
In this episode, Tim Shriver discusses the power of dignity and building an inclusive world. Tim shares his experiences working with the Special Olympics, highlighting how the athletes embody resilience and hope, often thriving in the face of adversity. He also delves into the significance of inclusivity and how it can transform our communities, encouraging us to see the inherent dignity in every individual, regardless of their abilities or circumstances.
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Key Takeaways:
- Explore the benefits of building inclusive communities for a happier and more connected society
- Embrace the impact of intellectual disabilities on families and gain a deeper understanding of their experiences
- Navigate mental health and addiction recovery with valuable insights and support for a more empathetic approach
- Learn effective strategies for fostering dignity and respect, creating a more inclusive and supportive environment for all
- Understand the crucial role of relationships in personal happiness and well-being, and how to nurture them within your community
Connect with Tim Shriver: Instagram | X
Tim Shriver is the host of Need a Lift?; Chairman of Special Olympics International, made up of 6 million athletes, families and volunteers; and co-founder of UNITE – which promotes national unity and solidarity across differences. Tim began his career as an educator and co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which is leading the global movement for social and emotional learning (SEL). Tim has produced 6 films, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Fully Alive – Discovering What Matters Most, and co-editor of The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening.
If you enjoyed this episode with Tim Shriver, check out these other episodes:
Embracing Imperfection: The Path to True Self Acceptance with La Sarmiento
How Relationships Shape Our Happiness and Well-Being with Robert Waldinger
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer:
Hi, Tim.Welcome to the show.
Tim Shriver:
Thank you. Delighted to be with you and your wolves.
Eric Zimmer:
Yes, it’s a real pleasure to talk to you. As I dove deeper into your work, I liked you and your ideas more and more and more. So that’s nice. Thank you. I think there’s a lot of great stuff to talk about here, but we’ll start in the way we normally do, which is with the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to know what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Tim Shriver:
Well, I mean, first of all, I think it’s a beautiful story. It has this quality of intimacy when you think about this child and this elder. wondering and thinking about these questions together, the goodness and the evil in the world, how we prevail, how we make decisions. So I think it’s a beautiful parable. You know, when I’ve heard it in recent years, Eric, it’s always reminded me that the good wolf within us feels malnourished. You know, I’ve worked in the Special Olympics movement for basically all my life in one way or another, as a teacher for a good part of my life. I feel like I’ve had a front row seat for people who are just doing beautiful work, just giving of themselves, full of compassion, zeal, energy, a determination to change the world in the most hopeful and positive of ways. So I feel like the good wolf in me has been fed at a banquet. But I look around me and I talk to people, my children, you know, my friends, people I know and care about, they feel so discouraged and so beaten down by the incoming messages in the culture. And I think that, you know, if I were extending this metaphor, I would say the evil wolf, the bad wolf is stuffed to being engorged almost with food, overfed. And the good wolf is sort of over in the corner, starving for food. and I think it’s just an invitation for us to remember that we have the good wolf within us and that feeding it both for ourselves and for others is a recipe for changing the course of the future.
Eric Zimmer:
I love that idea and I think there is a real need for all of us to think about what we are feeding ourselves. I mean, obviously food is one thing, but if you are what you eat, in many ways you are what you see and what’s around you. And if we don’t make an effort to look for the hopeful side of things, we don’t see it. It’s tacked on to like a two minute thing at the end of 58 minutes of Awful news. Yeah, you get the two-minute cute little story and I’ve just found for myself I have to actively seek that out on a regular basis in order to feed that good wolf because it’s not what shows up at the top Yeah
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, I think, you know, you’re pointing out this issue of, like, managing our incoming. Like, we manage our calories, or we manage our salt, or our sugar, or we manage our fats, or our meats, or whatever. We think of that sort of intuitively. This is what we do for ourselves, this is what we do for our children. Don’t eat too much of this, don’t drink too much of that. But we’re increasingly in a moment in which we are coming to realize we also have to manage what we consume at the level of our minds and our hearts. We have to actually manage it the same way we’d manage calories or the same way we’d manage fats or sugars or whatever. I met this teacher once and she said, you know, she’s so positive, so positive, bubbly, enthusiastic, she’s a special education teacher. And I said to her, how do you stay so positive? She said, I get up in the morning, I think she said at 4.30. and I have changed the last year, I don’t let anything into my heart, into my mind, through my phone that feels like a toxin to me. I do my exercise, I read my meditations and prayers, things like that. I don’t let anything else in. And most of us don’t think that way. We think, well, let’s click on this and let’s click on that. We don’t think it’s poisoning us.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, I think that’s a key point.
Tim Shriver:
But it is poisoning us. Yeah, yeah. So we’ve got a whole new challenge like, you know, that food pyramid that we used to see in schools and stuff with, you know, this much carbohydrates, this much fat, this much all. We need kind of like a consumptive pyramid of how much toxic news we can tolerate. like maybe it’s good to know some of what’s going on in the world of politics where people are yelling at each other or some of what’s going on in the world of culture where people are yelling at each other or maybe we need to know some of that but if you eat too much of that it’s going to poison you Yep, yep. You need something that’s going to remind you that there is peace within you, that there is a wholeness out there in the world, that there are people filled with compassion. That’s what I’m trying to do with Needle Lift, you know, which is the podcast I’ve been working on the last several months. I’m way behind you but trying to… We are aligned you know and what I’m looking for is people who are looking at situations where there’s pain and bringing purpose, looking at situations where there’s despair and bringing hope, looking at situations where it looks like things are overwhelming but these are people who are finding the inner resolve like their inner life is strong You know, they found a spiritual kind of or an emotional foundation that allows them to navigate hard incoming negativity and transform it into something hopeful and, you know, devoid of hatred and contempt. So look, I agree with you. We need a lot more attention. to what we consume through our minds and our hearts and we need a lot more attention to identifying those people who will inspire our minds and our hearts to believe in ourselves and in each other
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, you say somewhere, I found myself over and over again, confused by the strength of people who seem to be experiencing both pain and triumph at the same time. Say more about that.
Tim Shriver:
Well, I think one of the riddles of people who have the good wolf well fed is that it often gets fed in moments of turmoil, in moments of stress. You know, there’s the line from one of the spiritual teachers that says, you know, no great spiritual progress is made in times of comfort. So many of the people I’ve had the privilege, I meet moms, for instance, who have children, let’s say with Down syndrome, who were told from the moment of birth, your child doesn’t matter, your child’s going to be a burden, your child isn’t going to be able to make you proud, you know, to have friends, to go to school, to learn to read. All these messages that these moms and dads are bombarded with. And I come into their lives and what do I see? I see this huge smile. I see this endless optimism. I see this kind of almost invulnerable hopefulness. Like nothing can beat them up. Like you can’t say anything. that would sap their spirit of its energy. So I wonder, you know, that’s a strength that’s been refined in a fire of difficult and challenging and often oppositional energy, but they come out of it many times. Not everybody, you know, and many of us have these experiences in small ways and we get bitter and angry. Yeah. And resentful. And we all do that. I mean, I do it. When we see people who have had these experiences and come out of them seemingly with hearts that are almost exploding with love, I think to myself, man, I’m in the presence of greatness, you know? And it may just be a mom with a eight-year-old little daughter who has, you know, Down syndrome bringing her to a 50-meter dash. But man, does she radiate the kind of energy I want to live in.
Eric Zimmer:
It’s so interesting what you’re describing there. And I’ve heard you talk elsewhere about, you know, one of the things that the Special Olympics doing all that work taught you was to look at people from a different angle than the one we societally normally do. And this is a crazy analogy I’m about to make here. But you’re talking about a type of capacity in these people that reminds me of when I think about octopuses. And what I mean by that is they have an intelligence that is so different than ours, that is just fascinating. They can make their skin change color instantly. I mean, I could go on and on about them. But it’s this completely different type of capacity. And I think what I’ve gotten from your work is learning to see that capacity in people who may have intellectual disabilities or other types. There’s a quality of heart that can be found there that a lot of us that are going about our day and are, you know, quote unquote, more normal may not have as much of.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, I think, you know, the irony, I think you’re right. I’m not sure about how octopuses work, so I’m going to let your listeners figure out how to Google that and figure out where that lands, but it makes sense to me. And this is often the tragedy that people who have experienced great rejection develop the capacity for great acceptance. You know, what is the unique gift that people with intellectual differences often bring to the table? It’s their common experience of having been often rejected. And again, that’s not a good thing. That’s a horrible thing. But it often has nurtured in them a kind of a tenderness and a gentleness and openness to people that they themselves might not have experienced from others, but that they themselves develop and give back to others. You know, there’s a quality in people, Eric, I would say, you know, in the good wolf side of us, maybe we all have it at some level, that just kind of doesn’t hold our weaknesses against us. I would say if you go to a Special Olympics event, there’s not a single person in the crowd who hasn’t, at some level, discriminated against people with intellectual disability. I mean, literally everybody there has in the back and sometimes very much in the front of their mind thought, these people are too different. I can’t hire them. I don’t want to live with them. I don’t want one of them in my family. I don’t want them in my child’s school. Maybe they haven’t said it, but they felt it. And the Special Olympics athletes know they felt it. And yet when they look across at the person in the stands or the person serving water at the finish line or the person helping to line the field. our athletes just seem to have the capacity to go, I get it, but I’m still okay with you. I’m still gonna give you a hug.
Tim Shriver:
And that’s not restricted to people with intellectual challenges for sure. But that quality, which I’ve learned in many ways from them, I believe to be central to feeding the good wolf. I believe that when the good wolf is fed, that part of us has this big capacity, not to give people a pass when they make mistakes, but to kind of let them know that we get it. To maybe challenge them if they’ve made a mistake to change without hatred, without acrimony, without name calling, without brutality. that a vicious need to humiliate the mistake maker, but instead kind of with a open welcoming sense in which here we are now, this is your chance to grow through what you’ve just done or experienced. You know, we’re really good as a culture at calling people out. We’re not so good at helping people change and finding ways to rehabilitate people. We’re good at throwing people in jail. Yeah, you know, emotional jail, physical jail. We’re not very good. At helping people come back in my view. No, this special olympics community is really good at helping people rehabilitate
Eric Zimmer:
So they would get over an idiotic podcast host comparing octopuses I mean, it’s a good point. Is it? No, but I mean seriously, let’s just say Let’s just say you’d made a big blunder here. You’d said something and you thought, oh my god, I can’t believe I said that. Which, of course, everyone has done that, right? I’ve done it a million times. I’m like, oh no, I can’t believe I just said that. You know, at Special Olympics, everybody’s like, yeah, don’t worry about it.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Shriver:
And you know, there’s a part of us that says, no, no, no, Eric made that terrible analogy to an octopus. He should be shown the door and should be told and you should boycott his boat, you know, whatever, make it up. You know, our athletes are like, yeah, I don’t think that’s going to work.
Tim Shriver:
I’m not showing anybody the door. I’m inviting him to the next race.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, it’s beautiful. And I think you’re talking about how we have a tendency to call people out. I think that there’s a thing that’s been on my mind a lot ever since Me Too really got a lot of energy. But in general, and we talk about cancel culture, and I’ve thought about this since I was 25 years old and, you know, starting to recover from heroin addiction, is like, what does it mean to get a second chance? When do we say, hey, that person learned from that thing and they changed. They, like you said, they’re rehabilitated in some way. And I think that’s a really tricky thing to figure out in individuals in our own lives, but also culturally, it’s very difficult to sort that out. And I think as a culture, we’re starting to reckon with that idea a little bit more.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. I mean, I’m curious because you’ve went through the experiences you’ve gone through and the addiction and the bottoming out, I guess is the right way to put it, but use your own language experiences. Do you think those experiences have made you more capable of seeing through the weaknesses in others or beyond the mistakes that others make? If I made some terrible gaffe on this show, are you, because of your own journey, less likely than you might otherwise have been to say, God, that guy was a disaster. Jesus, get him away from me.
Eric Zimmer:
I think so. You know, we all have natural capacities. And I think one of my natural capacities is to try and see and understand the backstory of anyone and the belief that what people do makes sense to them. So why does that make sense to them? But absolutely, if you screw up as often as I screwed up and, you know, was a homeless criminal, you know, and just an active outright criminal to fund my habit. Yeah, I think there is a certain amount of learning to forgive yourself, which I think translates into learning to forgive others or at least understand others. So yeah, I think, I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t have that experience, because it’s unfathomable. But yes, I think that is an element that is really important is when we can forgive ourselves. I think there’s some synergy and it goes both directions. You know, learning to be kinder to ourselves helps us be kinder to others. But I also think learning to be kinder to others can sometimes translate back to learning to be kinder to ourselves. It’s a bidirectional relationship, I think.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. One of the guests on Need A Lift just recorded a conversation with her yesterday, Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams, you know, who grew up, had a dad as a firefighter, wonderful parent, but also had a caregiver who abused her as a little girl. And she was describing to me the experience of the abuser and of her dad and her dad’s inability to protect her And she described it all as sort of seeing in them a certain helplessness, seeing that they were caught in a web of experiences that they themselves couldn’t get out of at the time. It doesn’t excuse the abuse. The abuse was destructive and painful. But she saw a little bit more of their backstory than just their mistakes. And, you know, there’s this tension, I think, you know, whenever we talk this way, it’s like, wait a second, are you saying that it’s okay to abuse people and not have the Me Too movement? No, I’m not saying that. Are you saying it’s okay to be, you know, in some ways abusive of people with intellectual disabilities or race or culture or gender or whatever? No, it’s not okay. But if we want to heal those wounds, if we want to stop that kind of abuse, how we go about doing it is not necessarily clear, I don’t think. And just saying, hey, Eric, you are terrible, you are a criminal, you are a heroin addict. At the end of the day, that doesn’t bring anybody to recovery.
Eric Zimmer:
It doesn’t, because I think this is a very nuanced area that we don’t really know how to do, because it’s variable on people, is this idea of when you tend to come at someone, right, with criticism, that person is almost always going to get defensive and defend themselves. You see this with alcoholics and addicts all the time. If somebody is just riding them to get into recovery, they’re having to justify to the other person why they do what they do, which is justifying it to themselves in some way. You leave somebody in addiction with a little bit more space, most of those people know there’s a real problem. But they won’t admit it to anybody else if the admittance is, you know, being attacked and shamed and all that. And yet, at the same time, when you have somebody who’s in active addiction like that, you don’t pretend nothing’s happening. You know, I talk to families a lot, and I’ve gone through this with people I love who’ve been in addiction. What’s the right way to relate to somebody who’s in active addiction? You know, the tough love movement, I think, missed a lot of things. It got some things right, but I think it missed some things.
Tim Shriver:
You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who works in the addiction space and she put it this way. She said, you know, whether we’re dealing with addiction or whether we’re just dealing with our brothers and sisters or spouses, whatever, oppositional energy creates oppositional energy.
Eric Zimmer:
That’s a great phrase.
Tim Shriver:
It’s pretty simple. If I say to you, Eric, why the hell are you wearing your hair that way? you’re likely to say well you know because you know and then just become indignant you know like it’s just it’s just oppositional energy creates oppositional energy and you know threatening energy creates defensive energy it’s it’s just almost inevitable you treat someone with contempt you create an almost immediate and almost impulsively irresistible desire for revenge So, you know, if you want to disintermediate the problem that’s causing the addiction or the abuse of women or children or anybody else, it’s unlikely to work if all we do is name and shame and humiliate the person who’s… Again, it’s hard to say this because people that have done abusive and horrible things, you know, the impulse is we got to name and shame and humiliate them because we got to get them to stop. And I get it. I’m just not sure we have a very good track record of having that work.
Eric Zimmer:
You nailed it in a phrase. We’re not good culturally at how to rehabilitate people. And part of the problem is that some people just don’t want to be rehabilitated. If the behavior continues to go on, there’s no real choice.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. You’ve got to step in. You’ve got to create boundaries. You’ve got to put people in jail if they’re violent. You’ve got to put people out of your life if they’re abusive and all those kinds of things. But one guy, I was reading this quote from Pharrell Williams, and I’ve used it a lot to try to teach people around dignity issues. It goes on quite a bit at the beginning, but in the end of the quote, he says, even with people I disagree, I’m wishing them the best. You know, it’s okay to set a boundary to say, hey, look, Eric, you and I have been friends for 20 years, but what you’ve been doing the last five years, I just can’t keep. I’ve got to create a boundary. We’re not going to talk now. I’m kind of done. But to carry that boundary with a feeling that I’m hoping for the best for you on the other side of your life, of our life, of this friendship that I’ve ended, to me, that’s kind of the spiritual magic.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, I love that. I know someone who has a very difficult family relationship and their their mantra has sort of become minimum contact, maximum sympathy, right? Like, like they’ve just decided that like to be around that person is to be abused. So yeah, I need to minimize that. And yet I can try and keep my heart open to them as a person, which is really, really difficult to do.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, I guess my point is like, here we are on this podcast talking about this, that needs to be a national conversation. I think, like when we talk about the good wolf, you know, to the extent we want to feed the good wolf, that wolf within us needs some food around this gift, this quality. How do we set boundaries, stand up for principles, work for justice, by whatever definition we are given to understand justice, how do we do all that? with a lot of empathy and a lot of love. Instead of with a lot of hatred and a lot of revenge, vindictiveness. That’s a good challenge for us all.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. I saw a clip of you talking and you said something about when you fight for your principles, add one additional principle. And that principle is, while you fight for your principles, treat others with dignity. And I love that idea, which is really good. You’re part of something else called the Dignity Index. Can you share a little bit about what that is?
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, the Dignity Index is a little tool we created. My colleagues, Tom Raschert and Tammy Pfeiffer, created this tool that allows us to score the language we use when we characterize people with whom we disagree. So it’s basically if you and I, Eric, let’s say we don’t agree on picking anything, the border. You want to have open borders and I want to build a wall. So we disagree. The dignity index would let us score how I treat you, not how I treat the issue. How I treat you. Do I call you a name? Do I consider you to be evil? Do I characterize you as inferior to me, as stupid, as uninformed, as selfish? Or do I go even farther and say, your position is so dangerous, you don’t actually deserve to live. You need to be… That’s the language of war. Or do I go up the side of dignity and do I say, you know, Eric, you’ve got a position. I got a position that that would be kind of equal time. We each need a chance to, or do I go to the top of the dignity scale, which is an eight, which is you and I don’t agree, but I will never violate your Eric, your dignity under no circumstances, no matter how much we disagree, I will always do my best to make sure you know your dignity is intact around me. So we can score you now. It’s objective. It’s not like a Trump voter scoring Kamala Harris or a Kamala Harris voter scoring a Trump voter or somebody trying to catch Senator this or minister that in a mistake. It’s just an objective score. And it’s pretty reliable. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or left or, you know, rich or poor or black or white or straight or single or whatever. You can score pretty objectively. And what’s been so exciting about it, Eric, is that when people learn it, you can learn it in 10 minutes. It’s not like complicated. It’s a pretty simple scoring tool. when you learn it you start to have what we call the mirror effect you start to see yourself so instead of saying hey look Eric he’s done all this bad language he’s like a three on this or two on that or six on I start to see hey you know what Tim is a two. Like I just used two language when I was talking about my cousin, I can do better than that, you know? And you start to realize that how you treat someone is very central to whether or not your ideas prevail. Because when you treat someone with contempt, you make an enemy for your cause. So if I want to argue to you, we got to build a wall, we got to build a wall, you idiot, I’ve immediately made you into an enemy of the wall. Right. As opposed to winning you over, because I think I’m winning you over by calling you a name. But all you have to do is let people stand back and watch. And they go, of course that’s not going to work.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. There’s the relationship expert John Gottman, who’s been around a long time. And I’m familiar with his work a little bit. I don’t know it a lot. Yeah, I think he had the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse or something, right?
Tim Shriver:
That’s right.
Eric Zimmer:
And one of them was certainly contempt.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, that’s right.
Eric Zimmer:
It destroys.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, it’s cancer to our relationship.
Eric Zimmer:
It totally is.
Tim Shriver:
And it’s cancer to a culture, as it turns out. And sadly, you know, when we look at the data, we are living in a culture that normalizes treating other people with contempt when you disagree with them. Instead of a culture that penalizes people for treating people with contempt when they disagree, we reward them. Yes. So we create this vicious cycle of incentives to be more and more contemptuous. Instead of the alternate cycle, this is why I say the evil wolf or the bad wolf is overfed and the good wolf is emaciated. When I get likes and I get popular and I get more power and attention by being contemptuous, then you’ve created all the wrong incentives for the good wolf.
Eric Zimmer:
It’s really true and it’s really hard to resist that if you’re someone who’s trying to get attention in the public eye a little bit, right? Like, you know, I want people to listen to the podcast. So I’m trying to get attention. And there are ways to do it that would be much more effective knowing what we know about the algorithms. And it’s a difficult temptation to resist.
Tim Shriver:
It is. It is. And that’s why we need subcultures that create a counter incentive. where, and I think this is, you know, what you’re trying to do. You’re creating a listener community. I’m trying to join you, your listener community, invite you to join mine. Small cultures, maybe there’s 5,000, maybe there’s 25,000, maybe there’s 100,000. And they create subcultures of people who go, wait a second, that’s the world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where my ideas are explored, where people I agree with are listen to, where people I disagree with are better understood, where we come to solutions that actually work, that we can implement, that we can solve our problems for ourselves and our families and our community. Like I want to live in that world. I don’t want to live in that other world. So I’m going to opt for Eric’s podcast as part of my community. It’s not going to be the same as the hundred million likes you’d get if you, you know, called someone by the most vicious names possible.
Eric Zimmer:
Compared them to an octopus or something. Yeah.
Tim Shriver:
No, but you know, these things change over time. Human beings, we create cultures. We change them. I think we’re at a point where millions and millions of Americans want to change. They just don’t know how to do it. They don’t know where to look. And thank God some of them are looking to you.
Eric Zimmer:
Now, let’s change direction a little bit. I want to talk about something that you explored a little bit in your memoir. For listeners who don’t know your background, you’re part of the Kennedy Shriver family. You’re part of a very well-known, very successful, very ambitious family. And you talked about, when you were younger, the pressures you felt to actually measure up in that family. And you also talked about how to sort out your accomplishments, you know, feeling like maybe they’re just because you were, you know, related to the Kennedys. Now that, I think your memoir was 2014, which means you probably wrote the book in something like 2012. It’s 12 years later, 13 years later. Where do you stand with that today? Talk to me about, you know, sort of how you worked through that and any evolution that’s happened in you sort of since the memoir.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. Well, thanks for taking a look at it. That book, Fully Alive, was my attempt to do kind of three different things. One is tell the story of the athletes of Special Olympics and the effect they’ve had on changing my life. The other was to tell the story of how my family, largely my mother and her siblings, contributed to creating a movement around unlocking the gifts of people with intellectual disabilities. And the other was to tell my story. I’d say on all three fronts, I feel a good deal of, I guess what I would say is I felt like I got a lot of head nodding when I talked about that book. When I talked to people about the gifts of people with intellectual disabilities and how they in effect taught me the gift of how to be free to be myself, people go, oh, Oh, yeah. I’ve been to a special. I know what you mean. I know what you mean. What I did learn is that’s not a gift you learn as an idea. That’s a gift you practice as an experience, right? So I go back, you know, our local Special Olympics Unified Basketball program starts in two weeks. second week in January. I can’t wait for the Saturdays. The same way if, you know, some people look forward to going to the gym, you know, to practice building up their abs or their shoulders or whatever they’re building up. I look forward to going to the Special Olympics practices to building up my sense of my own freedom and my own dignity, uh, and to learn from those athletes. I’d say with respect to the story of my family, you know, President Kennedy, my uncles, Teddy and Bobby, my mom, my grandparents, I feel proud that at least some people know that a good part of that family history is not just about political success. It’s about the tenderness and heart that was infused in that family system by my Aunt Rosemary. She’s the missing piece in most of the stories that people tell about President Kennedy and about my Uncle Bobby, my Uncle Ted and so on. They tell the story of big legislation and speeches and dramatic events and tragedies. But I’m glad that at least somewhere in the record, Rosemary’s role is remembered, or at least has been shared.
Eric Zimmer:
I loved that part of the book because I actually do know a little bit about Rosemary because President Kennedy was part of a big movement to sort of shut down the big institutions, implement community mental health. We could debate a long time whether that was a good move or a bad move. It was a good move. But anyway, go ahead.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. Okay. Well, mostly, mostly.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. That’s certainly something we could debate. I think in principle, it’s a good move. I think the follow up to it that was supposed to happen did not happen, which created a crisis anyway. My point being, I’ve heard about Rosemary a little bit in that context, but I loved hearing more about her. Maybe you could just share a couple minutes of her story and a little bit about your sort of thesis that the tenderness and the kindness that the Kennedys have came from interacting with her.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, well, you’ve got it. I mean, my mom was one of nine children. My grandparents, my grandfather was very successful in business in the 20s and 30s and 40s and up into the 50s. He’s made a huge fortune by those standards. Those did not, you know. By today’s standards, I suppose it’s only a modest fortune, but still, he made a lot of money. And he and my grandmother are well known for their three sons. Jack, who became the President of the United States, and my uncle Robert Francis Kennedy became Senator from New York and Attorney General, and my uncle Ted Kennedy became Senator from Massachusetts. That’s the story. That’s the narrative. Patriarch, big Irish Catholic family, three gigantically successful boys. And then you have the tragedies of the murders and so on. What’s missing in that story is the birth of Rosemary Kennedy, who unlike all of her eight brothers and sisters had an intellectual disability. And in 1920s America, a wealthy family with a child with intellectual disability sent that child to an institution. That was the end of it. Doctors would have said give up the child, pretend like nothing happened, go home, take care of your other children. This child will be taken care of well somewhere else. Just move on. And they chose to keep her at home. So each of Rosemary’s siblings, including my mom, grew up looking across the table at a sister who had no school to go to, who had no friends, who had no childcare program, who had no doctor. who had no recreation program, who had no summer camp. And my view is that my grandmother and my grandfather, in keeping her at home, taught her siblings that they had to be able to see what the world didn’t see. The world saw Rosemary as a zero. They knew She was beautiful. They knew she was funny. They knew she was gifted. So they learned to see what the world couldn’t see. They learned to see human dignity where the world saw human nothingness. Yeah. So they didn’t talk about it a lot. But my view is that when President Kennedy gets up at his inauguration and says, you know, ask what you can do for your country, it’s because he knew that when people are asked to give of themselves, that they get their best selves in return. He knew it. Like he’d done it his whole life with his own sister. Every time he was asked to take care of Rosemary, to include Rosemary, to take her with you, he knew it was to his benefit that he had this beautiful sister. So at some level, the lessons that my Uncle Bobby taught, that my mom who, you know, started this camp for children with special needs in her own backyard. I mean, 1962, she had like four phone calls in the spring. You know, her brother was the president. She was working on trying to policy change. And the fourth mother called her and said, you know, Mr. Driver, there’s nowhere for me to take my child. None of the camps will take my child. And she said, yes, there is. You bring your child in my house. God damn it, you bring your child here. There is going to be a summer camp. It’s going to be in my backyard. Now, where did she get that resolve, that fire, that, you know, where did that heart fire burn from? It burned from knowing her sister deserved those chances and didn’t get them. And she wasn’t, she couldn’t tolerate having another mother tell her there was nothing so I kind of feel like the hidden Spiritual energy in that family and you know, I’m not saying this to lionize my mom or her brothers and sisters politically I’m saying that you know, a lot of people come up to me still, you know, President Kennedy’s been gone 60 plus years They still come up. Oh, I so admire your uncle. I so I you know, when he was president or your Uncle Bobby, he’s my role model, you know, and I think what they’re telling me is there was something in those boys and in that generation, there was some quality in them. And when I think about what that quality was, it was Rosemary’s heart beating through them.
Eric Zimmer:
It’s a really beautiful idea. And it makes a lot of sense in that we are deeply shaped by the experiences that we have. And we’re deeply shaped by what we’re taught about how to handle those experiences. And it seems pretty clear that that generation of Kennedy’s was taught to treat her with dignity, to treat her with respect. And they also, like you said, they got to see her, who she was.
Tim Shriver:
They got to see her. The world couldn’t see her.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah.
Tim Shriver:
So, you know, if you’re a political leader and you’re trying to say, hey, our country, you know, we’re talking about the cycle of contempt right now. I mean, I want to be able to say, hey, gang, which is what you’re saying. Don’t you see you’ve got a good wolf? Come on. I know you do. You know this because of your own life. You know even in the depths of your own despair there was something in you that was still there that wanted to be healthy and strong and contributing and compassionate and good to yourself. You know it was there. I don’t have to explain it to you. I don’t have to read a book about it. You don’t need a lesson plan to unpack it. You know it. So when you speak to an audience or when you’re speaking to your audience here on this podcast, you’re telling them, I know you’ve got it in you. Come on. I know you’ve got it. Don’t trust me. You’ve got it. And that’s what I think my uncles did. They said to the country at a time, at different times when it needed to hear it. Hey, America, you can do this. We can take on civil rights. We can work to create, extend health care. We can build a more peaceful future. We can volunteer and create connections to people all over the planet in service of peace. I know we can do this. So they knew at some level to trust their gut on these things and not just to trust the polls and not just to trust, you know, what people ask of their government. Most of the political rhetoric we hear nowadays is all about like, is the government delivering for people what they want? It’s a very good question. And if it’s not, it needs to be fixed. But there’s a second question, which is, are people giving to the country what they can? And that’s just as important, but almost nobody asks it. But my uncles and my mom and her siblings, her sisters, I think they did ask it. And I think they asked it because Rosemary told them to.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah.
Tim Shriver:
Even though Rosemary never wrote a book, Rosemary never gave a speech, Rosemary never started a company, Rosemary never excelled in a test, Rosemary never won an honor, ever. Nothing. Her whole life. On those measures of success, she had nothing. But on the most important measure of success, did she inspire the hearts of people that she touched? I think she gets an A plus plus.
Eric Zimmer:
Let’s talk about another idea that runs throughout your work, which is the idea of inclusiveness. Talk to me about what inclusiveness means to you. Why is it so important to you?
Tim Shriver:
Well, I think, you know, the tendency we have as human beings is to sort, you know, like good, bad, friend, foe, you know, tall, short. smart, stupid, all those decisions we make. And, you know, sometimes we’re classifying things that are good. You know, if somebody’s 6’8″, maybe they play center on the basketball team. And if somebody’s 5’8″, maybe they play point guard. It might not be the other way around. So that’s all okay. But what happens, I think, is that we slip from sorting in order to make sense of the world to sorting in order to create hierarchies. in the world. I like you, you’re good, you’re desirable, you not so much. And we start to exclude and we often exclude by when we judge books by their cover. when we judge people by blunt instruments. If you have a low IQ, not desirable, sorry. The Special Olympics movement is in 200 countries. You know, there’s 5 million athletes, volunteers that do 50, 60,000 games a year. Every single one of them is a rebellion against the tyranny and the brutality of exclusion and judgment and contempt. And every one of those events, whether it’s a little swimming race or a bowling competition or a skating competition or a track meet, every one of them is an invitation to say, when in doubt, when you have the option, when you have a choice, try to choose to be inclusive. That’s it. Do your best. Choose to include. That’s the message. The healthcare benefits of joining a community of opening yourself to others, of being a part of civic organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, social cause organizations. The benefits to our health, to our hearts, to our brains, to our souls are enormous when we include. But we have so many messages about who to exclude. You know, don’t hang out with those people. I can’t believe people say this to me. A lot of my friends are Democrats. I spent a lot of time in Republican circles working on this dignity work. You met with them? I’m like, yes, I met with them. I spent 30 years in Special Olympics. What do you think I am? I mean, I got the basic message. The basic message is have your heart open to everyone. So this inclusion message isn’t, you know, I think sometimes it gets distorted as a political agenda or… fight between this group and that group in the special olympics world inclusion is all about relationships it’s all about being open to another person it’s not about saying i’m better than them or they’re worse than me or i need to force you to let me in or i need to force you to get me out or whatever it’s just all about saying you know when i meet eric we come from different places we wear our hair differently we have different stories be inclusive if you can Try. Just try to listen. Try to find the good. Try to see what their gift is. If you find the gift, celebrate the gift. That’s the Special Olympics message. You know, we have a lot of people who can’t use language to express themselves, who can’t necessarily run unassisted. when they’re running a race. But in the Special Olympics movement, those are not the right measures. The measure is meet, train, play, and then find something to celebrate. Because if you have no words, and it took you 45 seconds to run 50 meters, and you worked really hard to do that, and you trained hard, and you have your coach there with you, I’m telling you the crowd will cheer louder than they cheered in the final four. Because they’ll know they’re in the presence of a gift. And it may not be the gift you see when you watch the NBA or when you watch the Olympics, but man, is it a gift. It’s a beautiful gift. So maybe that’s a long answer, Eric. I’m sorry for that. But, you know, choosing to include is good for us as human beings. It’s good for our physical health. It’s good for our emotional health. And it’s certainly good for, you know, I would argue our political health at a time when our country is really hurting. You know, people are really scared of each other and they’re threatened by each other and they’re fearful. We’re fearful of one another. We’re fearful of the future because we’re fearful of one another. We need a little dose of wisdom from the Special Olympics community that just says, hey, you know what? You don’t have to agree on everything, but try to be inclusive. Do the best you can. Try a little harder if you’ve tried already and give it another shot because there’s something good in that person. You just got to go find it.
Eric Zimmer:
I’ve heard you talk about this and you talk about this idea of, you know, every one of us wants to be part of the circle that includes us. C.S. Lewis talked about this, right? Like everybody thinks there’s like an inner ring of if you just got into that, you know, and once you’re in that, you know, it never really ends. But you say that this idea of seeking belonging in that way is backwards. We get the sense of belonging by giving it. And I think you’re talking about seeing with different eyes and seeing that it’s good to be part of a group, even if it doesn’t have the social status that many of us are seeking and chasing.
Tim Shriver:
I mean, status, you know, some of the most insecure people in the world are people who have the highest social status. Why? Because they’re always threatened that they’re going to lose it.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah.
Tim Shriver:
And I mean, I’ve been very privileged and blessed to be able to be around people with enormous political and financial power. But I got to tell you, a lot of times they’re not very happy. And a lot of times they’re quite unsettled and insecure about themselves. And you think, why is this guy, he’s got a billion dollars or why is that person insecure? Just came here in his private jet or why is she insecure? She’s on the cover of magazine and everybody adores her and admires her. And it’s like, those are not the things that deliver. You know, that’s the false programs of happiness, you know? Like, if only I get a lot of approval, I’ll be happy. It doesn’t work. If only I get a lot of control over other people, I’ll be happy. Also doesn’t work. You know, what works for happiness is deep, enduring, honest, authentic relationships. That’s it. I mean, the social science will tell us that, religion tells us that, philosophy tells us that. That’s it. I mean, yeah, we all need our basics, you know, we need food and shelter and things like that. And we need to be in a situation where we’re not at risk of losing food and shelter and these things. But after a fairly basic security around, you know, basic goods, after we’ve achieved a fairly modest level of security, the only thing that contributes beyond that to happiness is relationships. And it’s not like whether you’re the head of the Rotary Club or the Lions Club or the Democratic Party or the church council or whatever it is, it’s not that you’re the head of it, it’s that you’re in it, you know, that you’re feeling and seen and understood by other people. So this is a hard lesson for us to learn, but stature does not convey happiness. It’s kind of a scientific fact.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. Absolutely. We’ve only got a few minutes left here, and there’s two things I would love to get through here. The first is a question that we could spend an hour on, so I recognize I’m setting myself up here. But people talk about how polarized the country is. I love history podcasts. There’s one called The Rest is History. It’s a couple of English guys. It’s great. And they’re doing this long series on 1968, which I’m sure you know, is the year that your uncle was assassinated. Martin Luther King was assassinated. And I’m looking at that, and I’m looking at our current times, and I’m thinking, I keep hearing again and again, this is the worst it’s ever been. I just don’t know if that’s true. What do you think?
Tim Shriver:
Well, I’ll go with John Lewis, uh, who said towards the end of his life, I was at a speech. He must’ve said it a million times. He said, anybody who thinks things haven’t gotten better, hasn’t lived my life.
Tim Shriver:
Yep. So the year I was born in 1959, there were probably 200,000 Americans living in institutions with intellectual disabilities. Today they’re basically are zero. The year I went to school in 1965 or six, there were no children with intellectual disabilities in any school in America, pretty much. except segregated schools. Today, almost every school, public school in America has children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the school. That’s a big win. So I’m just looking at it from the point of view of one group, one population. I think that you could say the same thing about black Americans. Yeah, there’s a long way to go on all these things. We don’t shrink from the severity of the challenge by acknowledging the enormity of the change.
Eric Zimmer:
That’s a beautiful way to say it. Yeah.
Tim Shriver:
And our country, I look around, it’s more inclusive, it’s more diverse, it’s more wealthy, it’s more loving. I mean, like when I was a kid, I would never say I love you to another guy. I barely said I love you to my own mother. And now I hear that from friends all the time. My kids, when their friends come over, they say, oh, I love you. I mean, you can say that’s a small thing. I think it’s a big thing. Yeah. So I think there’s a lot of things. I think the country’s more diverse. There’s more attention to mental health. than there ever was. There’s more support for a whole diverse way of raising families that women and men are finding their ways into. So look, we’ve got big challenges. We’ve got a mental health crisis. We’ve got an income inequality crisis. We still have persistent and almost unforgivable discrimination in our country. We have a long way to go, but I’d say probably there’s a billion people in the world. I’m just going to say this because it’s a crazy number, but I’m guessing there’s a billion people in the world. If tomorrow you told them they could move to the United States, they’d say, yeah, they would. Yeah. Maybe two. Yeah. They’d come here in a heartbeat. Yeah. Why? Because still we do represent an enormously privileged way of living, an enormously privileged type of government. And I got more than my fair share of complaints about our government. I got a lot of complaints about a lot of things. But I don’t, for a minute, let it convince me that we haven’t made progress. And certainly in my lifetime, I’m with John Lewis. We’ve moved forward in many, many ways.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, I totally agree. All right, last thing. You talk about a miracle, and I love this. You said, a miracle is not a manipulation of the laws of nature and history. It can also be a way of describing a dramatic change of mind and heart at the most fundamental levels of reality. Say anything you would like to in closing, but I just think that’s such a beautiful idea.
Tim Shriver:
Well, I hope it speaks for itself because miracles, the premise is unchanged about who causes them. I think miracles are a function of how receptive we are to seeing the infusion of reality with laws of the spirit, the laws of the spirit which transcend and are matched by the laws of nature. They don’t disrupt, in my view, the laws of nature, but they operate alongside them. So when human beings fall in love, it’s a miracle. They don’t think in love, they don’t plan in love, they don’t decide in love, they fall. We fall. And we can fall in love this afternoon with a walk with a child. We can fall in love with a tree that’s changing colors. We can fall in love with the chance to see someone in an intensive care unit being cared for by a nurse with tenderness that’s unbounded by professional training or compensation or rules. We can fall in love with when the heart overtakes us and reminds us that we’re citizens of yet another dimension of reality. I guess that’s the way I’d put it. We’re all destined for something beautiful. And we come from something beautiful and a miracle is when we see it. And it’s there all the time. I mean, it’s just there all the time.
Eric Zimmer:
Well, that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Tim, I’ve really enjoyed this. This has been great. I wish we had two more hours to go.
Tim Shriver:
Thank you so much for thinking and working and playing around with some of the ideas that have been living in my head for a long time. And I’m grateful for the work you do and hope that our efforts at Need A Lift kind of create another kind of pod sister or pod brother of yours that will complement what you’re doing and hopefully add the voices of people on Need A Lift contributing to feeding the good wolf. Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you.
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