Jonathan Jackson, PhD, cognitive neuroscientist and fake epidemiologist, talks about failure had its importance in shaping his career and life, 40-60 feral hogs in Texas, white guilt wine, 5th grade teacher massages, and more!
Jonathan Jackson, PhD, cognitive neuroscientist and fake epidemiologist, talks about failure had its importance in shaping his career and life, 40-60 feral hogs in Texas, white guilt wine, 5th grade teacher massages, and more!
Jonathan Jackson:
I had gone to this weird thing the year before, like a business camp-
Lisa Bodnar:
Nerd alert.
Jonathan Jackson:
Nerd alert. Yeah. Weirdly, I met Bob Woodward there. And I had breakfast with him, but I had no idea who he was. And I was like, "Why are you so important?"
Lisa Bodnar:
Maybe you're the next tell-all book that's coming out, just saying.
Hi, everyone. I'm Lisa Bodnar. Welcome to Shiny Epi People. Today my guest is Jonathan Jackson. Jonathan is the founder and executive director of the Community Access Recruitment and Engagement Research Center, or CARE, at Massachusetts General Hospital. And he's also an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School.
His research focuses on midlife and late life health disparities in clinical settings that affect Black populations. John was just awarded a very prestigious NIH Director's Pioneer Award. Pioneer Awards support individual scientists of exceptional creativity, who are proposing innovative high impact approaches to major challenges. They only give seven of these out a year. So this is a huge deal. And with Jonathan's great success, who better to come on the show and talk about failure.
Failure is a major part of academia. Our papers are rejected. Our grants aren't funded. Our studies can't recruit participants. We get bad course evaluations. The committee we led produces a plan that fails. Once we're on step 15, we find a mistake we made in step one, and we have to start all over after months of work. Failure is universal. We just don't like talking about it.
Melanie Stefan, who now is a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, wrote an article in Nature in 2010, about the benefits of making a CV full of failures. And if you bear with me, I'm going to read a few paragraphs from her article. She said, "My CV does not reflect the bulk of my academic efforts. It does not mention the exams I failed, my unsuccessful PhD or fellowship applications, or the papers never accepted for publication. At conferences, I talk about the one project that worked, not about the many that failed. As scientists, we construct a narrative of success that renders our setbacks invisible, both to ourselves and to others. Often other scientists' careers seem to be a constant streamlined series of triumphs. Therefore, whenever we experience an individual failure, we feel alone and dejected."
Her recommendation is, quote, "Log every unsuccessful application, refused grant proposal and rejected paper. Don't dwell on it for hours. Just keep a running up-to-date tally. If you dare and can afford to, make it public. It will be six times as long as your normal CV. It will probably be utterly depressing at first sight, but it will remind you of the missing truths, some of the essential parts of what it means to be a scientist, and it might inspire a colleague to shake off rejection and start again."
I love this idea, and of course it can extend way beyond our professional lives. My niece actually attends a high school where seniors bring their college rejection letters into school. And then at the lunch period, they take turns standing on a chair and joyfully saying what university rejected them. And then they put the rejection letter through a shredder, and everyone cheers.
So in this episode, Jon Jackson, successful academic, figuratively stands on a chair and announces his failures. And I hope that you are cheering right along with me. And last thing, Jon also tells a great story about feral hogs in Texas. He and I refer to a tweet that went viral after the most recent deadly shooting in El Paso. Someone on Twitter wrote that no one should need to own an assault rifle. And then a man replied with great sincerity, "Legit question for rural Americans. How do I kill the 30 to 50 feral hogs that run into my yard within three to five minutes while my small kids play?" So if you want to hear the full story behind that awesome viral tweet, then listen to episode 149 of the podcast, reply all. And I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jon.
Jon Jackson.
Jonathan Jackson:
That's me.
Lisa Bodnar:
What are you drinking?
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh, I have a story for you.
Lisa Bodnar:
Ooh, tell me.
Jonathan Jackson:
Actually, I brought the bottle with me. This was a secret admirer gift that somebody left on my doorstep, where there was a note attached that said, "You are beautiful. You are amazing. Keep it up." So I got this bottle of wine the first week of June. So this isn't that somebody has a crush on me. This is white guilt wine.
Somebody saw me walking down the street, they don't know any Black people, and they're like, "Oh, it just must be a such a tough time for that one Black guy." And so instead of being like, "Hi, my name is so-and-so. I noticed that you've lived here for two years and I've never said hello," they looked around their kitchen and they're like, "What do I give the Black guy? Do I give him money? Are we doing reparations? Is this an alcohol reparation?" And I think that's what they settled on. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing about with Between the World and Me, and the case for reparations. So instead of my 40 acres and a mule, I got a bottle of Apothic Red.
Lisa Bodnar:
Wow. And I'm going to need to Google a third of the words you just said.
Jonathan Jackson:
So when I was in grad school, the person I was dating, who actually is my daughter's mom, we actually went through and tried to figure out what we liked in various wines. So because we're both nerdy scientists types, we had this Excel spreadsheet with these different descriptors for different kinds of wine. And we basically threw together a really shitty regression to figure out-
Lisa Bodnar:
Gosh, this is so nerdy.
Jonathan Jackson:
Yeah. I'm outing myself.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yeah. Love it.
Jonathan Jackson:
But yeah, we put together a regression to figure out what predicted our tastes in wine. And we included everything. It was like a kitchen sink approach. We were like seasonality, we were looking at year. It was pretentious and ridiculous, and it obviously told us nothing.
Lisa Bodnar:
You should have done a power calculation.
Jonathan Jackson:
I could've done a power analysis.
Lisa Bodnar:
Well, I think I just heard a whole bunch of people turn off the podcast when I said those words. So I need to say something here. I've always viewed you as an important member of the Epi Twitter community.
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh boy, okay.
Lisa Bodnar:
In the course of my preparation and research that I do for each guest, I learned that you do not have a degree in epidemiology.
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh, no.
Lisa Bodnar:
Nor do you have a degree in any domain of public health.
Jonathan Jackson:
I don't have a degree in epidemiology. I have a degree in cognitive neuroscience. So I have no idea how I ended up here.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yeah. How did you stumble into the world of epidemiology?
Jonathan Jackson:
I feel like I'm the ultimate groupie. I'm a wannabe epidemiologist.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yeah, okay.
Jonathan Jackson:
Of course, epidemiologists are the coolest scientists and researchers. Why wouldn't you want to be an epidemiologist? But yeah, so I was sort of adopted by a bunch of epi folks in the dementia space, and forever will I stay.
Lisa Bodnar:
So aside from your being a fraud-
Jonathan Jackson:
Yeah, totally.
Lisa Bodnar:
I wanted to talk about failure, because failure... Frauds are failures. So as academics, we are constantly faced with failure.
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh, yes. Absolutely.
Lisa Bodnar:
And we don't talk about it very much. But everybody experiences it all the time. And so when you were like, "I would like to talk about failure." I was like, "That's so interesting, because nobody likes to talk about it." I mean, I like to talk about it, but very few people like to talk about it. And so I was really excited that you're willing to be this open.
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh yeah, 100%. I wouldn't be where I am today, in terms of my career, without failure.
Lisa Bodnar:
So tell me about some of your big and small failures. Maybe let's start with failures at work. I'm happy to share my own, so you're not the only failure in here, but-
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh, yeah. No, I don't mind. I've got a long list of failures.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yeah. Tell me about some of them.
Jonathan Jackson:
So I spent years doing my absolute best to get into one particular lab that is cutting-edge. I started in 2010 and got nowhere, and including memorably once in 2013, they actually invited me to give a talk. And the talk went so poorly that they had this quiet meeting about four weeks later. And they were like, "Budget cuts. We can't actually offer you the position that we basically promised you."
Lisa Bodnar:
Oh, they promised you. But this was a job talk?
Jonathan Jackson:
It was a job talk.
Lisa Bodnar:
And you fucked it up.
Jonathan Jackson:
Yes, I did. I poured my heart and soul into the job talk. I wasn't lazy. I wasn't thinking that I could just waltz into this. I was like, "I want to come into this space, and I want to prove that I belong here." What happened was they started asking me about my analysis pipeline for one specific aspect of it. I basically flubbed it. And then I kind of flubbed it, and in a way that they knew it and I knew it, and I knew that they knew it. And so instead of the talk finishing with the strong finish, it was like, "Oh, okay. All right. Poor thing."
Lisa Bodnar:
Oh, at the end it was like womp womp.
Jonathan Jackson:
I didn't even get applause at the end of the talk.
Lisa Bodnar:
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Jonathan Jackson:
It was like one of those wet farts that just won't go away. And that was my job talk for my dream lab. So, yeah. So that was a really catastrophic failure, and it took me a long time to come back from that.
I decided to start my own research center, because this is the only way out that I could see. I think that things are starting to turn around now, three years later. But those first three years were also punctuated by failure. I failed again and again as a leader, because I tried to lead by being really cool and laid back. And it turns out that doesn't work at all. It doesn't work as a parent, and it doesn't work when you're running a small research center.
I really feel like I let a lot of those people down who were working in my lab in those first couple of years, because I was trying so hard to be the opposite of what I had experienced, that I was bad in a completely new way.
Inevitably you come up against this question of what is failure, what does it mean to fail? And in these cases, these stories that I have, where I have failed in what is the traditional sense or what society defines. But I found much more of a rich environment. I found better acceptance of myself. I found new career ideas through what most people would regard as failure.
And it gets to the point where now, I'm not quite sure what failure is. And so when I use that term, it's when I didn't do the thing that I expected to do, but now I recognize that it can really take you to a completely different place that you would have never expected or anticipated. And sometimes that place is incredible, and we're just too scared to try it. But I'm speaking as somebody who has put all of his chips in multiple times, it didn't go the way that I thought it would go, and I'm doing okay.
Lisa Bodnar:
Parenthood is just one failure after the next.
Jonathan Jackson:
Very much so.
Lisa Bodnar:
Right?
Jonathan Jackson:
Yes. I feel like I'm constantly failing as a dad, like especially in the age of COVID. It's just accelerated that feeling. This is where, I mean, I know that many of your guests have parent confessionals. Here's my parent confessional. I hate other parents.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yes.
Jonathan Jackson:
Other parents are terrible. The worst part of being a parent is other parents.
Lisa Bodnar:
Tell me what you hate about other parents.
Jonathan Jackson:
The nonstop judgment. And you know what? I'm a guy, so I see 4% of it. They make you feel so small, because for some reason, some group of parents decided somewhere that there's only a limited number of shiny points. And if you get one, that that means that it has to take one away from them. And so I'm one of those people who stays way far away from the PTA and the PTO.
Lisa Bodnar:
I'm the parent who, at the soccer game, there's the parents who sit together, and I'm on the away team side. I don't want to talk to you. I'm going to bring my laptop, not because I want to work, but because I want to ignore you.
Jonathan Jackson:
Yes, exactly.
Lisa Bodnar:
I don't want to hear neighborhood drama. There's all sorts of COVID school district drama. "Did you listen to the school board meeting last night?" I'm like, "Nope."
Jonathan Jackson:
Yeah. But during the time of COVID, I mean, I really like being a dad, but oh, my God.
Lisa Bodnar:
It's too much.
Jonathan Jackson:
You get zero seconds off.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yes.
Jonathan Jackson:
And you can love something with your whole heart and your whole being, but that does not mean that you want to do it all the time. And it's weird that we can't admit that. Why aren't we allowed to admit that?
Lisa Bodnar:
Totally. They're around too much. And they are sick of me too. This isn't one way.
Jonathan Jackson:
No. I completely understand it. It's one of those things where, as much as we talk about not judging other parents, I think that we still have this low level of judgment of ourselves. I know I'm speaking as a dad, where the bar is maybe a millimeter off the floor here. But that sense of trying to have an identity outside of being a parent is one of those things where it's so necessary, and it's so taboo, that I think many people can't even name the shame that they feel around wanting to have an identity outside of their kids. And the more of that that we can have in the world, I think the better this world will be. I think so much of the sadness and the violence that we have is this redirected, misdirected trauma that we've inflicted on ourselves over these standards that are completely impossible.
I grew up in a very small town called Ben Wheeler, Texas. When I was growing up there, there was literally only two gas stations, a post office and the Roundup Cafe. They actually have a festival to the local wildlife in Ben Wheeler. And because Ben Wheeler is located in a rural east Texas, local wildlife is feral hogs.
Lisa Bodnar:
Nice.
Jonathan Jackson:
Feral hogs outnumber people maybe 20 or 40 to one. They are everywhere.
Lisa Bodnar:
The feral hogs. You remember when there was one of the many shootings, and this guy was... something about he needed to keep his guns, because of-
Jonathan Jackson:
"What do I do about the 40 to 60 feral hogs in my..." Yeah, I remember that tweet, because I remember reading it, and I was like, "Oh yeah, that is a huge problem," because I know everyone else reacted, and was like, "What the fuck?" But no, it really is. It really is a huge problem.
And so I've actually been caught in a feral hog stampede twice in Ben Wheeler, Texas. It is terrifying, let me tell you. I noticed that there was something right next to me. And then what I saw was the grass... It was kind of like the Jurassic Park movies, rustling all around me. And there were easily 40 to 50 feral hogs, just like the tweet.
Lisa Bodnar:
Forty to fifty?
Jonathan Jackson:
Yeah. They were hidden in the grass. I couldn't see them. And they're just going. They're hundreds of pounds of pure muscle. It's like you have no defense. And some of them have these tusks, and it looks like a really dangerous version of Pumbaa from the Lion King.
Lisa Bodnar:
Minus the farting and giggling.
Jonathan Jackson:
Yeah. Well, I mean, there's less farting, I guess. I don't know about that, but maybe on the giggling. Anyway so yeah, that's happened to me twice in my life. But yeah, so feral hogs, that is Ben Wheeler.
Lisa Bodnar:
I just need to say on the record that you've said that you've listened to the episodes and are trying to identify patterns in my fun questions, in order to anticipate what I'm going to ask you. And I need to just tell you that that is incredibly nerdy.
Jonathan Jackson:
Is it?
Lisa Bodnar:
Yes. But that is what this podcast is about.
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh, okay. [crosstalk 00:18:22]
Lisa Bodnar:
So we're going to celebrate it.
Jonathan Jackson:
Yes.
Lisa Bodnar:
Hey nerd. Okay. Jonathan, what takes up too much of your time?
Jonathan Jackson:
I don't know. It's Tuesday afternoon. So I feel like I'm saying fucking meetings take up too much of my time.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yeah yeah yeah. Okay.
Jonathan Jackson:
I feel like every meeting is pointless, and I could just do what you want me to do in an email and save the hour. I had a meeting yesterday that was scheduled for an hour, and it was so efficiently run that it took 12 minutes. And it was the most amazing thing in my entire life. But I think right now, meetings take up too much of my time. It means that I can't do work, and I can't spend time with my family, and I can't spend time with my own goddamn self.
Lisa Bodnar:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I don't do meetings.
Jonathan Jackson:
What? What does that mean?
Lisa Bodnar:
It means maybe I have two a week.
Jonathan Jackson:
How do you do that? How do you not have meetings? Teach me your ways.
Lisa Bodnar:
I don't know. I don't have a big team. My data analyst is incredibly independent. She and I will touch base by phone. We're like, "Zoom's stuck. We're not going to Zoom, because I don't want to look at your face, and I don't want to look at my face. No. Let's just talk about what we need to talk about." Yeah. I don't know. I just avoid them. I also don't do a lot of administrative leadership stuff.
Jonathan Jackson:
I feel like I've been doing... I'm running this research center, but I don't want to do it forever. I've told everybody, after 10 years of doing this, I am out, and I just want to be left alone with a computer and lots of data, and just a chance to write.
Lisa Bodnar:
The people over time that I've learned who I want to collaborate with, they are people who also work like me, who work efficiently, don't work a lot of hours, only meet when we need to meet, and also are totally fine with fucking canceling meetings. Like, "You know what? I'm not feeling it today. Let's just not do this." Or like, "You know what? I was supposed to have more stuff done. I don't. Let's just forget it."
Jonathan Jackson:
Oh, my God. I would love that. Most of my meetings are not from people within my center. The vast majority of my meetings are outside of my group, because they're people who realize that racism exists, in the last three months. And they're like, "Oh, we need Jonathan to solve all of our problems." So I have so many, so many meetings, and they're just a waste of time.
Lisa Bodnar:
Maybe you need to set up a new boundary.
Jonathan Jackson:
So I'm setting a hard limit on my meetings. But I think what I need to do is I need to lower what that number is.
Lisa Bodnar:
Yes.
Jonathan Jackson:
For sure. And I think I need to stick to that. And if people need to wait to meet with me, they just need to wait to meet with me.
Lisa Bodnar:
Favorite breakfast food?
Jonathan Jackson:
Ooh, waffles that I make myself, because everyone else's waffles are bullshit.
Lisa Bodnar:
Why? What's so fucking great about your waffles?
Jonathan Jackson:
I am incredible at making waffles. I'm good with breakfast food in general. I'm very domestic. I like cooking and cleaning and doing all that kind of stuff. But where I shine is breakfast. I can make incredible breakfast foods. And my favorite is to make waffles. Right now, I'm in love with this recipe of kind of a yeasted waffles. And so you make them overnight, and you sit them in your fridge, and then you let them sit on your counter for a little bit, and then you make them, and they're so light and fluffy, and they have a little bit of that kind of bready, slightly beery yeastness, which really balances well with maple syrup and butter. Or what I like to do is I make my own caramel sauce to put on top.
Lisa Bodnar:
This is very unrelatable. So, okay. What's the weirdest thing you did as a child?
Jonathan Jackson:
Okay. So my list has four entries on it.
Lisa Bodnar:
Okay.
Jonathan Jackson:
And so do you want something that-
Lisa Bodnar:
You made a list with four entries, okay.
Jonathan Jackson:
So there are four entries. And so I can give you something that is cutesy and innocent, or I can give you something that is really weird.
Lisa Bodnar:
Fucked up?
Jonathan Jackson:
This is fucked up, yeah.
Lisa Bodnar:
It's your call.
Jonathan Jackson:
Okay. All right. We're going to do the fucked up thing.
Lisa Bodnar:
All right.
Jonathan Jackson:
So some of the other entries are cutesy, like when I was a kid, I used to eat leaves off of trees and [crosstalk 00:22:38], which is true.
Lisa Bodnar:
Okay.
Jonathan Jackson:
Or I watched a lot of cartoons and I had this crazy fear of anvils dropping on my head.
Lisa Bodnar:
Of course, Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner.
Jonathan Jackson:
Yeah, and so Wiley Coyote and Roadrunner and stuff like that. So I was genuinely afraid of anvils falling on my head.
But the one thing that I want to tell you about, and this is something that I didn't know was fucked up until like-
Lisa Bodnar:
Yeah, love those.
Jonathan Jackson:
Five years ago. So when I was in third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Bukasich, and I don't mind calling her out, whenever we had story time after recess, she would always have one of the kids massage her shoulders, and ... the look on your face.
Lisa Bodnar:
What?
Jonathan Jackson:
So she had somebody rub her shoulders-
Lisa Bodnar:
Right, right.
Jonathan Jackson:
Every day after recess, with our hot little hands, while she read stories to us in third grade. And so what happened was, at first it was rotating, a different kid did it every day. But apparently I was really good at it. And eventually, I became the [crosstalk 00:23:52]-
Lisa Bodnar:
Oh, no.
Jonathan Jackson:
That gave my teacher shoulder massages.
Lisa Bodnar:
Did you tell your parents?
Jonathan Jackson:
No. My parents legitimately don't know. I mean, I don't think they listen to podcasts, so they won't find out now. But I didn't even know that this was a messed up thing.
Lisa Bodnar:
No.
Jonathan Jackson:
Until not that long ago, after Trump was elected. And so I was telling the story, and somebody reacted the way that you reacted. And I was like, "Oh, this is not okay, what happened."
Lisa Bodnar:
You thought you were special, like, "And she chose me."
Jonathan Jackson:
I mean, elementary school, all of those things matter. You want to be line leader-
Lisa Bodnar:
Totally.
Jonathan Jackson:
On the safety patrol. You want to raise the flag. And for me, I wanted to be the guy that rubbed my teacher's shoulders.
Lisa Bodnar:
What sport would be the funniest to add a mandatory amount of alcohol to?
Jonathan Jackson:
Curling. So I don't know if you know a lot about curling, but it's sort of like ice sweeping. Doing that while incredibly intoxicated adds a degree of difficulty that should be entertaining for the people participating as well as the people watching.
Lisa Bodnar:
Have you seen people do the Beer Mile?
Jonathan Jackson:
What is the Beer Mile?
Lisa Bodnar:
You run a mile, but at each lap, you have to drink a beer. I've known people who've done this. I have not done it myself, but people do it. And wait, there is a national championship.
Jonathan Jackson:
For a Beer Mile?
Lisa Bodnar:
Beer Mile.
Jonathan Jackson:
When I was at Rice, we had something called Beer Bike. It was a fairly similar concept. I would never want to do that while running. That sounds-
Lisa Bodnar:
I know, so gross.
Jonathan Jackson:
Like the last thing that you want when you run, especially if you're running a long distance, especially if it's a hot day, you don't want a beer.
Lisa Bodnar:
No. And it's sloshing around in your stomach.
Jonathan Jackson:
No, no. I mean, I hope there are troughs for people to barf in at-
Lisa Bodnar:
Yeah. I think that there's a lot of barfing. But I also know that people do this competitively, and they train.
Jonathan Jackson:
Yeah. So when I was in college, with this Beer Bike contest, which again, is very similar to Beer Run-
Lisa Bodnar:
Beer Mile. Beer Mile.
Jonathan Jackson:
Sorry, Beer Mile. There's training. And so, if it was rainy or it was a bad track, we turned it into a Beer Run, where you had to guzzle a beer, and they teach you how to open your throat. Just let it pour through you. And then you have to sprint a third of a mile. It was horrible. It was really, really awful.
Lisa Bodnar:
Thank you for being on my podcast. This was so good to get to know you. I appreciate all your time.
Jonathan Jackson:
Well thank you, Lisa. I had a great time as well.
Have you ever met a celebrity? I'm sure you have.
Lisa Bodnar:
No.
Jonathan Jackson:
You've never met any? No?
Lisa Bodnar:
Does Ken Rothman count as a celebrity?
Jonathan Jackson:
I don't know who that is. I'm sorry.
Lisa Bodnar:
Ken Rothman? Oh, right. You're not an epidemiologist.
Jonathan Jackson:
I don't know who that is.
Lisa Bodnar:
All right, never mind.