The zebra who can't stop running.

Part 1 of a new arc — pivoting from the mind to the body. After months of talking about cognition, judgment, communication, and loneliness, Keith and Gerren finally get into what all of that is doing to us physically.

The framing is Robert Sapolsky's zebra — get chased by a lion, escape, calm down, go back to grazing. Nervous system reset. Modern humans don't get the reset. We're chased by an ongoing sequence of lions — inbox, kids' schedule, news cycle, credit card, dinner-table politics — where one stops and the next one picks up. Chronic fight-or-flight activation without the resolution the system was designed for.

Gerren pulls in McEwen and Wingfield's research on allostatic load — specifically type-two overload, where the stressors are social and structural, and can't be counteracted by escape. Only by learning and by changes in the social structure itself.

Also — Repetti's research on workload spillover to home (showing up as absent, not just angry), the person sitting in the driveway trying to reset before walking inside, and the honest permission slip at the center of the whole episode: you're not lazy, you're carrying a lot of load. Naming it is the first move.

Part 1 of 3. Part 2 next week — how we talk about all this now, and what the body remembers.

Key Topics: Sapolsky's zebras-and-lions framework, McEwen and Wingfield on allostatic load, technological pace of change vs. biological adaptation, Repetti's workload-spillover research, closing margins for connection, box breathing and the parasympathetic nervous system, and rest as a discipline rather than a reward.

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Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Keith spent 15 years convinced he was an introvert. Then he wasn't.

Part 3 closes our "It Is What It Is" arc — the personal turn. After two episodes on how the phrase functions as a permission structure and how marketing sold us pink and blue as biology, Keith and Gerren turn the framework on themselves.

Keith on the introvert-extrovert binary he lived inside for a decade and a half — using "I'm an introvert" as the reason to leave every party at 10pm and disengage. Until his wife, whose extroversion "stands alone," became the forcing function. Turns out he actually gets energy from people, too. He just needed the vocabulary to discern when he needed what — and permission to stop letting the label make the decision.

Gerren's version is the opposite problem. His whole life has been about refusing to settle — Bay Area to LA to Mexico, careers changed on rotation, always evolving. Keith flips it on him: is your never-settling itself an "I am who I am"? (Also — a Kanye West story from Gerren's Apple Store days, including an invitation to a house call he declined.)

They close with what they're passing to their kids — please, thank you, bless you, the rules of the roost — and the honest recognition that those kids will eventually need the agency to question those things too. That's the whole arc, really.

Arc closer. Part 3 of 3.

Key Topics: The introvert-extrovert binary as a false frame, using a spouse's opposite tendency as a forcing function, discernment vs. label, the identity work of refusing to settle, lifelong insecurity as an ongoing project, and what we pass on to our kids — including the agency to eventually question it.

The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — "It Is What It Is." — Is It, Though? 🎧 Part 2 — Pink Is Just Marketing 🎧 Part 3 — The Introvert Who Wasn't

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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.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

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.