A Bit of Optimism - Learning to Love with Tim Shriver

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Most people know him as a disability rights activist, chairman of Special Olympics or for his book The Call to Unite. But when we talked, our conversation took a turn. We ended up talking about what it means to learn to love. And it was wonderful. This is ... A Bit of Optimism.  If you want to know more about Tim and his work, check out :Timothyshriver.comwww.specialolympics.orgwww.amazon.com/Call-Unite-Voices-Hope-Awakening/dp/B08M8DY4XC 

A lot of people know Tim Shriver as a disability rights activist, the chairman of the Special Olympics, and the author of The Call to Unite. I know Tim as a brand new grandfather. We got together and talked about what it's like to see his daughter, a first-time mother, learn what it means to love and understand what it means to feel loved. This is a bit of optimism. Hey, Tim, good to see you. Nice to see you, Simon. Congratulations on Grandpahood 3. Grandpahood times 3. People bore one another with grandparent stories,

and they mostly bore people who don't have grandchildren with how wonderful it is. So I'll try not to do that. But suffice to say, it is indeed a miracle and wonderful, and I'm very grateful. a miracle and wonderful. And I'm very grateful. When I became an uncle, I remember taking my sister aside and saying, I know you're going to be a good mother. And I just want you to know that I will undo all of the great parenting that you will do. And for the rest of your life, I want you to just get used to these words, but Uncle Simon said we could. Well, you have a little bit of a hint of what it's like to be a grandfather already,

because I have the same experience. I looked at my daughter just the other day looking at her. I didn't even have to say it to her. She's just obviously going to be such a spectacular mother, and I just can't wait to steal the kid and go fishing and get in trouble and fall in the rocks and do everything wrong. It's an expression of my natural instinct, you know, which is much more much more about mischief and fun and delight than it is about conformity. And therein lies the problem or the opportunity. It's actually an interesting question,

right? Do you have to be on your best behavior when you're the parent and go against your natural question, right? Do you have to be on your best behavior when you're the parent and go against your natural inclinations to ruin another human being? Whereas when you're a grandparent, you can be your true self. Hopefully, by the time you get to be a grandparent, your true self is a better self than the one you were when you were 25 or 30, which is when I started having children confused, messed up, immature, and so on. So hopefully my true self is a little bit more polished. But I asked my daughter, what do you want to learn in the early part of being a mom? And you know what her answer was? Her answer was, I want to learn what it takes to make him feel like he's completely loved.

Wow. I think we all kind of hunt around for trying to figure out how to communicate to one another what it would feel like to be completely loved. But sometimes we kind of try to force ourselves to behave a certain way, which is, of course, not what children need. So anyway, I think you're right. When we get a little older and we have a little less responsibility, we can be a little more free. But in the end, I'm guessing that's a pretty good source of love too. Hold on. What she said is more profound than I think she even realizes, or maybe she does realize. I want to learn whatever it takes to make him feel completely loved. And we're living in a world right now where we're trying to learn what it takes for me to feel completely loved. And I think we've got it backwards. Like we're all in pursuit of finding love rather than in

pursuit of how to make others feel loved. You're right, Simon. You picked up a very powerful dimension of both what a wonderful mother my daughter Rose is going to be, but also how wise she's become at a relatively young age. I completely agree with you. I feel like we've become so obsessed with self-help and self-improvement and self-everything, as though we could find fulfillment by ourselves. It's taken us down a very dangerous path. I look, for instance, at the data on loneliness. You know, I think this is some of the scariest data in our culture. You know, there's a lot of bad news out there. This is one piece of it. But to me,

it's a really important and very inspirational piece. You know, almost half of Americans feel significant or serious loneliness. Wow. And this is pre-COVID? This is pre-COVID, 46% in the data. Wow. That's a stunning number. So if you go into a restaurant and look around you, half of the people you're looking at are lonely and chronically lonely. We've created such a gap between us that the spirit among us is so weakened that it doesn't hold us. It doesn't give people the sense in which they're not alone. To say to someone you're not alone is such a powerful and loving thing to say, as long as you can convince people that it's true. Yeah. Do you have comparative data of

how it was in previous decades? I don't, you know, we know that, you know, you can you can use proximate figures on this, for instance, indicators on anxiety we have in young people that have gotten progressively worse. The levels, for instance, UCLA does a fantastic annual study of college freshmen, the levels of anxiety in that group are over 50%. These are kids, theoretically, who've had the breaks. They're in college. They're in an institution of higher education. Over 50% of them report severe to clinical levels of anxiety. And that number has gone up almost every year for the last, I think they've done the study for about 20 years. These are indications of,

if you ask me, a crisis of us. It's not a crisis of me. We see all the political outcomes. We see the division, the anger, the hostility, the alternate truth worlds. But to me, that's the story of a longer cycle of breaking down trust and common meaning. That's a really interesting little insight there, which is the knee-jerk reaction is, of course we see rising rates of anxiety because look at the world we're living in with division, et cetera. What you're proposing, which I think is very interesting, is that division in many cases is symptomatic.

We see the division because, not I feel anxiety because of the division, but rather division anxiety because the division but rather division exists because we're also looking only at ourselves as you said the steady drumbeat of becoming more and more and more self-interested and the result is what we're you know in part some of the world we're living in today you know i've been asking myself the question what are the building blocks of trust you could ask this about a relationship, a romantic relationship, a familial relationship, a professional one. If you make your list of what it takes to trust someone else, most of those qualities are in short supply. A sense of benevolence, for instance, the researchers in business say that you trust a brand when you believe the brand has your best interests at heart.

How many people, how many relationships do we have with institutions where we actually believe the institution has our best interests at heart? A second building block is competence. Is the institution or the other person competent to care for my interest? A third building block is the capacity to overcome conflict. Trust comes when after a conflict, there's forgiveness and healing. Where is the forgiveness and healing in our culture? It's very difficult to find and very difficult to practice. So I think when you break down these practices that lead to trust, guess what you have? You have division in politics. You have people living in alternate worlds. Why? We don't trust each other. We don't live in the same world. And what happens to me? I'm all alone.

This goes back to your discussion with your daughter, which is, I want to learn, the word learn, what it takes to make my son feel completely loved. And that education includes benevolence, competence, and to learn those skills. And once again, it's not, what have you done for me lately, but what have I done for you lately? And to learn arguably, maybe the most difficult one, sometimes I think the one that's most missing in our culture is the capacity to authentically say you're sorry and actually also to be forgiven. Like, you know, a lot of us, we've watched our friends and our fellow citizens have to apologize for making horrific mistakes. And we've watched the art or the practice of the apology change. What do you mean by that? Well, I think, you know, a lot of times we, maybe even a few years ago, when a public figure apologized, they would apologize by saying something like this. I'm sorry you felt offended. Right. Which is, of course, no apology at all.

Of course. It's a blame game, right? Now we see people more honestly, I hope, saying I've made a mistake. I ask your forgiveness. Yeah. That's a big shift in the culture. I think an important one. It has come as a result of us feeling like when trust is broken, I need a real apology. I don't need some fake BS, but you also got to forgive. Exactly. Where's the forgiving? The other side of the apology is the other person has to say, I hear you. You're okay. We're back. And that's where we seem to be struggling quite a lot. I agreed. And that goes back to that service component, right? Which is, I expect the apology for you, but I have no responsibility in forgiving you. And that's just a public flogging, where the apology is simply the modern-day equivalent of putting someone in the stocks. And weaponizing his or her own mistake as a way of condemning him or her further and shaming him or her further, which of course leads to retrenchment, anger, hostility, and then division.

I can't help it because it keeps going through my head as we keep talking to quote your uncle and to adjust for the days, which is to ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, which is ask not what someone else can do for you, but what can you do for someone else? And we have to remember the times in which he said that, which is the height of the Cold War, the very real threat of nuclear war, and we lived with existential crisis. The question is, an existential crisis is a wonderful way for people to come together. And we see this after disasters, whether it's a tornado or a hurricane or an earthquake or something, where it doesn't matter what the politics are, we come together, we help each other. And the question is, is there an existential crisis that affects the entire nation that can unite us? And I don't think we perceive that. And so we start to view each other as the enemy. I think that's right. I mean, you know,

there are external events, as you point out, that can help. The age-old lesson here would be find a common enemy and you can find common purpose. That works okay. It's pretty short-lived. If you find a common enemy, you can usually marshal your forces. The problem is that creates belonging by exclusion and by demonization of some other. And the world is just too gosh darn small nowadays to allow for the only way for creating common purpose to require a common enemy. And we see this. The political parties are pretty good at this now. I don't know if you're on any mailing list, Simon, but give five bucks to a Republican and give five bucks to a Democrat, any one of them running for office.

And you'll be on five or 10 mailing lists of candidates running for office. And if you read what they say, it's as though both sides are being written by the same writer. You should be terrified of this other group. They're after you. They want to change your way of life. They are the bad people. We have to destroy them. If you don't give now, click here in order to protect the country you love. They both say the same thing. It is all belonging by demonization, belonging by othering. Was politics always like that? Maybe it was. Maybe it was.

And maybe religions have always been like that. Maybe countries have always been like that. But here's the thing. Even if it was always like that, it doesn't work anymore. We have to do what I think of as create common purpose without a common enemy. I've thought about this a lot, right? I know. I know you have. That's why I want to hear what you have to thought about this a lot, right? I know. I know you have. That's why I want to hear what you have to say about it. Well,

my conclusions are uncomfortable. One of the things that helped America unite was the Soviet Union, and it lasted for a long time. When the Soviet Union fell out of the game, and we falsely believed that we had, quote unquote, won the Cold War, we didn't. They dropped out because they ran out of the will and resources to play. It's like when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything. Same idea. All of a sudden, we no longer had an external existential threat. To your point, it's much easier to find belonging by pointing at what we don't agree with than trying to talk about what we do agree with.

Because vision is ethereal, right? It lives in, it literally lives in our imaginations. I have a dream, that's in our imaginations, right? And we strive towards that vision. That's the whole point of vision. But the thing about an enemy is I can see it and it's tangible. And I know I don't want to be that. And so, common enemy is a much easier and efficient way to bring people together. The idealist in me hopes that we can come together based on the dream, based on the vision. But the more I spend time sort of trying to understand it, the more uncomfortable I become that I actually think you do have to have a common enemy. And ideally, you want that common enemy to be so far removed

that it brings more people together. So, the greatest common enemy would be a meteor flying towards the earth where we don't even debate, you know, I mean, some would argue that climate collapse is that thing, except we're debating it. Like, we will come together as a human race a lot quicker. Absent that massive external existential threat, we seek to find the existential threat somewhere and we find it in each other, where now we live in a world in which political parties who simply have different interpretations on how to advance towards the vision that is America. That's all it is. It's like, we think we should go in this direction, we should go in this direction. Like,

let's take this freeway. No, let's take this freeway. Now we're literally labeling each other traitors, unpatriotic, anti-American. Like, that's relatively new language for our modern day. I'm going to try to convince you that your uncomfortable conclusion might not be the only one. Oh, I hope so. Please. It might be the best one. Nothing would make me happier.

We work in the field of social emotional learning. And one of the things we've tried to understand in this field is how do relationships function in learning? So you go back to the neuroscience here, and Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington does studies of infants at 9 months, 10 months, 11 months, and into later infancy, and watches the brain and how the brain develops, what sparks the brain. So here's what she found. She did a fascinating little experiment where they taught 10 to 11 and a half month olds Chinese. So these infants will sit up straight and they'll listen to a Chinese teacher, teach the sounds of Chinese and the intonations of Chinese. And then they measure how much the children, these little infants have learned.

Then Simon, they put the exact same lesson with a randomly selected control group. They put the exact same lesson on a screen with the same teacher. And then they measure how much the infants learn from the exact same lesson taught by a human being through a screen. And I want you to guess at how much, what percent of the first group is learned in the second group. Well, let's take the first group as one. Let's say the first group learns one unit of Chinese. Baseline one. Yeah.

What do you think the second group learns as a percentage of one? 0.5. 0.5. Zero. Zero. Zero. Wow.

Zero. Zero. Nothing comes through the screen. Now, the point is that, you know, our religious prophetic teachers have said things like, we are one, we are made for each other. Jackie Lewis in the book you and I both contributed to says, we are each a house of God. We hear that language and we a little bit dismiss it as the language of myth or magic or the past. But our brain is telling us you are meant for another. You don't find meaning unless someone is giving the meaning to you. In fact, you know, the way we teach it in school now to teachers is teaching and learning is a relationship. It is not a transaction. Now, why do I bring this up in the context of belonging? You know, there's the old Cherokee story. Maybe you've heard it. So forgive me if it bores you. But the old Cherokee story is the little child who comes to his elder. I feel like some days I have

everything I want is good. and some days everything I want is naughty. And the elder says, well, that's because you have within you a good wolf and a bad wolf. And the little child says, which one will win? And the elder answers, the one you feed. Now, those little infants learning Chinese are having the good wolf fed, right? They're connecting to that teacher. They're feeling the love, the desire, the hunger, the knowledge of the teacher. And they want to please the teacher. I don't mean that they don't have a selfish side. They do. Even at nine months, 10 months, we have the same little bad wolf. little bad wolf. If we only feed the bad wolf, I think right now our bad wolf is fully fed and lying in the corner burping. And the good wolf is emaciated. I believe that culturally we need voices and strategies and problem solvers who don't try to solve the problem as an us versus them, but try to solve problems as just us. You're right. It's more difficult. It requires more creativity. It requires more outside-the-box thinking. In some ways, it requires a whole new mindset. And you may say,

well, good luck with that, Tim. And you're probably right that it may be a fool's errand. But to me, it's the necessary errand to feed the good wolf and to trust that we actually do hunger. A good part of us hungers for that oneness, togetherness without making someone else the enemy. We want to belong, but we don't have to hate to belong. There's such an irony to this in this modern day and age where we are steadily losing the skills to have relationships. And we could argue that the reason politics are the way they are today is because the politicians have lost the skills on how to have relationships, how to reach across an aisle and say, how are you? That businesses have lost the skill of how to build relationships, which is why so many people are sort of cynical towards business and the number of quote unquote trusted brands is precious few.

And we're feeling lonely and anxious, not because other people have not learned the skill of relationships, but we haven't learned the skill of relationships. The irony is, is the first step of our 12 step program is to admit that we have a problem and that to solve our problem, I'll sign up for an online course on how to have relationships. Well, yeah, or at least to have the skills and the orientation and the desire. But this goes back to your infants trying to learn Chinese, which is so well-intended. We're attempting to learn a skill from a place that we're less likely to learn it and the place we're going to learn it it's going to be more difficult it feels more difficult but the place to learn it is in our relationships i want to go back to a point you just made about politicians we don't see them modeling the skills we don't see the media modeling the skills you

know you've seen the data where the more time you spend on cable news, the more unhappy you are. Not the more well-informed you are, maybe you are, not the more politically active you are, maybe you are, but the more unhappy you are. Why? These people have, sadly, and as you have many friends in the media who have confirmed this for me, they are gasoline on the fire. Yeah, yeah, of course. And they didn't start it. I don't think they started it, but they're benefiting from it. They're actually profiting from division and hatred. I mean, you and I are in complete lockstep, and this is something I've been preaching from the stage for years now,

which is there's an entire section of the bookshop called Self-Help, but there's no section of the bookshop called Help Others. The self-help industry has done one thing, which is help itself. If it were successful, it would be an industry in decline, but it's shown exponential growth since it was introduced in the 1970s, where the help others industry, that's, I want to build the help others industry. That's what I've sort of devoted my life to do. We need this outpouring of empathy. Jose Andres in the book, The Quality of Night, speaks of this, sort of devoted my life to do. We need this outpouring of empathy. Jose Andres in the book, The Quality of Night, speaks of this, sort of several others, the age old wisdom that when you give yourself away, you get your best self in return. It takes a little effort. I was with a

group of high school students yesterday in Salt Lake City who are volunteers for Special Olympics. And they're on what we call unified teams in schools, which is really just, if you will, a classroom of common purpose, right? So these are 16, 17-year-old kids. And one kid is the star of the lacrosse team and who's been playing on the team with his classmate who has quite significant intellectual disabilities, quite difficult speaking and so on. And they're sitting on the podium together speaking to us. And he turned at one point in the commentary and said, you know, this is just really all about overcoming the fear of difference. And then he said, you know, it takes a little extra effort. Yeah. And I think that's the point you make, Simon, so often. You know, the help other section requires us to stretch a muscle. It requires a

little more work. But boy, the benefit is so big. And I've talked about this in previous episodes. I always find it funny when you talk to sort of people who have the best relationships, the best marriages, and you take them aside and say, what's your secret? And they go, yeah, it's a lot of work every day. It's a lot of work. Every day, it's a lot of work. And like the people who have the happiest relationships, they don't talk about how easy it is. They talk about the work that it requires. And I think we've become a little lazier

because technology has made everything a little easier for us. We can Wi-Fi enable our lights so I don't have to stand up and walk three feet to hit the switch. It's made us all a little lazy. And if you look at the great movements, and when I explain to people the law of diffusion, how you get the law of diffusion to work, which is how you get ideas to spread and how you make things sticky,

you have to require people to put in a little extra effort. Because those who are willing to put in a little extra effort are the ones you want to show up first. You know the old story, right? The guy who prays for years and years to win the lottery. 20 years he's prayed to God, I want to win the lottery. Please help me win the lottery. I want to win the lottery.

And finally, at the end of 20 years, he hears a voice. And the voice is coming from God. He says, you got to buy a ticket. If we want to be happy, you got to buy a ticket. You got to check in. Got to take a chance. And you got to buy a ticket. You got to check in, got to take a chance. And you have to spend the dollar. You can't just sit there and go, I'm going to work my everything operationally in my house,

or I'm going to work my internet, or I'm going to watch 100 hours of stream, you know, series. You got to put yourself out there. Happiness doesn't just come knocking at your door. You got to open the door up. I think if we're expecting all this to be delivered like a good takeout meal, it doesn't work that way. The soul is shy. It needs a little encouragement. It needs a little support. It needs a little handholding. It needs a little work. You remind me of an experience I had in college. This is sort of coming, I'm having a flashback right now. I was involved in student government. And I remember I was hanging out with friends and friends of friends. And there's this guy, Mike, and he was sitting on the couch watching TV, and he was complaining about everything that was wrong with our school,

you know? It occurred to me, and I sort of asked him, I was like, Mike, you don't do anything. Like, you're completely uninvolved in anything at school. And you sit here and watch TV. That's your thing. And I remember sort of coming to the realization that we have to earn the right to complain. I'm not against complaining, but we have to have tried in some small capacity. You do not have to have exhausted every possibility, but you have to have tried in some small capacity to help solve the problem yourself. And now you have the right to complain. Yeah. If you and now you have the right to complain yeah if you vote you have the right to complain about your government if you don't vote you haven't earned the right to complain right but i think even more positively can i say this you have the right to be

happy yeah yeah amen maybe it's not a right but but i don't think any of us wants, really wants anyone else to be unhappy. It is a right. It is a right. But you've got to put yourself in the game. You've got to buy a ticket. Look at the people we admire. You know, I was reading, again, some of the work of Desmond Tutu the other day. You know, and this is a guy, I mean, if you look at a picture, I mean, maybe this seems far away for our audience, but a guy in South Africa well into his later years, maybe a soldier from a former battle. But Google a picture of Desmond Tutu.

You're going to see somebody with a huge smile on his face. It's just invariant. He just laughs as he moves through life. Because why? Because he's had it easy? Heck no. Because he's been treated brutally and come through it? Yes. Because he took chances on people who were horrible to him and forgave them with proper record? That's what makes him happy. Because

he knows the pain and he's transformed it. He took the chance on the other and said, even though I have every reason to close my said, even though I have every reason to close my door, even though I have every reason to complain, even though I have every reason to sit on my couch for the rest of my life and never do anything for anyone, I'm going to take a chance on people again. That's what gives us happiness. We can't, you can't phone it in. You got to take a chance. You got to put yourself in the game. So anyway, I get a little excited about this kind of stuff. This is Viktor Frankl stuff, right? Yeah, it's Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl, who goes to the concentration camps during the Holocaust, and as a young

psychologist, comes to the realization that all of these people, we are all suffering the exact same fate, and some people have the will to live and some people don't. And yet we're all suffering the same thing. And he, you know, comes to this conclusion that we cannot control the circumstances around us. All that we can control is our attitude. But he says that the attitude comes from the desire for meaning, right? Yes. It's man's search for meaning. Meaning is shared. It's a relational game. And it comes back to where we started this conversation. When you break the bonds of trust and shared meaning, bad stuff happens in the culture. Yeah.

Everywhere. Everywhere. Your politics gets bad. Everything gets bad. When we look back at our whole lives and say, okay, did I live a life worth living? Did my life have meaning? And we start to realize that the times that we were selfish and self-interested, the answer is no. And the times where we gave and we thought of others,

the answer is, I lived a life worth living. My life had meaning. I mean, this whole conversation was instigated by your daughter's magical response to you. I want to learn what it takes to make another person feel completely loved. Can you imagine sitting in a room of, pick an age group, you know, and say, what is your goal in life? Well, I want to be happy. I want to find love. I want to find passionate work. For every one of us to say, I want to learn whatever skills are required to make those around me feel completely loved. I mean, first of all, it would change the university system, would change the high school system. It would change the way business looks. It would change the way politics. I mean, your daughter is entirely right. We have a

responsibility to have an impact on the lives of the people around us. I'm just feeling emotional hearing you mention her as she sits in the room next to me. It makes me both so proud of her and love her so much just to hear you pull from her words and to see and hear in her words such wisdom, which are there for sure. Do you know what I'm walking away from this conversation with? It's a very simple lesson. Our desire to feel love is innate. Our desire to feel belonging is innate. But what is not innate are the skills to produce love or belonging.

That empathy and listening and all of that. We criticize others when they don't give it to us as if they lack it, as if they lack the innate skill. Like, you don't do this. You don't have this. And what it is, it's your daughter's word, learning. It is an education. a class and that's it. You can't take a class on leadership and you're a leader. You can't take a class on one class on parenting and you're a parent. You can't take a class on relationships and you're the perfect husband or the perfect wife. That is, it's a constant, constant, constant education. And like a muscle, if you don't flex that muscle to atrophy, you have to practice the skills you're learning of empathy and listening constantly. What does a doctor do? A doctor practices medicine. What does a lawyer do?

A lawyer practices law. What should a uniter do? A uniter needs to practice every day. And this is where, you know, we can look at some of the great spiritual traditions. What did they suggest to people who wanted to cultivate the soul? Daily prayer, sometimes four or five, six times a day. And you know the irony? The irony is we are surrounded by people who will help us learn. So, for example, if you have a friend who's fluent in French and you're just learning French, you say to them, I want to practice my French with you. I'm going to speak in French to you. Correct me when I get it wrong, right? We have the ability to go to any friend, any colleague and say,

I want to practice listening. I want to practice empathy. I want to practice love. I want to practice selflessness. And would you just correct me when I get it wrong? Will you point it out to me? Because I'm trying to get better at this skill. And the irony is,

it's like if we're committed to doing the work and we're willing to do the work, we are surrounded by people who will help us learn the skill. You put it quite beautifully, Simon. And I think this, honestly, I'm going to say something that sounds grandiose, maybe. I think this is the work of our time. Yeah. I think our planet makes it, literally makes it, if we turn a corner and begin the deliberate, conscious, creative, collective practice of us. I want to thank you for joining me on this podcast today. But in reality, what I need you to do is thank Rose for me.

I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. Believe me, I will. I can't wait to tell her that I had all my data prepared for this, and I had all my anecdotes, and I had all my insights from the wise and the holy and the mighty, and we spent an hour talking about her. And good that we did. Yeah.

Congratulations again on being a grandpa. Thanks, man. I'll talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.