You have more power than the algorithm.

Part 3 closes our 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. Last week we ended on a cliffhanger: how does the system itself stay curious? This week, the answer.

Keith opens with a story from the weekend — a real conversation about healthcare with his conservative dad that was going well, until he noticed his dad was drinking from a "leftist tears" tumbler. The dialogue was working. The identity object in the room was working against it. Mónica introduces the concept of conflict entrepreneurs — people who profit off division — and reframes what a system actually is. There isn't one system. There are many. Put down the one that isn't serving you and pick up the one that will.

Also — the astronaut cord metaphor for holding identity loosely (probably the sharpest visual in the whole arc), the surprising research that shows cognitively smarter people are actually worse at accepting information they don't want to hear, and the callback to our own tightly held values, loosely held beliefs arc.

Ends with rapid-fire questions (Citizen Kane, puchero, Maui, Blink-182), Costco chicken fingers, and the honest close of three episodes that changed how we think about this work.

Key Topics: Conflict entrepreneurs and the economics of division, the attention economy, the pattern of losing consciousness in argument, the astronaut cord metaphor for identity, the counterintuitive research on cognitive reasoning, and the many-systems reframe.

Guest: 📚 I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán — Available on Amazon 🎙️ A Braver Way podcast — YouTube & all podcast platforms 🌐 reclaimcuriosity.org 🌐 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 — You Have More Power Than the Algorithm

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://instagram.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.

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.

We're all sheep. It just depends on the flock.

That's Keith about 26 minutes into this week's episode — and it's the sentence that reframes the whole conversation. Part 1 of a two-part arc on judgment: how we do it, why we do it, what changed, and why our nervous systems weren't built for the scale we're doing it at now.

Gerren opens with a story about a friend's 50th birthday party — two baby mamas, three kids, all the grandkids around one cake. The kind of village most of us don't have anymore, and the level of acceptance it takes to hold it together. From there they get into the imagined audience concept from the 1960s, the infinite ladder we're all climbing without knowing where the top is, why judgment is culturally defined and not just "human," and why individualistic societies feel guilt and collectivist societies feel shame — and what that actually costs us at scale.

Also — the loss of the redemption arc. Why the interview process is one of the worst predictors of anything. Resting bitch face as an example of misplaced confidence in snap judgments. And why positive gossip might be a healthier sorting mechanism than the culture has given it credit for.

Part 2 next week, where we get personal about how this shows up in our own lives.

Key Topics: The imagined audience concept and social media's expansion of it, Dunbar's number and the judgmentscape, the difference between guilt and shame across cultures, moral attribution and intent vs. outcome, sociometric status as a happiness driver, cancel culture and the loss of redemption, and positive gossip as a social sorting tool.

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 don't have to be happy to be grateful.

That's the sentence Jonathan Pride lands on at the close of this week's episode — the distinction between contentment and happiness that reframes everything the three-part arc has been circling. You can be in a hard season and still be intentional about gratitude. That's not fake-it-till-you-make-it. That's the actual work.

Part three closes out the arc with combat veteran, author, and Caterpillar Leadership Institute founder Jonathan Pride. The why we still do it episode. Jonathan tells the story of the young man in the bathroom before a networking event who never learned how to tie a tie. Chris the welder from New Orleans, who Jonathan pushed into a sales role no one thought he was qualified for — and who became the top salesperson in a 7,000-person company within a year. What Jonathan wants those 37 promoted people to say about him when he's not in the room.

And a moment worth flagging — Jonathan names, live on air, that he might be in a cocoon moment right now, and that this podcast conversation might be the prompt he needed. That's a rare thing to catch on tape.

Practice intentional praise. Never stop learning. Contentment is not happiness. Big brisket energy.

Key Topics: Faith and the unseen outcomes of meaningful work, the individual stories that keep leaders going, systems change thinking, the moment of naming an in-progress transformation, Chris the welder and validating what others can't see in themselves, the difference between contentment and happiness as etymology, and practicing intentional praise.

Guest: 📚 Caterpillars Don't Fly by Jonathan Pride — Available on Amazon 🌐 Caterpillar Leadership Institute → caterpillarleadership.org 💼 LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/jonathan-pride-831b3875

The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — Who Are You Proving It To? 🎧 Part 2 — Who's Holding Space for You? 🎧 Part 3 — You Don't Have to Be Happy to Be Grateful

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.

Who's holding space for you?

Gerren asks it about halfway through this week's episode — and Jonathan Pride, combat veteran, author, and founder of the Caterpillar Leadership Institute, has to sit with the question a second before answering. Because when you're the one everyone else leans on, the question itself lands a little differently.

Part two of a three-episode arc. This one is about the emotional cost of always being the rock — representational weight, the impossibility of redeeming everyone's wrongs, the line between real resilience and quiet suffering, and where a leader actually replenishes. Jonathan gets into a funeral that reframed his understanding of his father, the Obama Fellowship moment that birthed his brand, and a permission slip exercise you can try tomorrow morning.

Also — the SOAR framework broken down (Storytelling, Ownership, Abundance, Resilience) and which pillar Jonathan admits is hardest for him to live personally.

Neither of them settled it. Part 3 next week.

Key Topics: Representational weight in predominantly white rooms, systems change vs. surface change, the SOAR framework as a leadership operating system, the Obama Fellowship, micro-communities as replenishment, the fringes of daily life where identity slips, the permission slip exercise, and a regret about a favor asked and never repaid.

Guest: 📚 Caterpillars Don't Fly by Jonathan Pride — Available on Amazon 🌐 Caterpillar Leadership Institute → caterpillarleadership.org 💼 LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/jonathan-pride-831b3875

The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — Who Are You Proving It To? 🎧 Part 2 — Who's Holding Space for You? 🎧 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.

Who are you proving it to?

That's the question Jonathan Pride lands on this week — and it's the one that stays with you.

Jonathan is a combat veteran, an author, the founder of the Caterpillar Leadership Institute, and one of fourteen (possibly fifteen) siblings from New York City. Keith and Gerren open a three-part arc with him about how someone builds an identity out of trying to escape everyone else's expectations — a hardcore Christian household with a father born in 1933, an older brother's shadow, a career in Military Intelligence, and a career pivot everyone told him was crazy.

The centerpiece: the moment Jonathan won an MVP trophy in high school basketball that arrived engraved with his brother's name. That's the whole arc in one image.

We get into the cocoon as the real story of a life, why the butterfly isn't the point, and how the framework connects back to everything we've been circling all season on hyper-individualism.

Part 1 of 3.

Key Topics: Family systems and identity, complicated inheritance from a father born in 1933, Military Intelligence and the drive to understand people, the ghost of an older brother, the three arcs of self, the cocoon as the real story, and the question that sits underneath everything — who are you proving it to?

Guest: 📚 Caterpillars Don't Fly by Jonathan Pride — Available on Amazon 🌐 Caterpillar Leadership Institute → caterpillarleadership.org 💼 LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/jonathan-pride-831b3875

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.