Pink is just marketing.

Girls didn't naturally gravitate toward pink. Boys didn't naturally gravitate toward blue. In 1918, a garment industry trade publication argued the exact opposite — pink was the "more decided and stronger" color, better suited for boys. It took the garment industry roughly 60 years to lock in the version we live with now. Then prenatal sex determination arrived in the 1980s and made the segmentation permanent. Now we throw gender reveal parties in the color scheme a marketing team invented.

Part 2 of our "It Is What It Is" arc. Case studies week. Keith and Gerren get into pink vs. blue, boys will be boys and the meta-analyses on when emotional differences actually emerge, the American work culture that traces back to Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1900s factory management principles, the seatbelt story, and a genuinely uncomfortable detour into Joseph Henrich's The Weirdest People — specifically the 500 CE Catholic Church ban on cousin marriage that reshaped how Western civilization thinks about trust, family, and strangers.

The through-line — none of the things we accept as biological default are actually biological. They were designed. Someone benefits. And the ones that stick get baked into cognition so completely that a few generations later we call them common sense.

For the record: Keith is not pro cousin marriage. That got clarified on air.

Part 2 of a multi-episode arc. Part 3 next week — the personal turn.

Key Topics: The pink-blue marketing history from 1918 forward, how gendered emotional conditioning emerges in preschool and elementary school, Joseph Henrich and the WEIRDEST People framework, the 500 CE Catholic Church cousin marriage ban, Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management as the origin of American work culture, and the seatbelt story as an example of how fast cultural change actually can happen.

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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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