Lindsey Wehking on Truth & Feeling

Lindsey Wehking is the Chief Investigative Strategy Officer (CSO) at Nonfiction Research in Brooklyn. If I remember correctly, I first met Lindsey in 2021 in Brooklyn, when I reached out to Nonfiction in a fanboy kind of way. I ran into Lindsey at the 4As Stratfest in New York City, where she presented (with Jim Stengel!) “Why taking your clients into nightclubs is the future of insights.” I was excited to talk to her about her path to this work, and how they work at Nonfiction.

I think you may know this, but I say it anyway, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a neighbor of mine who helps people tell their story. And I stole it because it's a big, beautiful question, but because it's a big, beautiful question, I over-explain it, like I'm doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know you're in absolute control.

You can answer and not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

I knew this question was coming, and I purposely had to resist the urge to over-engineer. I feel like it's a beautiful question, but it's also the kind of question people over-engineer their answers to. And so it's funny, I just closed my eyes and tried to figure out what visual came to mind.

And the image that kept coming to mind was of me when I was about eight years old, sitting in my dad's burgundy Ford Ranger, a 92 Ford Ranger, in our driveway with him, listening to NPR. My parents were notoriously defects from the Catholic church, and so I feel like NPR sort of became our religion. And my dad and I, he would pick me up from school when I was a kid, and my dad loved the heat, so he loved to sit in a hot car and bake like a poor man's sauna after work.

And I loved it too, so we would just sit in his hot car, sauna-ing, listening to very in-depth reporting on some anthropologist talking about the history of sex in human society, or what the Tootsies were up to. And I don't know why, but I feel like something about my personality is just forever ingrained in a shitty Ford Ranger listening to NPR with my dad.

And where were you? Where did you grow up?

Right outside of St. Louis, Missouri, on the east side of the river, so Illinois, so we were kind of edging the great western gateway.

Yeah. And you said they're sort of notoriously, I can't remember how you said it, but they left the Catholic church. What made that significant?

Both my parents came from, my dad came from a large Catholic family, and my mom came from a smaller Catholic family. But I feel like they in the era of scandal in the Catholic church, all of the priest abuse. I feel like at that time, every week a new leader of the Catholic church you found out was gambling away everyone's donations.

And so that had a big, especially my dad, that had a really profound impact on him because I think he yearned so much to believe and part of believing, especially believing in the Catholic doctrine was such a big part of belonging in his family. And yet he just couldn't stomach what he felt like was a lot of the hypocrisy and the contradiction. And because of that, he was such a seeker.

I think that's why the church of NPR, I joke, kind of was the church of our family because without the church, I think he was looking for other ways to seek connection and wisdom and knowing and not being able to put a God up there. I think we just all put, I don't know, nerd stuff, which may not be the best God, but it's not a terrible substitute.

And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

When I, God, I was probably in like kindergarten or first grade and my dad took me to work and my dad was a, he was like a network architect. He was an IT at, at Edward Jones, which is like a very old school financial institution that's headquartered in St. Louis. And, and I remember walking in and seeing all of these cubicle people and up here, I found cubicle people fascinating.

I was like, just like, there was all this like drama. Like he would tell me about how like, like lunches would go missing in the office fridge. And there would be like, like there'd be all this, like, like my dad was like a little bit of like a armchair anthropologist.

And so he loved describing the, like the politics that would happen in meetings and the way certain people would like, you know, kind of peacock for attention or the way certain people wouldn't speak their mind. And, and his way of like viewing the corporate world, I just like fell in love with. And I think at some point I like wanted to grow up to study cubicle people.

I was like, this is, this is my purpose. I will study cubicle, which is honestly not far off from what I think I do now.

What, yeah, you mentioned the anthropology even in the NPR segment and your driveway moment with your dad. Was there sort of anthropology or culture in your, in your childhood or?

We were so f*****g white. Like we were so white and without like much, much traditional lineage, I think because of all, like all, you know, we were German, German Catholic and German Protestant. And so because so much of our probably like ancestral ethnic lineage was so tied up in religion.

When we left religion, we kind of were lost of all that. And I think like, I haven't looked into this, but I, I presume there is a whole cohort of white people who feel this way of like, you know, they at one point or another, there was some break from religion in their family. And then you're kind of like left without any tradition or without any real anchor or sense of self.

And like, I don't, you know, honestly connect to like my German-ness or my English-ness. And so as a, yeah, maybe that, maybe that void is part of what made me want to know so much about how other people lived and prayed and loved. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Do you, do you have, can you tell me a story about that void? I'm, I'm identifying a lot with what you've just described and I'm just wondering if, because I know you went, you studied anthropology in college, so there must've been some sort of appetite for that at a relatively young age. I wonder, do you remember what it was like to sort of be in that void?

Oh, I feel like I'm still in the void. I don't know. Maybe we never leave the void.

Yeah. I, I mean, I, you know, I think for the, the first few decades of like trying to figure out who I was, was defined mostly by this insatiable appetite to understand others that like, in some ways I almost didn't have a sense of self. Like it was, it was so, it was so outward looking, but in, in pursuit of, of just like wanting to know how other people lived and found happiness and found safety.

And, and, and I was always very like fascinated with communities that were kind of on the margins. And one of the biggest, one of the first like big ethnographies I did when I was in college was on a, a subculture called Juggalos. I don't know if you're familiar with Insane Clown Posse.

I have a note, I have a note here to ask you about that.

Did you, like, have you, have you ever listened to their music?

I haven't listened. I don't think I've listened to the music.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it was very like, I mean, you know, for, for people who don't know, like Juggalos was what they call like a horror, I think this, the genre is actually called horror rap. And so they were two white guys out of Detroit who started in hip hop and rap in, I think they were coming up in kind of the nineties, but by the early two thousands, mid two thousands, they had really cultivated this like insane fan base. And they, you know, were one of like, I think we're kind of seeing a resurgence now in like pop music that has like true ritual.

And like, you get dressed up, you paint your face, you have singalongs, like it's, it's becoming like, there was a time where pop, you didn't like, didn't have fandom that way. But, but Juggalo culture was like true intense fandom. And it was like, it was a very true music subculture.

Like it, you know, existed in the lineage of like other cult music fandoms, like Deadheads and Fish Fans and, and, you know, Kiss. But, you know, it was specifically kind of speaking to, you know, they grew up in a pretty poor area of like white Detroit. And, and so a lot of the like, the culture that they grew up in was in the music and in the performance.

And so they would wear face paint. And so they would dress like clowns, but they were called serial killer clowns. And, and so they played with both like, these like dark circus themes.

And, and, you know, a lot of like themes around like serial killers and violence, but, and then they would, they would dress up as like dark, kind of like they throw these dark carnival shows where Juggalos would have like clown face paint, they would have these little like this little hatchet man was their logo. They would like spray the audience with Faygo, just like a cheap, like really cheap generic brand of soda that you could find in and around. I mean, you could find a lot of places now, but it was especially in and around Detroit at the time.

And but, but these, you know, people considered themselves family, and they would travel all over the country to go to these shows. And they would spend days and weeks and everyone would like party in the parking lot for hours before the show. And one of the reasons why I was so interested in them at the time, the FBI just classified them as like a gang.

And there was like a lot of fear around Juggalos, because, you know, it's a lot of young white men who appear to be very angry and are wearing like killer clown face paint. Like, you know, you can imagine how that would like scare the mothers anytime they came to town. But one thing that I was really interested in is like, what's really, what's really the pull here?

Like, because I think it's, you know, it's part of that era where we were just like, very dismissive of hip hop and rap as just being like, about violence and mistreatment of women. And, you know, there was definitely like, if you just consumed the stuff at the surface, you definitely got a lot of that. And there's definitely themes within that music that like, can be degrading towards women and does have violence in it.

But I think one of the most interesting things is that when you, when you talk to a lot of Insane Clown Posse super fans, there is, there's a lot of history of personal violence, of abuse in their family, of sexual abuse. And a lot of the violence in the music, not all of it, but a lot of it is actually towards predators. So when you actually listen to a lot of the music, it's, it's revenge against predators and abusers.

And so that was when I started to realize, oh, this is like a, this is like a, this is a trauma outlet, you know, like people are trying to kind of process their, their trauma, and their abuse through this like dark carnival. And there's actually like a great history of dark carnivals in human history, like even going back to medieval ages, like the dark carnival, and carnivals in medieval culture were a place in which you could, they call it turning the world upside down, that you would invert the social norms of a society for a day, as a way of kind of purging a lot of feelings of pain and oppression and injustice. And they sort of did that with the music, like for, for this one night, you were connected to everyone in the crowd.

And like, yeah, you were like screaming curse words, and like wearing fucked up paint. And there's a little like hatchet man running around stage. But it's also fun.

Like, it's very fun. There's like a lightness, even in all the darkness. And I don't know, no matter what you think about the music for the people, like, I just, I thought there was something very beautiful and in that.

Yeah, it's wonderful. It's really beautiful. I had not paid nearly enough attention to sort of understand everything that was happening there.

And so this was, this was an ethnography that you did while you were in college. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, it was like a, it was like an Anthro 101 class, like everyone picked something very simple. And I picked, we had to like, I dragged my best friend, we had to drive to Des Moines, Iowa, we were in Missouri, eight hours one evening to like go to a concert. So I could we could get like a concert experience before we finished writing the paper.

And it was the night before like our major journalism exam, like this is the exam that like makes or breaks you if you fail it, you can no longer continue your career in journalism school. And we were like, it was like 1am we were like in Des Moines, Iowa, just like covered in Faygo and like confetti. And we were like, f**k, we have we have seven hours to get to class to take this exam, or our career in journalism is over.

But we made it and we passed the test.

So catch me up. Where are you right now? And what are you doing for work?

I'm in Crown Heights, Brooklyn now. And I work for a company called nonfiction research. So we are a, you know, we always say we only do one thing well at nonfiction.

And it's deep studies on particular audiences or subcultures or occasions. And we do both qual and quant, but we also do conventional and more unconventional techniques. So I think a lot of the like, actually that, that that story about the about the insane clown posse ethnography is kind of how I got the job.

It was like in, in the most unhinged email that I wrote our co founders, the day I found nonfiction. And so we use a host of conventional and kind of unconventional techniques to do those studies. And so that sometimes that is a quantitative study on American sexuality.

Sometimes that's we've been on chaperoned into prisons to study the inmate experience. We have been rollerblading with Atlanta rappers to study Atlanta hip hop. We've sat with teachers in lunch rooms, gossiping to kind of understand how they make decisions on field trips.

And so that like deeply immersive approach to try to get to the life underneath what, okay, we believe most people are sharing with market researchers is, is basically like what we do now as a company. But when I, you know, when I look back, it was, it was what I was probably trying to do in, in Iowa when I was studying juggalos too.

Yeah. When did you discover you could make a living doing what you do?

Well, I mean, when I was in college, I was like, it was kind of a, I feel like it was the beginning of anthropology starting to sort of like bleed into the world of brand and marketing. Like there'd obviously been like anthropologist consultants working for brands, but it never really like, I don't know, like you'd never really seen like a shop. I'd never seen a shop really dedicated to it.

There were like some like anthropologists doing consulting work that I was like blind emailing at the time, but I just could not, couldn't get any traction with that. And so I, I kind of stumbled into strategy as like a consolation prize to that. And worked in strategy departments and I worked for a big PR firm out of school.

And that was during the era where all PR firms were trying to like import strategy into the agency and import creative into the agency. So it was like a, it was a cool time because, you know, I was trying to learn the discipline at the same time that organization was trying to kind of sell the discipline in to the industry of PR. And so they, you know, that came with a lot of, it gave me a lot of opportunity I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

But ultimately I like burned out and was just, I was just tired of not doing anything that felt real. You know, there's so many late nights and long hours and brief writing and nothing ever seemed to come to fruition. And so I was kind of had like a existential crisis as one does in their mid twenties.

And yeah, I was thinking about going back to grad school or becoming a bartender or I don't really know. And then I happened to be on LinkedIn one day during that existential crisis. And I saw a job posting that felt like a letter to my soul and I dropped everything I was doing.

And I wrote the most unhinged and unprofessional email of my life. And that's how I ended up with Ben and Gunny at Nonfiction.

Yeah. What do you remember about your unhinged email?

I think the title, the subject line was like dumb strategist for hire. And the, I think I meant, I mean, I mentioned juggalos and drag queens within the body copy. And I mean, it was just like, I just told, I told the stories of kind of everything that I had been doing in my life to in, in search of, in search of, I think, something real about people.

And yeah, but I cursed and I told inappropriate stories. And I was like, it's either gonna work or it's gonna fail miserably. But it worked.

Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?

I love, people are so weird and delight. I just love strangers. Like, in some ways, strangers are probably easier for me to relate to than sometimes the people I'm closest to.

There's something so beautiful about the container of meeting a stranger and the joy of just being able to watch this person open up to you. I think it's much easier for us to expose ourselves to strangers than to people who depend on us or people we're married to. It just comes with fewer trappings. An interview with a stranger is like the purest expression, I think, sometimes of who we are.

And I love it. I just love that you never fully know what they're gonna do. People always surprise you. Trying to find that take or understanding on why someone's doing something or what they want—that other people are dismissing or not paying attention to—that's my f*****g drug. I love that. Because I think we're so quick to form narratives around each other and ourselves. And those stories shape how we perceive each other and perceive ourselves. But that story isn't the only one; there are often many stories happening around us at once. It's about deciding which one to pick up and which one to put down. Can you find a new story about someone that will change how they do something or how they think about something?

Like, I don't know, to me, that's just, it's such a joy. Yeah, how about you? Why do you like?

Oh, I mean, I'm with you 100%. I mean, yeah, the thrill of people, I feel like I learned kind of late that I'm a people person, you know what I mean? Like, I'm amazed, you know what I mean? I can get really long with people very quickly.

Did you think of yourself as, like, what did you think of yourself before?

I mean, I guess I knew I was social or something, you know what I mean? Like, but, yeah, but I didn't realize the degree, not the degree, exactly. But it's, well, actually, you know, what I'm thinking about is the science that indicates that sort of a masculine is more, boys are orient more towards objects and girls and the feminine orient more towards people.

And so when I say I felt like I discovered I was a people person, I really feel like I discovered, it clicked for me that I have no f*****g interest in breaking something and putting it back together again. My brother, my brother can tell me the technical specifications for every piece of technology in his house. That information glides right off of me.

You know what I mean? Yeah. But I'll remember a story or a gesture or, you know, turn afraid or a person.

Yeah, that's beautiful. I totally, I totally get that. I totally get that. It's funny because you're in some ways you're still a technician. You're just like a technician of people. You know, there's a similar like, but yeah.

So when you, when a client comes to you, when you get a project, what are the first kinds of things that you think about when you're trying to wrap your head around what you want to do and how you want to approach it?

I think that question, 'What are we really trying to do here?' haunts me, because people come to research from a lot of different angles. Sometimes they come because someone just told them they needed to do research. So they're just like, 'We need research.' And you're like, 'Oh, for what? And to what end?'

Sometimes people come and they've got a really specific business problem. I think maybe an invisible part, the invisible 80% before you even begin a project is just: What are we really trying to find out? And how do you narrow the scope of that? Because often bad research is just because you were trying to go too broad and too big and too wide. It's really hard to get people to narrow on what they really want to learn and what they really want to find out.

As a strategist, often when you start asking those questions, you end up climbing up the ladder because you've got to figure out what business problem we're really trying to solve. And then what does that mean for what audience problem? And then what does that mean for what we can actually go and find in the hearts and minds of people?

There are a lot of questions you can ask that you can't ask people directly. I think a lot of times in our industry, we try to ask questions of people that they can't really answer.

We begin projects with like, 'What's the future of financial services?' not 'How do people feel about money?' But when you're starting with people, you have to begin on their terms and in their language, and in how they think about the world, which is much different than how brand strategists or business people often think about the world.

So I think step one is always like, okay, translating all of that - all the brand and the business needs - to what we can actually find out from people. And then from there, I tend to be, we are as a company, just very obsessive about a process we call edge finding. There's so much that is known already, and we're constantly haunted by the idea that we're just going to find something that someone else has already known, and it would be a waste of everyone's time and money. So how do you as fast as possible get to the edge of a domain and understand: What are the seven schools of thought around this problem so far? How have every major brand or person tried to crack this problem? What are the top five solutions? What are the top five ways to think about the problem?

What has all been done in this field so far? And once you have that base, it's much easier. Then when you're talking to someone, you can pattern match. You can be like, what am I hearing? And how does that compare to what has been said about this problem or how people feel about it in the past? And I think that's really the superpower in doing great research quickly - really knowing your canon so that you can figure out what's really going past the edge or what's contradicting a previous orthodoxy of how something is thought about.

Yeah. How do you feel about how most marketing organizations go about trying to learn?

There's a lot of pressure to have answers and knowledge very quickly. Most organizations are flooded with information. They have subscriptions to seven services and they have trend reports and they have research they commission every year.

The problem is not a lack of information. Everyone has too much information. But you could have all that information, still have no f*****g idea where to move or how to go.

I'm a big believer that often you have to see it and experience it to know what is real. It's really hard to figure out what is real in this world.

There's a very famous war correspondent, Maria Colvin. She's amazing. She has an eye patch. She was a war reporter, had so much style. Her reporting evolved over the course of the Internet Revolution. She was doing war reporting way before the Internet.

Then she was doing a lot of reporting during the Arab Spring, once we started to have Twitter and all these social media platforms. One of the things that she talked about a lot is just how rapid misinformation happened. The fog of war is already so confusing.

But to be trying to rely on social media to have any understanding of what's going wrong, it just so quickly skews the picture of what's happening. I think that's true with everything. We have so many think pieces and Atlantic articles and all this other crap. And some of those Atlantic articles are really good.

But you don't often have a strong feeling of, is that real? Is that really what's going on, on the ground or in people's real lives? Or is that just whatever narrative got picked up that day?

That lack of being able to feel what's true is a big problem. Because ultimately, that's what makes you feel confident and have the conviction to push things through: when you've had your own emotional experience with a topic, when you've seen it in real life, or you've watched something that was deeply moving, or you've heard it for yourself, and something inside of you has changed and clicked. Decisions become much easier and action becomes much easier.

We know that in our personal lives, when people have a really transformative moment in their own life—they have a near death experience, or they watch their child go through something difficult—that experience is so real and tangible. It's not abstract, it's not intellectual, it's not something they read in a book, it's real. And because it's real, all of a sudden, they can change their life.

I think organizations are the same way. They're relying on essentially what is equivalent to reading a self-help book, relying on secondary information and arms-reach information so much, that no one's having the transformative experience inside of themselves.

The experience that's gonna say, "Okay, I believe this insight or idea enough that I'm going to commit the next two years of my life to the very difficult challenge of trying to get an organization to operate around that thing."

I think that's what we try to do. Even if we can't bring people into the field all the time, I think we're trying to bring them something that will move them so that it's not just information on a page or another 200-page PDF. Instead, it's an emotional experience with their audience or their problem that will get inside of them and change them. And then that transformation will help them.

Hopefully, my hope is to help them carry that through into action within the organization.

That's amazing. The, the analogy of self-help books is sort of, you're characterizing how organizations currently use data, right? Secondary, secondary data as self, self-help books to guide strategy.

That seems totally apt to me. What, can you tell a story about the kind of thing that you deliver? I mean, I know you guys are so, what's the right word? Disciplined in really putting that kind of emotion, emotional truth forward. But how do you know when you've landed on something like, ah, here's the thing that we were going to the boardroom with?

So I think there's always two, I'll tell you like an example of this, but to abstract it first, because that's what we do as strategists.

I mean, I think one thing that I tell my strategists a lot and I try to practice is like, do you feel like, does it hit, does it really hit you? Like being able to be sensitive enough to be moved will tell you like, is this thing inspiring or moving enough? Which is like part one, but that's not the whole picture.

Things can be moving and inspiring and they can kind of be still useless to whatever you're trying to do. And so it still has to be useful and potentially something that either hasn't been done before or has been overlooked, or, you know, in some way it helps you to shift what you're doing. And so I think that like something that is both deeply emotional, but then something you have put through the ringer of, you know, debate almost, you know, we like, we debate the f**k out of our ideas.

Like we have this concept we call the Thunderdome, which is like, where you just let ideas crash into each other. And so like, we're constantly trying to toggle between like these deep feeling moody artists, people who are like, just inspired and felt. And then like, you know, kind of ruthless debate practitioners who are willing to kind of like separate yourself from the idea and then beat it up based off of what you know about the business and the client landscape.

And so maybe the best story, maybe the most recent is, we were doing a piece of research with twill, a mental health app on pregnancy in America a couple of years ago. And Gareth, who, I'm sure, you know, Gareth Kaye, like legend strategist, and he had just become their CMO. And he'd come to us initially with this ask to create a piece of research that they were trying to make a new product specifically for pregnancy.

So it was like a mental health product to address issues in pregnancy. And he felt like he really wanted to create something that would help his team empathize with the experience of pregnancy more. And so he wanted to create what's the most like realistic portrait of pregnancy.

And obviously pregnant, there's been so much done on pregnancy. And there are so many kind of cliches and tropes about the experience. And so we did a very large edge finding process to kind of identify like, what are the major tropes about pregnancy and the culture and in brand worlds too, like, what are the images we are most fed about pregnancy?

There's a lot of them, you know, there's like, there's a segment of Instagram that pregnancy is the most empowering moment of a woman's life. And you're like beautiful and your skin is like better than ever. And you're like glowing and it's like amazing.

And it was like the opposite where there's like pregnancy trauma, where there's just like, you know, a lot of, you know, they call it trauma porn where it's a lot of really difficult stories about like things going very wrong in pregnancy and childbirth. And then there was like kind of the, you know, there's been more conversation around things like postpartum, but they were kind of flattened to this idea of like, even when we call them, we call it baby blues, right? Like a very like cheeky kind of expression of maybe like some of the sadness or depression that can happen.

And so when we got in there, we were having all of these conversations with women and a lot of them were so moving, but I remember like, I remember the interview, and it was with a woman who, her, we call her M and I was asking her about her most difficult moment of pregnancy. And she begins to tell me a story about, you know, getting pregnant with her, her then partner and, you know, they didn't have a lot of money at the time. And so they were going to like, Wendy's a lot, they would get the four by four, the dollar, the dollar deal.

And, you know, she had felt really bad about kind of having to eat fast food during pregnancy that like, that's not how she wanted to be eating, but they just didn't really have the money or the support system. And she was going through a lot of like body change and body image issues with her body changing. That, that was really hard on her.

But then she started talking about these dreams she was having where she would go to bed and she would have these dreams where she was killing her unborn child and she would wake up and like, not even know what to do with that, you know, like, and it was this experience that started to like haunt her. And in the interview, I'm going to say something, I'm going to say something difficult. So, if anyone who listens to this struggles with mental health or suicidal ideation, I just want to give you a heads up.

But she did like the depression and the difficulty that was opening the darkness that was opening during her pregnancy eventually escalated to her trying to take her own life. And thank God her husband found her and then like, didn't leave her side for the next like six months of the pregnancy. But, but I remember afterwards she was like, why did no one tell me this could happen?

Like afterwards she like, you know, she got into psychotherapy. She never even had to go on medication, just like a little bit of talk therapy helps pull her out of it. And through that process, she learned it's actually exceptionally common for women to feel suicidal during pregnancy.

It's exceptionally common to have really crazy fucked up dreams about your unborn child. Like, you know, women would have all sorts of wild, like the dream landscape of pregnant women is fascinating. And there were all these other fears and anxieties that opened up, but women often didn't have any context to make sense of them.

And no one really told like, we talk a lot about postpartum, but no one really talked about any of this happening during pregnancy. And that interview, I was just like, why did no one tell? Cause if she would have known that this was an experience that is common, she would have had context for it.

And I think having that context for it, even if you don't have any mental health resources can help you survive an experience. Like they say, there's been some research that has said that when they tested parents who essentially like what are their beliefs going into parenthood? And then how does that compare to their like feelings of resilience and satisfaction after becoming a parent and parents who expected parenthood to be really f*****g hard, had a much easier time.

And so there was something just about that expectation setting. That was such a powerful antidote to some of the difficulty that arises. And so after that interview, I started diving into some of the literature and one of the like fascinating things I found is that, in the 1960s, there was an anthropologist who coined this term called matresence.

And part of what she was doing is she went out and she started studying indigenous communities and looking for models of models of making sense of the transition to motherhood and how have other societies and particularly more indigenous societies helped women make that transition into motherhood. And one of the things that she noticed is that, you know, in the West we have, we have a concept for that transition, in your teenage years, it's called adolescence and adolescence is a term that marks the transition from being a child to becoming an adult. And we have a lot of research on like the developmental arc of adolescence.

And we also have a lot of like just cultural wisdom that like, guess what? Teens get really depressed and really anxious. Like we know that we know rates of suicide spike when you are when you're in your teenage years, like we have a lot of understanding of that, that kind of developmental period.

And then we've been using that information to help people through that period. Motherhood was not the same. There was no word to describe that transition.

And what she argued was that, you know, right now, even we only have very clinical terms to understand pain. You know, we tend to like, we have kind of over, not say over, there's value in certain clinical terminology, but, you know, we've got words like depression and anxiety and, you know, BPD and all these other like DSM five terms to describe pain and suffering. But what she was, she was sort of arguing, it was that like, of course, this period is going to come with so much suffering.

Like your entire identity is being like reduced to the rubble and then being rebuilt over a period of nine months. Like your body's going crazy. You've got all these, you're making life like, there is a natural sort of darkness that comes with that, that we have not helped pregnant Americans like learn to expect or manage.

And then if it does reach a certain point to tip over into like, you know, proper clinical care, but there's even a big like section of those experiences that would never escalate to psychosis or postpartum depression. If women or pregnant Americans had the support, and even understanding of what was happening inside of themselves during pregnancy. And so that's, this is a very long-winded story, but that moment was like the emotional moment.

And then I think we looked back over the course of like human history and then looked at the healthcare system today and you're like, okay, this isn't like, like, yes, there are a lot of really systemic issues in healthcare, like massive mental health practitioner shortage. Like a lot of women, especially in rural areas, and who are, you know, don't make much money, like don't have access to a lot of these resources. You know, even rates of OBGYNs are low.

However, even with all of that, there are very simple things you can be doing by just telling people, this is something that might happen to you. And when it does, like, here's, what's in the normal range. Here's when you should call for help.

Like, it doesn't mean you're a bad mother. Like just because you have these dreams or you have like, OCD is a really big thing in pregnancy too. Like women get forms of OCD and intrusive thoughts that can be like intrusive thoughts of harm towards a child.

It's not really like, it doesn't mean you actually won't harm your child. It's just, it's your brain going haywire and like, it's fine, but there's just, just no one was talking about it, in a way that was actually helpful. And I remember I went to my OB during this time just to get like a routine pap smear.

She's like in the middle of the pap smear. I was like, Hey, so I'm doing this study. And like, I'm just curious, like, why don't you ask?

Like, it seems like from a lot of the conversations I've had, one of the biggest problems is that women just don't know this is something that could happen. Why don't you ask, why don't you ask how, how you're really doing? Cause even the conversations in the OB office would often just be very like, how's mama?

You know, there would be this like, and I remember my OB being, being like, she was like, I don't ask cause I don't have anywhere to send them. And I don't, it's too difficult for me to know if like, if I don't have a way to resolve the problem. And I was just like, what?

Like what? We've got like a don't ask, don't tell policy of like mental health and pregnancy among OBs. Like that's crazy.

It's crazy.

So yeah, I, that was a very, I don't even remember your original question.

Well, I mean, I got exactly what I asked for, which was, you know, like, what's an example of the kind of the truth, the reality that you guys deliver and how do you make sure that, you know, how do you, how do you, um, know that you've got one? And it occurred to me just listening to that thing that the, the, the power of this kind of research is that it becomes a story that you tell about your experience of this person. And then it's sort of, it's smuggles in all this stuff, right? Like just because you're telling the story of an interview, it's just compounds just the whole thing into this form. That's like a, it's like a, it's pure, pure magic. Do you know what I mean? Am I making any sense?

No. Yeah. I mean, it's beautifully said. I don't, I don't think I actually thought about, um, thought about it that way, but, um, but you're right that like so much of research is about aggregating experience into like a collective and, and then it, which is important because you have to know, is this just Miranda or is it 25,000, 25,000 Miranda's out there? But it often comes at the cost of like also finding like, what's the, what's the story that encapsulates the experience that you found that is moving enough to kind of be passed along and shared and retold, you know, a thousand times.

Yeah. That's my experience too, that it'll be one moment, you know what I mean? In a, in a, in a, in many, many interviews where something I'm moved, like you said, and that becomes kind of the, the, the foundation of something. And it, you, you seem to say the same thing that there was a, there's that moment with Em kind of opened you to the reality.

Yeah. Yeah. What was the last time you were moved?

I mean, I, you know, I have, I mean, you probably have this experience too. I mean, I had a successful project a little while ago, so I keep telling that story. I think I told it to Gunny. I told it to Gunny. Not in the interview, but yeah. I mean, for me, it's like free association. It's the imagination. And it was a project for Lundberg. I guess I'm going to tell this story. Lundberg's Family Farms.

Oh, fun.

Yeah. It was about rice. And you know me, I do the free association stuff.

I love that stuff. You work a lot with the unconscious.

I love it. And so I did, I was doing this, the battery of free association exercises around rice to understand and premium rice because premium rice isn't selling.

What comes up in people's subconscious associations with rice?

So many things, but there was one guy that I just, he totally nailed it for me. He was the new dad. And so he was sort of overtired and his animal, I would ask like, is it an, if it were an animal, if it were a day of the week, if it were an article of clothing, this whole bunch of questions, and they're writing it all down.

But his animal was a zebra. And I was like, well, tell me about a zebra, right? He said, well, I was told that there were two types of zebra.

There's black zebras with white stripes and there's white zebras with black stripes. And I thought he was screwing with me, but he really wasn't. He was, I say there was this bewildered pause and it was that, that bewilderment was sort of the center of the insight, which was that most Americans have no idea how rice is grown or what it looks like.

We have no mental model of what rice is or how it's grown. Whereas if I said corn, you know what I mean? The whole family pops up in the house and cornfields.

So anyway, so that, that confusion was, I was just amazed at his bewilderment. And then I realized, I realized what was going on. But it's too obvious to say, which is the other thing. It felt almost like crazy to say.

It's beautiful because it's also like one of those insights that's almost found in the negative, not the positive. Like it's found in the absence of something rather than the presence of something. And yeah, it's so, it's so true.

It's so true. I love that.

Thank you for listening and turning the tables on me. I have one final curiosity I want to talk to you about with the remaining time we have because I, so we ran into each other at StratFest. You're telling the story of this crazy Frito-Lay project, which sounds amazing.

And there's two things I think I want to ask about. One is the difference between, I guess what we're telling a story to a client, right? Going and doing your own research and then, and then coming and telling the story to the client versus taking the client out on an immersion like you did with Mega Flavors.

And then an asterisk question around that is, because that was a subculture exploration. And of course, when I was coming up, nobody really talked about subculture, but that word subculture seems to dominate marketing conversation today. And I'm just curious, what do you mean when you say subculture?

How do you think about subculture? So do you know what I'm after?

Yeah. Wait, on the first one, do you want to know like the diff, like what, like, what do you want to know about the two?

I guess I'm curious about how you, how you feel your role is different. How is it different for you as a, as a researcher to be immersing a client versus immersing yourself?

Yeah. So we, you know, we used to never take clients into the field. And there was a reason for that other than being a dick.

And it was that it's really hard to cultivate intimacy and trust with people. And it takes a lot of work. And the minute you've got the feeling of an audience, people tend to go into performance mode.

And so we've, you know, we've always been really diligent about trying to protect the intimacy. Like we have one researcher almost on everything. We don't have people listening to calls.

We don't do group interviews. Like, um, and, and so that was kind of how we operated for a long time. But with this project, um, you know, our client made the case to us that she wanted her whole team, everyone who's part of the process, innovation, marketing, um, brands to feel what we felt because she thought there would be a better chance that that would stay alive in the innovation process.

Also, we were working on food innovation. So like tasting the actual food is kind of helpful. Um, but I think like to your point, like when you're, when you're the researcher, you're in this mode of like the seeker and you're trying to find the truth.

And I feel like you're like, I always imagine like you're, I've just got, you've got like laser beam focus. Like it's you and whoever you're with or whoever you're studying. And that's like the only, it was like a, it was like a laser beam that goes from year to them.

And that's the only connection that matters. And you are just turning over rocks and exploring different things and trying to collect as much as possible. When you bring a client into a space, you're no longer the investigator. You are like the camp counselor, you know, you are facilitating an experience with people. And so a lot of times what we talk about is like you, the researcher can't do research in that moment. You are producing, not producing is not the right word. You're facilitating.

And so the research needs to be done beforehand. So if you're trying to, there's different ways to, I think, bring a client in the field. You can do it in a way that helps them see insights you've already found in real life, which means you have had to have done that research already. And for that project we did, like we would get on the ground a week before clients came and we'd already done significant research on the subculture. And then we would immerse ourselves and we would deepen the connections with the community.

And we would build trust because they have to trust us deeply to then bring in another stranger. And so we spent a week, a week and a half, sometimes building trust in those communities before we brought the clients in. And so by that point we had our findings, we had the, like, it was all done. We were just trying to give the client an experience that was an expression of what we had already found.

And then there's like a more free form version of that, which is, you don't necessarily need hard findings. You're just trying to give them an experience of a culture that might inspire them. Because that in culture is important. And so in that case, we essentially take our researcher hat off and we're like, we are going to facilitate your experience, but you're the researchers. And so you take the notes, you look for the details, you ask the questions, like, we are just going to hold the container for this and the client becomes the researcher.

Um, and so in that case, like there's still a lot of trust building that has to be done ahead of time and networking within those communities. Um, but we kind of, we kind of take a backseat on the role as researcher and we make, we make our clients, the researchers. Um, so is that, does that make sense?

Um, and wait, what was your second question?

Subculture.

Subculture. Yeah. I know it's such a funny, it's been so funny to watch the industry change on this. Cause I guess, cause I grew up sort of being obsessed with anthropology and anthropology is all about stuff. Like that's the entirety of anthropology is about subculture.

And so I'm like, I don't have like a tight quippy, you know, even in anthropology, people debate the definition of subculture, like ad nauseum. So I don't necessarily have, we don't have like a quippy definition of it. But for me, it is people who share a worldview, and a sense of taste or style.

So like you both have to, I think, share some way of viewing the world and that can come in at different levels. You know, like some people share a religion. Some people share an ideology. Some people share just an expression of an idea. So you have to share some kind of belief or worldview, and then you also have to have a shared form of expression. And so I think that expression can be music. It can be clothing. It can be symbols. It can be tattoos.

It can be, but there has to be some both belief and then some outward expression that is connected to that. And it's not like, it's not easy to be like, this is definitely a subculture. This is not a subculture because subcultures are like anything. They're these moving organisms.

And you know, I think in the age of the internet, it's been a really interesting transformation of subcultures. Cause I think before the internet, you would, subcultures tended to anchor geographically and they tended to be like, you know, you had either like religions or you had scenes. So like art movements would birth subcultures, but the boundaries of that subculture were more easy to define because there was often a geography and a set collection of like influences, you know? And so you'd, you know, you'd have all these, you have, you know, Atlanta hip hop, that's an easy subculture because it's anchored to a geography.

It's also around a music and there is a hundred percent, like a shared experience, but there's often, there's also different expressions and it's also evolved, you know, like you now have sub subcultures. So ATL hip hop might be the large subculture, but then you've got something like trap music, which is an evolution of Atlanta hip hop that has its own distinct expression and the symbols change and the themes change. And so it's all very fluid.

And you know, I think a lot of people like, spent a lot of time debating like, what is a subculture on the internet? And it can be tough cause I think there's a lot of things that are like groupings of people or ideas on the internet, but they're so shallow that there's not often enough there, there, I think to like, call it a subculture. And so we've kind of like, we've abandoned trying to like define so hard what a subculture is.

I tend to think about it in terms of like, whatever you're trying to do, like with Frito-Lay, we knew that we wanted to draw inspiration for new flavors from groups of people who were a little bit on the edges of culture. And so because of that, we knew, you know, we wanted people who had a story and expression that maybe wasn't as, hadn't like broken through the mainstream as much. But because we were also trying to invent a they needed to have a shared palette.

And so there's a lot of subcultures that are cool, but there's no like cuisine associated with them. There's no like lineage from like a palette perspective. And so that definitely kind of shaped the types of subcultures that we paid more attention to.

And so I think like, depending on what you're trying to do, like maybe, maybe cottage core, or like, you know, like coven culture, like witch culture, like there's so many different expressions of that. And maybe that's enough to think about as a subculture depending on what you're doing. But, you know, if you're trying to like invent a certain kind of thing, it may not, it may not be enough.

So, yeah, no, no. What's your take on the like explosion of that concept in our industry?

Oh man. I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's an indication of, yeah, the influence of anthropology and business, I guess. And yeah, the role that culture plays this sort of just naming culture.

Yeah.

That was sort of a, that wasn't happening when I started out, you know, so like, uh, you know, you said that you observed that change too. So yeah, but it does sort of flatten out into, it just becomes like this crazy mapping of course.

It's just like, and you're like, I said, I was like, I'm like, is it like, just because you wear fringe and wear like a white frilly dresses and you read Harlequin romance novels, like, is that enough? You know, do you actually have a, I think it's like, do you have a shared worldview? Like, is that, is that enough or is that just an interest?

Right. Or, um, I saw this guy, um, Eugene is a, he does TikTok brand strategy, brand strategy. He says, it's all he, I think he says subcultures are over. It's all cosplay.

Well, I mean, that's like a deep cut take. Cause doesn't like, um, God, who was the philosopher who was it? It wasn't Foucault. It was, who's the guy who was really obsessed with studying our, um, I've got his book.

I'm going to forget it now. I'll remember and I'll send it to you. But this idea that like, everything has just become a simulation of everything that like, um, has, has been around since like the sixties, I think that like, we are now in an age of human behavior where we are all just signaling.

It's like the idea that like something is a, like, think about like a straight out of Compton, like at some point straight out of Compton as a phrase meant something very real. It had a very real basis of like a group of people's experience, but then it became a slogan that signaled a certain aesthetic and lifestyle and worldview.

And what, what this guy was arguing is that almost everything has just become that, that like, there is almost nothing real anymore. We've all, um, just, we just signal we use, we use different identity markers to signal, which is kind of different. I don't actually, I haven't fully, I've been thinking about this idea for years and I have not fully reckoned with, um, with what I, cause I, I think it's true on the internet and I think it's true in social performances.

Um, but it's, it's curious to me about how we do reclaim, reclaim things that feel real and we don't all just become like a performance of identity signals.

Yeah. Well, it feels like that's very apt right now. I mean, um, that, uh, I mean, the guy that I worked for started out, he had this way of talking in koans. He would say that we consume what we're afraid we're losing. One of his little aphorisms.

Oh my God. That's kind of, I gotta sit with that for a minute.

I feel like, I feel like right now everybody wants to be in real life. Like we're hungry for the thing that we've, we were pretty sure we lost, which is connect human connection and presence and reality.

Do you think we will, do you think we will like reclaim that? Like with all the, it is curious, all the fear around AI replacing people is also made me wonder, like, will it force us as a species to like double down on the stuff that they're not like, and right now AI can't regulate co-regulate your nervous system. You know, it can't, um, it can give you some expression of intimacy, but I think there's probably even in the best form, something that would feel gone or off. And so does it actually like almost like forces as a species to become more competitive by doubling down on those things.

I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think it, it makes them, it asks us to name them in a way that we would never really have to name them before because there's no alternative. You know what I mean? Like, I think about this a lot with qualitative because this guy, John Dutton asked me, he says, what do you say to a CMO to invest in qualitative in an age of, um, you know, synthetic users and LLMs. You realize that on some level, those things kind of do replicate, they do something close and it's close enough that you kind of wonder, whoa, f**k, what is it exactly? What is it?

Yeah. Yeah. And like the other thing I've also wondered about those kinds of things is, um, is does it ever create a feedback loop that actually starts to influence real people, you know, like the simulation of people.

Cause like when we were doing the journalism work, one of the things that haunted me is just how flexible we are. Like, um, you know, at the time, like I was looking at the way people express themselves and their political beliefs in social media. And like, you know, at that time, like everyone was like the idea of being extreme online.

Like, it was just like the, it was the, the bastion of the era of being hyper extreme online. But when you would get, you would talk to people in real life and you would set a different, um, a different value system of that interaction. If you would be like, Hey, like, we're here to talk like the truth.

Like, I want to know, like, do you actually believe these things? Like, is this too? And like, when you set the rules of an interaction of nuance and when you set the rules of an interaction of gray area, people became more nuanced and more gray area and more uncertain.

And they admitted their uncertainty. And that's the exact same person who like, I would talk to people and then I would have them send me s**t. They have posted on the internet and the person on the internet was like, like, you know, an extremist and so certain and like very hard line.

And then the person in front of me was like, well, you know, I don't really know. And like, I've really wrestled with this. And you're like, these are the same people.

They're just a different part of themselves is expressing based on the environment and the rules of that environment. And, and I just was like, Oh my God, we're so much more, we perceive each other as so fixed, but we're actually so flexible. And that's beautiful, but it also makes us fragile and like these feedback loops, like the internet and like algorithms.

But I'm also like curious, like when we have AI telling us about ourselves and like telling us what people think, do you see people begin to become that image? You know, like I think we, and how do we, how do we fight the flattening of, of who we are?

Yeah. Yeah. It's horrifying.

Really. I mean, it's so alienating. It seems to me, I mean, the, the momentum that these generative AI things have.Um, but anyway, we've, we've wandered way off, way off the path and thank you so much. I really appreciate you. Yeah. It was nice to see you at Stratfest, um, in presenting amazing work. And, um, I really appreciate you, um, coming and spending time with me.

Yeah, this was great. Thank you, Peter.

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