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.

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