This is The Beautiful Writers' podcast. I'm Linda Siebertson and Maria Shriver will soon be joining us.

Her gorgeous new book, I've Been Thinking, Reflections, Prayers and Meditations for a Meaningful Life drops today.

My guest host for this one is The Amazing Lisa Gibbons. The three of us had this

conversation a few weeks ago, and I'm still so moved. Lisa is a long-time bestie of both of ours,

so this was so much fun. I'll keep this intro short because you already know these visionary women.

You've watched them on TV for decades. You've read their bestsellers,

perhaps cheered as they won awards and champion the lives of women and children. In this hour,

we're going to talk about family and friendship and parenting and our struggles believing that we're

doing enough. We'll break down tackling big things and alternately letting ourselves off the hook. Since we're all readers and

writers here, of course we're going to cover writing. And what could be more important than

keeping our brains healthy for that, right? Both Maria and Lisa are on the front lines fighting

for a cure for Alzheimer's. So I'll ask what kind of preventative things they're doing at home

that we can emulate.

We might have a few things to say, too, about how to be mama bears for ourselves when our kids

and our ex-husbands get on our one last nerve. I'll close this intro by saying that when your

uncle promises the country to land on the moon, uttering some of the most famous words

in the history of humanity, and when your parents founded, oh, I don't know, the Peace Corps,

head start, jobs core, and the special Olympics, all organizations that still inspire and uplift

the masses, how the heck do you find your words, your voice? And yet as you'll hear, it was Maria's

words, Maria's voice, that truly changed the course of my life and in part gave me the freedom

I now have. Lisa too was deeply impacted by Maria's words at a time when she really needed them.

Needless to say, I've been thinking Maria's

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