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The Financial Upside to Leaving Academia

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Chris Caterine, the author of Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Chris holds a PhD in classics and worked as a visiting assistant professor before transitioning into a career in the private sector. Leaving Academia addresses the necessary identity shift and practical steps that accompany this process and grew out of the informational interviews Chris conducted. Emily and Chris discuss the financial pressures that motivated Chris to shift to a non-academic career and how to financially prepare for that change. They also discuss the role side hustles and volunteer experiences can play in helping you land a non-academic job. This episode is a must-listen for anyone currently in PhD training or working in academia!

Links Mentioned in the Episode

financial upside to leaving academia

Teaser

00:00 Chris: And when I really stared down that fact it became very, very hard for me to cling to this idea that it’s okay to accept a certain degree of poverty or lack of wealth in being an academic. And to really say, you know what, like actually, I want to have some nice things and I’m not sure I’m willing to be ashamed of that anymore.

Introduction

00:27 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is Season 10, Episode 7, and today my guest is Dr. Chris Caterine, the author of Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, which was published one year ago. Chris holds a PhD in classics and worked as a visiting assistant professor before transitioning into a career in the private sector. Leaving Academia addresses the necessary identity shift and practical steps that accompany this process and grew out of the informational interviews Chris conducted. Chris and I discuss the financial pressures that motivated Chris to shift to a non-academic career and how to financially prepare for that challenge. We also discuss the role side hustles and volunteer experiences can play in helping you land a non-academic job. This episode is a must-listen for anyone currently in PhD training or working in academia!

01:29 Emily: Did you know that I run a couple of database websites for collecting stipend and salary information for PhD trainees? The domains are PhD Stipends dot com and Postdoc Salaries dot com. If you haven’t done it yet, would you please take a minute to: 1. Fill out the survey to report your 2021-2022 stipend or salary to the appropriate website? The databases consist of crowd-sourced information, so they rely on the willingness of PhD trainees like you to self-report their income. 2. Share the site with your peers over a social network, a listserv, or a forum website? These websites are super useful for prospective PhD students and postdocs, but they are also often used for advocacy efforts to bolster the case for raising stipends and salaries. Thank you so much for participating in these efforts! Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Chris Caterine.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:32 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Chris Caterine. He is the author of the new book, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, and I’m super delighted to have him on because we’re going to be talking about career changes, graduate students, and PhDs and academics who are leaving academia and how personal finance relates to that process. So I’m super excited. Chris, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

02:56 Chris: Of course. Thank you so much for having me, Emily. Again, I’m Chris Caterine, I’m a communication strategist and proposal writer for a global consulting firm. My academic career was actually in classics, which is Greek and Roman literature history and all that stuff. I got my PhD in 2014 from the University of Virginia. And as Emily said, last year I had a book published called Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide with Princeton University Press.

03:20 Emily: Fabulous. And in the book, it talks a lot about your own journey, as well as what you learned from others. And there were lots and lots of interviews which went into the book, which was fascinating. Can you just tell us like quick synopsis, what’s the book about, what do you want the reader to do with it?

03:34 Chris: The book is really designed to do two things. The first thing is that I’ll go to the practical side, which is to say, if you are in academia and you realize that you don’t have a career, a future in academia, which, you know, 93% of entering social sciences and humanities graduate students don’t, then the book gives you practical steps, just put one foot in front of the other and figure out what you need to do to find a new career. Even if you have no idea what that’s going to be. And that practical side of the book again, is good for everybody, not just humanities and social sciences, but STEM folks as well. The other side of the book is almost more psychological or identity-driven. And that’s really trying to get into the mindset of people who can’t imagine having any career besides a professorship. And what sort of, how do you approach what is ultimately an identity crisis, not just knowing what you will do, but not knowing who you will be if you leave the academy. I think those tend to drive more towards the humanities and social sciences side because there’s always been more industry outs for people in STEM. But really it applies to anybody who views academia as vocation and feels called into that line of work and realized since then, that might not be their future.

04:50 Emily: I love the way you described that. And I also loved, I don’t remember if it’s the introduction or something, but you sort of positioned what your book adds to the field already, because I don’t know if I read some of the exact same books you’re referencing, but I read the kind of book that you’re referencing, which is like a lot of like personal essays or like individual stories around careers that people have after they, you know, get out of graduate school or finish their PhD. And that’s wonderful to see examples of what’s going on, but your book is more about, okay, what is the actual like logistically, like, what is the process here? Like what do I actually do to get to that end point that I see as possible? And I really appreciated that. And of course I love, and I’m sure everybody loves that these six chapters have alliteration for all the titles to them.

Motivation for Leaving Academia

05:32 Emily: So there’s, I’ll just read them out because I have the book here. Dread, discern, discover, decipher, develop, and deploy. And I actually found I thought my favorite parts of it were actually in decipher when you were talking about, I don’t know if you use this term, but the translatable skills that you develop in academia and how they actually relate to other jobs you could do later. And I know I’d always heard that in graduate school, you have translatable skills, you can use them later, but like your explanation was just more detailed than anything I’d read before, which I found really delightful, it made me feel a little bit better about the things that I learned while I was in academia. So thank you for that. So, delightful book, and as I said it’s, it was driven by all these informational interviews that you did. And you did more in-depth interviews for the book. But I wanted to know about sort of your motivation for leaving academia. And it’s apparent from the book that finance has played at least some role in that. So would you please elaborate on that?

06:32 Chris: Yeah, really, for me, I think I began accepting that I was going to be leaving academia around age 30. It sounds a little bit cliché, but it was a big transition point, even if I didn’t want to admit it. And I was getting to that stage of life where you know, my wife and I had been married for a few years. We were thinking that we probably wanted to start a family at some point. I just remember looking at all of these jobs I was applying to, you know, I was making $40,000 a year teaching a 3/3 as a visiting assistant professor. And I was applying for jobs like that, that were apart from my wife and I was saying, well, first of all, how do we have kids if we’re living apart, that’s really work. But also like just doing the math and the salary and trying to think, okay, if we’re trying to live in two places, that’s two households, 40, 50, even $60,000 a year like this, just like the math doesn’t work.

07:22 Chris: And on top of that, even if we lived in the same place somehow, you know, solved the two-body problem, because my wife is also an academic, or still is an academic. Even if we solve that, I looked at it and said, you know, I don’t know that my wife and I would be able to give any child or children in the future, anything resembling the quality of life that our parents gave us. And when I really stared down that fact, it became very, very hard for me to cling to this idea that it’s okay to accept a certain degree of poverty or lack of wealth in being an academic. And to really say, you know what, like brass tacks, actually, I want to have some nice things, and I’m not sure I’m willing to be ashamed of that anymore.

08:07 Emily: So interesting. I mean, really what you’re talking about here is a realization of your own values as you grew, you know, towards age 30 and so forth, and realizing that the career, which is one of your values, I’m sure that aligned in some way with your values was in conflict with these other values of what is the standard of living that I want? What is the kind of family that I want? And you resolved, I assume, this conflict by having a career outside of academia that still, again I’m assuming, fulfills many of your values and so forth, but this book is about the process of finding that and landing that career. I’m just wondering, because we’ve heard the story before, a similar story before on the podcast. I’ll refer listeners to the episode with Dr. Scott Kennedy, who similar to you, came into academia, aspiring to the professoriate.

Financial Framework in Grad School

08:51 Emily: And during graduate school got married and actually had, I think, two or three children during graduate school, and realized that it was just not tenable financially and exited academia and found fulfillment elsewhere. So that was a wonderful example, but I want to know. Okay. You just mentioned, you know, as a visiting assistant professor, the $40K salary. Did you know, like back when you were in graduate school, that that was your financial future, if you stayed in academia? Or did you have like a rosier picture? Like what did you think was going to happen?

09:18 Chris: Well, in grad school, I was living on an $18,000 a year stipend. So I figured anything more than that would make me rich. I mean, I literally just thought it’s double the buying power and of course that isn’t actually the case, you know, taxes increase. If you’re living with a partner, like maybe you have two incomes, but you need more space for the two of you. The costs do not kind of move up in a linear way. And so I sort of expected that as my salary went up, you know, in a linear way that the costs would track and they just don’t actually in a lot of ways. And so, I really worked hard to live on that, that $18K a year. You know, it’s funny, I was looking at my pandemic hair, which is getting all too long in the back and I was like, man it hasn’t been this long since graduate school.

10:03 Chris: And I’m like, oh yeah. Like I got one haircut a fiscal quarter for $12 at a place, you know, a 20-minute drive away because I wanted to not put money into that and save it for drinks out, whatever it was. And so I think I just assumed that like my spending was so low that anything that I brought in would let me do infinitely more. And part of that was I was living in a low cost area. And part of that was, I just didn’t understand how those costs scaled, and part of it was that, you know, at age 22 the prospect of kids was a long way off. And then you start thinking about it, you say, oh, I have 18 years to save, you know, $350,000 for college. That’s that’s not going to work right on $40 a year. The math just doesn’t track. So yeah, I think my thinking definitely changed later on. But in graduate school I just assumed that it would be okay.

Financial Strain as a Common Motivator

11:03 Emily: And I think that, you know, you said earlier, oh, it’s cliché approaching my 30th birthday, I had all these, you know, realizations or whatever. But I think that your story, again, is common that as we age, we realize that we want a higher standard of living than what we were enduring during graduate school. And the other thing, you mention this, I think, somewhere in your book that during graduate school, I don’t believe that you were contributing to your retirement. That was something you were able to do only once you had your full-time job and so forth. And so there’s also this like sort of deferred cost, like you’re pushing off responsibility to the future for yourself. And so, yeah, maybe $40K is not actually double $18 K because you have XYZ taxes and retirement and all these other things. Maybe a house, maybe a family, all these other things you want to do. So I totally understand. And it’s the same, you know, experience that I have as well. Do you find that financial strain in academia is a common motivator for leaving academia for other people?

11:59 Chris: Yeah. A lot of people that I’ve spoken with do raise that issue. And I would say that the stories vary a lot. These are some people who say I have a ton of debt, I have nothing in savings. And you know, I’m done with graduate school in three months. Can you help me. And that’s a big ask. You know, I can give advice. I can tell you maybe how to prioritize that three months that you have, but that’s a challenging situation. For other people they see it a little bit earlier on, and maybe they realize that things won’t work out financially, for other people, especially in the U.S., healthcare becomes an issue as well. I would say that that is a big motivating factor for a lot of people. And I think as you do get closer to completing, and as you start applying for jobs and thinking about you know, incurring the cost to move for a jobs that pays you $30,000 like that’s going to cost you a few thousand anyway, you’re kind of burning negative on that deal.

13:06 Chris: I think when people start actually thinking about that or trying it out a few times and seeing how it works out, yeah, the finances do become a big issue. And especially looking at salaries outside of the academy, it’s just wild. I mean, I felt rich when I went from my $18,000 to $40,000 as a visiting assistant professor. And I didn’t realize just how small a salary that was until I began looking outside.

Personal Finance Strain on Contingent Faculty

13:36 Emily: Yeah, my husband’s also PhD and he and I went through a similar thing going from like graduate student to postdoc salary, but then realizing, oh, wait, we’re paying FICA now. Okay. It doesn’t go that far. So I’m actually wondering, so, you know, you mentioned near the start of the interview that only maybe 7% ish of people who start a PhD program will actually end up in a tenure-track job. And I think one of the issues that maybe is not discussed head-on, but certainly indirectly in your book is the problem of contingent faculty, right? So if you get the tenure-track job, then maybe you are on a decent salary path. I mean, I don’t know about your field necessarily, but I have certainly run across many citations of professors making over $100K a year and even $150K or more, but that’s not at the contingent level, the visiting level, the adjunct level. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the strain on the personal finances of contingent faculty, as they’re maybe holding out hope of this, you know this ultimate dream job?

14:38 Chris: Oh, this one really breaks my heart. And one of the things that actually precipitated my move outside of academia was working on contingent faculty issues for my professional society. So that was the first time I really started to look at what life could be like. And when you start hearing figures that something like, it’s like 54% of adjuncts qualify for food stamps you know, like I can’t remember all the statistics off the top of my head now, but I mean, the numbers are really bleak, and you start realizing like, oh my God, this is severe. And as a society, we’re essentially subsidizing these universities that don’t pay people. Like, what, why do we do this? Why do we put up for it? I think the thing that really crushes me so much now, when I talk to people in contingent roles who say, well, you know, I want to try one or two more times is that, you know, they are missing out on the opportunity cost of the situation as well.

15:42 Chris: And it’s like, well, yeah, okay. You can try to get an academic job one or two more times, and maybe you have a, you know, three to 5% chance of getting one, but all the time that you spend on those applications, all the money you spent flying to the conference interview for the job, whatever it is, all of that time and money could be put into other things that could be preparing you for a career that actually makes you happier than being an academic and gets you out from under the thumb of the system that is fundamentally broken. And convincing people that if they’ve bought into the idea that their identity is tied up in being a professor is very, very hard. And there’s sort of only so much that you can do to get people to move past that. And I hope, you know, the early chapters of my book, “Dread,” I give this dire name, title, because I’m trying to shake that sense into some people who maybe are resistant to it. But really, you know, for some people, it is just a matter of coming up and seeing what that’s like. But I would encourage all your listeners to really go out and read some stories of what contingent life is actually like financially. It’s not a good situation.

Commercial

16:53 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, including my recent set of Wealthy PhD Workshops. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, and progress journaling for financial goals. Our next live discussion and Q&A call is on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success! Now, back to the interview.

Changing Money Mindsets

18:06 Emily: Chris, I know we could stay on the subject for quite a while, and I wish we could, but let’s talk a little bit more about money mindset, specifically for you. So, you know, what was your attitude towards money, practice of personal finance when you were in graduate school, versus did it change later on as you became a visiting assistant professor, as you moved into your non-academic job?

18:26 Chris: So growing up, both my parents were trained as CPAs. I had like a pretty decent financial literacy growing up in that, you know, I knew how to balance a checkbook. I knew how to make at least a basic budget and make sure that there was more money coming in and going out and use that to sort of set my discretionary spending accordingly. So I’d been doing that sort of all the way through graduate school and had adapted pretty well to a very modest standard of living. And I was proud of doing it, and I still am that I did it, but, you know, as time went on, I think, especially with my move to New Orleans. You know, I grew up in Boston, went to school in Virginia. When I ended up in new Orleans, I saw a very different mode of life and people here definitely embrace the better things in life.

19:14 Chris: There’s good music, good food, good drink. And I started saying, wait a minute, like, why am I deferring all of that like a hundred percent? And so my wife and I had made a choice to live in a smaller apartment so that we could afford to dine out in New Orleans thinking we’d only be here for one year. Well, eight years later, here we are. So you know, geography sort of changed my outlook on what I actually wanted to be doing with my money. Not just squirreling it away in the bank, but using it to enjoy life. And I think I also ended up going from being extremely risk averse in graduate school. Just because there wasn’t that much, so if I lost any of it I felt it more, to over time just becoming a little bit more comfortable with risk.

20:01 Chris: And for me, leaving academia was actually a process of embracing risk and embracing financial risk in a way that I hadn’t before. So I had one year left on my visiting assistant professor contract and my wife and I had decided that we wanted to stay in New Orleans no matter what. And we decided to buy a house. And I was terrified of that decision, because we could afford the monthly payments for the next year, but I had no idea what was coming after. I hadn’t really built a good network. I didn’t have good leads on jobs. It was a big question mark, and I actually used that life event to sort of put my back against a wall and say like, if there’s the prospect of losing this house if I don’t figure something out, then I better figure something out. And that was a huge motivator to me. Again I was in a privileged position to be able to do that, but that was sort of the rationale was using sort of a financial tool to push me into a space where I was uncomfortable.

21:09 Emily: I think I’ve heard this referred to as like a commitment device. Like there’s going to be some real big downside if I do not follow through on my goal of X, Y, Z. I’ve heard it in a lower stakes situation than home ownership, but I think this qualifies as well. And, you know, I think what you said earlier about the opportunity cost of that particular example, the opportunity costs of staying in a contingent faculty position, doing 1, 2, 3 more cycles on the job market. There’s also a major opportunity cost to graduate school. There’s also a major opportunity cost at staying at these lower salary levels. So you said, you know, I had to think about risk in a different way. I had to be willing to take on more risk. There was implicit risk in what you were already doing, but it probably wasn’t forefront in your mind, right? Like the risk of spending years and years and years pursuing this career that was not working out financially, was never going to work out financially. But it’s so hard to see that. It’s hard to see graduate school as opportunity cost.

22:11 Chris: It is. And I think the biggest challenge with the PhD right now is really that if you want to be a professor, it is a credential that you need to get. So if you want to keep the professorship open as a possibility for your future, that is the only path you have to do it. And yet, the vast, vast majority of people who get a PhD, can’t become professors. And I think because of that tension, people do get sucked into this mentality that you just need to forge ahead. And anything that you do that deviates from your scholarship or your teaching is ultimately going to be lessening your odds of that thing that you’re working towards. So it feels like a risk-averse position to be overly narrow, when actually it’s not.

Preparing Finances for Leaving Academia

23:00 Emily: Very well phrased. You mentioned earlier an example of, you know, someone coming to you for advice who has three months until they’re not being paid anymore and they have a lot of debt and so forth. And you’re saying, oh, it’s a short timeframe. We can do something here, but let’s say that, you know, some listeners have a longer timeframe, a year or more before they’re thinking about exiting academia. What can that person do to help prepare their finances for this process of leaving academia?

23:30 Chris: I would say, you know, save every penny that you can because at a certain point, you can actually buy time. And what I mean by that is that if you have, you know, three months of expenses in the bank, then even after your last paycheck hits, you will not necessarily need to take the first job that comes your way. And if you are making a major career change, you know, from a planned academic path to something totally different, it is likely that the first offer that you get is not going to be a job you want. And, you know, I cite these examples in the book, but I was interviewing for jobs to pour samples of beer at the grocery store. I was offered a job to sell life insurance, which seemed like a really good idea going through the interview process until I stopped to think about it and then said, wait a minute, like actually this whole thing, the financial arrangement that they put before me was a scam.

24:32 Chris: And I had, you know, friends and family fortunately say like, yes, we didn’t want to be discouraging, but that would be a bad idea. And because I had some savings in the bank because I had a partner with a stable income, you know, we’d looked at the numbers and said, okay, I can probably wait three to six months after that last paycheck. And then at that point I’ll need to shift my mindset into another, take anything that’s available or, you know, begin looking outside of New Orleans and consider potentially having to uproot. But the more you can save, the more flexibility you will have to make a sort of a positive choice at that end game, instead of being backed into something that you’re not totally happy with.

Benefits of Pursuing a Side Hustle for Skill-Building

25:16 Emily: I am in total agreement. And if someone were to follow this process in your book, it’s very deliberate and it takes a good amount of time, not just like the number of hours, but sort of longitudinally for you to be able to process and understand what’s going on and make the networking connections and so forth. It takes quite a bit of time. So to give yourself that runway, it’s the same thing with entrepreneurship, give yourself a runway before your paycheck ends, or, you know, if you can give yourself runway with savings, the more you can, the less of a desperate situation you will end up in eventually. And hopefully, as you said, you can make a positive career choice. And so I really enjoyed that you talked about in the chapter “Develop” how a side hustle can further this whole process. And I think in that chapter, you were specifically citing side hustles as a way for you to sort of add to your resume, add more experiences, demonstrate your skills, that sort of thing. But I think that side hustles could probably be helpful in multiple stages of this process of leaving academia. Can you talk about the benefits that you’ve seen of pursuing a side hustle?

26:18 Chris: For me, what I will say first of all, is that in graduate school, the only side hustle I had was tutoring, which was great because it got me some extra money, but it was also a really foolish thing to do because it didn’t get me anything besides that money. Like it didn’t actually make me a better teacher. It didn’t develop any new skills. It just sort of deepened my presence in a space that I was already in. So if you’re thinking of doing that and like, you just need a little bit of extra cash. Okay, fine. But again, think about opportunity cost. How could you spend that time? Could you get, you know, more than $15 or $20 an hour tutoring to do something else? You know, in that regard, I got lucky. I had a neighbor and a close friend who had a small business.

26:59 Chris: It was him and one other developer. And he just needed somebody to help with website development and like maintaining his books and like doing all this stuff that I had no idea how to do. And I knew him well enough that he said, well, I can pay you. I think he gave me 15 bucks an hour, and he said, “you know, I know that like me giving you $15 an hour to do it is going to free up time for me to bill my clients. And it’s going to let you learn some skills. And it’s probably, you’re going to figure it out faster than somebody I’d pay $35. So I’m good.” Now I got lucky with that situation, but it was great because I brought in a little bit of extra money, but I also began thinking about, okay, how do you sell a business service to a buyer who is probably resistant to incurring that expense in the first place?

27:50 Chris: Where do you go to advertise to small and mature businesses for kind of a small salesforce.com development group. So I began thinking in all these different ways, and it turned out that all that practice talking about technology services for maybe skeptical business audiences really paved the way for the stuff I’m doing now, where most of the time I’m working on proposals for big technology for the patient. I had no idea that would pan out, but that’s sort of how it did. So I think, you know, to get back the core of the question, how can side hustles really help? You don’t know how they could help. But I think you want to use them as a way to simultaneously build new skills and make some extra money. And if you let them do double duty, then that’s great.

28:47 Chris: My wife has a saying now which is like, she doesn’t do anything that doesn’t count twice. And if she can’t kind of apply it in two places, it’s not worth doing because the time investment is just too high. So I think that’s a really good attitude to take as you’re exploring new careers, as you’re trying to, you know, make extra money in graduate school or even beyond graduate school. You know, tutoring, you know, working in a restaurant, all that stuff can, yes, get you money, but is it going to be advancing those other career objectives that you have? If the answer is no, then you might want to think again about how to balance that equation.

Career-Advancing Side Hustles

29:24 Emily: Yeah, you’re absolutely speaking my language here. I have an interview with Dr. Gaius Augustus, which we’ll link in the show notes, where we talk through this framework that I have thinking about how valuable a side hustle will be to you. My favorite side hustle, I call career-advancing side hustles. Double-duty, as you said, it brings in money and also helps you demonstrate a skill, learn a new skill, have another line for your CV, expand your network, anything like that. And I think what was interesting about your example of, you know, keeping the books for your friend’s business is that you didn’t know how that experience was going to advance your career. And it turned out it did, in retrospect. And I think that just speaks to the benefit of like trying something new. And as you said, instead of staying in the same space that you already know tutoring, you know, it’s in your wheelhouse already, try to stretch yourself a little bit and it’ll spark new thoughts and it’ll spark new perspectives.

30:13 Emily: And so, yeah, just give some new things, a chance. And I noticed from that chapter of your book, it seemed like you were pursuing this side hustle, maybe, you know, some other volunteer experience and so forth over a fairly short period of time. And you got a lot out of it over just like a few months, six-month period or something. And so it doesn’t have to be like, oh, I have to set this up and do it the entire time I’m in graduate school. No, just try something. You know, see if you benefit from it. If it’s good pay and you do, keep doing it. Or if not, try something else. Just experiment with it.

30:40 Chris: Yeah. In software development, they have this concept of failing fast. And the idea is that it’s good to experiment and try little things. And like the sooner you find out something doesn’t work, the sooner you can stop spending time doing that thing. And so, I think that sort of agile and iterative approach to trying new stuff to build career skills is absolutely the right path.

31:01 Emily: I think the other benefit is that, you know, working for your friend’s business for a bit, it gave you some language probably that you didn’t have before. Not just the skills, but just that practice, as you said, of speaking with people you weren’t speaking with already inside academia and just that diversity of experience helped you, ultimately, you know, get the job that you have, because I know you said in the book that it took practice to change the kind of language that you use the kind of speech that you used from what you were used to in academia to what was acceptable in the business world, and that exposure can help a person, you know, along with that process.

31:33 Chris: Yeah. It’s maybe expected that a communications strategists would say that like career changes ultimately come down to communication. But in this case, I really do think that that’s the biggest challenge, is just that academics speak their own language, their own jargon. We have ways of interacting with people that are different from the world outside. And until you go out there and learn how other people speak and behave, the like trying to translate is a fool’s errand. It’d be like me trying to translate Latin into Mandarin. I can’t do it until I know Mandarin.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

32:06 Emily: Chris, this has been such a wonderful conversation. I’m so glad you came on the podcast. I know we’re leaving the listeners wanting more. So where can they find you and where can they find your book?

32:15 Chris: So I’m available on Twitter @clcaterine, also on LinkedIn, Christopher L. Caterine. My book is available from Princeton University Press on Amazon and also at local independent bookstores.

32:27 Emily: Very good. And by the way, hat tip to Dr. Brandon Renfro who connected us, and you can listen to his episode, we will link that in the show notes as well. So Chris, the question that I ask all my guests at the end of our interviews is what is your financial advice for another early-career PhD? So would you please share that with us?

32:44 Chris: You know, we looped this earlier and I think budgeting is a really valuable tool and you should absolutely do it, but sort of don’t be tricked by thinking that the budget that you set for yourself as a graduate student is going to scale up. And yeah, you know run models, figure out what you might need to have the sort of life you want to live, and use that to figure out what kind of income you would need from a job to live that life. And if you have real data that backs it up, you can be really targeted in the jobs you pursue, both inside and outside of the academy, and find a career that works for your life.

33:21 Emily: Yeah. And I think that’s a wonderful exercise to couple with all the exercises that you lay out in your book. So thank you so much again for joining me on the podcast today!

33:29 Chris: Thanks so much for having me!

Outtro

33:37 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhds.com/Podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast. On that page are links to all the episode show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to voluntee to be interviewed on the podcast. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list listserv, or as a link from your website. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in like investing, debt repayment, and effective budgeting. I also license prerecorded workshops on taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhds.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps! The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio, and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This PhD Entrepreneur Advocates for Universal Basic Income (Part 1)

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and co-host of the Basic Income Podcast. Jim earned a PhD in computer science and subsequently worked for the Democratic National Convention and other progressive groups. He always aspired to start a business, and his post-PhD work experience inspired him to found ShareProgress, a software product and consulting service. Jim describes the evolution of his business, which now brings him sufficient income to support him in San Francisco in exchange for about 5 hours of work per week. Jim’s observations of changes in technology and the workforce while building his business and newfound time freedom drew him to investigating universal basic income.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

PhD entrepreneur basic income

Teaser

00:00 Jim: As you’re doing something, you’ll see many other, adjacent great things to do as well, but that can so easily be a distraction from actually figuring out, “Alright, what is the core of this successful business going to look like?” And if you let yourself be pulled in that direction, it can really detract from your chance of building something big.

Introduction

00:25 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode one, and today my guest is Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and cohost of The Basic Income Podcast. Jim’s doctoral work in computer science and his experience working for the Democratic National Convention inspired him to start ShareProgress seven years ago. In this first half of our interview, we discuss the growth and evolution of his business, which now brings him sufficient income to support him in San Francisco in exchange for about five hours of work per week. Jim’s observations while building his business and newfound time-freedom drew him to investigating universal basic income. Without further ado, here’s the first part of my interview with Dr. Jim Pugh.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Jim Pugh. It’s a really special episode for me because Jim and I know each other in real life. He is the older brother of a dear friend of mine and my husband’s from college. And we actually had lunch a couple months ago when we were visiting and had gotten into this really interesting conversation about what Jim’s up to these days, the activism that he does. And it was just really exciting and I could see there was a definite PhD angle there, not just because Jim himself has a PhD but also because what he works on has implications for PhDs. So, we will get into all of that in just a few minutes. So, Jim, will you please take a moment and introduce yourself a little bit further to the listeners?

01:53 Jim: Yeah. Well Emily, thanks for having me on the podcast. My background brings together a few different areas. My academic background is in the sciences. I did my undergraduate and doctorate in computer science, specifically robotics, my doctorate. And following that, ended up getting involved in the political world. And so, I spent some time working on the 2008 Obama campaigns, spent a few years in D.C. after continuing political work out there. And then about six, seven years back decided to take honestly experiences on both those fronts to start my own company called ShareProgress, working primarily with political and nonprofit organizations, providing them with tools and other technical support. And then just in the last few years, I started to delve really in on the activism side of things myself and helped to start an organization that does a lot of work around universal basic income doing both advocacy around that topic and also some policy development work in that field.

What Role Did Your PhD Have in Starting Your Business?

02:58 Emily: Yeah. Super, super exciting. Thank you. Clearly, you have a lot of skills and a lot of interesting experiences that you’ve brought to bear on these most recent endeavors. So, kind of backing up slightly to the business that you started, ShareProgress. How did your PhD prepare you for ultimately starting that business? Obviously, you had some work experience after that point before you started it, but how did the PhD specifically prepare you? Or how did it not prepare you very well for that?

03:25 Jim: So, I would say the PhD itself wasn’t terribly relevant for starting that because I was really in a hard research area and was working on algorithms and models that didn’t have any clear path to monetization to turn it into a company. So, that I don’t think was terribly relevant. What was a bit more relevant is I was involved with, at the university I was working with, which is the Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. They actually were making a pretty significant investment in cultivating entrepreneurship amongst their students, both undergraduate and graduate. And so there was a program on campus that was talking a lot about that. And so, I feel like there was some stuff I learned through experience with that going through events, and they had various activities that they would organize. And so, I felt like that it was informative in some ways, but it really was very much focused on taking the sort of research you do through your doctoral degree, through your academic work afterwards and turning that into a company. And my company that I ended up starting really didn’t resemble that much at all because that was much more informed by the political work I’d done and seeing what the needs were in that space. So, there were there aspects around “what does it look like to go through that process?” that I would say generally provided me with some guidance. But as far as the specifics, really not much at all.

Jim’s Entrepreneurship Journey

05:02 Emily: Did you have in your mind at that time that you did want to pursue entrepreneurship?

05:08 Jim: I did. That was something from I think pretty early on in college I realized was an area I was quite interested in. And when I was graduating from undergraduate, actually, I kind of had in my head either go to grad school or do a startup. I didn’t have an idea for a startup, so I said, “Well I guess it’s grad school.” But it definitely was something that I had been thinking about for awhile.

05:34 Emily: And did you initially, when you were getting involved during your PhD program with this training program for entrepreneurship, were you thinking about the possibility that you might turn your PhD work into a company? Or were you already like, “No, that’s definitely not going to happen, but this is just like for future reference?”

05:50 Jim: More the latter. Maybe there were a few moments where I considered something that was closely connected, but in general, that wasn’t where I saw opportunity. I more generally was thinking about, “Oh, I want to do something at some point. And this is an area that interests me and is just an area that’ll be helpful to know more about.”

Relevant Technical Skills Gained During PhD

06:10 Emily: Gotcha. And what about, I guess I could say, your technical chops. Did you use those in your business, or were you always hiring out for that? And then also is that something you got from your PhD, or do you think your undergraduate education was sufficient in that area?

06:23 Jim: I think there definitely was some of that from my PhD. Obviously, as an undergrad I had done a lot in that space, but I think that some of the specific technical skills and areas of expertise–and I think also just generally understanding different technological ecosystems–some of that did come through in my PhD. When I was starting my company, I very much structured it to not have put myself in the role of that technical person because I was interested in really taking on the CEO mantle in the more traditional sense. So, I had hired out for a developer to actually build out our software platform from the get-go. That said, I was being involved in various ways with the technical stuff throughout, and at different points definitely got more engaged on that front. And so, having that background definitely proved to be important and a valuable asset. And honestly, I mean I think those of us who are deeply into tech, and particularly doing software development and whatnot, we think of tech in a pretty extreme way as compared to the population in general. And so, just knowing how to work with various technical systems out there, I know it’s a leap for a lot of people not committed to that space. And so, certainly my background had equipped me well to be able to handle that sort of thing.

07:50 Emily: Yeah, I kind of see this as being a common sort of value of the PhD. You sort of prove yourself in an area, you can work very deeply, you can master something completely. And then after that, a lot of people do take a step back and allow other people to do that kind of work and do more of the management. And that’s kind of the PI model. Right? So, that sort of does apply, in a way, to what you did after. But it sounds like the actual work experience that you had after your PhD with the Obama campaign and so forth, that was what gave you the idea–right?–for what your company would ultimately be. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Inspiration While Working for the Democratic National Convention

08:19 Jim: Yeah, so the work I was doing, to some degree on the campaign, but in particular when I was out in D.C., I was working for the Democratic National Committee at that point, and we were actually running, effectively, the continuation of the Obama campaign. It was called Organizing for America at that point. And so, my role, I was the director of digital analytics and also web development for the program. And so, it was really paying attention to/digging in on what was actually happening under the hood with all of our digital presence, our social media, our email lists, our website, and so on. And so, I got a chance to see what’s possible, what’s not, what works well, what doesn’t. And one of the observations I had was that so much of our ability to do anything, whether that was raise money, whether it was to try calls to Congress, whether it was to get people turning out in their local communities for events, it depended on us having a wide reach.

09:19 Jim: And that reach, to a large degree, came from us intentionally doing outreach to get people involved. Whether that was big publicity efforts, whether it was paid acquisition online. But then the third category being people bringing in their friends. And actually during that time period, that was really crucial for us that so much of the new people we had coming in, it wasn’t from anything we were doing in particular, it was because our existing supporters were recruiting people they knew to get involved in a campaign and whatever the moment was. And it was an area that there really had not been much investment in as far as figuring out, “Alright, well how do we facilitate, and how do we amplify this?” So, that was really the motivation for my company, which was, “Let’s build some software tools that make this more effective and easier to do.”

How to Gain a Wide-Reaching Audience

10:10 Jim: And so, basically we had a plug and play solution where organizations, as they were doing this sort of advocacy work, they could be encouraging their supporters to be reaching out to their friends through various digital social channels. So, social media, Facebook, Twitter, but also just getting people to email folks they knew and say, “Hey, I’m involved in this really important thing. Will you be involved as well?” And that’s proved very, very effective at bringing in new people, particularly in high-energy moments. And then we allowed organizations to track the analytics on what was happening there. And so they really understood what was going on and actually allowed them to do controlled testing around what sort of messaging they could give to their supporters that made them more convincing, basically, to people they knew. So, when their supporters post on Facebook they could have a couple of different headlines, a couple of different thumbnail images and the system would be able to measure, “Okay, well how effective are those different pieces of content at getting their friends to say, ‘Oh, I’m interested,’ and click through it and get involved.”

Evolution of ShareProgress

11:16 Emily: Yeah. Super scientific approach to that. Right? I’m sure your background helped with that, the design of it. Okay, so that’s around the product that you created. I think you said when you introduced yourself that this was maybe six, seven years ago that you started the company. Two years ago, you transitioned more to doing this advocacy around universal basic income. So, I’m curious about how your role within the company, and in particular the time that you put into it, evolved over that, five-ish-year period.

11:44 Jim: Yeah. So, at the start, the software that I just described, the plan was for that to be the company. That was what we were going to do. I realized relatively early on about six months in that the growth that we were seeing from that wasn’t going to allow us to sustain. And in exploring different investment strategies, the type of company I was looking to build, which very much had a social mission, wasn’t looking to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible if that compromising that, wasn’t actually a great target for traditional investment routes with startups. And so, what I decided to do was to couple on with that a consulting arm where we would actually work with the same sorts of organizations that we were providing the software to, but a system with either data analysis work or some sort of web design development work, which is similar to what I had been doing out in D.C. prior to that.

12:42 Jim: And so, that actually ended up being the bulk of what the company did for most of its existence. We were able to find clients there. I was able to scale up our staff with that sort of work. And so, while we were doing the software, we were continuing to grow the consulting side of the company. And so, our peak was I think early 2017 we were nine people and most on the consulting side. But it was around that time I had realized–I had known pretty early on, I didn’t really want to start a consulting company. That seemed like where the path to profitability was. But around that time, my interests had started to shift to more of the advocacy work around universal basic income. And we went through some tough periods as far as expectations around business and profits and not matching reality. So, we had to do some downsizing. And so, at that point I actually decided, “This isn’t where I want to be investing my time and effort for the future. So, let’s just ramp down the consultant product company.” And at that point, our software was making enough money that I could support a much smaller staff. And so, over the course of 2017 I went through a process around that. That ended with, at the end of the year, I was having more of a skeleton crew and requiring not very much of my time in order to just keep our software running, or the clients that we had there.

Consulting as a Stage of Growth

14:20 Emily: So, I’m curious, with the evolution of adding the consulting aspect and then winding it down, are you happy that you did that, or do you think that you should have just stuck with the software product kind of throughout that whole time and come to this point where you are now maybe a little bit sooner?

14:36 Jim: Well, it honestly wasn’t an option to do exactly that because we did need the consulting early on in order to make payroll. So, it took a while for us to build up enough of a client base and the software where that was an option at all.

14:49 Emily: So, it’s a stage of growth, then.

14:51 Jim: It was a stage of growth. Whether or not I would have invested as much as I did in that, I think looking at it solely from a business perspective, I think that was probably a mistake. I think that it would have been a better approach to say, “Let’s keep focused on the software. Let’s do this as much as we need to, but let’s not really invest in growing that as the company.” Because I think that in most cases, when you’re trying to do more than one thing, you’re not going to do either of them as well. And so, that would have been the better business decision. As far as from a personal perspective, I think I certainly learned a lot through the whole process. So, I wouldn’t say it was a bad decision from that. It certainly was stressful at times, but I think that it’s hard for me to make a valuative judgment on it.

San Francisco Venture Capital (VC) Environment

15:40 Emily: Sure. I want to say for the context, for the listeners, that you live in San Francisco right now, and you mentioned living in D.C. before that. Did you start the company when you were living in San Francisco?

15:50 Jim: Yes, that’s right.

15:51 Emily: So, you’re in a very different environment than probably most of the listeners who are maybe still on academic campuses, you know, spread throughout the U.S. and other places. So, anyway, I just want to say that because you probably had a lot of exposure just from your environment in things like how to approach for VC funding, whether that’s actually a good idea for your business. You decided that the values that they’re going for are not exactly the values that you were going for. And so it wasn’t a good match there. This is actually something I’ve heard about quite a bit that people elect not to go the VC funding route for various, I guess, “vision” reasons.

16:23 Jim: Well, I should clarify that I did attempt to raise funds for the company with already knowing that there would be certain people I wouldn’t accept money from, certain types of investment that I wouldn’t be comfortable with. But, I was hoping to be able to do it in some capacity and was not successful at it. So, that was part of it. Maybe had I met the right people, those things could have looked differently. But I will say, both prior to that and since then, having observed the dynamics in that space, I see how that would be a challenge for many, many people who are attempting to do something similar. But it wasn’t as though I was equipped to know upfront, “Oh, there’s no way this is going to work.” It was very much a learning experience for me.

Current Role in the Business

17:11 Emily: Yeah, that sounds really great, actually. And you’re still living in San Francisco, so you’re still exposed to all of that stuff. But I’m curious about this decision that you said around two years ago, you wanted to focus more on the UBI stuff and you restructured the business. And now, how much time do you spend working on the business now, maybe per week or per month? And what is your role in it now, exactly?

17:32 Jim: Yeah. Well, I’m still CEO of the business, but to be honest, it probably averages about five hours a week at this point because we want to keep running, we want to keep our clients happy there. The idea is really to have it be maintaining the service rather than doing new things. And so, that just doesn’t require that much work. So, I have an employee who is, basically, like any sort of support we need to provide, is dealing with that, keeping an eye on things, and then myself overseeing things. And that allows us to keep going with that.

18:06 Emily: And to ask kind of a more pointed financial question, but you are supporting yourself entirely off of your business income for which you’re only putting in about five hours a week at this point?

18:16 Jim: That’s right, yes.

Financial Independence and Early Retirement (FIRE) Movement

18:17 Emily: Wonderful. Wonderful set up for you. So, we’ll talk about this a little bit more in the upcoming UBI conversation. But the reason I was kind of interested in your story and sharing it on the podcast is because there’s this big movement in the personal finance community called the FIRE movement, Financial Independence and Early Retirement. In season three, I released a pair of interviews with someone on that subject. And your story, while the FIRE community might not call you financially independent by their definition, a lot of what they’re going for, financial freedom, you have bought for yourself with your business, right? So, there’s a lot of overlap there between the goals of the FIRE movement and what you’ve done for yourself. So, I was really interested in having you on the podcast for that reason.

Business Advice for Early-Career PhDs

18:59 Emily: So, okay, now that we’re going to transition to sort of the universal basic income aspect of our conversation, I kind of wanted to wrap up the aspect of our conversation about the business by just asking if you had to give some advice, if another early-career PhD asked you advice around starting a business, what would you tell that person now?

Advice #1: Talk to People

19:20 Jim: I think just go and talk to a lot of people who’ve been through the process because I think part of the challenge is it does look very different in different situations. And that was something I struggled with early is thinking, “Okay, well, there’s going to be standards around this. And so did a bunch of Googling online for like, “Okay, what is the standard, whether it’s around the equity or whether it’s around other aspects of the business.” And I found some stuff but not as much as I expected. And so, I think that, if you can just talk to a lot of people who have gone through the process, you get a sense of the diversity of ways that can work. And so I think it can give you a better idea as to what the trajectories may seem to be. That was something I know I struggle a lot with, and I think may have delayed me deciding to start a business, is that it just felt too amorphous and scary. Alright, what does it look to get something like this off the ground? And in hindsight, it’s such a simpler process than so much of the work I had done before, but I think that there is that opacity and then those unknowns that make it difficult. I feel like I was not unique in having that perspective.

Advice #2: Find Your Focus

20:33 Jim: And then I think focus is another big thing that I continually struggle with frankly, but I see many, many people struggle with. There’s many great things to do and, as you’re doing something, you’ll see many other, adjacent great things to do as well, but that can so easily be a distraction from actually figuring out, “Alright, what is the core of this successful business going to look like?” And if you let yourself be pulled in that direction, it can really detract from your chance of building something big.

Commercial

21:07 Emily: Emily here, for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early-career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing, career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers even while social distancing. Now, back to our interview.

Should Entrepreneurs Move to San Francisco?

22:06 Emily: I’m trying to think about for someone who is, let’s say still affiliated with the university, I would imagine there are some people to talk to there, networking, especially universities that have incubators or something from launching a business out of. But I asked you before about living in San Francisco, what do you think about moving to a place like San Francisco where you can just run into other people who are on a similar path? What do you think about that idea?

22:31 Jim: I mean, I think it’s a very double-edged sword because certainly the density of that happening is a significant asset for a lot of this sort of work. And it is so expensive here that if you’re looking to hire locally, you’re gonna be paying, sometimes easily two, three, four times as much as you’d be paying, not too far away. And so, I think it’s a question of balancing those sorts of things. I mean, I think there are ways, like either if you live somewhere not too far away, where you can go into the city and have those easy conversations in-person with folks, but still be in a place where it doesn’t cost you thousands and thousands of dollars every month to pay for your rent. That could be your compromise. Or, just take the occasional trip out here. Assuming you can afford whatever the travel costs are. And then I think there are other areas where you’re starting to see better density. I don’t really have a great sense for what it actually looks like yet. And I do think that there is a cultural component to why Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because there’s kind of a pay-it-forward mentality, pretty broadly, where people who have done well are eager to help new people coming in, which I think has made a big difference. But yeah, you get both sides of it.

Advocacy for Universal Basic Income

23:54 Emily: I see. Okay. So, now that you pay for your life based on your business, which you only work in a few hours per week now, I’m curious about this transition that you made two years ago. I mean, you said it was kind of like you became more interested in universal basic income and that movement. You then structured your life so that you didn’t have to work so much. So, I guess the question is, how has your experience of having that business and having that source of income that requires only a very small amount of work at this point or small amount of time, how did that lead you into your advocacy for universal basic income?

24:34 Jim: So, I think there are a couple of different ways that I can answer that. So, as far as what first got me interested in universal basic income, a big part of it was the process of starting my company because I had certain expectations coming in around staffing related to operations, to payroll, to HR services, and expecting that, assuming things at all got off the ground pretty quickly, I would need to be hiring at least part-time help to assist with that. And what I found is that there were all these new online services that automated a lot of that. And so, from the beginning for payroll in the company, we use Gusto. It used to be called ZenPayroll, which you have to plug in the information to start with people’s where they live, their bank account transfer information, what the unemployment insurance rate is in the state. But then every twice a month you just say, “Okay, go,” and it pays them and files their taxes and that’s it. And costs not very much money to do it. And so, that being one example of how technology is allowing us, not just to replace jobs because I think you lose something when you describe it just that way, but is A) definitely changing the way that that work is being done, and B) and this is the thing that really stood out for me, is allowing much smaller groups of people to be able to do far, far more than was true before.

Small Business is the New “Big”

26:14 Jim: Because in the past, if you wanted to start a big company, or I shouldn’t say big, I should say a company that was going to generate a lot of income and wealth, kind of inherent to the process is you would need to involve a lot of other people. And it’s far less true now. You can have a team, I mean if you look at I think, what was it, the WhatsApp team, which is like half a dozen, a dozen people who then sell a company for multiple billions of dollars. Never in human history before could something like that happen. And so I think that was an A-ha moment for me and realizing that things are already starting to and will continue to look very differently than they have in the past and we need to stop assuming that the economic solutions that have been effective before are necessarily the right ones going forward.

27:06 Emily: So, it’s not necessarily just jobs are going away, but maybe some jobs are going away, some other jobs are popping up, the people that create the companies and the software and so forth. Are you also speaking about wealth concentration?

27:20 Jim: Yeah.

27:21 Emily: Gotcha.

Changing Mindset Around Universal Basic Income

27:22 Jim: Yeah. And I think for me, that was as much of a factor as jobs are not. I think we’re used to thinking about the jobs thing, so it’s more clear why that would be problematic if we had only a requirement that 10% of the people have a job. But I think that, particularly as I’ve worked on the issue more, that piece more clearly is a big issue that I think as our systems are structured now is really incompatible with having a fully-functioning society, I would say. Anyway, so that was kind of how I first started to think about UBI, universal basic income. And I don’t even remember where I first heard about the idea. I think I read maybe some piece about the referendum that Switzerland was pursuing.

28:18 Jim: It started back in 2013. But my initial reaction was, “This seems dumb, frankly.” I was like, “Oh, this seems like an oversimplification. Just thinking you can give people money and that will solve things. And then I started to look more into it and look at the research and understanding what are the actual, both economic and psychological ramifications when you do this. And it turns out it was incredibly positive that this is something where we have, at this point, a lot of evidence that unconditional cash–people take that and use it for whatever they actually need to use it for. And that, in fact, it confers a sense of agency to people that they might not otherwise have. And that in itself is hugely beneficial because it encourages people to think more longer term in terms of sensing more responsibility for a situation, all things that are actually very valuable in sending people out for their own longterm success.

29:15 Emily: I want to leave this for part two of this interview. Where we’ll be talking less about your personal story and more about, well, maybe what you’ve been learning over the last few years. We’re going to take a step back and define universal basic income because we haven’t done that yet. So, listeners, if the next part of this conversation sounds like it’s going to be really interesting to you, please tune in next week. For the second part of the interview, we’ll be talking a lot more about universal basic income with the expert, Dr. Jim Pugh.

Outtro

29:40 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.