Episode 37, The Atomic Number of rubidium, what did you get it? It's the shit that makes fireworks purple. Thirty seven is a normal human body temperature and degrees Celsius. Let's bring up the heat and let's make the fireworks that are this life. Are this pot burn?

Go, go, go.

Welcome to the thirty seventh episode of The Proff 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 Korona 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 and tells me to give money to PBS for a free tote bag anyway.

Anyway, anyway, got it. Sounds a fucking echo. By the way. I am in an where this has been such a shed show.

I was on Fox this morning. Fucking disaster. Fucking disaster. Internet's not working here. My computers are working. My tech is doing as best it has just been. First weird shit. Second word show. So why should this be any different. I can hear the echoes in this Joey bag of donuts room I men. Anyways, as you can tell, I mean 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. A 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 Korona. I think there's actually 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 I will try to entertain you with what I think is some of the most insightful passages from this wonderful book.

But first 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 in a book agent. I'm bored. I'm bored, but it's not he's a he's a role model for me. He's a really interesting guy. He's a literary agent and the founder of Elga 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 D'Alessio, 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 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 thirty seven. That's Deepika and you know, I am honored.

Let me guess. You checked Wikipedia too and probably. But go ahead. Go ahead.

No, no I just, I just knew that thirty seven is the atomic number of rubidium, the normal human body temperature and degrees and the number of slots and European roulette.

I didn't mean for this to we we knew the first two the number of slots in European roulette. OK, good enough of that. Anyway, as Jim is, Jim is sort of a role model for me. Someone is kind of my Yoda around this stuff. And Jim literally came into my office one day and said, I saw your videos, you should write a book. And I said, I have no idea where to start, pull out an iPad hit record.

And that was the beginning of all this.

Anyways, Jim, give us a sense give us the state of play in the book industry. Like 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 twenty twenty compared to two thousand nineteen, sales are up almost seven percent, six point nine percent in all formats. Print, e-book, audio, new deal flow for new deals in trade publishing are up 11 and a half percent compared to last year.

That's the second highest in a decade. But all of the trends actually confirm your thesis in post Garena. The strong are getting stronger and that means the tech giants and publishing. That means Amazon and 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 audio book sales, which for the first time audio book sales will eclipse e-book sales. The big challenge that we're facing as a 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 & Noble.

You know, those are places where people wander around the 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 indie's and physical bricks and mortar stores are going to take more of a hit. Yeah, and more of the sales are going to flow towards Amazon.

So a consolidation of power. It's always struck me as strange about the book industry as an 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, rose right off the tongue.

They are. Is that what you need to do? Is that what's happened to the book industry, that the other players have all consolidated and have the power to push back on? Amazon, which is unusual at Amazon, has not rect book publishing the way it has wrecked other industries. Why do you think they've been able to sort of fend 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, pretty high. Amazon now has fifty three percent of unit sales. It has seventy three percent of online sales and seventy six percent of ebook sales. So if you're running an independent bookstore or you're an outlet at Barnes and 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.

Is this a perfect illustration of the strong getting stronger? So the biggest global publishers, Penguin, Random House, they are right now. There are two publishers up for sale, Simon and Schuster, which is one of the big five. The two publishers that are in the lead for acquiring Simon and Schuster are Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins, the number one and number two of the big five.

It's all consolidating there. So, yeah, it's like every other industry. Yeah. So basically what's happened is we're seeing consolidation is is a trend that we're seeing that's happening on the authors side.

What has happened is that the same thing that the top ten are authors now get used to get fifty percent of our revenues. Now they get 70 or 80. What's happened on the talent side?

On the talent side, clearly there's a push for that. It's know it's self reinforcing that the top selling authors who have big social media followings print out a new book. And on social media, it's kind of like in one of your previous shows talking about Tick-Tock and the self reinforcing. You know, basically it's we're moving more and more to lower the risk is the homogenization of taste. As we move, publishing moves into more of a tick tock universe.

We have an algorithmic driven marketplace. Tick serves up or other social media serves up your preferences. The best selling author is the ones who are promoting on social media. Get larger and larger followings. And when they come out with a new book, those are going to be to be best sellers. 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.

OK, 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 and what you do. What is in social media followings? What is your algorithm now for your filter for finding authors who will sell what makes a great 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 books?

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 you 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, a 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 that's the process. And then the joy, frankly, from 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 and 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? So what coaching would you give to young people who want to be in this business around someday being being able to make a living as an author?

Well, I think it's a couple of things to tenacity, being able to deal with rejection. Yeah, I've done a fair amount of writing in my career. One of the most valuable lessons I got was this. Maybe 40 years ago, I went to hear a presentation by a psychologist I admired named Tom Codal. He stood up on the stage next to a six foot high stack of computer printout paper, and he opened the door to his talk by saying, see this stack?

These are my rejection letters, and to have somebody who was such a role model for me. I just thought everything. I mean, this guy was every week it's something that had been the Atlantic or Harper's, the New York Times Magazine. I mean, there was just no end to it. I'm thinking they must accept everything he sends in. And he's got a six foot high stack of rejections is saying. You see my published articles, but 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, too, I think is 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, I mean, you just really have to keep at it. It is a perfect example.

I don't know your kids or maybe were too old for this, but Mo Willems, the children's book author 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 millions of copies later of that book and other books is 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, you're like your and 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. What a couple a couple of pieces of advice. We have a very young, very male listenership. Talk to me a little bit about four young fathers or just fathers in general.

Any I mean, you initially started in child psychology, right?

I have a doctorate in child development. Social policy 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 work in low income communities, who worked in an upscale workplace setting. As you know, to me, I think the most important thing I think I might have said is to 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 if and 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 remember that. But it's 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 you just feel this or that 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 in the first one was when you showed up to my office and you said, all right, we've got it. 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 van 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, can you have you seen these?

Have you seen these? He has these little.

Pokemon things, 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. I'll go out in my driveway with him and search for Pokemon's because it offers a moment and doesn't happen every every time.

But it offers the opportunity for a moment where you can act. 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 percent of them, because I remember you telling me that about, I don't know, seven, eight years ago and now anything.

And dads will dads will appreciate this, especially as your kids get older. And quite frankly, you know, they either want to spend too much time with you or too little. But before the age of five, they just want your one hundred twenty percent of your attention. And then they turn kind of 11, 12, and all of a sudden you become just the coolest thing around. But those moments of engagement have really been a really been a gift.

So anyways, Jim, 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 hard, harder. They you know, 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 are driving, they're sitting next. 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 that they're not they don't feel you staring at them. You can have the radio on listening to some music. I mean, really, that's it's it's it's an untapped area of 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 Elga 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, you know, Connecticut, Connecticut, Connecticut border anyways.

And also, Jim is a role model and a man I look up to and makes me 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 where we write back for our post current audio excerpt from Chapter one, the covid gangster movie, Variable Cost Structures. Oh, my God. Could we have made that sound any less interesting? I love just setting an incredibly easy, low bar.

Trust me, it's not as awful as it sounds. In print and online, The New Yorker stands apart for its commitment to truth and accuracy, quality writing and compelling reporting and storytelling. The New Yorker is considered by many to be one of the most influential publications in the world. I love The New Yorker. I like the quite frankly, I love the cartoons. And occasionally it's nice to just sit down and read a long form article, just a shock to your system with something more than 15 or 30 seconds.

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The covid gangster move, variable cost structures. Cash is great for survival purposes, but the real gangster move is to be capital light, 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 rent space and 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 cost 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 dollars in cash, but if its revenues go down 80 percent, they can take cost down maybe 10, maybe 20 percent. 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 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 as 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 health care. Most people who survive 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 maybe 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 prefer to pick out their own food, especially produce, stay at home. Advisories have taught us it's OK not to squeeze the avocado. From the beginning of March to the middle of April, online grocery sales increased roughly 90 percent, while food delivery sales melted up 50 percent.

The infrastructure the shift has inspired from warehouses to entrench 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 received 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 and they free us from Commute's 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, in an email, meetings can be more productive and lead to more camaraderie than Zoome 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 percent of corporate leaders plan to allow remote working, at least some of the time, and 47 percent 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 Zoome fatigue, but new tech is emerging that can improve team interactions. We crave contact, but not surveillance. This is a massive opportunity for innovation. Zoome, 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 Ozanne tablet aimed at small teams that want constant and spontaneous communication among co-workers 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 through 12 school from home. And that's a difficult but likely prospect short term as K through 12 goes back to 100 percent 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 2000 dollars a month for office snacks at L2.

It was 20000 dollars a month. Now that we're not buying those at my new startup section, for we are giving employees monthly grocery debit cards. They can buy their own snacks. Many people don't have home set ups comfortable enough to spend eight to 10 hours a day. And do you do an audit of home office needs and by people good shares? Do those who already have good chairs get a speaker? Do you buy everyone a good mike or just give them gift cards for office supplies stores, the options will depend on the size of your team in 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-Katrina, 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 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 in 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 you're a 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 home schooling 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, are 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 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 five, but we can't ignore the fact that remote work will be a means of increased income inequality, 60 percent of jobs that pay over 100000 dollars can be done from home, compared to only 10 percent of those that pay under forty thousand dollars.

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 Korona. 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, we work better, 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 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 drawers 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 save 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 grade schools and let the 20 somethings come back to the village.

Coming up, we have our audio excerpt from Chapter four, 21st Century Higher Ed, stay tuned. There are tons of VPN providers out there. You've probably heard of a couple of them and some of you may have even used a VPN before, but I like to do research on my sponsors and I recommend brands to my listeners that I believe in. I can say with full confidence that Express VPN is the best VPN on the market. Here's why Express VPN doesn't log your data.

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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 microgeneration of innate distances, 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 would 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 percent of college students live with their parents, and over half don't live in college housing. 27 percent 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 months 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 percent more likely than men to say they would choose an online college option, or that blacks are 50 percent 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. Recommendation's. 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 percent have graduate degrees.

Tax Private K through 12 schools to supplement public K through 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 one point five 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 nonprofit but a private enterprise. Senator Elizabeth Warren taught in the mother of all Warren Caves Harvard. A dean of a top 10 school needs to be a class traitor 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 and 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 it a mix of helicopter parenting and social media has rendered many 18 year olds unfit for college. 90 percent 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 percent of students return to college. Sixty percent decided on what they wanted to study and 60 percent took academic work more seriously.

We need national service programs, I talk more about this in Chapter five, but in brief, we should start with the Korona core 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 LAMDA 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 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, focused training. One thing we should not do, free college.

That's a popular slogan and a bad idea. It's a further transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Only 32 percent 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 through 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 percent of their children to college. Our producers are Caroline Chagrinned, Andrew Burrows, if you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Audio excerpted courtesy Penguin, Random House audio from Post Korona by Scott Galloway, narrated by the author. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next week for another episode of the Prop Guys Show from Section four and the Westwood One Podcast Network.

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