EdTalks | Episode 184 | What If Being a Misfit Is Your Superpower? | Kevin Johnson

Hey, welcome to another edition of Ed Talks. And one of my favorite sort of subtopics of Ed Talks is introducing new authors to our audience. So with me, I have a longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Kevin Johnson. Kevin, welcome to Ed Talks.

Well, thank you so much, Ed. I can't thank you enough for giving me a chance to talk to your audience.

One of the sharpest dressed men I know and handsome. So, you know, it has a good haircut.

So, you know, it's like, Hey, that's, we got, we share, we share beard color. We're getting there.

But yeah, you're, you know, one of the icons, I think, in the industry, one of the first out there as an informaticist, but you're a longtime professor. Let's see if I get this all right. Informaticist, professor. You also are a communicator of science. And now you're a podcaster, family, and now you're adding Author. So I really want to break down that book, but before we get there, please introduce yourself, Kevin. I just gave sort of the highlights.

Well, thanks a lot. Well, you know, Ed, I'm following in your footsteps. You know, I'm a pediatrician. I'm an informatician. I do science communication just like you. And I was obviously a healthcare AI leader for a while. At Penn Medicine, I'm the vice president for applied clinical informatics. At the University of Pennsylvania, I also lead a lab focused on AI and ambulatory care. My timing couldn't have been better. Before Penn, I was CIO at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. I led our Epic rollout there across a very large health system. And I think that taught me a lot of the same lessons you learned when you were at Cleveland Clinic and beyond, which was that, you know, that a great technology isn't enough. It has to work in the real world. People have to use it. It has to make care better and not just make another thing for people to manage. I've produced a couple of documentaries, one called No Matter Where, which is still on Amazon Prime. One called Living Through Going Live. I don't know if you've ever seen that. It's a piece about our Epic go-live chronologuing the whole 18 months it took us to go from our old system to the new system. And I always tell people, have tissues ready when you watch that. It's on YouTube. But I've been lucky to work in medicine, research, health system leadership, and really enjoy sort of taking crazy ideas that I think can make systems better and make people healthier. and getting them into production. I've had a great journey. And one of the things I've learned while I've been giving Juneteenth talks and, you know, the usual leadership tour that we all do is that the journey really is something people don't always appreciate. They think we sort of just arose, you know, arose ready to be leaders, ready to get into communities like the ones we're in. And that's part of what motivated me to continue doing this kind of science communication on more of a personal level.

Yeah, no, that's super cool. And I didn't know about some of those, the documentary or the YouTube video. So definitely please send it. We'll put them in the show notes for everyone because I'm sure everyone's like me, like, I want to see that. So we'll definitely put it in the show notes. That is so, so cool. So what captured me about the book, I mean, I would've read anything you could have titled anything, Kevin, that you would write. I would buy it and read it. But what captured me was the title Misfit. I just love that. And then the subtitle, if I get this right, it's kind of a, you know, Notes on Belonging, Brilliance, and the Spaces in Between. So tell us how this book came about.

Well, as I was saying, and again, I so appreciate it. I, I've given talks about my journey for years. And I even have a book series. I didn't tell you that, but we have a book series called Who, Me, which is about scientists who are in historically marginalized groups. And that book series has done quite well. It's now international. And it's got 9 books in it. And every single time people kept saying, well, tell us more about you. And I think it was really important for me. Frankly, I've had a very complex, you know, last 20 years. I came out as gay. I kind of figured out that a lot of the things that always made me really quirky were the things that made me unique in the spaces I was in. And I started seeing more and more people's heads nod when I talked about my history. Yeah. And I realized, you know, if I'm not gonna be comfortable enough describing it, then I'm not really fulfilling my personal mission, which was to help humanity and to help society kind of benefit from the diversity that we currently have. So I just decided, you know, I have a book to write and I started writing it way long ago in 2004, which was actually the year I realized I was gay and wrote the first chapter. And once I sort of got going, it became a real passion. I was doing it a lot of weekends. I had a chance to go to Lake Como this year as a part of of scholarship that I had. And I spent a lot of the time there polishing the book and it was starting to feel like something people could benefit from.

Yeah. Isn't that fun to, we did the same thing with the book that Chris Ross and I did for Mayo Clinic. We spent a lot of time on the Mississippi River and just when you can get away, right? Maybe this applies to a lot of different parts of life, but certainly something creative like writing, you just kind of get away and surround yourself with the beauty of nature. And yeah.

Isn't it the case? I mean, it was amazing to me. There were nights when I was going to sleep and all of a sudden I would think, I know how to end the book. And I would just get up and just start writing it. Yeah. And so I'm, I'm really excited to see how it does. And I hope, I hope that it gives a lot of people an opportunity to sort of realize their own dreams, honestly.

Yeah. So yeah, that, that was gonna be one of my questions. Like, what, what's your hope for the reader? Is, is that it's like, hey, go pursue, you, you could be a misfit, you could maybe not fit in and you can still accomplish everything that you've ever wanted to.

Yeah, that's basically it. You know, I personally, I was a kid in Baltimore who was kind of taken pretty quickly from an all-Black neighborhood to an all-white neighborhood. But I was always the curious kid who knew, you know, like the lyrics to Mary Poppins, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, you know, things like that. And I had geckos and a pet octopus and I started a plant club and then I sang and I've met those kids. I've met them at magnet schools and They feel as awkward as I did at that point. And I think this is an opportunity for me to have a book that they can curl up and say, you know, I could be okay in my life. And these maybe are superpowers that I've been afraid to sort of, you know, put out there. So a big part of the book for me is to give it to that group of kids. I've been focusing on them for quite some time. It's not just boys, it's not just girls, it's not just Black. I think it's really a question of people who feel like They maybe don't fit the clothes they have to fit to be in a certain room. And I think you and I both understand that given the kind of rooms we've both been in and kind of the eclectic life we've had, even dating back to kids. So that's my goal. My goal is to get this in the hands of young professionals so that they can realize their dreams, take advantage of what makes them unique, and hopefully enjoy learning a little bit along the way.

Yeah, I love that. That's what resonated with me. why I was reaching out because when I saw some of the things that you were putting on LinkedIn, so we'll also put in your LinkedIn profile so people can follow you. And then also that leads to your Substack where you're dropping portions of the book, right?

That's right. I've been doing that for a while. And what I'm doing now is I'm dropping the parts of the book that aren't in the book, if you know what I mean. The more people read this and ask me questions, the more other things come up. Not too long ago, there were some stories that we had around the EPIC Go Live that I realized I probably should be a little bit more forthcoming about what it was really like to do that. You know, you know well, but there were a lot of very, very late nights where, you know, Carl Dvorak calls me at 2 in the morning to talk about a part of our contract, and you gotta take that call, right? So just understanding, you know, what it was like to be in a situation like that. I now have an audience of people who are very, very curious about how you do it and what toll those types of things take on a family at the time.

Yeah. No, Kevin, this is brilliant because yeah, I mean, I can relate, right? I didn't fit the mold either, and I think there's a lot of people that They don't feel like they fit the mold and therefore they give up and they stay below the surface and they stay hidden. And that's wrong. And we're losing out as humanity. We're losing out as healthcare tech, the whole ecosystem. And so I think your book's really going to resonate with many, many people and help them to sort of come out of that covering and be them authentic selves and then do brilliant things like you have done.

I do have to tell you, we're in the stage now where we're trying to pick the cover for the book. So if you preorder it, I've actually used, you know, good old-fashioned ChatGPT to create a cover that looks like a brown paper bag where we've ripped off only the word Misfit.

Yeah.

And somebody said, oh, is that going to be the COVID I'm like, no, we've got some good ideas for the COVID So I'm really looking forward to, we're down to about 5 different versions of the COVID I mean, you've been here, you've written enough books that you know how important the kind of branding is for these covers and marketing.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm so excited. I can't wait to read the book. I need to get on the Substack. So thank you for being our guest, Kevin, and we'll put all that again for our audience in the show notes. You need to follow Kevin, get on his Substack, preorder the book, and I think it can change your life. So I really appreciate it.

Well, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Hey,