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[0:00] Mason Bray: So we have Nick Bernstein, the senior vice president of late night programming at CBS. If you frequent the Late Late Show with James Corden, he's been featured heavily in the past few months, and I think he has made an amazing show even better. I'm so excited to talk to him today. Hi Nick.

[0:14] Nick Bernstein: Hi, what a nice introduction. Thanks, Mason. Nice to meet you officially.

[0:18] Mason Bray: Nice to meet you too. How are you?

[0:21] Nick Bernstein: I'm doing really well. Uh, it's been a whirlwind of the last few months for me personally, but for the opportunity to finally get out in the world and go back into the studio, which I hadn't been to for 14 months or so, has been like starting to feel normal again, which is really cool.

[0:46] Mason Bray: Absolutely. Um, can you start by telling your path to how you are here at CBS?

[0:53] Nick Bernstein: Sure, from the beginning.

[0:55] Mason Bray: Yeah.

[0:56] Nick Bernstein: Well, um, I'll you're in high school in the right now, right?

[1:01] Mason Bray: Yep. Going to be a sophomore.

[1:03] Nick Bernstein: You're gonna be a sophomore. Okay. So sometime around your when I was your age, um, which was in the nineties, which was several decades ago, uh, I um, I started to really figure out like what I liked about comedy, and it was just by watching other shows that I uh, that I started to fall hard for. So that was like, uh, for me, it was like Saturday Night Live, like so many people, Conan O'Brien show, um, and In Living Color. Uh, those were like some of the big shows that in eighth grade, ninth grade, I would talk to all my friends about. And then we uh, we had a couple of projects when we were in high school where we got to make videos um that were kind of longer than normal. So they uh, I was in an English class where they had us make um like a satire, and it was supposed to be based on, you know, Shakespeare, uh, or I think it was all Shakespeare.

We did do a satire and we had to do a tragedy, but we got to make it our own. So the satire was really fun because it was basically a comedy and uh, we did a goof on a show called Leave It to Beaver. Have you ever heard of Leave It to Beaver?

[1:51] Mason Bray: No, I will put it on this to watch.

[1:51] Nick Bernstein: No, you don't have to. It's not that great a show. It just was like a classic sitcom from the 60s. Um, and we did like what would it be like if Leave It to Beaver was around in the 90s? So that was basically our idea. But anyway, that was like the first time I got to do something that was my own real comedic thing and worked with friends. And then I kind of realized during that moment like I wonder if I can do something in college that was, uh, that speaks to how to make things. Um, my thought originally was like, well, I'll do something that's broadcast journalism related because that seemed like a real job. You watch people do the news and they write their own scripts and they tell their own stories.

And um, and so I found a school that, uh, that did that. Um, that was Syracuse. I went to Syracuse and while I was there, I realized the thing that I liked the most were like the satire things, the Leave It to Beaver type of thing. So I shifted a little bit from journalism as a focus to television, radio, and film as a focus.

[3:35] Nick Bernstein: And um, so I really liked doing things like, um, trying to come up with pitches for shows and making short videos. Uh, and I worked at a radio station at the school called Z89, which kind of was like, it was like a pop radio station basically run by college kids. So those were all things I really liked. And then I knew I wanted to work in TV, so I uh, I thought the best chance to do something in TV was to move to LA because most of the production happened there. But I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about, uh, which was not the greatest, uh, on my part. I didn't think a lot about how am I supposed to get a job in TV. I just figured, well, I'll move there and then maybe I'll figure it out.

Um, it doesn't really work that way, especially now. Um, so I uh, I had one, I knew one person who worked at NBC. Um, we'd gone to the same summer camp, but he was like 10 years older than me. Um, and he helped me get my, uh, my resume to the page program um at NBC, which do you know what the page program is at all?

[4:56] Mason Bray: Have you seen 30 Rock?

[4:56] Nick Bernstein: Yeah.

[4:56] Mason Bray: I just finished watching that.

[4:58] Nick Bernstein: Oh, you did? Did you like it?

[4:59] Mason Bray: Yeah, I loved it. It was hilarious.

[5:02] Nick Bernstein: Yeah, so yeah, so then you know Kenneth, the page. Um, in real life, you can't be a page for more than a year. I think he must have done it for seven years on that show, uh, or longer. Um, but uh, but that was a similar thing. It was just I did it in Burbank in California, and he was in New York. But we gave tours and you'd see people at the shows. Um, and from there, uh, I had an opportunity to work. I got a job as an assistant in the late night department. Um, because a lot of the times you hear about job openings uh at NBC when you're working as a page, and a lot of times they like to hire pages because we've worked on people's desks before and um gotten to sort of know a little bit of the lay of the land and who the people are.

There's like sometimes, uh, it's a shorter step to really knowing a, uh, a department when you've been around the place. So I worked, I, I and I was also at a point where, um, you know, like people were doing one of two things. If they wanted to work in TV, they were either working on a show and working on a production as like a PA and getting people coffee there, or they worked in an office for a studio or for a network, and they got people coffee there. Um, and uh, and I didn't know which one, uh, was sort of the best chance to learn the most, uh, for the next step. But I loved late night and um, and my boss, uh, seemed like the type of person and ended up being the type of person who really wanted to teach and, uh, and give his knowledge to, um, to the next generation.

And I just happened to be the lucky one who got to experience all of that and take in all that knowledge. So I ended up working at NBC in late night for, um, almost a, uh, for more than 11 years. Um, and, uh, it was just a two-person department, so it's just Rick Ludwin was my boss. He passed away, uh, about two years ago, sadly. But, um, but, uh, it was just the two of us in the office, and we were in charge of all of the, uh, helping to oversee all of the shows in late night. Um, so at NBC that was Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, eventually Jimmy Fallon, Carson Daly, and Saturday Night Live. Um, so we watched the shows as they taped, we got to read scripts when they came in, um, we dealt with all the other departments at the network who, um, who also interact with the late night shows.

So that's like people who do publicity, people who handle sales, the people who make the promos, uh, the people who even literally program the show, um, which can be, um, giving them the information about who's on what nights or what the repeats are, or literally, uh, how the act breaks are supposed to be, uh, positioned. So if you're watching the show like we all used to, maybe not you, Mason, because you're a little younger, but um, we'd watch it on television and we'd watch it when it aired. So, um, so how long are the commercial breaks? How long are the acts? All, uh, how do you fill all that time? We worked on that too. Um, and then after I worked at NBC, um, I, uh, they merged my department in another department.

Uh, so I moved on from there and I ended up, uh, being a producer of a show um on TBS. It was called The Pete Holmes Show, and uh, it was with Pete Holmes. We were, uh, we were produced by the Conan O'Brien production company, and we came on after Conan. Um, so I did that for a couple of years, and then CBS announced their transitions after Letterman and Ferguson, Craig Ferguson, and they'd announced Stephen Colbert to host the 1130 show, and uh, they announced James Corden to host 1230. And I didn't, I didn't really know James as a host. I, I knew him, I knew I knew him from Gavin and Stacey, and uh, I'd never seen him on Broadway, but I know he'd won a Tony. And so I like a lot of people, I like I did a big deep dive on like what is what else has he done.

Um, and I saw all these other specials and um, award shows that he'd hosted and and all of sort of the like interests that he had and and uh, the way that he asked questions and he, he was really sort of intrigued and interested in a lot of, uh, quite a wide variety of, uh, subjects. And I thought, well, this is, this is exactly what a late night host does and has to know. And so I was really excited about that. I didn't know anyone at CBS or I knew very few people at CBS, but I was fortunate to get a call from the people that were in charge of CBS. Uh, Nina Tassler was the president of CBS and uh, David Staff, who is still the head of the studio, and they both said that they were looking for someone who, uh, to be a network executive for the West Coast to, um, help with the late night shows here.

And um, that sounded really interesting to me, and I'd never been a person who had reported to the heads of anything before. So, and I got to meet Ben and uh, Ben Winston, who's the EP of the show, and I met James, and then they told me that Rob Crab was gonna be, uh, an executive producer of the show also, and I knew Rob from uh, Last Call with Carson Daly and and Jimmy Fallon's show. So we'd known each other for at that point like 15 years, and so I was really excited to hear that he was on board, and um, and then it just really like, uh, I started in November of 2014, uh, and no one had even moved to LA yet. They were all in London or New York or somewhere else, and they didn't get a chance to really start working on the show full time until January of 2015, and they started on air in March of 2015, and so it was this like whirlwind of hirings and figuring out what the show is gonna look like and be, um, and then you know, we're now almost seven years later, six and a half years later, uh, we're in this really wild position.

[11:32] Mason Bray: And recently James has questioned your title of senior vice president. So I'm here to say if you ever need an unpaid junior vice president, um, I'm here.

[11:44] Nick Bernstein: Oh, uh, thank you so much, Mason. Uh, yeah, my title's gotten a lot of, uh, flack on, on the air. Um, I, I was, uh, I so was, um, I was a vice president at NBC for I don't know, about five years, and then I was a vice president at CBS for about five years. Um, and they just bumped me to, I just got a title bumped to senior vice president, um, not that long ago, and I thought it's taken like, it took 15 years to become a senior vice president, and it literally took one episode of television for me to be called junior vice president. So I'm glad to have someone else who could take that mantle from me if, uh, if we get to that point.

[12:28] Mason Bray: Um, so you mentioned in your, um, introduction of how you got to where you are, um, pitching shows. So do you have any tips for people who are trying to pitch shows?

[12:37] Nick Bernstein: Man, um, I think it's a really challenging process. Um, you know, you get into, well it and look, all shows are different because the thing, the type of shows, uh, that I've ever pitched are almost entirely in the late night genre. So you are when you're doing that, you are pitching, you're pitching an individual. You're saying, like, please like this person, trust this person to be the face of a show, and trust his voice to or her voice to be the one that people are going to be interested in hearing from. And then you have to have a lot of conviction about how you have something to say that isn't necessarily out there, which in this day and age is very challenging because there's so many opportunities, whether it's podcasting or or short form on YouTube or Instagram or even TikTok, like there's a lot of ways to get your voice out there. So describing and displaying what you would do if given a bigger budget and a half hour platform or an hour-long platform to do that.

[13:45] Nick Bernstein: Um, you're selling yourself a lot. I think that's probably different than pitching a comedy or a drama in which you're really trying to have a big picture for an arc of what a season might look like or what a series might look like, and you're describing all these different individual characters and what it's based on, and you're setting a mood. I guess you're setting a mood in late night, also. I don't know if this isn't necessarily the same in comedy or drama because you have to have a lot of conviction in those places that your ideas that you're coming in with are very fully formed and you have a real strong concept of what you want to do and that's when you know how to execute it. In late night and in these style shows, I think that that is part of it but you also have to have a realization that there's a flexibility to what you're doing because you might go in with an idea and then the world changes and you have to pivot a little bit and be flexible enough to go with whatever the sentiment of the country is or as the longer that you do something you're not necessarily the same person in your 30s as you are in your 40s or your 50s or sometimes in your 60s and so you have to be malleable to change a little bit in that way too and I don't think you can pitch that in a room necessarily but you're hoping that the executives or the people who hold the purse strings and can green light a project see you as someone that viewers will want to spend a lot of time with and be invested in their growth in the same way that they were with so many of the pioneers that started, you know, in the 50s and 60s.

[15:49] Mason Bray: Absolutely. Um, can you walk me through a day to day at Television City for you?

[15:55] Nick Bernstein: So a normal day before the pandemic, there would be a production meeting that happens in the late morning. I got there on the earlier side more days than not. I would oftentimes do two things. I'd catch up with some of the late night shows that aired on other networks so that I could see what the guests did, what the comedy was, if there was anything that already had some virality to it that maybe I hadn't seen yet, because I don't stay up quite as late anymore, even though I work in late night and I still try to go to bed at a normal hour, a decent hour. But America don't do that. America, stay up as late as you want. And then I also like to watch the morning news to see what are the headlines of the day.

If I haven't already seen them on Twitter, I'd like to see how specifically how CBS This Morning is handling the news. And I'll flip over to the 24-hour cable news networks also to see what they're focused on because our writers are really smart, they do the same things, but it's important to know what the focus is, because it is possible that we will also be talking about that if there's a comedic angle to it, or sometimes sadly if there isn't a comedic angle to it, and we still have to talk about it and feel like it's something that needs to be discussed. Then I go to the production meeting so that I know what the show is planning on doing for the day and how they're structuring their day.

As scripts come in, I'll read those scripts. I will often have meetings, sometimes with the producers of the show, sometimes with some of those other departments that I talked about, where it's my opportunity to catch up with them. It used to be on a conference call often, but now it's on Zoom, which is really nice because I'm at Television City, but a lot of the people that I work with on the network side or on the studio side work at a different location. They work at CBS Radford in Studio City, which is like 20-25 minutes away. Or some of them work in New York. And so that's how I communicate with them. We try like the more information you can give about a show and hear about what other departments are planning on the show, the better we can say, like, yes, that's a good idea, or actually we're not doing sort of X anymore.

I know we'd said maybe we're gonna do X, but we're gonna move that to another day. So we just try to keep everybody informed about what's happening. And then I have a coordinator in my office. Her name is Kelsey, and she puts together an update, an email update about what's happening and who the guests are and what comedy we might be taping and what comedy we're airing. So we'll go through that. She writes a draft, I look at it, and sometimes I might hear about something that she hadn't heard about yet, so we just make some adjustments before we send them out. And then we have rehearsal in the afternoon. After rehearsal, I will go back to my office and I'll watch if I can, if there's time, I'll watch Colbert because I get a feed of when they're taping, and they're New York, they're three hours ahead of time.

But I also like to see what they're doing in their monologue in their act one. So because every once in a while we might be hitting very similar topics or even similar jokes. Not all the time, but sometimes. And so I like to try to give a heads up to the producers and the writers, just in case something might like be really close. That's an act, you know, that's just happenstance, similar minds, similar ideas, just so that they have the option if they want to tweak it or change it. That maybe we have enough time to do that. The fact that they're coming from two different people and two different voices, that sometimes is enough to make it feel unique. And then we tape the show normally at five o'clock in the afternoon Pacific time.

And so this is once again in the before times. I used to be in the control room and I would sit next to Ben Winston, and one row ahead of us is Tim Manselli, the director. Sometimes there's another producer, James Longman, who's in the control room with us, and he's often the one who's really executing the comedy and has he started with it, like he'll send out a pitch to whoever might be in it, the talent who's in a sketch with James, and he'll sometimes say, like maybe we can get a second take of something if it's so desired, and he'll often oversee an edit of that comedy piece. So he's in there and we'll talk and Ben and I'll talk. I also sit next to the person who handles the teleprompter.

Her name is Karina, and so we talk a lot, and sometimes I'll look over something and it could be a last minute like a word might have been misspelled, or we have to we figure out Karina and Joe, who handles the script coordinator. How can this is a challenging word to pronounce? How do we make it phonetically correct in the teleprompter when we're all just sort of looking at each other and figuring it out? They do it mostly, but it's fun to like be in the mix of those things. And then during commercial breaks, we talk about what we're watching on TV. Because most of the time a really nice day for me is I watch a show it's really funny I tell people that was really funny and I go home. That's pretty good.

But it's a little bit different now in the pandemic since we've gone back. Now you're sitting in a spotlight and yeah. I am not a person who has ever been on camera for anything outside of like silly high school things which we had no choice. We had to do everything. You're a performer right you you act and you're in shows.

[21:49] Mason Bray: Yeah, I'm both backstage and on stage whenever I can.

[21:53] Nick Bernstein: So I like the backstage part that part's really fun because of the way that the show is now and I don't know how many people I you clearly have been watching but like everybody there's not that many people that are in the studio currently so James is back in the studio and he's been back since September and they've changed their the studio format around so that he is COVID compliant and there's enough room and space for camera ops scripts people behind the scenes and there's a handful of space for like some of the writers some of the producers the band there's maybe 20-25 people that are in that studio at any given time and everyone wears masks and everyone keeps distance and then I was able to go back in May and then they started putting me on camera with the rest of them and it started by just like an offhanded remark one day where they're like, let's put Nick at the bar and make fun of his hair basically because my hair hasn't always looked like this.

It was your length before, and I never I didn't get it cut during the pandemic when I was at home because I don't know, it's hard to cut curls, and I wasn't gonna leave it up to just you know, it's not fair for like my wife or somebody to that was pretty much it. It's just my family. No one's gonna cut my hair. So I let it grow, and they'd see me on Zoom in meetings, and you know, it was a lot of laughs at my expense. And you know, I'm a pretty good sport about this, and I've worked in late night for a long time. So I know the benefits of having foils for people to work off of. I just didn't anticipate it would be me, but like I've been chosen a little bit to be one of those people. So they put me at the bar when I came back, and then they just decided, as you've seen, to put me in a higher and higher chair to the point where I was literally in the lights, borderline fearing for my life, because it wasn't the safest way to go about being on being in a studio or on TV.

But luckily everything went okay. And then I thought, well, that's it, right? Like they had their fun for a week. Now I'll go back and I couldn't really be in the control room. There's not a whole lot of space in the control room. Even the executive producer that I sat next to, Ben Winston, he has his own sort of makeshift control room that they built in his office so that he can do everything from there that he would have normally done in the control room. And then, like I said, everyone else who is there, which is still only I think like a quarter of the people who work on the show are able to come in on any regular basis to the studio on any given day. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll just I'll probably watch the show from my office or something.

And then they're like, well, no, you can sit, you can sit in this other spot. So the like where I where they put me is in a chair where normally that's where the guest band would be performing. But that's now just an open space. And then I the where I'm sitting is almost like perfect sight line to where James's desk is. So he has nowhere else to look sometimes except at me. And I think that's probably why he just started asking me questions and nudging me about things that I probably shouldn't talk about on television, like that are sales related or that are sort of behind the scenes and like what my bosses are saying. And I have to be really mindful. You gotta kind of remember like the way that the show is now, it kind of felt like what rehearsal used to be like, where there's only a handful of us that are in the studio, and sometimes if they were doing if James had to do like an audience bit, he would rehearse it, and we're the only ones in the audience, so he'd come up and he'd just have fun with us, and then it was done, it was over, never on television.

That vibe and that feeling's the same now, but this actually airs on TV. And so we're a bunch of people who are all very good friends, I'd say, and get along well and have good rapport with each other and good rapport with James. And now I guess like sometimes America sees that and how they like to have fun with me to the point where like they literally, the director, Tim, decided to have a locked-off camera that is just on me for the whole show, which is mortifying, honestly. Like, I it's so weird to be there and they mic me every day. There's this giant spotlight on me. Because it's a guest band area. It's like natural for a for the Foo Fighters or somebody, or you know, I don't know, name anybody who's been on the show.

They have to have lights. I should not have lights. That's just strange. And then what's happened now, which I find even stranger, is sometimes James will still reference us, even when he has a guest on in the studio. And by us, I mean a lot of times, unfortunately, it's me. Like, I don't know if you saw a couple weeks ago we had the governor of California, Gavin Newsom was a guest. And one of the reasons he was on was because they had opened up LA and they had loosened some of the restrictions and were doing a pretty good job in LA County of getting people vaccinated and having getting closer to that point where you know we're in a herd-esque situation, and so that's all great. Like he was opening up, I don't know, Universal Studios and Disneyland and all of those places, and then he's a guest here, and we at CBS we still aren't quite there yet.

[27:37] Nick Bernstein: We're still there's some things that we have to still get settled before we can bring an audience back, have a maskless indoor situation.

[27:46] Nick Bernstein: So James started blaming me for that, basically.

[27:50] Nick Bernstein: Um and so I was getting grief from the governor, and that's the point where I was like, Well, none of this is normal.

[28:00] Nick Bernstein: Like, absolutely nothing here is normal. And so you just kind of have to roll with it.

[28:05] Nick Bernstein: Um, you mentioned the audience coming back. Is the audience coming back, or what can people look forward to from scene to show in the future?

[28:12] Nick Bernstein: What are you trying to get a scoop now, Mason?

[28:13] Mason Bray: Yeah.

[28:15] Nick Bernstein: Um the answer is I don't know yet. We there is a break coming up that's fairly lengthy. And you know, the one thing about the world over the last, let's just say in 2021, is it's hard to know month to month what changes are happening and what new restrictions might be in place or what restrictions are loosened.

[28:39] Nick Bernstein: There are a lot of shows that are starting to get audiences back. There's gonna be a point in time where we have audiences back, but when that happens, I'm not really sure. And how the show changes at that point, I also don't really know.

[28:50] Nick Bernstein: It's kind of one of the joys of late night though, right? Like we have to be flexible and malleable to these things, and I think we understand we're having fun. I think that's palpable. I think as viewers, they're enjoying watching this.

[29:05] Nick Bernstein: I think at least certainly a portion of them are. And so that's something that we never really done before is the way that James communicates with cast and with the band and everyone.

[29:18] Nick Bernstein: So hopefully there's gonna be a continuation of some of that. How that looks and how that also is informed by having audience back, I think we just have to sort of wait and see.

[29:32] Nick Bernstein: Uh and when that happens, I think that's also a little bit of a wait and see. So um, what advice would you give people who want to follow in your footsteps and become an executive of a network somewhere?

[29:47] Nick Bernstein: Well, I think it's a good question. I'll put it this way. When I was your age, and even through college, I literally didn't know what an executive was. Or that they existed, or that it was a job.

[29:59] Nick Bernstein: When I knew was I liked TV and I wanted to work in it. And so I think having a passion for whatever it is that you like is important. And when you are, if you have the capability and ability in your 20s to give yourself an opportunity to follow those dreams, it's really worthwhile.

[30:22] Nick Bernstein: I don't think there's you're not gonna regret the things you tried. I think you end up regretting the things you didn't try. And um I think that the hardest thing when you are young and just trying to break into a business is you have very little experience.

[30:40] Nick Bernstein: And uh every time you apply for something, you how are you supposed to apply for something where you need two or three years of experience when you've just started? Like that's uh that's not easy.

[30:52] Nick Bernstein: So you have to just go put yourself out there a little bit and start to meet people and do informational meetings when you can. There's uh and how you take advantage of that is you know, you sometimes you have to fall on the kindness of people.

[31:07] Nick Bernstein: I mean, we didn't know each other, and you just sent me a message and you took a chance, and here we are now. I don't know where that's gonna lead, but you know, in six years, you could be the junior vice president of late night television.

[31:19] Nick Bernstein: And it all started from, you know, taking a chance on sending a message out. Sometimes you won't hear back, and sometimes you will, and you just have to keep kicking the tires for a while.

[31:30] Nick Bernstein: That's sort of how I feel like a lot of these things are lucky in that, like I was very fortunate that the person who worked as the assistant in late night was moving to Hawaii, and I had to, I called there randomly, and she told me that.

[31:44] Nick Bernstein: I didn't know that before. We didn't have, we didn't weren't text buddies. There was no text messaging in 2000. So I'd met enough people that like something opened up and they knew me and they didn't, you know, they thought I was okay, and like they're gonna give me a chance.

[31:58] Nick Bernstein: And when you continue to knock on doors, I think that's how it happens. I'll give you one other example. This just happened like this week.

[32:04] Nick Bernstein: And here's I'll give you a like a just a tiny bit of advice. When you talk to older people like us, we have less idea of how you break into the business now because the business now is a little bit different than what it was when whenever we started.

[32:18] Nick Bernstein: So ours are like vague concepts. There was a person who was an intern. There was a person who was an intern at Full Well 73, which is Ben Winston and James's company that they have.

[32:31] Nick Bernstein: And she had to do her internship via Zoom for the whole time. Every once a week, they have a gathering of people who work with Fullwell, and it's just a catch up and how is everything going?

[32:44] Nick Bernstein: How are things what's happening? And um, even after her internship, she still was on the Zooms, and then she asked to do an informational meeting with me, and we talked about the types of jobs that she was looking for and just her career aspirations.

[33:00] Nick Bernstein: She just graduated this past May and you know, was hoping for a job out of college, and it's hard to know what jobs are open until you're there because people aren't hiring six months from now, they want to hire like for next week.

[33:14] Nick Bernstein: Um, that is often how the jobs work out here. Like you hear from something from something 24 hours later, that job's gone. So I had a friend who worked in Nickelodeon who just put out a like, hey, we're looking for PAs, and I sent that message to the Fulwell intern and was like, is this something you're interested in?

[33:36] Nick Bernstein: She was like, Yes, that sounds good. I forwarded the resume over to them. They loved her, they hired her this week.

[33:43] Nick Bernstein: And that all happened because she took enough interest to just continue having conversations with people who peripherally were involved in Fullwell, but she didn't know me and she didn't work directly with me, but I also like recognized her the sort of passion she had for television and thought she would be an asset to anyone's department, and I wanted to see if I could help at all, and then like all it is is I got to open a door, she kicked that door open, and she made that happen.

[34:19] Nick Bernstein: But that is you'll hear more stories like that because sometimes it'll happen through an internship, but not directly for the company that you were interning with. But those types of things really do help.

[34:30] Nick Bernstein: Like networking is an important part of business, and it's can be hard to put yourself out there and you hope you're not bothering people, but sometimes that's like the only way that you can get through.

[34:42] Mason Bray: Yeah, absolutely. Um, something I've asked every single guest I've had on my show is do you prefer education or experience and what has helped you more?

[34:53] Nick Bernstein: Huh. So I've seen it work both ways. How about that for a wishy-washy answer?

[35:01] Nick Bernstein: Um I personally learned a little bit about the types of things that I wanted to do when I was in school. So I did education was important to open my world a little bit more.

[35:13] Nick Bernstein: I learned about programming, a lot about programming in school, things that I thought I knew, but I learned a lot about in classes that I took. And even I did a semester in London and learned a lot about British television.

[35:27] Nick Bernstein: And I really responded to that. And so I knew like, okay, that's a that's an area that I like a lot. But my grad school was essentially my first year working for RIC, where I learned way more about TV and that experience than I did in a class.

[35:45] Nick Bernstein: That being said, my wife, Andy, she works in podcasting now. She was she's a journalist and she's a podcast producer. And she got an entirely new set of contacts and experience and sort of a catapulting her career to another level when she went to get her master's degree at USC in basically online journalism, a convergence journalism program, because like in journalism, there was only print and there was broadcast, and that was it then.

[36:21] Nick Bernstein: And now that is those are two of many, many aspects of journalism. And so USC was starting to feel like I'm promoting USC right now, but they were starting to like they recognized that early on in the 2000s and started to change their department based on that.

[36:37] Nick Bernstein: And she got to learn about and meet people who worked in radio and NPR and who ended up becoming sort of the people who are prominent in podcasting now, and I think a lot of that is sort of like a combination.

[36:51] Nick Bernstein: Maybe the best educations also give you some real world experience. And a lot of times internships, which is sort of that like fusion of both, are a really good way to learn both what you like and what you don't like, which is equally important like I knew I didn't really want to work in local television when I did an internship in local TV.

[37:07] Nick Bernstein: I just felt like if there was an opportunity to do something in a slightly bigger world I liked the bigger world more than I liked the smaller departments.

[37:16] Mason Bray: Yeah. So we've been in quarantine for the past 18 months something like that. What have you been doing with your time?

[37:26] Nick Bernstein: I started keeping a list of all the movies and TV shows and books that I've watched and read. And it's like no one should have done this much over this period of time.

[37:40] Nick Bernstein: I started um I started jogging which I hadn't done in a really long time and like I've they have virtual 5Ks now. I don't know like I'd never heard of that before.

[37:52] Nick Bernstein: But basically like all these places that used to do 5Ks in their community they couldn't gather so they opened it up to virtual so like I ran a podcast I ran a podcast. I ran a uh a 5K that was based in Utah that was uh it was called a festivus 5K which was uh around the holidays and based on a like one episode of Seinfeld um where uh they didn't do Christmas or Hanukkah they did festivist um it's a good episode if you've never seen it I highly recommend it but uh I kind of did it for the um for the t-shirt that they gave you um and uh it was like me and 17 people from Utah who uh who did this on a a virtual 5K.

[38:34] Nick Bernstein: So like those are the types of things I've been doing. And now, like honestly, it's just been over the last again, two months that like post vaccine, I get to uh I get to go to work again and like seeing people has been an absolute revelation.

[38:48] Mason Bray: Are you back in you've been back in school? Did you ever did you do virtual or remote learning?

[38:53] Nick Bernstein: We had a choice all year, and um I chose to do virtual for the entire year. I guess I'm done with it now, and I'm ready to go back as soon as possible.

[39:04] Mason Bray: Well, I mean, it is like it's a sea change. It'll be a sea change for you too. I mean, it's hard being home and doing this the whole time and staying in one room.

[39:13] Nick Bernstein: Like we, you know, I have I have two kids, uh, two daughters and they're in middle school, and my wife and like literally anytime somebody like dropped something or talked louder than we are now, we'd all rush out of our rooms to see what happened.

[39:28] Nick Bernstein: Because we just we wanted anything. We wanted to do anything. And uh we probably got on each other's nerves. I'm sure like you're ready to not see just your parents right now, as lovely people as they might be.

[39:38] Nick Bernstein: So uh it really is nice to be able to see people again. And like I, you know, I hadn't seen my parents in almost two years.

[39:46] Nick Bernstein: Uh so I just got to see them for the first time um recently, and uh that was just like uh there's so much to look forward to and feel grateful for right now that uh I hope we don't forget that because it's um because it's easy to get like caught up in the just day-to-day annoyances.

[40:06] Nick Bernstein: Uh, but we can be really thankful that we're like just for our health and uh our friends and family.

[40:13] Mason Bray: Yeah. Um, so do you have anything else you want to add before we wrap up the episode?

[40:18] Nick Bernstein: Uh you know, I I think I would um only say that um I think it's great that you are doing uh a podcast and that you've decided in high school that this is uh a way for you to talk to people that uh that you're interested in and I hope you continue doing this and uh and just getting to sort of take advantage of the situation where I don't know, you have there's access to people that you you didn't necessarily and I'm not one of them, I was pretty accessible before.

[40:53] Nick Bernstein: Just people that you're interested in that you want to talk to. Like this is great for you to do. So uh congratulations to you on this.

[40:59] Mason Bray: Well, thank you so much for saying that, and thank you so much for you and the team at CBS for scheduling this and getting it together.

[41:06] Nick Bernstein: Yeah, absolutely. It was a pleasure.

[41:08] Nick Bernstein: It's really nice to meet you.

[41:09] Mason Bray: Nice to meet you.