Confidently Irreverent | Jessie Rack

Jessie Rack is an ecologist, naturalist, and environmental educator passionate about communicating how the world works. Jessie has a PhD in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut (for which she studied salamanders!) and diverse experiences in both formal and informal education. She taught writing at Princeton University, wrote for the NPR ScienceDesk, and is a AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador, one of 125 women in STEM fields chosen to be a science role model to middle school girls. Currently, she is a professor in the biology department at Northern Arizona University.

In this episode:

- The Iceland job interview at 9pm in midsummer daylight, in field gear, for a video call she thought was a phone call
- Why the offer of a tenure track position might be the thing she'd need to escape — the container of permanent employment as the scarier prospect
- Prions, AI, plant intelligence, jumping spiders, scorpions — how each functions as a probe for what the categories are doing when they start to break down
- "Everything is conscious or nothing is"
- The sentence in a scientific paper about scorpion eyes that made her write a poem
- A Princeton classroom assignment connecting pheromones to free will — and what happens when your students come out of it realizing nothing they do is free
- The difference between deference and respect, and why "I'm not scared of you" is the part that matters
- The psychic who looked into her eyes and saw only swirling chaos
- What "confidently irreverent" means from the inside

The Scorpion and the Stars — the poem she wrote after reading about scorpion eyes — is reproduced here with Jessie's permission.

The Scorpion and the Stars

“[Scorpions’] median eyes appear capable of image formation, and their lateral eyes can identify subtle changes in light magnitude. Both sets of eyes are highly sensitive to light and can putatively detect starlight against the background of the night sky.”

-from “Scorpion fluorescence and reaction to light,” Gaffin et al., 2012

The scorpion pauses on top of a flat rock

Midway through a nocturnal scuttle,

A foray to find delicious bugs to crunch.

Its legs still all at once. Its pedipalps—the great pinchers—lower, the coiled tail relaxes

In surprise.

Both sets of its eyes would widen if they could,

Except they’re held fast

In the chitinous rigidity of its exoskeleton.

It has, for the first time, noticed the stars.

It has no sense of distance, of space,

So the tiny sparkling points could be

Glowing insects for all it knows, could be

Some odd phosphorescent rock formation,

Could be a human-thing, inscrutable and meaningless.

But it senses something more,

Some feeling stirring in its tiny chest, its tube heart contracting powerfully,

Its copper-laced blood pumping with a new intensity.

The scorpion’s would-be prey skitters away across the sand

As the creature freezes, awestruck,

Feeling its size.

Not understanding, but understanding enough.

Fully present for the first time, somewhere in the desert night,

The distant stars reflected in its flat, pupilless, 

Wondering 

Arachnid eyes.

**Also mentioned:**
- Franny Choi's "Turing Test"
- Zoë Schlanger, *The Light Eaters*
- "The Comforts of Horror" — Jessie's unpublished essay on science communication and horror films; watch this space...

Transcript

Transcript: "Confidently Irreverent"

The Principal Uncertainty | Jessie Rack 

Edited for readability. Timestamps are approximate.

⸻

George Laufenberg (00:00) 

New puppy this week, one of my kids not sleeping. My eight-year-old woke up at quarter to four, came upstairs, woke up the puppy and the older dog. We went outside and the older dog found his way into a dead skunk carcass. The worst thing I have ever smelled, and I'm from New Jersey. "Nuke the site from orbit" was my preference. It's been a day.

Jessie Rack (00:19) 

NOOO.

George Laufenberg (00:37) 

So — are you outside Phoenix? No, Flagstaff.

Jessie Rack (00:41) 

Flagstaff, yeah. High elevation — about 7,000 feet. We have seasons, not just hot. We get snow up here. Well, technically we're supposed to, but climate change. The mountains got a little snow. Historically, we received a lot of snow.

George Laufenberg (00:51) 

"Historically." "Historically, snow happened."

Jessie Rack (01:12) 

But it's really nice. I rent a house walking distance to downtown Flagstaff, which is sick — it's just a cool mountain town. Very chill. And I work at NAU, Northern Arizona University. I've come back around to teaching writing again.

George Laufenberg (01:35) 

Yeah. So on the long list of questions — I want to hear about how the trajectory has unfolded for you.

Jessie Rack (01:45) 

It's less a trajectory and more a random walk. Do you know that term from statistics? That's my career path. The hardest thing is any time I apply for a new job and have to tell it as a cohesive story with a thread running through it. Which is fake. I don't have a thread.

George Laufenberg (02:13) 

Oh my god. Right.

Jessie Rack (02:29) 

Okay. So. I last saw you in Princeton in 2018. And I believe the last you heard, I quit that job without another job lined up, and I was like — I don't think I'm going to do this anymore, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I think I'm going to move to Arizona. So I jumped off a cliff.

I have friends who own a summer camp in Maine — Madomic, you should go — and they caught my fall. I went and worked there for the summer as a counselor. Camp counselor emeritus, actually. I keep going back. I'll be there for two weeks this summer. All I want to do is be in the woods shouting about nature with children.

George Laufenberg (03:53) 

Charlie remembers. We were looking at pictures from that hike in Hopewell last night.

Jessie Rack (04:10) 

How old is she? God. Twelve?

What I knew was that the people who stayed in a freshman writing position for a long time tended to get stuck as writing professors. And I'm a biologist. So I quit, went to camp, applied for jobs in Arizona.

In the meantime I did a week in Iceland as an instructor for a field institute — teaching glacial ecology on top of a glacier, which was badass. And while I was in Iceland, I had an interview for an environmental education position in Tucson. I was like, I'd love to do it, but I'm in Iceland. I can do it though — I can sit next to the main building and get WiFi.

George Laufenberg (05:28) 

Yeah, yeah.

Jessie Rack (05:42) 

And so I did a job interview at 9pm in Iceland in July with the sun still up. I also didn't realize it was going to be a Zoom — I thought it was a phone call. So I was in full field gear, in a vest, and all of a sudden my face popped up on the screen.

George Laufenberg (06:07) 

Perfect.

Jessie Rack (06:07) 

Anyway, I got that job. I think they were mostly impressed. I was like, yeah, look, I'm in Iceland. Here I am. So I spent two and a half years in Tucson doing environmental education — working at the University of Arizona's Community and School Garden Program, teaching ecology through gardens and outdoor spaces, mostly Title I classrooms. Going to different schools around Tucson, taking kids outside, teaching them ecology.

And then the pandemic happened.

George Laufenberg (07:06) 

Whoa.

Jessie Rack (07:06) 

I tried to keep going — I made a YouTube channel of interactive science stuff kids could do at home. Everything from experiments you could do with kitchen supplies to virtual field trips. I'd hike up a mountain and talk about the ecology of biotic communities. But the program furloughed us, and I looked for something different.

And this is a part I don't talk about very much. I moved to Maine for a brief stint as educational program director of a very small nonprofit that shall not be named. It lasted four months because the executive director was the biggest asshole I've ever met in my life. I hope he hears this.

It wasn't just that — it was unrealistic expectations, bullying, just ridiculous. And I had one of those moments: he thinks I'm trapped because I moved across the country for this. But little does he know I'm never trapped.

George Laufenberg (09:00) 

Whoop, whoop.

Jessie Rack (09:07) 

I tried professional interventions. Spoke with my education committee — they had my back. Spoke to the board — they had his. So I left, went back to summer camp, and applied for jobs again. And it turned out all my environmental education connections were in Arizona, not Maine. So I moved back to Arizona — to Prescott this time, where I became program director of the Natural History Institute.

George Laufenberg (09:59) 

Interesting.

Jessie Rack (09:59) 

Stop laughing at my career trajectory, you ass.

George Laufenberg (10:03) 

[laughing]

Jessie Rack (10:08) 

It lasted a couple of years, and I was getting a little tired of nonprofit life. And I was sort of passively looking — I was telling my partner, yeah, there's this thing called HigherEdJobs where you look for higher ed positions, but I don't think there's anything for me because I'm such a unicorn. I open it up and there's one at Northern Arizona University: biology department writing professor. And I was like — what? I'm sorry, what? There's only like one person in the world who can do that and it's me.

George Laufenberg (11:10) 

Ideally with a first name starting with J.

Jessie Rack (11:21) 

It turns out NAU does their junior-level writing class in-house in a lot of departments. They wanted someone to teach genre-based biology — how to do lit reviews and grant proposals and read scientific papers. I was like, that is wild. It paid more and I get summers off. So here I am. Three years. Fire away.

George Laufenberg (11:52) 

All right. See you in a couple of years.

Jessie Rack (12:19) 

My poor cat. I had a cat — this angel of a cat who passed away last summer, bless her — who moved across the entire country three times with me. She was such a trooper. She was just like, okay, I guess we're doing this again.

George Laufenberg (12:45) 

Pour one out for the cat.

Jessie Rack (12:45) 

Penny. She was the best.

George Laufenberg (12:47) 

Man. None of that was laughing at you — it was all identifying laughter. I can't use the word "career" without giggling a little.

Jessie Rack (12:55) 

Right? This is a cohesive story that makes sense for sure.

George Laufenberg (13:19) 

The only thing it's really evidence of is that you can narrate absolutely anything as having had a causal relationship. It's like: yes, stuff that happened before other things happened, and they're all things that happened.

Jessie Rack (13:33) 

The way I frame it in interviews: the cohesive thread running through all of this is my dedication to communication and education. Is it? I don't know. That's my interview voice.

George Laufenberg (13:49) 

And mine is: through all the various things I've done, I've always been deeply concerned with how people's sense of their capacity to change the world moves, how the horizon shifts. Which is true as far as it goes, but it's retroactive — it's the thing I've found myself most interested in no matter what situation I've gotten myself into.

Like, leaving Princeton — I also spent a couple of years working with a Title I charter in Baltimore. We moved to Missoula and the stay-at-home-dad thing was rock and roll, but it went from a year of that to three and a half years between the pandemic and other things. I'll never regret having spent those years at home with the small people. And it was really hard. And it turned out to be a lot harder to get back into work than I expected.

Jessie Rack (15:17) 

Were you being considered for executive director of something?

George Laufenberg (15:23) 

Yeah — there was a job I was really stoked about with Wild Rockies Field Institute. A gig that was like my dream job that I was a finalist for and didn't get. The most bummed I've been about a job not happening, ever.

And about six months later I saw a listing for a camp job here — it's complicated. It's an oncology camp. A camp for kids and teens and families affected by cancer. The name rang a bell, and I realized I had known someone ten years ago back in Jersey — a kid I was mentoring who was diagnosed with a brain tumor who wound up going to this camp.

Jessie Rack (15:50) 

Dang. That's so cool.

George Laufenberg (16:10) 

I was like, this is either going to read like weird synchronicity or like why is this person emailing us. I'll let the board decide. Short story long, I ended up as executive director there for a little over two years. Great mission, great people. Not a good fit from the beginning. And I am so happy that's somebody else's job now.

Jessie Rack (16:42) 

That's the nonprofit thing, right? The mission and the ideals are so pure and idealistic — but the execution isn't always successful. Yeah.

George Laufenberg (16:46) 

And it's structural, not anecdotal. It's baked into this weird third sector that is underresourced and expected to do everything. There's so much of that: the sense of mission supplants the need for lunch, free time, boundaries. You want people to outgrow a role that pays them a third of what they're worth.

There was a weekend in May of my first season where I went to the ER three times in forty-eight hours with kids who were in crisis, health-wise. Then flew to Minneapolis with someone we didn't think was going to make it home. My next actual day off was mid-August.

Jessie Rack (18:42) 

That's emotionally a lot. And on top of the regular nonprofit stuff.

George Laufenberg (18:55) 

I'd be in the kitchen at five AM making pancakes for a hundred and twenty people. It was buckers. I don't miss it at all. Not even the tiniest bit.

It wasn't a good fit from the beginning, but I kept convincing myself — there's so much that looks good about this. Staying for the kids. It's a shitty marriage. And then clarity: this is not a good fit.

It's been a really interesting six, eight months. Taking time to pull on threads — instead of forcibly narrating the giggling career, like yes, this looks chaotic but really it's coherent, no — it was not coherent.

Jessie Rack (20:10) 

And yet you can look back and say, yeah, there are threads — not ordered or logical, but the questions that have moved me, the things I've cared about.

George Laufenberg (20:39) 

Doing coaching and consulting and writing. And it feels so much better.

Jessie Rack (20:55) 

That's your podcast title, right? The Principal Uncertainty. I was actually telling my therapist last week about this, and I went to your website and read the blurb to her, and she was like, wow, everything we've been talking about the last few weeks is all about this — you're in uncertainty all the time. And I was like, yeah, basically.

Like, even at NAU — I'm a teaching professor, not tenured, never will be. And this year they're like, we're out of money, nobody's getting contract renewals until summer, and twenty percent of career-track faculty are getting either a one-semester offer or a buyout. Someone asked me: how does it make you feel, are you freaked out? And I was like — no. If they get rid of me, I'll just do something else.

In some ways, the lack of uncertainty is scarier to me. If someone offered me a tenure track job, I'd be like, god, how would I escape? What if I change my mind? I like being like, I don't know, I guess we'll see this time next year how I'm feeling.

George Laufenberg (22:43) 

Whatever you're doing, you're all in on it while you're doing it. You're committed fully.

Jessie Rack (22:54) 

Yeah. And I'm never afraid to identify: this is not the right fit for me. I'm out. I deserve better. It's okay to be uncertain and to not know and just leap into space sometimes. Trust that there's a bottom. There's something. Probably.

George Laufenberg (23:27) 

There's a net. Something.

Jessie Rack (23:30) 

We'll find out in a few minutes.

George Laufenberg (23:36) 

All right, let's go right into the deep end. How has your relationship to that question changed over time? Your experience of yourself in this kind of uncertainty — which for somebody else might feel like precarity, but that's not what I hear you talking about.

Jessie Rack (23:47) 

It's almost exciting. I don't know what's going to happen next — and at the back of my mind, I know I have really good friends who love me. If I truly fuck up badly, I'll sleep on someone's couch for a few weeks. It'll be fine. I do have high anxiety, I should say that. But I force myself into that space.

I never give myself the stability to just be like, alright, everything's fine, nothing scary is going on. I can't live like that for some reason.

How has it changed over time? Now that I'm in my forties, I enjoy the stasis a little more. Three years in this job is the longest I've been anywhere in my entire adult life. That's crazy. But I really can do both — I can do the quietness at home, sit with my giant kittens and read a book. I'm not itching to move or get out of town or leave this job. But if it happens, cool. I'll find something else.

George Laufenberg (25:39) 

Is part of what you're talking about the difference between running from versus running to?

Jessie Rack (25:55) 

Maybe. I don't know. I just like chaos. Actually, I have a story. One time while I was in Princeton — do you remember Christina Gonzalez? I went to her house for a party and one of her friends was a psychic.

George Laufenberg (26:13) 

Yes, of course.

Jessie Rack (26:22) 

We were all drinking, and the psychic gets a little wasty, and he just starts looking at people and saying things to them. He was freaking people out. He'd be like, yeah, watch out in November, something's coming. Shit like that.

I was sitting next to him. He turned to me and he said: when I look into your eyes, the only thing I see is swirling chaos.

He didn't have a future for me. He just — there was nothing. The chaos was the read.

If he was a fake psychic, he would have said something. Made a prediction. But he just had swirling chaos and it was freaking him out. And I think about it at least once a year.

George Laufenberg (27:21) 

That needs to be on a T-shirt. That's art.

Jessie Rack (27:46) 

I think that's the theme. It's not running from or to. I like shaking things up. I like change. I like novelty. Also I have ADHD. This may be related. Who's to say.

George Laufenberg (28:18) 

[laughing] I'm not that kind of doctor.

I think I heard myself say to one of my kids yesterday: "I'm not the kind of doctor who helps."

Jessie Rack (28:34) 

Have you seen the memes — help, is there a doctor on board? And they're like, I'm sorry, I have a PhD in salamander ecology. Yeah. Salamanders — I'm here. Their range. Their response to predators. That's me.

Did that answer your question at all? Telling a story about a psychic at a party?

George Laufenberg (29:03) 

It's completely perfect. I had a really interesting interaction with a psychic during preliminary fieldwork and wound up spending two months living on a roof in Palm Desert studying with people who were learning to recognize and develop their psychic gifts and metaphysical healing. So — totally.

Jessie Rack (29:15) 

SHIT. Wow. Are you a psychic? Look in my eyes. Do you see the chaos?

George Laufenberg (29:39) 

It's swirly. Swirly whirly gumdrops of chaos.

I've had some profoundly mysterious metaphysical experiences in various contexts over the years, but it's not a thing I do. At a party it wouldn't come up.

Jessie Rack (30:10) 

I'm the type of scientist who's like, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Tell me about ghosts, tell me about astrology — you can't prove it's not real. I'm open.

George Laufenberg (30:29) 

What was always interesting to me about pseudoscience was not the mystery — it was how authority works. It's performing a certain kind of certainty and invoking a scientistic authority when there's nothing to stand on. And I get twitchy about that. But —

Jessie Rack (31:06) 

What I like about it is that sometimes it gives you a lens for understanding yourself. That's why astrology is cool — not when it's making predictions about other people, but if I'm like, wow, this helps me understand my motivations. Same with Myers-Briggs. Totally debunked. And yet, my astrology and my Myers-Briggs align. So that's interesting to me. And if it's not hurting anyone — I'm not telling anyone not to get vaccinated, to be clear, you should get vaccinated — but if it just helps you understand a dimension of your personality, it's harmless. Same with tarot. They're pictures on cards, but maybe they're sparking your subconscious to think about something that was in there anyway.

Also, ghosts are probably real. Prove me wrong, George.

George Laufenberg (32:22) 

It sounds like you have a ghost story.

Jessie Rack (32:26) 

I'm uniquely insensitive to ghosts. I want to believe in them but the ghosts know I'm a scientist and refuse to give me a sign.

The closest I've come: my grad school ex John — he was doing anadromous fish research, the fish that migrate upstream and back out — and he was staying in a cabin in northern Massachusetts that belonged to one of his committee members. I went up to visit for a weekend. I did the walkthrough when I arrived, and upstairs I immediately felt this: ooh, I'm not supposed to be up here. Totally unfurnished. I went back downstairs and asked John — a little creepy upstairs, right, is it haunted? And he said: I don't believe in ghosts. However. The last few nights while I've been reading papers, I heard footsteps up there. I figured it was a raccoon, but when I went up there there was nothing. No animal, no sign of anything. Just sounds like a person walking around.

And then that night, in the middle of the night, a door slams. And I was like — okay, Mister Doesn't Believe in Ghosts. Go check the doors. He comes back: all the doors are locked, no sign of anything that could have made that sound.

I left the next day and never came back. The end.

George Laufenberg (34:50) 

That's probably close enough.

Jessie Rack (34:52) 

We live near a little ghost town in Arizona called Jerome. It's supposed to be super haunted — old mining town, bloody old West history. We've stayed in haunted hotels twice and done a ghost tour. They give you the equipment, the box that makes noise and speaks through it. And my partner Cisco and I — we're both biologists — we're walking around with this thing, and everyone else is fully talking to ghosts, their lights are lighting up, things are coming through. And I'm like, wow, I think our box is dead.

So I go to the guide and I say, are things not working? She trades with me. Her box immediately goes off in my hand. Ours immediately goes dead. I was like — it's us. The ghosts were like, screw you guys, you're biologists.

George Laufenberg (36:31) 

So — speaking of psychic, circa 2018, you wrote an essay on AI consciousness and the Turing test?

Jessie Rack (36:44) 

Yeah. It was a blog I did in grad school where I'd take a poem someone else wrote and do a scientific explication of it. I used a poem by Franny Choi — it was called "Turing Test." Her book Death by Sex Machine is all about cyborgs and robots. What I loved about the poem: the first time you read it, it's almost free association. You're like, this is just an AI giving random strings of words. But it's framed as questions from an interviewer and responses from the computer or android. And it starts to make sense — but a sideways, abstract sense. Does it have consciousness? It's kind of interpreting and responding in a weird way.

George Laufenberg (38:43) 

The shift from "is it conscious" to "it's about longing" — there's something very psychoanalytic in that. Everything in psychoanalytic theory of consciousness is about desire. The gravitational pull of desire.

Jessie Rack (39:24) 

And that connects to the bigger question of what consciousness even is. Which is a live question in biology right now. I'm actually reading The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger — it's about plant intelligence. Plants can do things like: if an insect is eating them, some species can identify the insect and emit a volatile chemical that calls in the predators of that insect. And if you touch them, there's an electrical impulse — which is how nerve signals work — that pulses over the entire plant. But they don't have nerves. They know that we're touching them.

There's a plant in South America called the boquila vine — the chameleon vine — that grows up other plants and imitates their leaves exactly. Color, shape. And they're asking: does this plant have vision?

We don't even know what consciousness is. So how could we expect to know it if we saw it in a machine?

George Laufenberg (41:56) 

Michael Pollan's new book touches on this too — as soon as you start trying to specify the contents of the term "consciousness," it gets incredibly slippery.

Jessie Rack (42:30) 

I have a friend here who's working on a book on insect cognition. And one thing that's sticking in my head: some researchers have identified REM sleep in jumping spiders. So they're dreaming.

George Laufenberg (42:51) 

What?

Jessie Rack (42:58) 

Everything is conscious or nothing is, right?

George Laufenberg (43:02) 

But this is also consistent with a thread through a lot of your work — the edge cases. Prions. AI. Coyotes as betwixt-and-between critters. Mad cow. They're not just interesting subjects. They're probes for what the categories are actually doing. The liminal case reveals what the center was assuming.

Jessie Rack (43:39) 

Yeah. I really like weird shit.

George Laufenberg (44:00) 

I'm super curious about how the science-poetry interface works for you. My read is that it's not a communication strategy so much as an epistemological claim. You've been holding science and poetry in the same room without making either explain the other for a decade. It isn't the "making science accessible" move. It's a claim that there are two different registers of knowing, each with something the other can't do alone. Poetry gives form to experience from inside. Is that a fair gloss?

Jessie Rack (44:52) 

Sort of — except I would also say it is about communicating science. To an audience that wouldn't necessarily think they were thinking about science. And I just want to be like: you were the whole time. Science all the way down, baby.

How it started was me just practicing being like, everything is science, the whole world is science — but it doesn't have to be dry, it can be beautiful and still represent things that are really happening.

George Laufenberg (45:47) 

The epistemic humility baked into your presentation of this is the thread I want to pull on. There's a version of capital-S Science that swings its big science Johnson around and does precisely the thing you were playfully disavowing — absence of evidence being evidence of absence. That's colonial science. And you're very carefully, painstakingly clear about the limits of what you can make scientific claims about.

Jessie Rack (46:07) 

Yeah, yeah. That's like white masculinity science, fully.

George Laufenberg (46:33) 

I want to spark some things together. You take play very seriously — that's clear. You're narrating the chaos of your vocational path self-deprecatingly, but I'd use the word "playful" to describe your orientation toward it. There's a structural privilege in that — I totally relate. I'm a straight white guy with a PhD in America. There's going to be a safety net under the safety net. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it's not the same thing.

Jessie Rack (47:52) 

I just don't take myself or anything too seriously. There's no reason to. And I think there are just no disciplinary boundaries for me. Right brain, left brain — I don't want them separate. I want them to interlace. If I'm reading poetry, I'm like, this is a really beautiful way to describe this thing I understand in my other brain.

I once wrote a poem inspired by a scientific paper about scorpions.

The first time I encountered a scorpion I didn't know they fluoresce under UV light. When you shine a UV light at them, they glow. So I went on this deep dive. Nature is my special interest — I have to know what's going on. I started reading all these scorpion papers. And it turns out nobody knows why. They know why mechanistically, but not evolutionarily. They've done experiments — it doesn't seem to be to evade predators, find prey, find a mate. They're trying everything.

But they found this other thing: scorpions have normal eyes in front, but they also have median eyes along the sides of their body that are just light-sensitive. And I encountered this line in a scientific paper —

"Scorpion's median eyes appear capable of image formation, and their lateral eyes can identify subtle changes in light magnitude. Both sets of eyes are highly sensitive to light and can putatively detect starlight against the background of the night sky."

And I was like — what? The person writing that paper was thinking the way poets think. It's the wondering, the curiosity, the playfulness. So I wrote this whole poem about a scorpion noticing starlight for the first time. There's something up there. Something beyond me.

George Laufenberg (53:19) 

I get chills right now. Oh my god.

Jessie Rack (53:22) 

Yeah. And I think it goes both ways. This conversation between language and science and curiosity and playfulness is just a whole big pool I like to splash in.

George Laufenberg (53:39) 

I wish we'd had this conversation when we were both in Princeton. The central question animating my dissertation research — these mental health professionals who practice Native American religion in complicated and much more than just complicated ways — was about how they decide to reach beyond the worlds in which they were encultured, and crucially, where they decide to stop. What they protect and what they don't.

And anthropology as a way of asking questions is most fundamentally — Marilyn Strathern described it once as studying relations by means of relations. You're never fully a participant or fully an observer. But if you're in a milieu long enough and you can watch the transit back and forth — that's like calling it "data" feels absurd, but it's really fascinating. What starts to come up when you linger long enough in those tensions to see how they move.

Rilke — the Letters to a Young Poet — his one-off on defining love: two solitudes that border and protect and salute each other. It's the boundary implied in the border. Just to open up the question of boundary.

Jessie Rack (56:16) 

Yeah.

George Laufenberg (56:19) 

Because it gets so often flattened. And that's why I didn't like the job we had together at Princeton. It felt, in the most basic sense, like the job was about inculcating a particular set of boundaries around what kinds of claims you can make about what's true in the world.

For all the talk about interdisciplinarity, it's so rare to actually be in a venue where people are doing the very protracted epistemological handshake required to figure out where the gaps and tensions are between the basis on which we make claims about what's true. Poets and scientists, right?

Jessie Rack (57:08) 

I had this piece. Do you remember the piece I was working on — using horror movies to communicate science? I was reaching into psychological and social science reasons why that could work. The protective frame of unreality around what you're saying means people aren't scared. My example was Annihilation. That's a really good example of nature run amok. But I've tried to pitch it everywhere, I even rewrote it for a popular science audience, and everyone was like, what is this. Maybe it's intrinsically bad. But I'm like — why are we only looking at film studies? Why is everyone doing this in isolation?

George Laufenberg (59:30) 

You were doing sensory communication at Princeton.

Jessie Rack (59:32) 

Sensory communication, yes. My favorite assignment: I gave students a bunch of papers on purported human pheromones — all the evidence we have that they might be a thing — and a bunch of papers on free will versus determinism. There's no such thing as free will if you ask a philosopher. Everything is determinism. And so I had these kids read both sets of papers, and they'd come into class and I'd say: if human pheromones are a thing, what does that mean for free will?

And they'd be like — oh my god, nothing I do is free. And it was around midterms and they were making decisions about their grades and relationships and they were just like, everything is just chemicals in the air changing my mind.

George Laufenberg (01:01:05) 

You broke them.

Jessie Rack (01:01:01) 

That was my favorite. Anyway.

George Laufenberg (01:01:05) 

I really struggled with bringing that kind of playfulness to the classroom. In part because I'd spent so many years in the — you can't really call anthropology a social science, it's really humanities with an empirical referent. Velvety soft science. And I had the same giggly response to using the word "science" to describe anthropology as I do to "career."

But so much time spent critiquing the conjuring and performance of academic authority — including but not limited to science studies — meant that when I was on the other end of the pipeline, getting kids to internalize the rigid boundaries of what kind of claims you can make, it felt fundamentally at odds. Using films as evidence. Always having to get through: no, you can't actually make a claim about the world based on a movie. You can do it in an op-ed, but not here.

And getting to those Princeton kids who were either total imposter syndrome or: why do I have to take a writing class? I got into Princeton. And I'd say — look, you are qualified to write an op-ed for a major newspaper. You can do that. But that's: here's the thing I think, here are three pieces of cherry-picked evidence, here's why I'm even more right than I thought I was. This is a different genre. You'll need it for your thesis and maybe for one particular class. But this is about something different.

Jessie Rack (01:03:43) 

I mean, that's technical writing. You have to follow the rules and stay within the lines. I hate technical writing in science. I don't do it for fun. Nobody does — well, maybe somebody does, but it's not something you do out of playfulness and joy. It's something you do because you have to. That's where I run up against the wall of it. But it pays the bills and I get summers off.

George Laufenberg (01:04:27) 

It matters that Picasso was a surgically precise draftsman. He could draw realistically when he wanted to. Like formal verse in poetry — it's the context from which divergence is meaningful. It isn't chaos. It's a directed act of will.

Which pulls back to the beginning: yes, chaos, but not actually chaos. The difference between chaos and a complex adaptive system with emergent properties. It isn't pure noise.

What's either appealing or unsettling about the label "chaos" to you?

Jessie Rack (01:05:32) 

Both. The appealing part: I never know what's going to happen next. That sounds fun. The unsettling part: I never know what's going to happen next. It could also not be fun. Both things are true. Unpredictability is both exciting and scary.

George Laufenberg (01:06:07) 

I want to ask about your experience of yourself as a stable reference point in the field of your life. What makes the difference between chaos and something with emergent order is the perspective of the viewer transiting through it. The self having the experience. Otherwise it's all chaos.

Maybe the way to pose it is: one of the things I remember is that we could drop into genuine conversation about things that felt real. And that quality of presence — I don't love the word "position," but in a chaos metaphor, it's the strange attractor around which moments of stillness cluster. Whatever category fits — time, place, quality of experience. How has your sense of yourself as a still point changed? What is that like right now?

Jessie Rack (01:08:40) 

Do you remember in Poltergeist — they walk into the bedroom and all the toys are flying around the room?

At times it has felt like that. Everything is a chaos of things and opportunities and people flying around me, and it's felt very unsteady and unsupported and terrifying. You never know when that clown is going to pop out from under the bed.

But even though there is still an element of spinning toys, I feel like it's more contained as I age. I have a little more control over it. I can make it be still sometimes. Is that too much metaphor?

George Laufenberg (01:09:55) 

No, no. What's the texture of "contained"? The embodied texture?

Jessie Rack (01:10:08) 

It's the control. I can choose the elements that are flying around me. When I was in grad school and at Princeton, it was random stuff and I didn't know what was going to hit me. Now — in biology we call it channelization, or differentiation. Cells are all stem cells at first, and then through one thing and another they choose a major and turn into what they need to be. The chaos has lessened. It's more things of my choosing. I've chosen a major, finally.

George Laufenberg (01:11:31) 

Of course it's an answer.

Jessie Rack (01:11:35) 

My body. The texture. That's really hard. I don't think in embodiment, it turns out.

George Laufenberg (01:12:25) 

It's either a useful question or it's not. What I find useful about it is that it invites more description than analysis.

Jessie Rack (01:12:38) 

Mm-hmm.

George Laufenberg (01:12:40) 

You've thought about this a lot in different ways. I'm not putting you on the hook as the expert. I just — at its best, these conversations are containers in which I get to surprise myself in a moment of reflection. And often the way to get around the analytical impulse is to start with something very concretely true.

Jessie Rack (01:13:18) 

Did the poltergeist metaphor not work as concrete? That's what I pictured.

George Laufenberg (01:13:32) 

I love it. My question was about your experience of being in your body watching that.

Jessie Rack (01:13:52) 

It's on the knife edge between panic and excitement. I'm freaking out, but in a good way, maybe. I don't know yet.

George Laufenberg (01:14:07) 

My dog is precisely on that knife edge. Always.

Where do you find that in your own life? Not mediated by a screen.

Jessie Rack (01:14:42) 

I try to do a lot of scary stuff. Put myself in situations where I'm trying something new or meeting people in ways I'm not expecting. There's always a leading edge of questing into whatever's around me.

George Laufenberg (01:15:20) 

It doesn't have to be skydiving. For me an example would be: I did a bunch of theater in high school and college, and then no real theater until about two years ago when Charlotte — who has an incredible singing voice, I don't know where she gets it — and I auditioned for a show together at a community theater here that's actually an international institution, they do children's theater around the world. We did it again this past Christmas — Annie. And I had a solo. I don't really sing. I've certainly never had a solo on stage. And it was terrifying.

Jessie Rack (01:16:27) 

Right?

George Laufenberg (01:16:39) 

Exactly that. Cultivating a particular kind of presence. I am aware of myself in a state of profound — I want to say discomfort, but that doesn't feel quite right.

Jessie Rack (01:16:58) 

It is discomfort though! Where's the discomfort right now?

Everything. I have several scary things going on at once that I keep forcing myself to do, and they keep turning out fine. I just joined a writing group with a couple of women in town, one of whom is a bestselling author, and I was like, oh god, imposter syndrome, I'm scared. But I just show up and write and everything's chill and they're really nice.

And — unrelated — I have my first colonoscopy next week. It's related because it's terrifying. My aunt had colon cancer. I have to get screened. But colonoscopy aside —

George Laufenberg (01:18:10) 

Notwithstanding the colonoscopy.

Jessie Rack (01:18:10) 

The other things: I went paddleboarding last week with a newer friend and I was like, I'm not that good at paddleboarding, but it'll probably be fine. Just putting myself in situations where I'm doing something that I know will make me grow as a person and is aligned with the stuff I want to be true in my life.

The discomfort edge is uncomfortable, but that's where you grow. That's where you find what's true.

George Laufenberg (01:19:14) 

I've watched myself relate to that edge in very different ways at different points. Is it easier, harder, or different now than ten years ago?

Jessie Rack (01:19:21) 

I kind of always have the same move: I get an idea, I get really excited, I commit to it, then I get terrified and wish I could back out. Every time. Like, everything would be fine if I could just stay home.

But I've gotten more comfortable pushing myself through it. Because I know from experience that that's what I find meaningful. The stuff I remember is the stuff I was most scared about.

George Laufenberg (01:20:26) 

Let God sort it out.

As a non-scientist — or soft scientist — it seems to me that ecology, among the not-soft sciences, is almost uniquely comfortable with a degree of complexity and uncertainty.

Jessie Rack (01:21:20) 

Thank you for saying that. It's so true.

George Laufenberg (01:21:22) 

How much of that do you understand as purposeful navigation on your part, versus discovering retroactively that it fit?

Jessie Rack (01:21:41) 

My special interest has always been nature. And here's a sidebar: I went to school first for music and creative writing. Major in music, minor in creative writing — I wanted to study poetry, but my poetry professor gently suggested my short stories were stronger. So I ended up doing a small thesis in short fiction.

A couple of years after graduating I was like — I don't want to teach music, I don't want to teach creative writing. I wanted to use them. So I went back and did basically a post-baccalaureate in biology. There was almost nothing transferable between music and biology. Even my math — I had to restart from the beginning. As a music major you only need one math class. So I took Math Appreciation, and we spent two weeks on even and odd numbers.

George Laufenberg (01:23:34) 

That's tragic.

Jessie Rack (01:23:52) 

I got a B. Anyway. Later I took calculus and got A's. But at the time. It's fine. It's all about what interests you.

So I had to retake everything. I liked biology because I love memorizing facts — I could do the biology undergrad slog all day. Let me tell you this, let me tell you that. But that's not what real science is.

It wasn't until I took my first ecology class and we did fieldwork that everything suddenly made sense. It was intuitive for the first time. We were doing mark-capture grasshopper work, studying acid-base stuff at mine remediation sites. And I was like, this is applied. This is the world. I'm not just memorizing and regurgitating. I'm in it. That's when I became an ecologist.

George Laufenberg (01:25:31) 

"Intuitive" is a fascinating word in the context of this conversation.

Jessie Rack (01:25:35) 

Ecology made sense in a way the rest of it didn't. In colder places, animals tend to get bigger. There tends to be more biodiversity in warmer places. It just mapped onto what I already saw in nature.

Which is also, as you point out, the opposite of the randomness in nature — which is also true. You can make predictions, but natural systems are not actually bounded by rules the way we wish they were. Not like molecules or physics. They're bounded by some rules, but they don't behave the way you predict most of the time.

George Laufenberg (01:27:21) 

There's something here that connects to how I understand your approach to science communication. It's often framed as a deficit problem — the public doesn't know enough science, so we translate. That model assumes the problem is on the public side. Your work doesn't feel like that at all. The translation is at minimum bidirectional.

Jessie Rack (01:27:36) 

I hate the deficit model.

George Laufenberg (01:27:51) 

The goal isn't really information transfer, if I'm reading that right. What is the goal?

Jessie Rack (01:27:56) 

It's more like sharing knowledge and incorporating multiple understandings. I don't see myself as an expert telling you what's happening. I want to hear what you already know, and then maybe provide some context — but I want to hear what you have to contribute. It's more a conversation about stuff.

George Laufenberg (01:28:32) 

What I think I hear is curating a particular kind of experience. The classroom at its best is about making a space that's safe to play and be wrong and surprise yourself. The substrate is what's your experience of yourself in real time, how present can you be to it. And in a place like Princeton, where all the institutional infrastructure mitigates in favor of quarantining uncertainty — those kids had to make so many choices to avoid risk from age five on to be a competitive applicant. The labor of getting them to be playful.

Jessie Rack (01:29:47) 

Yeah.

George Laufenberg (01:30:05) 

How does curating an experience work differently across different aspects of your life? To the extent that boundary means anything.

Jessie Rack (01:30:20) 

My professional life is, some would say, pretty unprofessional. In the classroom and in any science communication: I don't have the knowledge and you will sit down and shut up and listen to me. It's all a conversation. It starts with me learning my students' names, getting to know a bit about them. My whole framework: I'm going to tell you some things, but I want you to apply yourself. I want you to pick what you're studying. I want you to do something you think is cool. Here are the guideposts we're trying to meet, but we're in conversation.

I always tell my students: I'm excited to learn from you. By the end of the semester you're going to be the experts in whatever you're studying. I'm just here to help your writing sound good. The content is yours.

George Laufenberg (01:31:52) 

Does being in that writing workshop — with the bestselling author — does that articulate with what you just said? Is it in the same bucket?

Jessie Rack (01:32:14) 

Yeah. It's an equalizer. We're all just getting together to have ideas and bounce things off each other.

I think this is also my best and worst quality: I don't respect anyone — which is not what I mean. I have trouble with hierarchy. In grad school there are always the eminent professors everyone bows down to, and all I could do was treat them like people. I was like, oh, do you like James Bond movies? Me too. And people really respond to that, unless they're directly telling you what to do, in which case they don't respond well to it at all.

In my brain I really like thinking of everyone as humans and equals. So I don't expect my students to worship me. Talk to me like a normal person. Same with supervisors. I want to be talking to you like a human. I'm going to ask questions. If I think something sounds incorrect, I'm going to say so. Which doesn't always go over great. But I can't picture us all as anything other than on an equal level.

George Laufenberg (01:33:57) 

I don't hear you talking about respect at all. I hear you talking about deference.

Jessie Rack (01:34:16) 

Deference. Yes. I respect a lot of people, but respect for me looks different than deference. Respect for me looks like: I respect you as a human, I want to hear what you have to say, but I'm not scared of you.

George Laufenberg (01:34:26) 

I think the failure to parse those two is at the root of an awful lot of really shitty things in our culture.

Jessie Rack (01:34:39) 

Mm-hmm.

George Laufenberg (01:34:49) 

You've described an iconoclastic orientation — and I don't mean that pejoratively. Lots of icons need smashing. Or just not arbitrarily, preemptively deferring to them.

Jessie Rack (01:34:58) 

I've been called that before. I don't mean to be.

George Laufenberg (01:35:07) 

I'm a big fan. Mostly from the sidelines, because I'm usually too scared to do that.

Jessie Rack (01:35:31) 

I think it comes from a lack of social awareness, honestly. I just don't understand that I'm not supposed to say that thing.

George Laufenberg (01:35:31) 

I buy that up to a point. Because you also talk about moments — like that writing workshop — where you are very self-conscious, very tuned in. You're not unable to read social cues. You're hyper-aware of them, and having to slow down and be very intentional about how you show up for yourself in that space, so you don't do the deference thing. Is that fair?

Jessie Rack (01:36:01) 

Maybe flattening a little. My instinct is never deferential — I don't even know how. If you meet a famous author at a reading, I can't be like, oh my god, I've been reading you for years. I just want to be friends with them. I think of everyone as equals until proven otherwise. Earn my respect.

George Laufenberg (01:36:40) 

I want to leave that as an open question — how those two things work for you — because I imagine it's been a complicated experience. It's obviously served you in some very interesting ways and made some things harder.

The moment when that presents itself as a question — you're uncomfortable with something in the space — and then how has that changed? How is it different?

Jessie Rack (01:37:36) 

I can be intimidated by people I don't know well without being deferential. I'm self-conscious because I don't know you yet. I don't know — I'm not answering this.

George Laufenberg (01:38:02) 

That was actually really helpful. I was looking at point B when I should have been looking at point A. The moment of self-consciousness is the thing. Because for you, deference is not the response in that setting. But the moment of self-consciousness and its attendant discomfort is still there.

Jessie Rack (01:38:30) 

Mm-hmm.

George Laufenberg (01:38:41) 

The stuff at point B — whether it's deference or irreverence — is observable phenomena. Whereas the prior moment, the self-consciousness, is an interior state. Be is like your scientific faculty coming to bear — you can observe it. Whereas this other way of knowing that you attend to in such interesting ways —

Has that tension changed? How is it different?

Jessie Rack (01:39:46) 

The tension between being self-conscious and appearing irreverent. I often feel self-conscious inside of myself and I nearly always present as irreverent, and I can't seem to stop it. The best I can do is just be quiet. But it never lands in deference.

When I first started down this professional track — grad school, science, being a professor — I always felt self-conscious, but I always came off as irreverent, and that made me even more self-conscious. God, people hate me. They don't think I'm serious. They don't think I'm professional.

But over the years I've become more confident in that dissonance. I now know that I can be self-conscious and it's probably going to be fine. I'm almost more confident that my irreverence is going to land. And the people who respond to it are the ones I'm going to connect with anyway. That's what matters. If they're looking for deference, it doesn't matter whether I'm self-conscious or not — I'm never going to do that. That isn't me.

George Laufenberg (01:42:11) 

Yeah. Absolutely. That's beautiful. That might be our episode title.

Jessie Rack (01:42:30) 

Not "Science All the Way Down"?

George Laufenberg (01:42:32) 

I kind of like that too. We've got options.

⸻"Confidently Irreverent" — The Principal Uncertainty