The Salary Conversation: Why America Doesn’t Talk About Money.

Part 1 of a new three-episode arc. Keith opens with his mom’s birthday — the political conversation she didn’t want to have and the friend who pushed anyway. Gerren pulls the thread: politics, religion, money. The three things Americans don’t talk about. The first two we’ve covered. The third is this arc.

Keith walks through what he found trying to trace when the silence started — the National Labor Relations Act, company towns, union busting, and why corporations had a vested interest in employees not sharing numbers. Gerren brings the Gen Z counter-pattern of posting salaries publicly on TikTok. Keith brings the research complicating the “transparency is always better” story — Norway’s public tax records widened the happiness gap, UC employees who learned they made less than peers reported lower job satisfaction, and one European pay-transparency law reduced overall pay by 2%.

Also — the Mexico/India bargaining culture as the counterpoint to American money taboo, why the freelance world can’t afford the silence, and the SAG-AFTRA strike as the current-day version of the same fight.

Part 1 of 3. Part 2 next week — the class caste system America doesn’t name.

Key Topics: Why Americans don’t talk about money, the National Labor Relations Act and corporate suppression of wage talk, pay transparency laws, the counterintuitive research on what public salary data actually does to happiness and compensation, bargaining culture outside the US, and why freelancers can’t afford the silence.

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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.

The shirt comes untucked.

Both hosts show up exhausted this week — and the arc gets demonstrated in real time. Gerren was out late at a gala, then a college bar. Keith hasn’t slept right in three days.

Keith walks through his pattern on-mic — hard training, undereating, waking at 2am with “the hum” in his body, snapping at his kids by day three. Gerren tells the gala-to-dive-bar story: the tight utensil work, the smaller movements, and the moment the shirt comes untucked at the second bar. Code-switching as a physical act. “Not everybody knows how to act” — what the friend who invited him said.

Also — the environmental privilege of being able to design your own recovery, and Gerren on carrying a goldfish memory for the things he can’t control.

Arc closer. Part 3 of 3.

Key Topics: Performing through exhaustion, environmental privilege and recovery, Keith’s sleep-nutrition-cortisol cycle, code-switching as a physical experience, and the gala-to-dive-bar transition.

The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — The Zebra Who Can’t Stop Running 🎧 Part 2 — What the Body Remembers and What It Doesn’t 🎧 Part 3 — The Shirt Comes Untucked

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.

What the body remembers — and what it doesn't.

Part 2 of our body arc. Where last week was about chronic stress chasing us like an endless sequence of lions, this week is about what the body holds — the stuff from earlier that doesn't go away just because the circumstance changed.

Keith opens with revertigo — the How I Met Your Mother concept for how you can be 30, independent, functional, and the moment you walk into your parents' house, you're six again. Nothing wrong with you. The context is just doing what context does. Which means the hardest conversations we have — the ones with family, especially about politics or ideology — happen in exactly the environment least likely to let us access the dialogue skills we've built.

They engage honestly with The Body Keeps the Score — what van der Kolk's clinical work got right, and where the specific cellular claims aren't actually backed by peer review. Same with Rachel Yehuda's intergenerational trauma research on Holocaust survivors and their children — the real science, the honest hedges, and Gerren's direct question: what does three or four hundred years of generational stress do to a person's genes?

The strongest moment of the episode — Keith admits he can't empathize with what it's like to be a Black man in the South and be called "boy." He can understand the concept intellectually. He can't feel it in his body. That gap is the thing the arc is about.

Part 2 of 3. Part 3 next week.

Key Topics: Revertigo and context-dependent memory, cue-dependent forgetting, ACE studies and HPA axis calibration, honest engagement with The Body Keeps the Score, Rachel Yehuda's intergenerational trauma research and FKBP5 methylation patterns, cultural trauma and dominant-culture recognition, and Mark Bouton's extinction learning as a path to changing the signal.

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.