Greg McKeown:
Before we get into today’s episode, let me just say this. I am politically independent, and on this podcast, I have invited people from across the political spectrum. And in all cases I have tried, perhaps not always successfully, to really listen, to really understand, and to balance challenging people and asking them what I hope are incisive questions with respect for the individual because we cannot bridge these times of polarization by starting with the things we most disagree about. We have to engage with people as if we want to have an ongoing conversation, an ongoing relationship, because it’s only that approach that can help us to solve any problems at all.
I was just speaking with one of the world’s leading authorities on negotiation, and he made this point that a relationship, by definition, is someone with whom you can solve problems. I hope through my writing, through my speaking, and, of course, through this podcast, to be a part of the solution, not the problem. To listen to people from all walks of life, to be able to see the good in them, and to learn from them, even if there are things with which I disagree. Or, of course, as you’re listening, that you may disagree with. It’s my view that we face a serious understanding paradox in our times, that as information has exploded, understanding has imploded, and that’s affecting everything around us. So whether I’m interviewing somebody from the left, from the right, from one administration or another, what I’m going for is understanding.
And that is what I’m asking from you as well. To remember that there is a space between agreeing and disagreeing. And in that space, there is understanding. Understanding doesn’t mean we agree. And realizing that there is space for that is among the more game-changing things in my whole life. To listen, to understand, to be able to appreciate, to have, in some ways, a holy envy that even if we don’t see things a certain way, we can see why it might be appealing to somebody else.
And with that, let’s move on to today’s episode.
Welcome, everybody. Before we get to the podcast itself, a reminder to sign up for the 1-Minute Wednesday newsletter. You’ll be joining more than 175,000 people. You can sign up for it by just going to gregmckeown.com/1MW. And every week, you will get 1 minute, or something close to it, of the best thinking to be able to help you design a life that really matters and to make that as effortless and easy as possible. So go to gregmckeown.com/on1MW.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how a single person can make a disproportionate difference in the world. And today I have someone on the podcast who I believe has done that, and he’s been in a family of people who have done that too. My guest is Tim Shriver.
Tim is a proud member of the Kennedy family through his mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a younger sister of President John F. Kennedy.
His uncles are John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Edward Kennedy. His siblings are Bobby, Mark, Anthony, and Maria Shriver, the former first lady of California and a previous guest on this podcast, I might add. He’s cousins to Bobby Kennedy Jr., who recently ran as president as a Democrat, then an independent before throwing his support behind the former president Donald Trump in an effort to build. And I’m just not making a political point, just their own view.
His father started the Peace Corps. His mother started the Special Olympics. But back to Tim. He has served as the chairman of the Special Olympics. He’s worked with the Special Olympics for decades. He’s dedicated his life to advocating for the world’s most forgotten minorities, people with intellectual disabilities. With over 6 million athletes across more than 200 countries, the Special Olympics under his leadership has not only championed the joy of sport but has also offered lessons in what it means to be fully human.
Beyond his work with Special Olympics, Tim is a leading advocate for social-emotional learning in education, specifically, co-founding and chairing the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. He continues to challenge the way we think about education and empathy as tools for societal change. He holds degrees from Yale University, Catholic University, and a doctorate in education from the University of Connecticut. He’s a film producer, New York Times bestselling author, and a relentless champion for a more empathetic world.
Welcome to the podcast, Tim.
Tim Shriver:
Thank you so much, Greg. You’ve shared a lot, and your listeners who are still here. Thank you for all listening.
Greg McKeown:
I want to start on a little bit of a sad note, really, but an interesting one. In 2020, your cousin, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, tragically died with her son in a canoeing accident. And at the time, you said, we were telling stories yesterday about how she could navigate tensions in our family in a way that no one before and no one since has been able to do.
Tim Shriver:
You know, just a horrible, horrible… it was and continues to be a horrible loss. Maeve and her little boy Gideon both losing their lives in a terrible accident on Chesapeake Bay. Her husband, Dave is doing great with their other kids, and her mom, Kathleen, my cousin, is doing her best, but she’s just an enormous loss. Maeve had a spark of goodness that allowed her, I think, to speak truthfully to people in a way that didn’t threaten them.
Now, there are people who can come up to us, Greg, and say, “Tim, I want you to know, as much as I love and care about you, I think you’re making a mistake here on the way you’re handling this.” And there are people who can do that, and you go, “Thank God you told me.” But most people, when they come up to us, they come up to us and say, “You know, by the way, pal,” and, you know, your defenses are up.
Maeve had this capacity. She was a scholar, she was an activist, but she had a certain quality of humanity that made it possible for her to bridge. We’re a big family now, 100 people or more. I don’t know. I lose track of how many, what we call the fourth generation of our family exist, even. But she just had a beautiful capacity to follow her own conviction but be able to meet each of us where we are in a way that allowed her a certain license to help us all. But she was still almost kind of like a mentor in that regard.
Greg McKeown:
This idea that she could just come up and really both affirm you and then also give you feedback—that she somehow was able to speak the truth is a very particular skill. You sort of implied there that she’d done that with you before. Is that right? I mean, is it something she would speak directly to you about?
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. I mean, the last time I saw Maeve, she was at our house for an event, a social event. It was an event for a woman in my family who, at the time, was running for political office, and all the speakers were men. And she just said, “You got to remember sometimes that optics matter, Tim. And what kind of family does it look like if we have a woman running for political office and the only people talking are men?” And she was right. She was right.
The person running, my cousin Amy, wasn’t there. So it wasn’t as though she didn’t get a chance to speak, but her husband spoke, and then I spoke, and then someone else spoke, and we just missed the point. We’d missed the moment. But as soon as she said it, I was like, “You’re absolutely right.” She didn’t say it in a way that made me feel like, how dare she? Or, after all, this is my house, and what am I? I’m trying the best I can to… all the things you could imagine becoming defensive over didn’t happen because of her quality.
And I think it’s the larger question, which you’ve, I think, captured so often on this podcast, which I also, you know, I’m trying to catch up to you a little bit, starting my own podcast called Need a Lift? I’m looking for people who know how to do this. I almost would think of it almost like cracking the code of how to build a spiritually healthy life, which allows you to connect with people at a deep level without being excessively deep, you know, allows you to talk to people about what matters most without belaboring these issues, to inspire you to build civic connection with others without overplaying your own role. These are great qualities that are so desperately needed.
And, you know, I’m glad you reminded me of Maeve. I hadn’t thought of her in the context of our conversation today, but it’s been a poignant invitation to reconnect with the gifts she so beautifully brought to life.
Greg McKeown:
It’s a “Maeve effect,” we might say. You’re wanting, with the new podcast and just in other ways in your own life, to use your voice in such a way that, what would you say? It’s not to impress but to bless. That’s a phrase, right? That’s a saying.
Tim Shriver:
That’s a good one.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. But I think there’s something else too, of you wanting to not sow greater division, to find those things that are in common. So many things in common to find.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I mean, it’s an interesting question of how best to do that because one way is to frame it like, “Oh, we need to just be centrist in our messages about things.” And then another is making it so that people can talk again, even if they don’t see it from the same place, you know, whatever that center might be, so that people can just really talk and have it out and work through things so that you get real unity, not just in the name of keeping the peace.
Tim Shriver:
Well, I think it’s a very important conversation. First of all, I think the wrong strategy, if I can be blunt, is to say, “Everybody move to the center.” That’s a way of sort of saying like, passion doesn’t matter, principle doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is compromise or diluting the things you care about. That’s wrong. That’s just not a healthy way of living. You wouldn’t ever say to your children, “Hey, by the way, don’t have any passions; just be mild and moderate about everything.” No, you don’t want to tell that to your kids. You don’t want to tell that to people you care about. You want to tell people to be passionate about the things that matter and to go live your life with a conviction that you can make a difference. That’s the only way you make a difference. That would be my message.
The way we’ve thought about it, Greg, is don’t abandon your principles, but add one principle: treat other people with dignity. Even in the face of the most catastrophic divisions, we can treat each other with dignity. Even a person who has committed a horrible crime can be incarcerated but can be treated with dignity in a jail. Even people in a post-war environment where tens of thousands, if not millions, of people have lost their lives, people can treat each other with dignity, particularly the victor.
We saw that in World War II. Many people point to the rebuilding of Germany. The United States and the Allied powers defeated the German government but didn’t visit hatred upon the German people. They tried to treat them with dignity, tried to help rebuild their country, and as a result, we have, in part, attributable to the Marshall Plan and other rebuilding efforts after World War II, three-quarters of a century of relative peace in Europe, economic stability, and military stability, which was unthought of for the previous three or four hundred years.
Greg McKeown:
So treating people with dignity doesn’t mean you don’t believe strongly. It just means that you also see, at the deepest level, that the other person also has dignity. This is the best way to actually get people to come to your opinion because if you treat people with contempt, you create an automatic revenge response. If I start insulting you, almost involuntarily, you want to insult me back, and vice versa.
You can try to moderate that response, but you’re going to feel it if I start calling you names and attacking your identity, and claiming that you’ve got bad values. Contempt is an almost surefire strategy for not winning people to your side, whereas dignity is the opposite. So that’s our conviction.
Greg McKeown:
And when you say “our conviction,” who’s the “our” in that?
Tim Shriver:
Well, there’s a lot of people. For instance, the people I’m having on the podcast are all people who, I would say, remind me of my own childhood. They’re all people who live in the “no hate zone.” They live with conviction. Killian Noe lives with conviction about supporting people who are recovering from addiction and giving them jobs. Loretta Claiborne lives with conviction about… she’s a Special Olympics athlete… about serving other people, about caring for those who are forgotten.
Scarlett Lewis, who lost her son to gun violence, lives with conviction about teaching children how to choose love. They’re dedicated people, but they don’t hate anybody.
Greg McKeown:
The “no hate zone” is a pretty good name for a podcast if you’re still considering, you know, a title.
Tim Shriver:
You know a lot more about this than I do, so I’ll take that seriously.
Greg McKeown:
I want to tap into something that you’re saying, and I’m not trying to draw you into the politics of this. There’s a deeper principle.
Tim Shriver:
I’m okay with that.
Greg McKeown:
So, on July 20, there was a hearing in Congress about the weaponization of the federal government. Bobby Kennedy Jr., so your cousin, was asked to testify. So, first of all, just as a context setting, did you watch it? Have you seen the hearing?
Tim Shriver:
I did not watch it.
Greg McKeown:
So, it was, you know, very fierce interactions and engagement and so on. But at one point, Bobby said the following. I want to read it to you. He said, “I want to say something. I think it’s important. It’s about the need to defeat this toxic polarization that is destroying our country today. How do we deal with that? This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than at any time since the American Civil War. How do we deal with that? Every Democrat on the committee believes that we need to end the polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I’m telling you, you cannot. That only aggravates and amplifies the problem. We need to start being kind to each other. We need to start being respectful to each other. We need to start restoring the comity to this chamber and to the rest of America. But it has to start here.”
What’s your reaction to that when you hear it?
Tim Shriver:
Well, on the dignity index, which is our scale for scoring speech, the lowest score on the dignity index would be a one, which would be someone saying, “You don’t deserve to live. You’re not human.” And about a four would be, “Well, I’m just better than you.” A five would be like, “Well, we each deserve equal time. We both do have an opinion.” And you move up to a seven or an eight. Eight is the highest, which is, “I treat you with dignity no matter what.”
I would score from just listening to you. I would score Bobby’s comments there—most of that—I would score either a six or a seven, which is very high. And I applaud those comments. I’m not sure how I would score the selection you just gave about the Democrats. I would have to get the language exactly. If, for instance, he were to have said, which I gather he didn’t, “Democrats want to censor me, and you’re wrong,” I would score that a four or even a three because that’s treating a group of people, in that case, not just an individual, as being bad.
If he were to say, “Democrats believe in using public health justifications or other justifications for trying to reduce misinformation. And I don’t agree with that,” I would call that a five or even a six.
So how you characterize people matters here. I think Bobby has, at times from his campaign, challenged us to overcome what I’d call the “contempt industrial complex.” I think at other times, he hasn’t scored as well.
So there are no saints, and there’s no perfection, I should say, in this work—there’s only a better ratio. The ratio is out of whack now; you know, the Gottmans have studied marriages for 40 years, right? And they say when the ratio of contempt to respect or dignity is at five to one, the marriage is over.
Greg McKeown:
Right?
Tim Shriver:
So, no one is perfect in a marriage, but you’ve got to get the ratio right. Or in a romantic relationship or in a committed relationship.
Greg McKeown:
Or at least not get it so badly wrong.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, right. And as a culture, we’re bordering on a five to one or even worse ratio at times from our leaders. I mean, this is not playground bullies that are doing this. This is not thugs who are, you know, operating in criminal gangs that are doing this. It’s our leaders who are treating each other with contempt at that kind of ratio. And that’s dangerous.
Greg McKeown:
Why? Why is that happening? Assuming that you believe that that is happening at a greater rate now than it was five years ago, 20 years ago, and so on?
Tim Shriver:
I think we’re in a period of enormous change. Change is disruptive. It’s scary. The changes in technology, the changes in the global relationships we have, changes in the environment—all these things are charging at us all the time. And change at that level or pace is scary. The things that would have mediated and supported us in these change processes—faith-based institutions, civic organizations, community-based organizations, families—are all weak or weakened in the last 30 or 40 years for reasons unrelated to the pace of change, in my view.
But then you’ve got a whole new thing, which is the algorithm. Partisan media and politics have entered into a kind of unholy alliance that rewards contemptuous behavior. So, you know, we’ve got to break that. That’s a cultural question. It’s inevitable that we’ve got to do something about the environment. It’s inevitable that we’re going to have technology in our lives. We’ve got to figure out how to manage it. But culture is ours to make. And if we continue to reward with our clicks, with our views, with our votes, with our money, if we continue to reward contemptuous behavior, we will get something very close to what my cousin Bobby described, which is the dangerous precipice of civil war.
Greg McKeown:
And there’s something in what you’re saying about contemptuous incentives that I think is really interesting and important—and particularly concerning. Somebody was just sharing with me the point that if you gerrymander the election areas in such a way that you increase the likelihood of a particular area being red or blue, so the voting lines… what you think you’re doing in the short term is increasing the chance of winning. But in the long term, what you’re doing is making it so that there’s less incentive to compromise once you’re elected. In fact, you’re incentivizing exactly the opposite, which is to speak and act and vote in such a way that it produces red meat for that primary constituency. Because areas are gerrymandered, then it’s the primary in your area that’s the real election. And so there’s no moment at which you have to come back to the center or try and work out how to collaborate with other people.
I thought that this was such an insightful observation because it’s very easy to have invisible systems affect people’s behavior, and then we only look at the behavior.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, there are structural changes. Gerrymandering is one. Different forms of voting— a lot of people like ranked choice voting as a way of disintermediating the polarized first or second win-lose kind of mentality that people bring to the polls. People talk about the role of money, in particular, dark money in politics—the capacity of large moneyed interests to push very extreme or very polarizing messages.
These are all structural issues that do have a major role in my view, there’s no question. I like to, maybe because of the way I was raised, I like to ask the question, what can I do about it?
Greg McKeown:
That’s the question I was going to ask.
Tim Shriver:
The question is, we should all make a difference, and we can all try. Then the question is, what difference can I make? What difference, Greg, can you make? We might not be able to change the Supreme Court ruling on money, or we might not be able to change the way in which voting districts are being drawn in North Carolina or Pennsylvania or Georgia or wherever it is—California, New York, doesn’t matter.
But we can disintermediate that. We can disincentivize the people who are appealing to us with hatred. And we can say, you get emails if you’re a normal human being, you get emails pitching you stuff, and most of us get emails pitching us political stuff. And most of those emails are full of hatred and contempt for the other side. And what I say to people is, write back and say, “I like the candidate, but I’m not giving to this because I don’t give to hatred and contempt.”
If we got even 50 people to do that for one political candidate, I’m telling you, there’s a consultant in the back room who says, “What the hell’s going on here? We’ve got to change this.” You can tune out partisan media; both sides can do this. And people say, “Well, wait a second, my side isn’t full of contempt.” Yes, they are. Call out your own side. This is the most important message. Don’t call out the other side; call out your own side.
That’s when people will start to see this isn’t working anymore. We’ve got to tune out the contempt. We’ve got to rebuild, in a way, our own algorithms. Back in the prehistoric days, when people were trying to manage media, what did we have? We had a rating system for films. This was a G, and this was a PG, and we still have this as an R. We need to make algorithmic support systems so that I can create my own algorithmic lens and block dehumanizing contempt.
So we’re working on that with AI folks. But in the meantime, everyone can make their own stand for dignity. And I think we can remind people that in politics, this isn’t working. You know, remind people that politicians who use contempt to win—okay, maybe they use contempt to win, and let’s acknowledge that happens—but when they do that, they’ve automatically incentivized the other side to seek revenge. And so they don’t govern well.
And if they win and they don’t govern well, maybe they don’t care, but maybe they do care that they win and they don’t govern well, and they alienate and damage the lives and hopes and dreams of young people who are checking out more and more and not believing in the future because of all that they see and watch from their leaders. And maybe they would care that 20 or 30% of Americans now are ending relationships in their own families, that they’re tearing families apart.
At what point does someone say, “That’s not a price I’m willing to pay in order to win my seat”? I can’t govern, I’m splitting families, I’m disillusioning children, and I’m damaging democracy. That’s too high a price to pay in order to get a seat in Congress or a seat in the state legislature or the mayor’s office or the governor’s office, or the office of the president itself.
So we’ve got to tell people that’s not a price I’m willing to pay. I’m not going to give to you if you’re paying that price. To me, that’s a more important issue, I dare say, than many very important issues—education, environment, energy, the border, taxes—these are big, important issues I’ve cared about my whole life. But this one now, to me, is more important.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I mean, I’m with you on this because, as far as I can see, as our ability to understand each other approaches zero, so does our ability to make any progress at all. In fact, it’s worse than that—that’s just stalemate. And we’ve seen that for quite a while in a lot of ways in Washington. But of course, it’s worse than that because as understanding turns into, we might say, “anti-understanding,” right—not just misunderstanding, but a deliberate, strategic decision to not understand each other—then this can spin down incredibly quickly. Contention begets contention.
There’s a question that I want to come back to from earlier in the conversation, and then I want to pick up back where we are right now. You said something like, over the last few decades, our faith institutions, our families, and you listed a few other things, have deteriorated in strength—they’re not healthy. And you said for certain reasons, but then you didn’t describe what those reasons were. I’m curious about your theory of why these institutions have become weakened over the last few decades.
Tim Shriver:
Well, I think the simple answer is the evisceration of trust in everything. It’s not just those institutions—trust in everything is down. And the evisceration of trust is, in part, things like structural things you mentioned, like things like gerrymandering or in the media, the absence of the fairness doctrine, where media outlets had to provide equal time for competing positions, and structural things like that.
But in general, this evisceration of trust has become a strategy for gaining power and money and position for a lot of people. When I started on this phase of my career—which, I mean, I suppose my career should be kind of over at my age—but nonetheless, here I am launching a new initiative. I was talking to a guy at The Washington Post, of all places, and he said, “Good luck with what you’re doing. You’re up against a two-trillion-dollar business.”
And I was like, “Well, at this point, we’ve raised a couple hundred thousand dollars. Don’t we have a shot?” And, you know, he’s right. So, faith-based institutions have their own story. I think, in many cases, they have resisted attempts to respond to the changes. Like, I could do a whole long discussion about this, but I think people still want faith, and they still want to find their spirits, but they don’t trust the institutions that they think are selling them moralizing. Too often, they think they’re selling the magic, and they don’t buy it.
They think faith-based institutions are mean—young people. So they don’t want that. That’s not their version of what they think God, or their higher power, or the spirit, or providence, or whatever word they use… it doesn’t resonate with them. And I don’t think that’s what faith-based institutions should be, but I think too often they’ve allowed themselves to be cornered as those kinds of places that are just oppositional—like, we’re here, and we’re against them, we’re against those people, those people are bad. Well, that’s a narrow view of faith. And I think more and more people don’t want that view of faith.
So I think, look, we’re up against a very, very difficult time with respect to holding on to trusting each other. Isn’t that what a podcast is? Your listeners come to trust that you will give them something that they can rely on and understand and that matters to them. So, you’re an expert at building trust with your listeners, and many people are good at it in small pieces. What we have to be able to do more and more is figure out how to build that trust across the divisions. We have to find a way to belong. Yes, I want to belong to Greg—I love what he said—but I’m also not going to hate people who have the opposite message.
Greg McKeown:
I’m going to jump from there back to where we were in the conversation, because what you were pushing us to, you said, because of the way I was raised, “What can I do about it?” And there are two simultaneous questions here. One is, quite rightly, “What can I do? What can I influence? What can I control?” That seems like a really important thing because to focus on what you can’t control is disempowering and pointless.
But the question I have for you is, is there an overlap between what you and I can do and what it will take to bring this in from the brink? That’s the leverage point I would love to uncover.
Tim Shriver:
I don’t know the answer. I don’t think anyone does. I think we have to, in the overused jargon of organizations, we have to have a “grass-tops” strategy and a “grassroots” strategy. I believe that the problem, if I can put it this way, if I could use a medical analogy, I think what’s putting the poison in the system is a top-down system. It’s the two-trillion-dollar business, honestly, that’s pumping the toxin of contempt into the culture from the grassroots up.
We have to from the grass roots up, we have to stop buying it. So we can organize, as we’re doing in our work, students for dignity on college campuses, school districts that are teaching dignity at K-12 schools, businesses that are trying to bring dignity—we call it “dignity works”—bring dignity to the workplace, create this groundswell of demand and use that to create an accountability structure. Politicians—not always, but often—are reactive institutions, reactive people. They look for what people want, and then they try to give it to them.
And if people start asking their political leaders—and I mean your mayor, your first select person, your county commissioner, yes, your state legislature, maybe even your governor, and then maybe your United States senator and your president—if we start asking them and saying, “We want to vote for the person who cares about the institutions and our young people and our families and is willing to stop using contempt in order to lead,” then the political figures would go, “Hey, there’s something here. Maybe we should pay attention.”
Greg McKeown:
Who do you think was the last president who didn’t use contempt?
Tim Shriver:
Well, we don’t, you know, in this dignity work, we don’t judge people. I would say, look, people talk about Barack Obama’s 2004 convention speech—it was textbook dignity. Textbook. And arguably, in my view, at least, it played a major role in getting him elected president of the United States. So when people say it doesn’t work—that’s not true. It does work.
Greg McKeown:
And what I want to clarify there is that when you say you don’t use it to judge a person, like in totality, you’re saying that’s not what you’re focused on. But you can look at the speech itself.
Tim Shriver:
That’s right. And I can look at President Trump’s opening to his convention speech, where he says, “We rise together or we fall apart.” And that’s high-level dignity. And I can look at Vice President Harris’s convention speech and see the same kind of language. Before the convention speech and since it, where she says the same thing. I can find many examples of enormous contempt in both, I’m sorry to say, in both Vice President Harris and President Trump also.
And that’s where I think their politicians get kind of advised and feel they have to attack the other side and at the same time advocate for their own position. But I think what we’re realizing is even when we look at this last debate that took place a little while ago, what we saw is everybody thinking, or at least many people saying, that Vice President Harris won the debate, but not much movement in swing voters.
And the point here is that they’re waiting for a different message. They’re not looking for winners and losers—they’re looking for, you know, who’s going to lead them to want to check out more and disengage more, or who’s going to bring them back? And to bring people back, I believe all the data suggests you’ve got to treat the other side. It’s not how you treat your side—it’s how you treat the other side that will bring them back.
Don’t just talk about, like we say, don’t talk about the other side—talk to them.
Greg McKeown:
For everybody listening, what is one thing that stood out to you? You know, what’s a key thought that has penetrated your mind, your heart? Maybe it was something Tim said, maybe it was not something that we’ve even talked about, but you have felt it. What is one thing you can do immediately differently because of it that’s in your sphere of influence? And who is somebody you can share this conversation with now that this conversation has come to an end? Thank you. Thank you for listening.
