All right, Jess, let's do some questions. We're kind of a long one here. This one comes from Steve. Steve says, "In the '90s, I had a plan to get my PhD in exercise physiology to teach and dive deep into human performance testing research. Unfortunately, I allowed my significant other at the time to convince me otherwise, which led me down a path of ever-changing careers, always taking different jobs to maintain some sort of financial security.

At the age of 53, and after listening to most of your Deep Questions episodes, I now have the confidence and motivation to go back to school to achieve my previously stated goals. However, after doing the math, I would be 60 by the time I graduate with a PhD, which would leave me maybe 10 to 15 years to work before retiring.

One alternative is to start a small human performance testing lab as a side gig, slowly building up a strong client base while maintaining my day job as an office manager for a major Southern California university." All right, so that's the question. At the age of 53, do you go get your PhD because you have this idea for some sort of performance testing lab?

Or is it just a vision that you could run? Well, Steve, regardless of your age, my graduate school advice applies here. My graduate school advice says never start a graduate program unless you have clear evidence that the specific degree you're going to get at the specific school that you're going to get it is needed to unlock a specific step in your career that is appealing to you, that you've gotten to a point where you say, "I see this thing I want to do.

This is why I want to do that. But if I can get this degree here, I can do it. Otherwise, I can't." I am not a big believer in get the degree to see what options it opens up. Now, you have a bit of an idea about what you want to do with this PhD, but I think it is too vague to qualify.

I mean, just based off of your question wording, so I'm extrapolating here, but just based off your question wording, you have this idea that there's some startup with a human performance testing lab that could be interesting. That is super vague. I would not spend six or seven years getting a PhD with the idea that maybe that will help me do this thing that's kind of vague.

I think your side hustle exploration approach is probably the right one here. So keeping your good job, starting to explore what would this mean, what you even mean by human performance testing lab, what are the real opportunities here, what are the real demands here. And there's two things you'd want to capture from this experimentation on your side.

One, using money as a neutral indicator of value. Can you actually get clients? Can you actually get people to give you money for something along these lines? That's a great indicator about whether or not the idea has value or not. Everyone will tell you your idea is good, but they will only give you money if it actually is.

Two, it allows you to actually explore the contours of this new territory. What exactly do you mean by human performance testing lab? You probably aren't quite sure. What is the market opportunity here? Is it consulting? Is it content? Is it working with other companies? You need to figure that all out before you go get a degree for seven years.

I want you to be at the point where you say, "We're rocking and rolling, and I'm being held back, just being held back by not having this degree. I could just see if I had it, I could do this. I'm so close, but I can't do this because I don't know how to do this." I want you to be at that point before you pull the trigger on any sort of higher education.

Start exploring, Steve, and don't get that PhD until you have to have it. What would be, outside of your own, what would be a good example of that, getting a PhD, clearly elevating your career? It's a good question because PhDs are very specific. Obviously, academic, you want to be a professor, then you're going to need a PhD.

We have a question about this coming up. If you're going to be a professor, you do need a PhD, but that's where the second part of this is, this degree from this program is what I need becomes important. If you say, "I would love to be an MIT professor, so I'm just going to go get a PhD." It's like, "Wait a second, you better be getting a PhD from a top two program, or it's not going to be the right thing." I have this issue also with a lot of military and recent vets that I talked to who are using their GI Bill.

I think there's a lot of predatory online degrees where they come in, "Hey, get your online MBA and we'll suck out your GI Bill benefits for it. It's convenient, you do it on the side." It turns out that the employers down the road say, "I don't know what this online MBA is," and you just wasted your money, so the specific degree matters.

There's other fields that have specific PhD requirements. In biomed, biomed research, working for a drug company, you want to be on... I have a colleague whose wife works on respiratory virus vaccines at Moderna. We always tell him, "Your job for the rest of our culture is to make sure your wife is completely unburdened because we need her working on that.

You can help the culture." If you want a job like that, it's not an academic job, but you need a PhD for that, be very careful about PhDs is the way I think about it. In computer science, this is shifted, but the traditional thinking in computer science, for example, is if you're just looking at going to industry and making salary, getting a master's degree, especially if you do a five-year program where you start your master's classes as an undergrad and just add an extra year, so you do five years and you get an undergrad and a master's degree, from a pure economic perspective is probably worth it because with the master's degree, your starting salary is up here, with the undergrad, it's down here, and in the time it takes you to get that master's degree, you couldn't catch up, so you do start out ahead.

The math often, or at least it didn't back in my day, work out for getting a PhD and going to industry. So if you spend five years to get a PhD, and then you go to work at Google, you're going to get paid more. Your starting salary will be more than someone coming in with a master's degree, but it took you five more years.

And in those five more years, the person who started with the master's degree has been promoted enough that they're making a lot more than you are coming in. So you actually have to account for the time it takes to get the degree. So that was always the conventional wisdom.

There is one exception right now that's AI and machine learning. If you are able to get a PhD from a real star in the field in a relevant artificial intelligence topic, where you are doing, moving the avant-garde of the field forward type research, like I'm moving forward what's possible with deep learning, I'm working with Greg Hinton in Toronto, and we're sort of innovating the field, some of those PhD students are getting close to or exceeding seven-figure salary offers.

So in some fields like AI, where actually being able to produce original research is going to be a huge competitive advantage, then a PhD might be different. But if you're going to go into a development job or an executive job, then in computer science, it's not really worth getting a PhD.

So just be wary about it. Just go in with your eyes open. You need evidence. This is the type of thing I want to do. I know for a fact it requires a PhD to do it. I know for a fact the quality and competitiveness of the program I'm going to go to will satisfy what's necessary there.

You just want clarity. Never use graduate degrees as a delaying function, as a generic option-opening function. No, no, it should be very specific. It should be solving a very specific goal.