More In Common

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.

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

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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.

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Guest:

The Full Arc:

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Gerren Taylor:

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

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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.

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Guest:

The Full Arc:

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Gerren Taylor:

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.

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Guest:

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Gerren Taylor:

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.

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Gerren Taylor:

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

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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.

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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:

Find Us:

Gerren Taylor:

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.