BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Apple and original TV: a strategy teardown

    The world’s most valuable company is spending more than a billion dollars on new TV shows. The question is why? Last week, the New York Times published, “Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending?,” a useful but incomplete article by John Koblin. The article is useful because it describes how Apple…

  • The not-caring economy

    Inside every positive statement is a negative counterpart. In the second sentence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The sentence doesn’t mention women. In his sweeping, seemingly universal statement, Jefferson only includes half the population. A similar gap lurks…

  • It’s not information overload: it’s information hoarding

    Hi, I’m Brad, and I’m an information hoarder. Here’s an example. During this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, I was drinking my morning coffee from a mug that I’ve owned since the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Back then, my high school sport was fencing, which was as obscure as sports got in the…

  • It’s about so much more than health care

    This week, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase announced a partnership to change U.S. health care. The implications beyond health care are immense. As if we needed another sign that U.S. health care is itself far from healthy, this week Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase announced that they were partnering to improve health care…

  • Facebook needs a Surgeon General’s warning

    It’s hard to decide whether Facebook is more like beer, doughnuts or tobacco, but whichever comparison you prefer, there’s no doubt that Facebook is bad for you: recent research shows convincingly that as your Facebook use goes up your mental and physical health go down. (I’ll did into the research on this a little later.)…

  • 8 Thoughts on Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”

    I picked up my copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House last night at 5:45pm; finished it today at 5:45pm. Here’s what I think. 1. It’s fascinating in an I-can’t-look-away-at-the-17-car-pileup-with-lots-of-ambulances way, but I didn’t learn anything reading it. The book is the signature aria in a media opera of confirmation…

  • Why using cash won’t protect your privacy

    We need to upgrade our nightmares, thank and excuse the monsters under our beds, and tell our bogeymen that it’s time to make room for a new generation of things that make us go “eek!” Some of our fears are analog antiques in a digital world. Here’s an example of what I mean: in our…

  • My 2017 in Books

    This is the fourth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2016 list here,…

  • Death Star Scenario: Amazon Prime Bank

    If Amazon decided to move into the world of commercial banking, would the company then revolutionize how people relate to their money as profoundly and irrevocably as it has already changed how people read? Why do I pose this question? A provocative finding from our forthcoming Future of Money and Banking report inspired it: when…

  • Brief review of “Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz

    Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is a just-released and consistently interesting near-future dystopian science fiction novel set about 120 years in the future at the intersection of robotics, AI and biotech. Newitz, the author (with whom I went to grad school many years ago), has created an intriguing world that combines golden age science fiction tropes about…