 HTML's not complicated.

Julie Roehm: 06:00 No, but it just seems... so, I guess it's a whole clearly nerd thing that I missed out on. Because I feel totally inept. And I actually studied engineering so I had to learn Fortran and I still didn't...

Brad Berens: 06:12 At that time the bar was so low that it was really easy to do. And the standards were not that high. And so a friend of mine was expert on it. He handed me a mimeographed or xeroxed how to do HTML in 10 minutes thing, which I did. I created websites for my students and I created... and this was a really interesting moment, which is I created an introduction to Shakespearean stage history that I put on the web, and that became something that people were using as a textbook all over the world. People in South Africa, professors would say, "Is it okay if I use this in my class?" I'm like, "Yeah do that. I published it on the web. It's there for free." And it was this extraordinary kind of transformative moment.

Brad Berens: 07:03 So that's what I wanted to do was I wanted to keep on doing that and teach Shakespeare. At the time, there was a certain flaw in my logic, which was there was a 90% unemployment rate in my chosen field. People would go through endless years in graduate school. And then there would be no jobs. And they were saying it'd be a four or five year job search because in the humanities you really get one shot a year at the Modern Language Association conference. And so that was a bad enough, it was also a political moment in which really the last thing that anyone needed in an English department anywhere in this country was another Jewish guy teaching Shakespeare.

Julie Roehm: 07:45 So what was that timeframe when you were saying-

Brad Berens: 07:48 This is late 90s.

Julie Roehm: 07:49 Late 90s, okay. So we were near the dotcom bubble?

Brad Berens: 07:53 I would say the bubble was starting to inflate. The Dotpocalypse came soon thereafter and that's about when this was.

Julie Roehm: 08:01 Yeah. So when you were saying that was your holy shit moment, and just by the way, commercial for everybody here. When I talk about the holy shit moments and created this HoShiMo thing, it was Brad's suggestion actually to have a signature question. And we talked about that. So again, I'm going even full credit to you as part of what we do here because it's fascinating to hear people's holy shit moments, frankly.

Brad Berens: 08:26 And there's a lot of them. I just had idea. You're the one who's been executing on that. The holy shit moment was, I was one of two finalists for a teach here Forever tenure track job teaching Shakespeare at the university of Wyoming at Laramie. And I went, I flew on what they call the vomit comet from Denver to Laramie, which was one of the most terrifying-

Julie Roehm: 08:59 Those little jets that go over the mountains.

Brad Berens: 09:00 And hit every air bubble. Oh yeah. That's why they call it the vomit comet. And I spent a sort of glorious two or three days there, I gave talks, met the students, met the faculty. And there was one other guy and it was between the two of us and I didn't get it. I didn't get it. For the very logical reason, which was that he was already finished with his PhD dissertation and I was still writing mine.

Brad Berens: 09:28 And so they were like, "Well, we want him." And I became very depressed. I wasn't institutionalized, but I mean I was in a real funk for weeks because you shoot your wad and that's it for a year. That's it. You have no more at bats. But it was several weeks later that I kind of sat up and I thought, "Wait, I'm catatonic about a $30,000 a year job in Laramie, Wyoming where good luck finding a Starbucks or anything."

Brad Berens: 10:14 And that was that moment where I thought, "Oh, there's something wrong here. There's a flaw in my logic."

Julie Roehm: 10:25 But you were pretty young.

Brad Berens: 10:25 Yeah, I was not even 30. But I'd been doing that sort of my entire professional life at that point. I had been teaching, teaching writing, teaching literature, researching, being a research assistant, all with this sort of sense, "Okay, this is my audition piece." And then you blow the audition. Another way of thinking about a holy shit moment is a failure. And this was big one.

Julie Roehm: 10:52 Yeah. Well we've all, I mean clearly, right? I feel you, I feel you on that one. But I do think that's something really powerful. And when we say you were late late 20s I think that age is a really challenging age because you have sort of, for right or wrong, you kind of committed, most people by the end of their 20s, have kind of committed to a path, whether they love it or hate it. They're sort of been like, "Well, I've dabbled. Now I got to focus in." And when your plan goes awry, I understand the devastation and the depression. So how did you work your way out of it?

Brad Berens: 11:31 Well, there were a lot of... Life is always complicated. And I'm talking about one aspect of it. One thing I decided was, "Okay, I'm going to give this one more try." But while I'm giving it one more try, I'm going to start thinking about other things. And so I wound up going back on that job market a year later, I was once again... And actually this one was even funnier, which was this was at Middlebury college. This is where I learned that when given a choice between people's security and their values, most people will choose their security. Because I went to Middlebury and they said, "Here's the thing, what the faculty thinks of you is important, but we really take seriously what the students think of you. We want the students to be excited about whoever's going to get this job."

Brad Berens: 12:25 I said, "Okay. And I was there, and at that time Berkeley was the kind of den of something called new historicism, which is literary analysis embedded in the context of whatever, whoever, whenever the thing originated. Middlebury was the complete opposite. They were textual purists. Sort of like with the Supreme Court, you have people who are very focused on the text and people are very focused on precedent. Middlebury people, very pure. And so one faculty member later on said, "I came from a suspect department where they taught suspect books." This was the number one-

Brad Berens: 13:00 And from a suspect department where they taught suspect books. This was the number one English department in the country, but the students loved me. I was their favorite of the candidates by orders of magnitude. But the faculty did not care. They were freaked out.

Julie Roehm: 13:17 Look, I have heard you... A, I know you, I've heard you speak and in fact Brad and I spoke together at a conference yesterday and what's fascinating about Brad is that he's super witty and so I have to imagine that your witticism was a hit, assuming that you had developed that skill then, [crosstalk 00:13:34].

Brad Berens: 13:35 I was funny by then, I wasn't funny as a kid. I actually don't think that I charmed my way into their good graces. What really happened there was I was the first person talking about Shakespeare as anything other than a poem and talking about the plays as ways that meaning gets made in the minds of the play goers. And this was a revelation to them. I'm funny on stage quite deliberately because you can't unlaugh at a joke. And if I've made you laugh about something as opposed to being stupid... I mean, I can drop my pants on stage the way anyone else can and everyone will get a big laugh. But that's not about the argument. If I make a joke about the content of technology trends of where Uber is going about the impact of 5G on sort of life as we know it and people laugh now, then I've persuaded them of something.

Julie Roehm: 14:35 It's probably stickier too, the more memorable.

Brad Berens: 14:37 To them-

Julie Roehm: 14:38 Because if there was an emotional attachment to it, you made them laugh, right?

Brad Berens: 14:42 Laughter is almost as good as crying. But making people cry at an industry conference, you don't get invited back.

Julie Roehm: 14:49 Yeah, right. Not the one. Okay, so that's kind of how you rolled out, but where in this path were you advising Hollywood on stories?

Brad Berens: 14:59 Oh gosh, so that was different. That was after that. When I started looking around for the next thing, I just started talking to people and one friend of mine said, "You really should think about Hollywood." You've got all this expertise in storytelling and drama. I happen to have a friend who is working at a certain place, and why don't you go meet with him? He, like you... Actually, there was this sort of cadre of people who were refugees from English departments who were working in Hollywood. And this gentleman named Alex Siskin, he's still a producer today.

Brad Berens: 15:39 And I met Alex and Alex introduced me to another guy who was a refugee from an English department named Greg. Greg introduced me to another guy who was a refugee from an English department named Scott. Scott's a big time Hollywood executive these days. And I wound up through all of these different connections sitting in front of a wonderful, brilliant woman named Andrea McCall, who was the head of story for Dreamworks. And Dreamworks, that part of Dreamworks, has kind of faded back into Amblin, which is Steven Spielberg's production company. I think she's still there.

Brad Berens: 16:10 And she sat with me and I explained what was going on and my career transition. And she said, "Well, clearly you know everything there is to know about the story, so why don't we give you a test?" And I said, "Well, okay. What's the test?" She said, "I'll messenger..." Everything was messenger back days. Back then there was not... before email was prevalent and before you could send attachments. "I'll messenger some scripts and their analysis and I'll include another one and then take your time doing it. Do the analysis and get it back to me."

Brad Berens: 16:44 And I said to her... I don't have the presence of mind to do smart things very often, but in this case I did. I said, "Well, wait a minute, that doesn't sound like a very fair test. How often can people take their time with these analysis?" And she said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, if you were giving this script to one of your current analysts, when would you need the analysis?" And she said, "Tomorrow morning." I said, "Okay, I'll have it due tomorrow morning."

Brad Berens: 17:09 And she looked at me like I was nuts. I said, "That seems like that's the fair test." And so she said, "Okay." She messengered seven scripts, six with the analysis and one without, and it came to the house in the sort of evening time. And I read all six scripts and I read all six analysis and then I thought, "Okay." And then I did the seventh, and I got hired.

Julie Roehm: 17:35 Okay. The question is, did that seventh was made into a movie?

Brad Berens: 17:38 No, it was not a very good script. These scripts, so the way... It's called coverage in Hollywood, and there are an infinite supply of screenplays by an infinite supply of screenwriters in a very, very limited amount of slots. And so, the average agent, manager or executive gets dozens and dozens and dozens of pitches a week. They can't read them all. What they do is they send them out to an analyst who will read the thing, do a one-page summary, "Here's what it's about." A one page analysis, "Here's why I think it is or isn't a movie." A basically a tweet, a log line, and then a recommendation. Recommend means, "I am putting my own life on the line for this story."

Julie Roehm: 18:25 [crosstalk 00:18:25] reputation.

Brad Berens: 18:26 Absolutely. I only did one and it was really a novel by a man named Hector [Tobar 00:18:33], who's a journalist with the LA Times. Everything else are "Consider" or "Consider with reservations" or, "No, thank you."

Julie Roehm: 18:42 No way.

Brad Berens: 18:45 There were very few "Considers" there are lots of "Considers with reservations." There were some things that were just so wacky that you almost wanted to consider it just because it was so nuts. And then there were a lot of just, "No, thanks."

Julie Roehm: 18:57 And so were any of those that you had reviewed ever made into a film?

Brad Berens: 19:01 Lots of things that I reviewed were made into movies. I can't necessarily go, "Oh, because of me that got made into a movie" or things that I said, "This is a terrible idea," did get made into a movie. So the movie Pay it Forward, which was a wonderful book and a wonderful idea and a terrible idea for a movie because it's basically... it's hagiography. It's a saint's life is. There's zero narrative tension and it did zero box office. And so I said, "Don't do it." The studio at the time, I think it might've been Mirage, the studio I was working for didn't do it. Someone else made the terrible mistake of doing it.

Julie Roehm: 19:41 How fun. Is there any of them that you worked at? I'm just curious. I'd like to be like, "Oh yeah, my friend Brad, he..."

Brad Berens: 19:47 Nothing. I mean, I remember seeing reading the script for Phone Booth, which at the time I'm like, "Oh, this is a Will Smith movie." And another studio then bought it, attached him to it, which was really weird. I was tapping into something in the air, but it wound up being made by somebody else later on.

Julie Roehm: 20:09 Oh, okay. Well, that's fine. The whole Hollywood thing I think is fascinating. And so from there, how long were you doing that?

Brad Berens: 20:16 I did that for a couple of years, but it was pretty itinerant work, and that's when the internet was really starting to grow. It was swelling up and I was... I needed a job with benefits and that kind of thing.

Julie Roehm: 20:31 Yeah. Had you met your wife by this point?

Brad Berens: 20:34 Oh, yeah. We were married. We've been married for... It'll be 25 years in June. We've been together since graduate school. We were married, I think we were living with my parents. We'd moved to LA from Berkeley and we were shopping for a house, finishing our dissertations, and I was working in Hollywood. And I think we then had bought the house and that's when I sort of needed to make this move.

Brad Berens: 20:59 I had already been involved with one crazy startup in the coverage business, which was a kind of collective where one analyst would analyze a script and it would get syndicated. And that idea was so terrifying to agents and managers because instead of 25 at-bats, they'd have one. But they actually took the founders of the company into a room and they said, "If you do not disband this company immediately, you will all be blackballed from the entertainment industry in perpetuity."

Brad Berens: 21:29 And they shut that one down. The next day they're like, "Come pick up your check, we're out of business." And I was like, "Okay." I then worked for a crazy.com that wanted to be YouTube when broadband penetration was at about 3% of the population. Good idea, way ahead of its time, early 2000 or so.

Brad Berens: 21:53 That was another fascinating thing because I'm sitting here and I'm like, "How are you going to make money?" And they had this whole kind of patter that they would do. And it didn't make any sense to me, but I thought, "Well, I'm just a little Shakespearian, but what do I know?" And then I would learn more about the company. Turned out, to no one's greater surprise than that of my mother, I had practical skills in business.

Brad Berens: 22:20 She still can't believe it to this day. I learned more about the company and they kept promoting me because again, I was good at managing people, good at strategy, and I learned more, and I'd think, "This doesn't really make any sense at all." They were doing things like we were teaching the pool, editorial pool, to kind of dive into the code, find the URL for the stream, plug the stream URL into our database, which would then serve the video in our player, which we were going to then be surrounding with ads... It was larceny.

Brad Berens: 22:57 And I said like, "Isn't this stealing?" And they're like, "No, no. Our lawyers at this prestigious firms say it's okay." I'm like, "But it's stealing." They're, "No, no." And so the more I learned, the more my initial common sense sort of take on the thing was confirmed, which is why I eventually started looking around and that's how I wound up working at EarthLink, which was the ISP. Just because I thought, "Wow, this place is crazy town. There's no way this can last." And so that I wound up moving on.

Brad Berens: 23:29 That, by the way, I'm 51 and to this day I still have trouble going, "That makes no sense." And believing it. That's the glorious thing about data, which is when you have data, you could actually go, "Let's just confirm this." Which is one of the reasons why I'm sort of one of the great Uber skeptics.

Julie Roehm: 23:54 Yeah. I mean, look, we could go through your whole history, but I love what you're doing now, this thought leadership sort of in this digital space, but I know you had other, "Holy shit," moments sort of in the path that has led you to where you are today. I think it would be interesting to hear about what happened.

Julie Roehm: 24:14 So, I mentioned that you and I... Well, we obviously met via phone call, but then we met oftentimes at the Ad:tech conferences, the iMedia conferences, and certainly you were using kind of your innate instinctive skills that you had learned about as you were just explaining and sort of brought it to life, sort of an education. I mean, for me it's, again, my armchair psychology, it makes a little bit of sense.

Julie Roehm: 24:40 I mean, the whole, "How did you go from Shakespeare to tech?" was a little bit of a leap for me.

Brad Berens: 24:44 It's still mysterious to me.

Julie Roehm: 24:46 But it worked because the storytelling, again, in the digital landscape, it's a digital storytelling mechanism. But then you went into this, when you went to DMG, and I know you had a few other steps, you basically were trying to create story to educate and to teach the audience about new technologies, new applications of them. That actually that now really makes sense.

Brad Berens: 25:10 No, it's not a big stretch to go from explaining plays that were written in the 1590s to explaining early third millennial technology to marketers. I mean, it's definitely weird, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. I think I know the kind of Hashimoto you're talking about, which is the one that involves both of us, which was... and I'm going to let you fill in the details, but you were at that time, a victim of what I saw from afar to be, and thought to be, extraordinarily unfair set of circumstances.

Brad Berens: 25:47 You were one of the moments when I realized that in addition to just sort of putting on a show that the platform that I had been in trusted with iMedia, with ad:tech, with all the other shows-

Brad Berens: 26:00 With iMedia, with Adtech, with all the other shows, was also a platform where I could push things and I could push ideas that I could push right behavior could question things. And so you had this particular misadventure.

Julie Roehm: 26:20 Serious hoshimo, in my life, yep.

Brad Berens: 26:24 One that is really unfair. And I said to the team, I said ... At that time we were about to put on a show called Driving Interactive, which was about interactive automotive marketing, which is not actually esoteric. It just has a long ... It takes a long time to get there. And given your history with automotive, I thought, well this is a no brainer, right? She really needs an at bat at this moment. And I think the industry needs to hear what she has to say. And it's perfect. And I reached out to you and you did it. And I don't know if it turned a corner for you or not, but I felt that it was really important to do it. And there've been a few other moments like that where I could actually intervene in something. And it was good to do so.

Julie Roehm: 27:13 Doing good. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but there were for me, and again this is not about me today, about you, but there were a culmination of events that helped to put you back together. I mean when like certainly I had a major hoshimo, and you're down and how we all feel with our hoshimo's if they're sort of a big negative, to be able to find those with that closed door, those open windows can sometimes be very difficult. My attitude was say, yes. You just go out and say yes, just try new things. And so the opportunity to speak was very intimidating because at the conferences that you were running, Adtech and iMedia, you've got some of the executives and digitally, you've got thought leaders, you've got start ... You have business, people who really know their shit, for lack of a better way to express it, and you're going to speak and try to teach something.

Julie Roehm: 28:10 So it was, for me to get up and to have confidence again and to speak what I knew, I knew, and just to have a platform to do it. And then to know that there were people out there to support you. I love that about you. I mean it speaks so much to who you are, which is in addition to sort of all the thought leadership and the great things that you do. You're also just such a wonderful human. I mean you use your power for good.

Brad Berens: 28:36 I've been very lucky in a couple of regards. One thing is I believe that if we can engage with other people in a more than transactional way, that, that is a karmic investment in the universe. And it can be something as simple as I tend to introduce myself to people if I'm at a restaurant. Particularly if someone is wearing a name tag, I don't think it's fair in life for Mary to come up and for me to know that Mary's name is Mary and Mary, not to know that my name is Brad. It's an unequal distribution of power that's entirely without merit.

Brad Berens: 29:20 Some years ago, a man named Bernie Weinraub was the film critic of the New York Times and his kid and my kid went to school together. And Bernie, who's a wonderful guy, was married to Amy Pascal. And Amy, who's a wonderful person as well, was the head of Columbia Pictures and she now has segued into a producing gig. She does all the Spiderman movies. And when Bernie and Amy got together, all of a sudden he couldn't review a movie without people saying, "Well, he gave it that review because Amy put that in turn around." There was never ... His critical judgment could never be taken seriously anymore. So he wound up leaving and he was working in television for a little while and didn't like that. And now he's a playwright.

Brad Berens: 30:04 But he wrote this three part ... I don't feel bad about saying any of this because it's all in New York Times. He wrote this three part article sort of saying goodbye to Hollywood, where he said, "I'm leaving because you can't take me seriously anymore." And then he discovered that no one would return his phone call anymore. That studio heads who had gotten back to him in 15 minutes when he was the film critic for the New York Times would not return the call at all.

Brad Berens: 30:29 When I wound up leaving my role as the worldwide head of programming for Adtech and iMedia, I thought, well that's it. Bye-bye to the industry. No one's going to ever respond to me again. And so, one of the most pleasant surprises of my life was that actually, people are still interested in what I have to say. And I'm still kind of surprised to this day by it. But believe that I've lived my adult life in this kind of non-transactional way, which is I'm interested in the person behind the speaking gig. I'm interested. I always would ask people like, "Well, what's a win for everybody?" Like if someone's giving a talk. I'm like, "All right, so here's what my audience needs. What do you need?" And I think that, that's a philosophy that I tried to impart to other people because I think it makes the world a better place. And I think it's why people still answer when I call, which again is still a pleasant surprise.

Julie Roehm: 31:26 Truly. It's not on your resume, but it should be. You are one of the most amazing connectors.

Brad Berens: 31:32 Oh, thank you.

Julie Roehm: 31:32 Let's talk about people who are connectors and networkers. And I do my very best, but first of all you've got like some sort of crazy, mind Rolodex of people's names.

Brad Berens: 31:43 It's called LinkedIn. It's really handy.

Julie Roehm: 31:45 No, look no, because I call you and you rattle them off. You're not researching it. I mean you've got one of those innate abilities. And I think that's why probably people call you because you are so good at making everything better. And I know we haven't talked a bit about your book and your books, but I have been reading your papers or your kind of your blogs that's really about the auto industry, which of course just because of my history, I'm generally interested.

Julie Roehm: 32:13 But you've taken sort of that and some of that think tank thought leadership and making predictions of what's happening in the future. I won't make you rattle out too many of them. And I think you're ... Are you writing another book?

Brad Berens: 32:29 I writing-

Julie Roehm: 32:29 Did you mention?

Brad Berens: 32:29 Yes, I'm writing another book.

Julie Roehm: 32:31 Is this book another science fiction book or is it something more-

Brad Berens: 32:35 No, this is a business book.

Julie Roehm: 32:37 Business book. Okay, right.

Brad Berens: 32:37 No, I'm actually beginning to noodle another science fiction book. But they're very hard to talk about because the more you talk about them, the less sense they make and then you get discouraged. So I have to kind of-

Julie Roehm: 32:53 Well don't do that then we don't want to discourage you.

Brad Berens: 32:53 That's early in the morning. Just me before, anybody except the dog wakes up. No, the work I did on Shakespeare as an academic was about Shakespeare. Ultimately it turned out to be about Shakespeare as a businessman. And then so I did between, depending on how you measure 10 or 20 years in the Shakespeare biz and then since around about, you know, 99, 2000 I've been in business and mostly in digital. And so I wound up over the years giving this talk about Shakespeare as a business genius all over the world. I've done it a couple times in this country. I've done it in Norway because we lived there for a year. Because my beautiful wife Cathy who is a professor of English in-

Julie Roehm: 33:34 Also ridiculously smart, yeah.

Brad Berens: 33:36 Oh yes, she's the brains of the operation. She got a Fulbright to Bergen to in Norway. And while we were there, I wound up getting involved with a TEDx and I wound up speaking about this and then I did it in England. In fact, my old team at iMedia U.K. called me and they said, "We just realized that we're doing an event on Shakespeare's birthday, which is also as it happens, his death day and we have nothing Shakespearian in our programming."

Brad Berens: 34:07 And I said, "And?"

Brad Berens: 34:09 And they said, "You did that talk, right?"

Brad Berens: 34:12 And I said, "Yeah."

Brad Berens: 34:13 So I wound up going to England and actually bringing one of my old Shakespeare history buddies to come to the event, which was also fun in lots of other ways. So the book is now about Shakespeare and innovation because I think that in business today we tend to conflate and confuse innovation with technology. And that most chief innovation officers or innovation incubators in digital biz today. Are really about the gadget or platform of the week. They're about new technologies. They're not about innovation, which was frequently different. It's actually about arranging things you already have in different ways.

Brad Berens: 34:57 It's about trying to layer experiences on top of each other in ways that will then yield different experiences. And so because of the work that I did back then and the way that it's informed that the things that I do today, I finally realized, oh, there's actually, there's a tidy nice little book about this. So that's what I'm working on.

Julie Roehm: 35:18 So. when will this ... Do you have a-

Brad Berens: 35:22 Oh, I'm just working on it.

Julie Roehm: 35:23 So you just, when it comes, it comes.

Brad Berens: 35:23 I'm hoping as soon as possible. But like 2020 would be a stretch.

Julie Roehm: 35:28 But in the meantime, as would be expected from your background, when you write these blogs, they're written in a highly entertaining and educational way and their short. So will you share with the listeners your-

Brad Berens: 35:41 Oh where to go?

Julie Roehm: 35:41 Yeah.

Brad Berens: 35:42 Oh, sure. So the easiest way to, to track me down is just, I'm on Twitter. My name is Brad Berens. I've seen enough of the platforms coming that I tend to get that username early. So B-R-A-D, B-E-R-E-N-S on Twitter, bradberens.com. The work I do with the center for the digital future as a digital center.org. Yeah, I'm one Google search away. You'll find entirely too much Brad Berens.

Julie Roehm: 36:09 Yeah. Well, no, it's good. And I'll leave people with a bit of a tease as we close out, because even if you're not a technophile or a marketing ... Like this is just pure interesting, this kind of prediction of the future. I will leave you with the fact that Brad believes is it ... Can I share the story about the Uber and Lyft? That Brad believes that Uber and Lyft-

Brad Berens: 36:28 Oh they're doomed.

Julie Roehm: 36:29 Are the Friendster and Myspace of the future. So not that ride sharing or ride hailing is-

Brad Berens: 36:34 Ride haling is forever.

Julie Roehm: 36:35 But at these two companies.

Brad Berens: 36:37 Yeah.

Julie Roehm: 36:37 So I'm going to leave that tease.

Brad Berens: 36:38 Oh great, yeah-

Julie Roehm: 36:41 Because I think people should go ... Because first of all I could never do it justice and it would-

Brad Berens: 36:44 Meaning you'd like me to do it or we're going to let them go and search it-

Julie Roehm: 36:46 No, no, no. I want them to go find it. And what's website specifically they go to read all your blogs?

Brad Berens: 36:51 Bradberens.com.

Julie Roehm: 36:52 Just bradberens.com.

Brad Berens: 36:52 Yeah, it's all there.

Julie Roehm: 36:54 Okay.

Brad Berens: 36:55 So.

Julie Roehm: 36:55 This was so much fun.

Brad Berens: 36:56 Thank you Julie.

Julie Roehm: 36:56 Thank you for coming. And thank you for being part of the impetus and support for this podcast in general.

Brad Berens: 37:01 I am so excited. I've been very blessed that you've interviewed some of our friends and so I've gotten to learn more about them than they've ever told me over beers at bars. So you're just opening people like their tin cans.

Julie Roehm: 37:16 Well, hopefully showing that the inner blossom in them and not the-

Brad Berens: 37:19 Not the guts.

Julie Roehm: 37:20 Not the ugly. Right. All right. Thank you Brad. Appreciate it.

Brad Berens: 37:23 Thank you. Julie.