What nobody tells you about staying curious.

Part 2 of a multi-episode arc with Mónica Guzmán — journalist, founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, senior fellow at Braver Angels, and author of I Never Thought of It That Way. This is the honest episode about the cost of the work she teaches.

Mónica opens up about a footnote in her own book — "sometimes I'm too curious for my own good" — and what that's actually meant across her career. The friendships lost with people who share her politics but not her style. The exhaustion of being the person the room turns to for the answer. The reality that curiosity is contagious, but only if you have the capacity to keep offering it. And why "waves crashing on a cliff" is the right metaphor for what she does, and why sometimes it's still too insurmountable.

Keith and Gerren push into the harder questions: what happens when the framework is asked of people whose humanity is on the table? What does curiosity look like from the non-dominant culture? Mónica lands somewhere honest — the luxury of not asking questions when you're in the dominant culture, the reality that curiosity aimed inward is also curiosity, and that if the choice is always "I'm never safe so I will never be seen," the non-dominant group is never made visible at all.

Ends on a cliffhanger — how does the system itself stay curious? Part 3 next week.

Key Topics: The cost of being professionally curious, friendships lost to stylistic disagreement, the exhaustion of the framework, the uneven ask across dominant and non-dominant cultures, curiosity aimed inward, Julia Minson's research on receptiveness language, and why "your uncle isn't talking to you, he's talking to all liberals."

Guest: 📚 I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán — Available on Amazon 🌐 Reclaim Curiosity → reclaimcuriosity.org 🌐 Braver Angels → braverangels.org

The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — When the Conversation Gets Political, Can You Stay Curious? 🎧 Part 2 — What Nobody Tells You About Staying Curious 🎧 Part 3 — [coming next week]

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

When the conversation gets political — can you stay curious?

Journalist Mónica Guzmán has spent her career trying to answer that question, and she has more standing to ask it than most. Her Mexican-immigrant parents voted for Donald Trump twice. She didn't. And she never stopped talking to them.

This week Keith and Gerren open a multi-episode arc with Mónica — journalist, founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, senior fellow at Braver Angels, and author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Part 1 is her origin story — a shy kid who found her way to journalism through pure fascination with people, the sobremesa tradition (the Spanish word for the conversation that follows a meal that English doesn't have), and the moment when her sense of the fight had to sharpen from "win the argument" to something more sustainable.

Also — the reason the movie Pearl Harbor made her a movie reviewer, the trap of "avoidance that calls itself brave," why every relationship is a mini society, and what she does with the flash of anger before it dictates her actions.

Part 1 of a multi-episode arc. Part 2 next week.

Key Topics: The sobremesa and why English doesn't have a word for it, how bilingual/bicultural upbringing shapes curiosity, the American dinner table rule about politics and religion, meeting division with strength, naming emotional escalation out loud as a de-escalation tool, and effective vs. performative convictions.

Guest:

🌐 https://www.moniguzman.com/ 📚 I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán — Available on Amazon 🌐 Reclaim Curiosity → reclaimcuriosity.org 🌐 Braver Angels → braverangels.org

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

You're not for everyone. Neither is anyone else.

That's Keith halfway through this week's episode — and it might be the sentence that closes out the whole two-part judgment arc. Where Part 1 was the intellectual framework, Part 2 is the personal application.

Gerren opens with the answer he almost didn't say out loud last week: "It's kind of a white guy thing." Then he goes into what it's actually like to be both hyper-visible and invisible as a Black man in American society, what it's like to be a Black American content creator in Mexico who represents an entire community every time he steps outside, and the fear of his own success creating a level of surveillance he doesn't want. Keith gets into who he still lets judge him and why he still wants everyone to like him — plus the friend he almost wrote off after 10 minutes who is now closest family.

Also: karaoke Hamilton, the traffic stop math (the 10% racist cops who will kill you make the gamble bigger than any statistic), why the biological default explanation of judgment doesn't hold up, and how literacy in 1517 actually reshaped the physical structure of the human brain.

Ends with: this isn't for our lifetime. It's for our kids. And their kids. And that's why we keep showing up.

Key Topics: The dual experience of hyper-visibility and invisibility, being a Black creator in Mexico, the traffic stop math and percentage-of-consequence, how judgment shapes our judgment of others, The Weirdest People and how literacy reshaped human cognition, the friends we almost wrote off, and every situation not requiring all of you but every situation requiring a sincere reflection.

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.