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.

Sometimes the podcast about growth gets tired.

Keith and Gerren close out a three-part personal arc — the one where they turn the lens on themselves. This week is the quieter one. Not a framework episode. A real one.

Keith gets into the shame loop of teaching emotional awareness and still losing his patience by bedtime, the parenting exhaustion nobody teaches you about, and the moment on the pre-call last week when he realized he wasn't ready to talk about his own recent layoff — and now, this week, he is. Gerren gets into the loneliness that comes with cutting out relationships that felt good but weren't feeding growth. Both hosts land in the same place — the growth path can be an isolating one, and even the people making the podcast get tired.

"We can't always make a nice sound bite of a messy life." — Gerren, this episode.

Neither of them wrapped it up. That's part of the point. Try it again tomorrow.

Key Topics: The shame loop of teaching what you can't always practice, cognitive fatigue and emotional regulation, on being laid off, the loneliness of the growth path, choice-based social ecosystems, permission to not be growing all the time.

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.

What are you protecting?

Picking up right where last week left off, Gerren asks Keith the question that ends up defining this episode — and the answer goes deeper than either of them expected. Keith traces it back to growing up an only child, learning to be everyone's safety net instead of needing one himself, and a moment with a corporate cohort where someone finally invited him to share and he said no anyway.

They get into the "inner circle" — who actually gets to see all of you, and why most of us keep that list shorter than we'd admit. Keith reflects on how close he came to the manosphere at 20, back when loneliness had an easy answer and he didn't have the tools to resist it. Gerren shares his own story about a man, an unwanted comment, and the instinct to just shut the door rather than get curious. And they land, for now, on a simple but hard-won idea: you know better, you do better — even though the gap never fully closes.

To be continued next week.

Key Topics: Why Keith learned individualism early, the difference between facilitating other people's vulnerability and practicing your own, the inner circle and who's allowed in it, the emotional pull of the manosphere, social norms we never actually agreed to, and the honest admission that growth doesn't mean the gap disappears.

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

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.

Do we actually practice what we preach?

This week Keith and Gerren turn the lens on themselves. Is the person on the show the same person they are in everyday life? Gerren's nephew recently told him "sometimes uncle, you're a real asshole" — and Gerren agreed. Keith talks about a poker buddy who asked about the podcast and how he immediately changed the subject rather than open up.

They get into social concentric circles, honesty in a new relationship, the fear of being upfront anyway, and the honest admission that neither of them always lives up to what they ask listeners to do.

To be continued next week.

Key Topics: The show-self vs. real-life-self question, directness from live TV experience, honesty and vulnerability in new relationships, social concentric circles, and why bringing the show's openness into everyday spaces is harder than it sounds.

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.

Can we buy back what we gave up?

This week Keith and Gerren close out a three-episode arc on the cost of independence with the hardest question of all. Not apps. Not initiatives. Not policy alone. Until the identity of the person shifts — until they see themselves as better with the group than alone — none of the programs work.

Keith gets personal about his own lifelong pattern of stepping back from community at the last moment. They get into Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart, Adam Smith vs. Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan as an Ayn Rand acolyte, the temporarily embarrassed millionaire, and Harvard's 85-year study on happiness. The number one predictor? Social connection. Not wealth. Not career. Not health habits. Other people.

And then Gerren connects both full arcs — trust collapse, identity, the stories we tell, and now this — into one throughput about how human connection breaks down in America. Institutionally. Personally. Cognitively. Narratively. Structurally.

Hard questions. No easy answers. Arc closed.

The Full Arc: Part 1 — The Deal We Didn't Know We Were Making Part 2 — What We Left Behind Part 3 — Can We Buy It Back?

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 knocked down the load-bearing walls and called it progress.

This week Keith and Gerren dig into what we actually gave up — the third place, intergenerational family, shared child rearing, the male social ecosystem, and the spaces where doctor, lawyer, janitor, and teacher used to just exist together without any of that mattering.

Ray Oldenburg coined the term "third place" in 1989. In 1990, only 3% of Americans had no close friends outside family. Today that's 20%. The loneliness epidemic is not a phone addiction problem. It's seventy years of being told you don't need other people — and now we've stopped doing community so thoroughly we don't know how anymore.

Part two of three. Part three next week: what do we actually do about it.

Key Topics: The third place and its collapse, the data on loneliness and friendship, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, intergenerational community, shared child rearing, Día de los Muertos, the CIA veteran who never felt less free than back home.

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.

The pitch was freedom. Nobody mentioned what we'd have to give up.

This week Keith and Gerren start a three-episode arc on where American hyper-individualism came from, who constructed it, and what it cost us. From Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged to Reagan's government-is-the-problem reframe, to the suburbs, the single-family home, and the structural dismantling of collective institutions every time they started serving people they weren't supposed to.

Part one of three. Hard questions. No easy answers.

Key Topics: The philosophy of radical individualism, the Cold War and collectivism as the enemy, Reagan and the moral reframe of government, the structural isolation of suburban life, welfare and unions dismantled by race, and why you can't individual-choice your way out of a structure built to isolate you.

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.

"I'm sorry you felt that way" is not an apology.

This week Keith and Gerren get into the full anatomy of a fake apology versus a real one — what makes one land, what makes the other make things actively worse, and why most of us were taught to do a version that makes us feel less bad and call it the same thing.

They work through the five elements of a real apology, the neuroscience of repair, why you are never obligated to accept an apology or reconcile, and what institutional apology without repair actually looks like — from Germany and South Africa to the United States and slavery.

The word apology shares a root with repair. What is one without the other? Hard questions. No easy answers.

Key Topics: The fake apology anatomy, the five elements of a real apology, neuroscience of repair, receiving vs. accepting an apology, institutional apology and reparations.

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.