The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Post-Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Scott shares two audio excerpts from his latest book, “Post-Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity,” which is out now. You’ll hear chapter one, The Covid Gangster Move: Variable Cost Structures, and chapter four, Twenty-First-Century Higher Ed. You can find the book here or on Scott’s Twitter, @profgalloway.  Scott also brings on his literary agent, Jim Levine, to hear about COVID-19’s impact on the book industry, Amazon’s position in this space, and what Jim looks for in talent. Jim also shares his advice for finding moments of engagement with your loved ones. Jim is the founder of LGR Literary Agency in New York City.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

episode 37 the atomic number of rubidium what is rubidium it's the shit that makes fireworks purple 37 is the normal human body temperature in degrees celsius let's bring up the heat and let's make the fireworks that are this life are this pod burn purple go go go Welcome to the 37th episode of the Prof G Show. We have a special episode today for Thanksgiving. Instead of our regular scheduled programming, I'm sharing an audio excerpt from my latest book, Post-Corona, From Crisis to Opportunity, which dropped yesterday or the day before.

What a thrill! I know you're thinking, wow, a live book reading. Oh my God. Indubitably, I hope he wears a cardigan and pets a Labrador and tells me to give money to PBS for a free tote bag. Anyway, anyway. God, it sounds so fucking echoey. By the way, I am in, I don't know where I am. This has been such a shit show. I was on Fox this morning. Fucking disaster. Fucking disaster. Internet's not working here. My computers aren't working. My tech guy's doing his best. It has just been first word shit, second word show. So why should this be any different? I can hear the echoes in this Joey bag of donuts room I'm in. Anyways,

as you can tell, I'm in just an awesome mood. Anyways, my dad, who hasn't read my book yet, says it's my best yes. That's my joke. That's my joke. That third book, I try and put one out every 18 months, or at least this is what I've done the last few years. I've been thinking a lot about how the world changes post-corona. I think this is a game changer, so to speak, And I think both in terms of bad things and good things. But I will try to entertain you with what I think is some of the most insightful passages

from this wonderful book. But first, we also have a special guest. We're kicking off this episode with a conversation with my book agent and dear friend, Jim Levine. Jesus Christ, a live read than a book agent. I'm bored. I'm bored. But it's not. He's a role model for me. He's a really interesting guy. He's a literary agent and the founder of LGR Literary Agency in New York. Some of his clients include Tom Brady. Tom Brady, Scott Galloway. That

makes sense. Scott Galloway, Tom Brady. I get it. I totally get it. Ray Dalio, Dan Ariely, total gangster in the world of academia. Annie Duke, and like I said, yours truly. That's right. That's right. I'm number one. We discussed COVID-19's impact on the book industry, trends, and some predictions. So with that, here's our conversation with Jim Levine. Jim, where does this pod find you?

Scott, delighted to be with you. I am in a small cabin in the rural northwest corner of Connecticut, kind of where Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York come together. I've been here since March 17th to avoid COVID as much as possible. And I am especially honored to appear on episode, what I think is episode 37 of the Prop Chiefcy Podcast. And do you know why I'm honored? Let me guess. You checked Wikipedia too and probably, but go ahead, go ahead. No, no. I just knew that 37 is the atomic number of rubidium, the normal human body temperature and degrees, and the number of slots in European roulette. I didn't know.

We knew the first two, the number of slots in European roulette. Okay, good. All right. Enough of that. Anyway, Jim is sort of a role model for me, someone who's kind of my Yoda around this stuff. And Jim literally came into my office one day and said, saw your videos, you should write a book. And I said, I have no idea where to start. Pulled out an iPad, hit record, and that was the beginning of all this. Anyways, Jim, give us a sense, give us a state of play in the book industry. What are the trends in the industry? How's it doing? So overall, and this is trade publishing I'm talking about, not educational, professional. This year, for the first three quarters of 2020, compared to 2019, sales are up almost 7%, 6.9% in all formats, print, e-book, audio. New deal flow for new deals in trade publishing are up 11.5% compared to last year. That's the second highest in a decade. But all of the trends

actually confirm your theses in post-corona. The stronger getting stronger, and that means tech giants in publishing. It means Amazon. In bricks and mortar, it means Walmart, Target, and Costco. And we're seeing an acceleration of trends already in place before the pandemic, most noticeably in audiobook sales, which for the first time, audiobook sales will eclipse e-book sales. The big challenge that we're facing as Thanksgiving and we're going into Black Friday and the holiday sales is retailers are going to face a real challenge and consumers around discovery because people are going to be reluctant to go into their local independent bookseller or their Barnes and Noble.

You know, those are places where people wander around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and weeks leading up to Christmas and discover books as gifts. And that's just going to be vastly diminished. It means that the indies and physical bricks and mortar stores are going to take more of a hit. And more of the sales are going to flow towards Amazon. So a consolidation of power, which always struck me as strange about the book industry is that Amazon has literally gone to different retail villages and burned them and poured salt in the ground. And books where it started, the book industry is actually still relatively robust. I know Amazon is a big player in it, but your industry, and I know there's been a lot of consolidation, maybe flight to quality, but when I talked to our publisher, but I guess maybe our publisher,

Penguin Portfolio, Random House, which by the way, rolls right off the tongue. They are, is that what you need to do? Is that what's happening in the book industry that the other players have all consolidated and have the power to push back on Amazon? It's just unusual. Amazon has not wrecked book publishing the way it has wrecked other industries. Why do you think they've been able to sort of send off Amazon, if you will? Well, I think wreckage depends upon where you sit. If you are a retailer competing against Amazon, you're feeling that wrecking ball pretty high. Amazon now has 53% of unit sales. It has 73% of online sales and 76% of e-book sales. So if you're running an independent bookstore or you're

at an outlet of Barnes & Noble or one of the other bricks and mortar, you're certainly feeling the pain. If you are one of the publishers, you're being squeezed harder and harder by Amazon to offer deeper and deeper discounts. The way that publishers are retaliating, again, this is a perfect illustration of the strong getting stronger. So the biggest global publisher is Penguin Random House. They are right now, there are two publishers up for sale, Simon & Schuster, which is one of the big five. The two publishers that are in the lead for acquiring Simon & Schuster are Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, the number one and number two of the big five. So it's all consolidating. So, yeah.

It's like every other industry. Yeah. So basically what's happening is we're seeing consolidation is a trend that we're seeing. What's happened on the author side though? What has happened? Is it the same thing that the top 10 authors now get, used to get 50% of all revenues, now they get 70 or 80? What's happened on the talent side?

On the talent side, clearly there's a push for, like it's self-reinforcing, you know, basically it's, we're moving more and more to, or the risk is the homogenization of taste as we move, you know, publishing moves into more of a TikTok universe. We have an algorithmic driven marketplace. TikTok serves up or other social media serves up your preferences. The best-selling authors, the ones who are promoting on social media, get larger and larger followings. And when they come out with a new book, those are guaranteed to be bestsellers. So it kind of forces publishers to acquire and be

willing to pay even more for the tried and true authors, which can make it harder for an unknown author to break in unless he or she comes with a social media platform. Okay. So my next question is, you have a nose, as is evidenced by the fact that I have you on this podcast. You're the best at what you do in what you do. Is it social media followings? What is your algorithm now for your filter for finding authors that will sell a lot? If you're sitting out there, what boxes do you need to check to sell a ton of books and be a successful author and make your living this way? Look, some agents probably do follow.

I'm sure they do follow authors with big social media platforms. That's great when we have an author to bring forward to a publisher with a big social media platform. For me, that's becoming increasingly necessary, but not sufficient. I mean, I think what you still need is a great book. What I'm always looking for is a contrarian idea told in a compelling way, that is, by a fresh voice, somebody you want to keep paying attention to. You want to stay with page after page. If it's on audio, you want to keep listening to. And I go through the process of helping them turn those ideas into proposals and eventually manuscripts. Now, this may be a little bit of a reflection of my, I have a bit of an unusual background.

I'm a lapsed academic. So for me, a lot of this is like working with a, you know, a smart undergraduate or graduate student who wants to develop a thesis. And you sit with them and you coach them and listen to their ideas and help them shape them, that's the process. And the joy, frankly, for me, being an agent is a continuing liberal arts education. I just get to meet with people who are at the top of their field in a variety of fields from social sciences, physical sciences, economics, I mean, really all across the board, and sit with them, listen to their ideas, and help coach or tease out of them their ideas so we can present them in the most compelling way. Are there certain attributes or skills or a type of person you meet when they're young and think this person either has the skills or will develop a voice. What coaching would you give to young people who want to be in this

business around someday being able to make a living as an author? Well, I think it's a couple of things. Tenacity, being able to deal with rejection. I've done a fair amount of writing in my career. One of the most valuable lessons I got was this may be 40 years ago, I went to hear a presentation by a psychologist I admired named Tom Cottle. He stood up on this stage next to a six-foot-high stack of computer printout paper. And he opened his talk by saying, see this stack? These are my rejection letters. And to have somebody who was such a role model for me, who I just thought everything – I mean, this guy was – every week you'd see something.

It would be in The Atlantic or Harper's, the New York Times Magazine. I mean, there was just no end to it. I'm thinking, geez, they must accept everything he sends in. And he's got a six-foot-high stack of rejections and saying, you see my published articles, what you don't see is my rejection letters. So I think it's, one, being able to deal with rejection and have the tenacity to stick with it. Two, I think it's really being open to getting feedback, getting feedback from others and not just your friends, not those people who love you and tell you you're wonderful and will be afraid to give you constructive and tough love criticism. And a third thing is you just really have to keep at it. Here's a perfect example. I don't know.

Your kids are maybe too old for this, but Mo Willans, the children's book author, you know, of the huge bestseller, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. He spent two years sending that book around to publishers, getting rejection after rejection after rejection. And finally, a publisher took a flyer on it. And, you know, millions of copies later of that book and other books, he's a success. So it's really important for young writers to understand luck is just a good part of this. But don't quit your day job while you're trying to get lucky. And then Jim, I've told you this, Jim is part of my kitchen cabinet in his 70s, in great shape, married 50 plus years, makes good money. Nice man, seems happy.

You are a role model for me and other men. A couple of pieces of advice. We have a very young, very male listenership. Talk to me a little bit about, for young fathers or just fathers in general, any, I mean, you initially started in child psychology, right? I have a doctorate in child development and social policy. I, for many, many years, ran a large nonprofit project called the Fatherhood Project, which worked to get men more involved in their children's lives. Men of all backgrounds

who worked in low-income communities, who worked in upscale workplace settings. To me, I think the most important thing, and I think I might have said this to you at one point, is I just think finding some time, way to connect with your child is the most important thing. And there's no specific recipe to that. I think it can depend for you. And maybe it'll be playing a PlayStation game with your kids when you get the new PlayStation, just hanging out. It's really in the small moments. It's not taking the big trip to

Disneyland. It's great if you can do that, you know, kids will remember that. But it's just sitting on the floor and playing blocks with a three-year-old. It's reading a book together. And it's doing that over and over in a way that develops some sort of lasting connection that you just feel viscerally, you just share. And you're never going to lose that. They're never going to lose that. Yeah. You know, Jim, it's like you've changed my life twice. And the first one was when you showed up in my office and you said, all right, you've got to write a book. And I was really intimidated. And you said, it's not that hard. And you just hit that record button. But also, that was meaningful.

But the profound change, the profound lesson I got from you is you called it moments of engagement. And you said, always pursue and take advantage of moments of engagement with your boys. And I hadn't. I always thought that I wanted my boys to be interested. I wanted there to be a Venn overlap. I was interested in sports as a young man. I wanted them to be interested in sports, and then we would connect over that.

And it was sort of what I realized was my moments of engagement were what I wanted them to be. I envisioned how our father-son relationship should play out. And what I recognized and started doing when you told me that is if my kid comes up to me and says, hey, dad, have you seen these? He has these little Pokemon things. And he says, are there Pokemon in our driveway? I have no interest in Pokemon. I don't like video games, but I'll grab my phone. I'll download the Pokemon app and I'll go out in my driveway with him and search for Pokemons because it offers a moment and it doesn't happen every time, but it offers the opportunity for a moment where you connect. And I know I like to think that they're not only going to remember those moments, but they're going to remember that feeling that they felt connected to me. And I think I would have demanded that those moments of engagement had been an overlap with something I was interested in. And I would have missed out on 70 or 80% of them, because I

remember you telling me that about, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. And now anything, and dads will appreciate this, especially as your kids get older. And quite frankly, they either want to spend too much time with you or too little. But before the age of five, they just want your 120% of your attention. And then they turn kind of 11, 12, and all of a sudden you become just the uncoolest thing around. But those moments of engagement have really been a, uh, really been a gift. So anyways, Jim, well, let me give you, let me give you one more tip now that your kids are getting into it. So as they get to be teenagers, it can be harder. They pull away. They don't want you in their life. Actually, one of the best times to engage is riding in a car together. This is before they get their driver's license.

Because you're driving, they're sitting next to them. They're trapped. They're trapped and you're not looking at them. And that actually turns out to be one of the safest and easiest places to have a conversation is they're not, they don't feel you staring at them. You can have the radio on, listening to some music. I mean, really, it's an untapped area or space for fathers and kids and mothers and kids to find those moments of engagement. Jim Levine is a literary agent and the founder of LGR Literary Agency in New York. Before establishing his own agency in 1989, he taught at Wellesley College and spent almost a decade as vice president at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, where he developed a wide range of book, magazine, audio, video, and software products.

He calls us from the Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania border. Where are you? I don't know. Connecticut. Connecticut border. And also, Jim is a role model and a man I look up to. It makes me want to be a better man. Thanks for all you've done for me, Jim.

Thank you, Scott. Honor to be on. Stay with us. We'll be right back for our post-corona audio excerpt from chapter one, the COVID gangster move, variable cost structures. Oh my God, could we have made that sound any less interesting?

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Ready, set, grow. Go to constantcontact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. Constantcontact.ca. The COVID gangster move, variable cost structures. Cash is great for survival purposes, but the real gangster move is to be capital-liked. That is to have a variable cost structure. Uber is the paradigm of this new model. The way the company leverages other people's assets is why its share price held its value despite the near collapse of its core business in the early days of the pandemic. Uber rents space in other

people's cars driven by non-employees, in the eyes of the law anyway. The second an Uber car stops making the company a profit, it effectively disappears and costs the company nearly nothing. Revenue can go to zero in a crisis, and Uber can take its costs down 60 to 80 percent. Hertz, on the other hand, owns its cars and went bankrupt. Boeing has $10 billion in cash, but if its revenues go down 80%, they can take

costs down maybe 10, maybe 20%. Tesla can furlough its workforce, but it still owes hundreds of millions of dollars on leased properties, factories, retail stores, charging stations, billions of dollars in purchase commitments to feed those factories, health insurance payments for its workforce, and has to provide warranty service on nearly a million Teslas on the road today. The Uber model is exploitative, to be sure. Uber's driver partners still have to make their car payments and insurance premiums. The model is akin to United Airlines telling its flight crews to bring their own 747 if they want to get a paycheck. But it's a model that works for Uber. Airbnb is another well-positioned

player, despite being in an industry that virtually disappeared for a few months. They monetize other people's property, which means someone else is responsible for the mortgage payments. Their business will rebound well, since renting private spaces is going to look attractive long before people are comfortable returning to hotels, amusement parks, or cruise ships. As more and more unemployed people consider joining the gig economy, it will be a good time to rent that extra room, or even move in with your parents for a while, and rent your whole apartment. The gig economy is attractive for the same reason that it's exploitative. It preys on people who have not been casted into the information economy as they didn't have access

to the requisite credentialing or can't work a traditional job. They might be a caregiver, have a health condition, or just not speak great English. Uber preys on the disenfranchised and offers sub-minimum wage work that is flexible and has few startup costs. Is this a failure of character and code on the part of Uber management and their board, or an indictment on our society which has allowed these cohorts of vulnerability to form in the millions? The answer is yes. The Great Dispersion. COVID-19 is accelerating dispersion across many economic sectors. Amazon, of course, took the store and dispersed it to our front door. Netflix took the movie

theater and put it in our living room. We're going to see this dispersion across other industries, including healthcare. Most people who survived COVID-19 never set foot in a doctor's office. During the pandemic, people with psychological conditions saw their therapist and had medications adjusted without leaving home. This was enabled by changes to insurance rules, which had largely frowned on telemedicine and remote prescribing. Those changes are not likely to be undone, and a flood of innovation and capital will pour into the opportunity well they have drilled. The high-def camera on your mobile phone is a decent diagnostic tool already, but it's a small step to the

consumer-friendly diagnostic tools arriving on our doorsteps, used, and shipped back. Specialists will be consulted across town and across the country. Teladoc Health, the largest independent U.S. telemedicine service, is adding thousands of doctors to its network. The transition to electronic health records was a major thrust for Obamacare and may be the program's most lasting and important legacy, as electronic records enable a dispersal of an industry ripe for disruption. We've seen a shift toward dispersion in grocery take place with unheard of speed. While pre-pandemic, most people preferred to pick out their own food, especially produce. Stay-at-home advisories have taught us it's okay not to squeeze the avocado. From the beginning of March to the middle of April, online grocery sales increased roughly 90%, while food delivery sales melted up 50%.

The infrastructure the shift has inspired, from warehouses to entrenched customer relationships, will survive the pandemic and change our food system. Habits that should have taken a decade to acquire are the new normal. Working from home. Of everything wrought by the pandemic, perhaps the most visible and widespread trend acceleration is the radical transition to working from home. The dispersal of work has arrived. It's a double-edged sword to be sure. Like so much else in the pandemic, its greatest benefits are being reaped by the already wealthy who have home office setups, child care help, or other means of making money during lockdown. Most working class people, on the other hand, can't do their

jobs at home since they are tied to the store, warehouse, factory, or other place of work. And for those of us who can do it, it may free us from commutes and office coffee, but it imposes burdens as well. As a business owner, I've long been skeptical of work-from-home cultures. Ideas need to flirt and fight with one another, and that happens best in person. Just as some things are better said in a phone call than an email, meetings can be more productive and lead to more camaraderie than Zoom calls. Presence is also great for accountability. Visual cues help build trust. Also, proximity is key to relationships, which are key to the culture of any organization. But presence is also expensive. Office space, commuting, dry cleaning, overpriced sandwiches, the costs all add up. Meanwhile, the tech that enables virtual interactions keeps

getting better and less expensive. The trillion-dollar question is whether tech can disperse our workforce without reducing a culture of innovation and productivity. Six months ago, I still thought it could not. The virus doesn't care about my management theories, however, and so here we are. Despite stereotypes that telecommuting breeds slacking, early data suggests productivity is up, at least at some companies. As of June 2020, 82% of corporate leaders plan to allow remote working at least some of the time, and 47% say they intend to allow full-time remote work going forward. We are still early in the work-from-home experiment. High stress levels, distractions from family, and improvised tech aren't a great match.

We all have Zoom fatigue, but new tech is emerging that can improve team interactions. We crave contact, but not surveillance. This is a massive opportunity for innovation. Zoom, for instance, announced its first dedicated at-home video conferencing system, a 27-inch monitor with microphones and wide-angle cameras. The startup Sidekick offers an always-on tablet aimed at small teams that want constant and spontaneous communication among coworkers, simulating sitting together all day long. Anecdotally, I think working from home has been harder, not easier for most people,

certainly for parents of young children, and the coveted work-life balance seems further away. But the overwhelming reason for that is that we are also trying to do K-12 school from home, and that's a difficult but likely prospect short term. As K-12 goes back to 100% in-person by 2021, the benefits of work from home will hopefully loom larger. No commuting, no morning rush, less time getting ready, working from several spots in your house. This is an opportunity for employers to come up with new perks and new ways to support employees.

Companies in big cities could spend $2,000 a month for office snacks. At L2, it was $20,000 a month. Now that we're not buying those, at my new startup, Section 4, we are giving employees monthly grocery debit cards. They can buy their own snacks. Many people don't have home setups comfortable enough to spend 8 to 10 hours a day in. Do you do an audit of home office needs and buy people good chairs? Do those who already have good chairs get a speaker?

Do you buy everyone a good mic or just give them gift cards for office supply stores? The options will depend on the size of your team and your budget. The important thing is to show awareness and support. Working from home on Fridays used to be a perk few people enjoyed. Post-corona, working from home on Friday or Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will be the new normal. Second order effects of the dispersion of work. Some retailers stand to benefit. If I'll spend another 10 to 20 percent of my waking hours at home, I'll get the great couch from CB2 or invest in Sonos. Home improvement purchases were

up 33 percent in March, even as much of the country went into lockdown. If people are going to be stuck in their homes working from home, it's time to tackle those home improvement projects. The normalization of work from home may help create greater opportunities for women. Women under 30 who don't have children have closed the pay gap with their male counterparts. Once women have kids, they go to 77 cents on the dollar relative to their male counterparts. Part of our ability to create the same career trajectory for women with kids is to create more options and flexibility around where they work from. Part of working from home is the ability to work at different hours than the rest of your team, allowing for

family needs like caretaking, side gigs, or hobbies that contribute to work-life balance. It may be time to unroll the yoga mat or dust off the drum set in the garage instead of spending 225 hours or nine full days a year commuting. However, there are risks to working from home. If your big tech job can be moved to Denver, there's a decent chance it can be moved to Bangalore. Also, as great as it is to work from your couch, we are an unequal society in which women still do more housework and caretaking than men. As a result, especially as schools are reluctant to reopen, if extended child care or homeschooling is required, the more likely parent to drop out of work will be the woman. This is especially true for the lower

income brackets. Career advancement is often the result of in-person informal communications like drinks after work or impromptu lunches. Presence has implications for who is top of mind for a promotion or whom an executive is most familiar and comfortable with. This calls for companies to make extra efforts to include employees working from home in meetings, informal communications, and advancement decisions. Judge performance, not the schedule. Even with the best efforts, it will be difficult to avoid a disparity in opportunities between those who can come to the office five or more days a week and those who

cannot, whether because of child care or other dependent care obligations, most likely to be women, because they are immunocompromised or because they live a thousand miles away. This is unfair to employees, but it's an employer's loss. The very obstacles that interfere with office attendance can forge skills and discipline. In the nine firms I've founded, my experience has been the employees who are also mothers have often mastered a level of efficiency that noticeably outstrips their peers who are fathers. I'll talk more about this in Chapter 5, but we can't ignore the fact that remote work will be a means of increased income inequality. 60% of jobs that pay over $100,000 can be done from home, compared to only 10% of those

that pay under $40,000. This is a major contributor to the pandemic's disparate impact across income levels. Low-income workers are nearly four times as likely to have been laid off or furloughed as high-income workers. Post-corona, the benefits of increased flexibility that come with remote work alternatives will flow to the already well-off. There's an intra-class dynamic here as well, though this is more about comfort than fundamental inequality. Working from home can mean a lot of different things. Senior people with big houses in the suburbs have dedicated office rooms and equipment. Many have even worked out full-time

child care, or their kids are old enough they don't need constant supervision. Junior people, on the other hand, are more likely to live in cramped apartments and starter homes that don't have dedicated workspaces. Those frustrations spell opportunity, however. The same tech that enables working from home also enables working from satellite and temporary offices. I was, to put it mildly, a WeWork bear, but I'm actually bullish on the underlying concept. Flexible spaces where people can work alone or in teams, distributed throughout cities and beyond, sounds like the future. The second-order effects of a shift toward much more working from home or working from remote offices are fascinating. What happens to cities in a world where

you don't need to live in them? It's a trend worth watching, but I wouldn't write the obituary of cities just yet. Forty years ago, it was fashionable to predict the death of the watching, but I wouldn't write the obituary of cities just yet. Forty years ago, it was fashionable to predict the death of the city, but they came roaring back. And not because people had to live in them for their jobs. Young people brought cities back because they wanted to live near other young people and to get access to culture and entertainment. Indeed, those draws have proven so strong that many cities, New York first among them, have become so desirable that young people, in many cases, the children of those who saved cities in the first place, can no longer afford to live there. Best case, we see the midlife professional move out to the leafy, charming villages with great

schools and let the 20-somethings come back to the village. Coming up, we have our audio excerpt from Chapter 4, 21st Century Higher Ed. Stay tuned. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM. 21st century higher ed. When we can let all this restart and give the on-campus experience a chance to compete with the virtual, a generation that comes of age in the pandemic may not perceive the same value in the proximity my generation cherished.

By the time the virus is contained, we may have raised a micro-generation of innate distancers. Even post-corona and a return to proximity, the temporary elimination of the college experience will have catalyzed a question American households were afraid to ask. Is it worth it? After a month taking classes at home, most students were likely desperate to get back to campus. After a year without the traditional college experience, plenty of people will begin to wonder how much they miss it and what it's really worth. Moreover, the need to rethink how campuses are utilized and the injection of online tools into the college toolbox is going to expand the notion of the college experience. For many students, it already looks nothing like the brochures. Around 20% of college students live with their parents, and over half don't live in college housing.

27% of full-time students work at least 20 hours per week. In the near future, schools looking to reduce density on campus are likely to move toward rotating schedules, such as four- to six-week modules, rather than four-month semesters. Schools could encourage or even require students to spend a year or more away from campus or invest in satellite campuses, as my school, NYU, has done in Dubai and Shanghai. Finally, we cannot overlook that even for those participating in the traditional college experience of lecture halls and discussion sections, dorms, and dining halls, there have long been inequalities and inefficiencies. Disruption is an opportunity to better serve the broader community. Women, people of color, gay and transgender students have had to fight, and still have to fight, for an equal place on our campuses. So we shouldn't be surprised that women are 50% more likely than men to say they would choose an online college option,

or that blacks are 50% more likely than whites to say they are confident in the quality of online coursework. Simply put, they have less to lose, as the status quo was different for them, and as a result, they stand to benefit the most from a rethinking of higher ed. Recommendations What needs to happen? The U.S. needs a Marshall Plan to partner with states to dramatically increase the number of seats at state schools while decreasing costs for four-year universities and junior colleges. Only a third of the U.S. population has college degrees, and less than 10% have graduate degrees. Tax private K-12 schools to supplement public K-12 education. Higher education has become a caste system in substantial part because the rich now

have a private educational system greasing the skids for entry to the best schools, and poor kids, except the truly exceptional among them, can't compete. We should be investing vastly more in our public primary and secondary schools. Endowments over a billion dollars should be taxed if the university doesn't grow freshman seats at 1.5 times the rate of population growth. Harvard, MIT, and Yale have combined endowments of approximately $85 billion, greater than the GDP of many Latin American nations. If an organization is growing cash at a faster rate than the value they are providing, they aren't a non-profit, but a private enterprise. Senator Elizabeth Warren taught in the mother of all wine caves, Harvard. A dean of a top-ten school needs to be a class

trader and reevaluate tenure so as to limit it to cases where it's truly needed to secure academic freedom, rather than the expensive and innovation-killing employment perk it has become. This would require greater compensation in the short run to attract world-class academics, but productivity would skyrocket as academics would find that the market, while a harsh arbiter, often brings out great things in people when they face competition. We need firms like Apple to seize the greatest business opportunity in decades and open tuition-free universities that leverage their brand and their tech expertise to create certification programs, Apple in Arts, Google in Computer Science, and Amazon and Operations. The business model is to flip the model and charge firms to recruit, shifting costs from students to firms, bypassing the cartel that is university accreditation.

Apple training, certification, testing, and reporting would lead to bidding wars among their graduates, the secret sauce for any university. I first wrote about this in 2017, and one of the silver linings of the pandemic has been Google announcing in August 2020 that the company will offer courses awarding career certificates that it and other participating employers will consider equivalent to a four-year degree in that area. Gap years should be the norm, not the exception. An increasingly ugly secret of campus life is that a mix of helicopter parenting and social media has rendered many 18-year-olds unfit for college. 90% of kids who defer and take a gap year

return to college and are more likely to graduate with better grades. Here we have a chart showing that after a gap year, 90% of students returned to college, 60% decided on what they wanted to study, and 60% took academic work more seriously. We need national service programs. I talk more about this in Chapter 5, but in brief, we should start with the Corona Corps and expand from there. National service programs of all kinds, from military to education, provide exceptional returns on investment for both the nation and those who serve. We fetishize a university degree, but for many, it's prohibitively expensive and unnecessary. A two-year community college degree in business management, marketing, or similar field is a sufficient prerequisite for many office jobs. Computer programming, UX, UI, and product management are hot fields that will get hotter,

and certification programs including General Assembly and Lambda School are a gangster way of preparing a person of any age for a career in those fields in a matter of months. Many front-end developers are also self-taught through Khan Academy, YouTube, and other free resources. Expanding the variety and efficiency of certification programs can not only retrain workers in dying industries, but can position a young person for a rewarding entrepreneurial career. We need a nationwide vocational training system in the U.S., similar to programs in Germany, where four times more people per capita have vocational training

than in the U.S. With a shifting economic and labor landscape, vocational programs could provide a changing workforce with options and purpose. Our declining life expectancy is mostly due to deaths of despair, drugs, alcohol, suicide. Many of them could be prevented if people are given dignified work options through affordable focus training. One thing we should not do? Free college. That's a populist slogan and a bad idea. It's a further transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Only 32% of Americans go to college, and cost is not what keeps the most exceptional kids of any income level from getting to college. Improve K-12 education, strengthen two-year programs, expand the seats at the best universities,

and college becomes an engine of upward mobility, without leaving behind the two-thirds of people whom high school serves well. College needs to be more affordable, but we don't need to subsidize the wealthiest households in America, who send 88% of their children to college. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Audio excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio from Post-Corona by Sky Galloway, narrated by the author. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next week for another episode of The Prop G Show from Section 4 and the Westwood One Podcast Network. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe. Stripe is a payments and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like Uber, BMW, and DoorDash. Thank you. invoicing and all recurring revenue management needs. You can learn how Stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at Stripe.com.

That's Stripe.com to learn more. Stripe. Make progress.