Need A Lift? with Tim Shriver

In the final episode of our four-part Redefining Masculinity series, we turn to one of the oldest tools for transformation: the rite of passage. Across cultures and generations, rites of passage have marked the moment when boys become men—not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and communally. But in our modern world, these rituals for men are often missing, leading to issues with addiction, loneliness, rage, infidelity,...

Ruth Whippman grew up with her sister in the UK, attending an all-girls school. In adulthood, when she pictured parenting, she usually pictured parenting a daughter. “My life was so dominated by girls and women, and I think I just had no idea how to parent a boy,” she tells Tim. “And then I had three boys.”

Ruth is an author and a journalist by trade, so she started to research how gender roles affect the ways we parent our sons...

When he was a kid, Simon Hooper says his dad was a calm, constant presence in his life. “I don't remember him ever raising his voice really,” he tells Tim. That stood in contrast to some of his fathers who acted distant around their kids, begrudgingly picking their kids up from the playground and angrily barking orders. But even though Simon’s dad wasn’t “scary” like some other fathers, being open with his dad wasn’t always easy. O...

In the first episode of our series exploring what healthy masculinity can be for men today, Tim sits down with Jason Wilson, a martial artist, mentor, best-selling author, and founder of The Cave of Adullam, a Detroit-based martial arts academy where boys learn to master not just their bodies, but their emotions. Jason’s work went viral in 2016, inspiring a powerful scene on NBC’s This Is Us. Jason teaches boys to “fight before the...

In high school, Dr. Corey Keyes was thriving as a star athlete and top student. Yet, on the inside, he felt numb, restless, and on autopilot. Afraid that this emptiness might follow him forever, he set out to study it and that search became his life’s work. Corey discovered that millions of people are neither mentally ill nor mentally healthy, they are “languishing” and experiencing what he did as a teen. “Languishing is the absenc...

“What does it mean to be a true American?” 

That’s the question filmmakers Horacio Marquinez and Kirill Myltsev asked thousands of people during a nine-month road trip across America at the height of the pandemic. Their journey became America Unfiltered, a raw, resonant documentary capturing voices from people in Las Vegas, El Paso, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and beyond, including gun owners, undocumented immigrants, grievin...

For John Bucher, storytelling matters. It’s how we make sense of the world around us and define the boundaries of what we think is possible, and he’s spent a lot of time exploring how the Hero’s Journey, a model for telling epic stories of individuals experiencing adventure and triumph first defined by the academic Joseph Campbell, can help us see our own journey to personal growth and self-discovery. But John says that the Hero’s ...

Before his autism diagnosis, Susan Senator didn’t know why her first born son Nat didn’t act like the babies in her parenting books. “I mean, he was beautiful,” she tells Tim. “But… he did everything differently than what I expected.” Susan put in intentional work to better understand Nat and her two younger sons, Max and Ben, getting to know her kids' distinct personalities through how they played: one son wanted to line the toys ...

After his second divorce, John Gottman decided to treat finding love like a research project. To collect enough data he went on 60 different dates that were all disasters, until one day at a Seattle coffee shop, when Julie Schwartz walked past his table. It was love at first sight.

The Gottmans have been married for 38 years and have spent decades as collaborators studying the psychology of love and relationships. In 1996, they ...

When Grant Snyder started his career in law enforcement, he quickly realized that a huge part of the job was witnessing the worst day of someone’s life, whether they were a victim or a perpetrator. “I really had to try and imagine what it was that I had to offer people, and more often than not, it was… how do I protect somebody's dignity?,” he tells Tim, “I felt like I had a role in that beyond just handcuffs.”

Grant’s carried t...

Growing up, poet and mindfulness teacher Diego Perez (better known to his millions of Instagram followers as Yung Pueblo) watched as his parents struggled to maintain a healthy relationship amidst the poverty and external pressures they faced. So when he met his wife Sara in college and they started arguing, and their communication broke down, he feared he might be repeating the same cycle. Diego explains, “We knew we wanted to be ...

What would our lives look like if we learned to see death as a teacher and not something to be feared? And what if “grief is love obstructed, but not gone?” That’s what Rabbi Steve Leder believes. 

Rabbi Leder, who has been called one of the most influential rabbis in America by Newsweek, spent decades of his life guiding families through loss. He officiated thousands of funerals, helping people make sense of what feels imp...

The world knows Maria Shriver for her many accolades – award-winning journalist, bestselling author, former First Lady of California, media mogul, just to name a few, but in her new book she’s introducing us to “Maria the poet.”

In I Am Maria, her most intimate book yet, Maria is reporting from the front lines of her own life, with what she calls “reporter poetry,” uncovering emotions she had long buried. “The voice that wrote t...

What happens when life gives you a second chance? For Steve Avalos, this question isn’t hypothetical but the difference between repeating a cycle of violence or breaking free from it. Growing up in Los Angeles, which has been referred to as “the gang capital of the world,”  Steve was surrounded by generational gang life. His parents, brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles were all affiliated and by age 17, Steve was sentenced to...

Ever since she was a kid, singer-songwriter Jewel has taken a methodical approach to her own happiness. As a teenager, she moved out of her abusive household with one mission: “My goal was to learn if happiness was a learnable skill,” she tells Tim. “If it wasn't taught in your household, could it still be taught?”

Jewel says her practical attitude helped her stay mentally healthy and successful in a creative field as chaotic as the...

Growing up in Dewey, Oklahoma, Tanner Ray never felt like he fit in. In his small rural town, Tanner says he was “kind of the weird artsy kid” who aspired to become a documentary filmmaker. After graduating high school, he briefly achieved his dreams of traveling the country. But at 18, when financial problems led him back to Oklahoma, he realized that many of his friends from high school had moved away. “They all were starting the...

What does it really take to succeed—not just in school, but in life? David Adams believes the answer isn’t our intelligence or talent but our ability to control our emotions. Back in high school, he noticed a surprising link between cross-country runners and top students: enduring discomfort and delaying gratification led to their overall success because it built resilience. David says, “One of the things I think we've gotten a lit...

We’re almost two months into 2025, and how many of us have already given up on our New Year's resolutions? If you feel stuck in old habits, don’t beat yourself up. You might just need a new approach.

Eric Zimmer is a behavioral coach and host of the podcast, “The One You Feed,” and he believes in creating realistic goals. “We often set ourselves up to make big changes that we're just not in a position to make,” he tells Tim. A commo...

As a young child who often found delight in isolation, award-winning writer and cultural critic, Hanif Abdurraqib now regularly curates playlists as a way to connect with others as well as as well as himself. But for Hanif, a playlist is never just a list of songs. It's a carefully constructed narrative, a shared emotional experience, and a "catalog of excitements," creating a sonic world that other people can access. Like a writer...