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.

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.

"It is what it is." — Is it, though?

Keith and Gerren open a new arc on the phrases we use to shut conversations down — and the systems that benefit when we do. It is what it is. Boys will be boys. That's just how it works. Common sense. Every one of them functions as a permission structure: a way of accepting a condition without ever inspecting whether it's actually inevitable, or whether we've just been told it is.

Gerren lays out the three-part framework: the stuff we don't want to think about, the stuff we don't want to be responsible for, and the stuff we don't want to change. Keith names the tension — sometimes "it is what it is" is legitimate cognitive load management. And sometimes it's just laziness dressed up as acceptance. The difference is whether you actually inspected it.

Also — callbacks to our arc with Mónica Guzmán, why the Jordan Klepper problem matters, why Keith is deliberately getting worse at social media, and the sentence that names the whole arc: nothing that is conditioned is inevitable, and most of what we treat as inevitable is conditioned.

Part 1 of a multi-episode arc. Part 2 next week — the designers, the beneficiaries, and what we can actually do.

Key Topics: The "it is what it is" permission structure, capitulation vs. acceptance, cognitive load management, the boys-will-be-boys responsibility dodge, the sample-size fallacy in political comedy, and why the uneven weight of "it is what it is" hits harder when you're not in the dominant group.

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 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.