Truth Be Told with Mitch Albom
About This Episode
What if truth could speak? Not metaphorically, not through human interpretation, but as its own entity—indignant, unyielding, and, above all, betrayed?
This week on Mission Forward, Carrie Fox sits down with bestselling author Mitch Albom in front of a live audience to examine the anatomy of truth—how it bends, how it breaks, and how, in the hands of history’s most cunning deceivers, it can be weaponized.
Mitch, known for Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, takes us behind the curtain of his latest novel, The Little Liar, a story where truth itself is the narrator. He unpacks the moment of inspiration—standing in Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, listening to a survivor’s voice echo through time. He shares his research journey from the streets of Thessaloniki to the darkest corners of human deception.
And he pulls no punches about the world we live in today—where lies are not just believed but preferred.
As much as this is a conversation about literature, history, even philosophy, it is just as much a conversation about faith—not the quiet, passive kind, but faith in action. Mitch talks candidly about his work in Haiti, the children he has come to love as his own, and the moral weight of decisions that shape their futures. He even gives us a glimpse into his next book, Twice, a whimsical yet profound meditation on second chances and their unintended consequences.
How do we cultivate truth? How do we resist the seduction of comforting lies? And, perhaps most poignantly, what does faith look like when it moves beyond words? In a world where deception is currency, the real question isn’t whether truth exists—it’s whether we have the courage to hear it.
Links & Notes
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Mitch Albom:
The only thing that's going to matter...
Speaker 3:
Look at what you're doing right now.
Speaker 4:
The more we divide and silo ourselves, it's at our peril.
Speaker 5:
Did we miss something?
Carrie Fox:
Hi friend, and welcome to the Mission Forward podcast. I'm Carrie Fox, your host, and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B Corporation. And if you are new to listening, well, I am so glad you're here. Today is a special episode, because we get to bring back a guest from 2022, and we did it in front of a live audience. A few weeks ago, I had the awesome pleasure to interview Mitch Albom once again, about his newest book, The Little Liar. We talked about truth, trust, redemption, and what faith in action means to him.
The event was our most recent in a series of the same name, Faith in Action, hosted by our friends at Grace United Methodist Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. And I was thrilled to be invited back as their emcee. If you were in the audience with me that day, I am so glad you're here to relive this conversation. And well, if you haven't heard it yet, you are in for such a treat. Mitch Albom is full of hope, humility, and great stories, and we were glad to listen in on a few of them. So, enjoy this conversation with Mitch Albom, and I'll see you on the other side.
As you say in your book many times, "Truth be told." Truth be told, you are someone who gives so much hope through your words, and through your actions, and the whole idea of this faith in action you represent so well. So, thank you for sharing all of that with us today.
Mitch Albom:
[inaudible 00:02:07].
Carrie Fox:
You speak, and you just shared a little bit of it. You speak The Little Liar through the voice of Truth. Why did you choose Truth? And was there ever a moment that you considered another virtue as the voice of your story?
Mitch Albom:
There wasn't ever a moment that I considered another virtue, but there was a moment where I considered telling it more conventionally, a third-person story, or first-person story. But, when you write, the most important thing you can decide when you're writing a book is what's the voice going to be? Think of like Catcher in the Rye, and everybody read Catcher in the Rye in high School. Can you imagine if Catcher in the Rye was told in the third person, instead of the first person? It would never work, because you're hearing Holden Caulfield talk about what it's like to be a teenager, and the angst that he has, and all the rest of it. It only works because he's telling you the story. So, the voice that you decide to tell your story in is really, really important.
And as I started constructing this, at first I just did it conventionally, in the third person, you know, "He, he, they, [inaudible 00:03:13]." And I said, "It's not really lifting off the page." Then I thought, "Well, maybe Nico can be the narrator." But then if Nico was the narrator, then how would he know what everybody else was doing in the book? So then I thought, "Well, this is a book about truth." And the more I researched it, and the more I looked into what the Nazis did, the angrier I got about what they did to the truth.
And then I thought, "Well, what if instead of me being angry, truth gets to be angry?" And so, I wrote that page that I read all of you when I first came in, when I first started, that was kind of the first usage of Truth as a narrator. And when I finished, I said, "Yes, I'm going to tell the whole book and the Truth, because then Truth gets to say, 'How could you do this to me? Look what you did. Look how you destroyed my child, who was always honest, and look at what Hitler did, and how he did it.'" And Truth has the right to be indignant. I don't, but Truth does. And so, choosing to make Truth the narrator, I think is what made the book. If the book's any good, it starts with that.
Carrie Fox:
I'm going to watch time, because we don't have all that much time with you, but I will note there are little question cards in the pews. If you have one, feel free. I think they're at the edges of the pews. Feel free, and we'll have some volunteers walking around in a few moments to gather them, just so you know that. There's another line in the book that you actually spoke a bit to, though didn't use these words when you were speaking a little while ago. Some lies are easier to believe than the truth. That's a heavy line. I sat with that line for a long time after reading it on your page. Some lies are easier to believe than the truth. And in the days that we are living in now, I wonder if there's a lie you prefer to believe, than the truth.
Mitch Albom:
I hope it's not a lie, that things are going to get better, because right now, I think lying is winning. I'm not political, and I don't tell anybody where they should be on a political spectrum, but it's quite apparent that we have figured, "Well, they're lying, so we can lie." Whichever side you're on, we're both doing it, and it's wrong. And we're getting to the point where we just... If we want to see people a certain way, we just find someone out there who tells us that that's the way we ought to see them. And I'll be no more, or no less specific than Haitians. Okay? I go to Haiti... I've been going to Haiti every single month for over 15 years. I just spent the last two days in and out of there, and I spent the last two days in and out of there because I had to gather up my children who are sick, or who have college scholarships, and bring them here, because our administration is about to put in a travel ban that will not allow any Haitians to ever come into the country.
Now, it's being done under the premise that these people are dangerous. And if you want to believe that, and many people do, it makes you feel better about it. "Well, they don't deserve to come in. They're dangerous." Except Nadi, who we are trying to adopt, is one of those kids, and she was on a visa that was about to expire, and if I didn't get her down, and back when I did, and if I waited until this coming week, she wouldn't be able to come back in the country. Now, I'm pretty sure that she is not planning to overthrow America. Maybe our household, but not America. But if you choose to believe a lie that these people are all bad, it works for you, right? So, that's just a tiny, small example, but of something that I know isn't the truth, any more than there was truth in the fact that Haitians eat cats and dogs.
I can promise you, first of all, every Haitian that I've ever met is scared to death of cats, because there's this thing in Haiti that cats are like the incarnation of evil spirits, or people who come back. So, if we have a cat comes into our orphanage, everyone runs the other direction. So, when I heard that they were eating cats, I said, "Okay, that one I know is just a fabrication." But people chose to believe it. And even when it was proven untrue, they said, "Well, it must've been true." So, that's an example of people want to believe certain lies. Long before I wrote this book, Paul Simon wrote in, I think it was The Boxer, "A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest." It's the same thing that I said there.
Carrie Fox:
I admire you for many reasons. One of them being that you are one of the, hopefully not just few, but one of the few people I can point to that is universally beloved, and isn't political in what you say, but is clear in what you say. And I think you do a very good job of reflecting the truth back at people. The way you tell stories so intimately, it's easy to project ourselves into the stories you tell, and feel like we are part of those stories. But in telling this story, The Little Liar, you had to do an enormous amount of research. You had to dig in to try to figure out elements of the truth, and how you were going to tell that story. Tell us a little bit about the process you went through to uncover truths, and tell them in this novel,
Mitch Albom:
Thank you for what you said, I think you're being too kind, and way too complimentary. And my wife would crack up at the notion that you just... The way you just painted me, but I'm going to tell her anyhow, when I get home. But, it began actually with a true story, because about 10 years ago, I was on a book tour in Israel, and I went to the museum there in Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, that is called Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Museum, the biggest one in the world. And in that museum, they have these videos up on the wall that run constantly, of survivors telling various stories. And one of those videos I happened to be standing in front of, and it was an older woman, and she was saying in an accent, "They always ask us, why did we get on the trains? Why did we get on the trains, if they knew we were going to be killed, why did we get on the trains?" And she said, "They don't..." She was almost livid. She said, "They lied to us, and they used our own people to lie to us."
And she talked about how they got Jewish people under threat of killing their families, to stand on the platforms and say, "The trains are safe. You can get in." Because after all, why would you get in a train if they said, "We're going to a concentration camp, or we're going to kill you. Come on, let's go." You're going to fight. You might as well die on the platform, right? And fight there. So, the Nazis figured this out, and they said, "Let's just lie to them." And it takes a certain brazenness to be able to do it. So the whole book was birthed in an actual factual event.
And then I went to Thessalonica, and had a wonderful guide there who walked me around the city and showed me everything, and it's astounding. All these landmarks are all still there, of what was... There aren't very many outside of Israel. I don't think you can find a city in the world that has a majority Jewish population, and to see what was once there, and how it's all wiped out, all gone. What there used to be the cemetery, all the old tombstones and everything are all just gone, and they built a whole thing over it.
So, I tried to immerse myself in that whole place. I immersed myself in the stories. Honestly, it was a very depressing research process, and you find yourself feeling kind of bad about mankind, and bad about what happened. You're listening to these tragic stories over and over again. One I used that's in the book about a little girl on the train, who, there was a grail up on grid, on the window, and they had bars on the window, and somehow they had a guy in the train, and he was strong enough to pull this grid off the window as these trains were taken to the concentration camps, and then the adults tried to crawl through it, but it was too small. The window was too small, and the only person who could get through it was a girl, a little girl.
And so, they lifted her up. Can you imagine this little girl, all by herself? She couldn't have been probably more than eight or nine years old. And somebody said to her, "Tell the world what happened here." And then they threw her out the window of the train. And I don't know what actually ever happened to that girl, but I created a character in the book, Fanny, who gets thrown out of a train window, and survives to tell the story of everything. So, it was probably the most research I ever did for a book, and it was heartbreaking most of the time.
Carrie Fox:
All right, we will take a couple questions. So, feel free to bring up a few, Brian or Nick, whoever's collecting them. I'm going to make a connection from this book to some of your other books, and I may do it again. I may compliment you again, Mitch, but if you're the king of hope, I'm going to try to be the queen of kindness here.
Mitch Albom:
Okay.
Carrie Fox:
So, there's a line in your book which says, "By the time you share what a loved one longs to hear, they often no longer need to hear it." By the time you share what a loved one longs to hear, they often no longer need it. I felt Tuesdays with Maury in that line. I felt The Five People You Meet in Heaven in that line, I felt Stranger in the Lifeboat in that line. Do you think intentionally about carrying these themes through your books?
Mitch Albom:
Well, I was a sports writer until Tuesdays with Maury, and I was 37, so I wasn't just a novice, I was part way along in my career. And then I wrote Tuesdays with Maury to pay Maury's medical bills. It was never supposed to be anything. In fact, most publishers... All the publishers except one, told us we were crazy. "We don't want that. It's boring. You're a sports writer, nobody's going to want to read it. It's about a guy who's dying." But I needed to pay his medical bills. It was the only way I could think of. I didn't have that kind of money to pay his medical bills.
And so, we found one publisher three weeks before Maury died, who agreed to publish it, and that's the only way that that book ever came into existence. And then they only printed 20,000 copies for the whole world. I thought I'd have them in the trunk of my car for the rest of my life, and every time Christmas came, I'd just pull up, and open the trunk, and say, "Here." And when the book came out, they put it out in August. I mean, think of the most perfect time to put a book about the meaning of life, about a guy who's dying, in August, because that's what everyone wants to read in the blazing heat.
So I was planning on going back to being a sports writer, and then this weird thing happened. People just started reading the book, and passing it along, and passing it along, and it just grew, and grew, and grew. It didn't get on the bestsellers list until five months after it came out. It didn't go to number one until 10 months after it came out, and then it stayed there for four years. So, I thought a lot about that, and I spent six years before I wrote the next book. And during those six years, I went to places like this. I went from being a sports writer, who everybody just wanted to know who's going to win the Super Bowl, and that's an easy... Especially in those days, was Patriots. You had a 50% chance of being right no matter what, and I would just sort of say, "Patriots," and just kind of keep walking.
And then I went from that all of a sudden to people coming up to me and saying, "My mother died of cancer, and the last thing we did was read your book together. Can I talk to you about her?" And you can't say, "Patriots," and just keep walking. So I began, Carrie, to have to listen to people, and hear their heartbreak, and hear how they were grieving. And each person who would come up to me would think that they were the only person telling me that story, so it would be very intense, and whatever. And then the next person would come up, and I'd hear it again.
And by the time those six years had passed, I realized I didn't want to write sports anymore. I didn't want to write books about sports. I wanted to write about all these things that I was hearing from all these people. And you can look at every book that I've written since Tuesdays with Maury, and it's probably true that you could find something from Tuesdays with Maury in that book. Certainly, we talked about the truth in Tuesdays with Maury, forgiveness, faith, family, children. I've written books about all those types of things. So, I think subconsciously, or consciously, I'm kind of taking the themes that I spent those six years just hearing people talk to me about, and all Tuesdays with Maury related, and layering them into the next books.
Carrie Fox:
So, this book is not new, although you would think it is, reading the pages, how relevant it is. Thanks [inaudible 00:17:14]. But while I look at these quickly, given that it's not new, I imagine you have something else in the works, and I wonder if there's anything you want to preview with us.
Mitch Albom:
I actually finished my next book a week ago, just before everything hit the fan in Haiti, thank goodness. So, I mentioned that this was really a gut punch of a book to write, and I knew I couldn't do that again. So, when they asked me, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I want to do something light, and kind of whimsical." And the result is a book called Twice, that's the name of it, Twice, and it comes out in October, and it's about a guy who discovers when he is a kid that he has the magical ability to do everything in his life twice, but he has to live with the consequences of the second time. If it turns out to be worse the second time, he can't go back to the first time, and every time he goes back, he has to live from that moment going forward.
So, he spends a lot of his childhood, and his teenage years fixing his mistakes, and his embarrassments, and if he misses a shot in the game, he tries to go back and make it, or little things like that. But then when he becomes a man, he falls in love and he discovers there's one caveat to this power. If you go back when you're in love, to try somebody else, or anything else, then that person can never love you again, and they'll be in the world, but they can never love you again.
And of course, as you can imagine, he reaches a point in his marriage where he starts thinking, "What would it have been like if I..." And he has to make a decision about what's going to happen. So, it's a love story through and through, but it's mostly about that question of the grass is always greener, and if I had a second chance to do it again, what would I do differently? And you might be surprised at how correct our first chances actually be, because the truth is, if you get a second chance at everything, you never learn from your mistakes. Right? And so, that's kind of the theme of it. So, it's lighter reading than this one, but hopefully you'll like it.
Carrie Fox:
That's great. Thank you. Okay, we've got a great one from the audience. I'm also going to note that we are also going to raffle off the books. So, if Eleni or Elena wants to prepare those, and bring them up, I'll raffle those books off in a moment. How do you think we can best cultivate and inspire truth in others?
Mitch Albom:
So you're starting with the easy ones, huh?
Carrie Fox:
Easy question.
Mitch Albom:
I think the answer to that is really actually fairly simple. Be truthful yourself. You have no leg to stand on to tell somebody else to be honest with you, if you're not honest with them. The one thing that I always tell my kids in Haiti, and I feel like I'm kind of a dad, or a dad figure to tens, and dozens, and dozens of kids, so you kind of have to be consistent with your philosophy. I always say to them, "I will not lie to you, but you cannot lie to me." And because I don't lie to them, when they do lie to me, because of course they lie to me, I say to them, "Is that fair? I don't lie to you, and yet you lied to me." You have to use the innate guilt, if you will, of owing someone the truth when you're given the truth to bring it out in them. But if you're not going to be truthful yourself, they'll just point out, "Well, you lie," and you're not going to have any retort to that.
So, I think that it starts with kids, and it starts with how we teach them about the... Even the littlest thing, like we have with Nadi now. I mean, she's three, and she took a lollipop, and put it in her pocket, and when I said, "Do you have the lollipop?" She said, "No." And then I found it in her pocket and I said... Now it's hardly a crime of the century, but I made a big point about, "You don't tell daddy something that's not true." And you could see her, on her face, and absorbing. I remember thinking to myself, "This is the moment, this is when it begins, and if you don't do it now, it won't happen." And so, we don't all get to do it with kids at three years old, but if we are that way in our own lives, we become the example for them, and I think that's how you do it.
Carrie Fox:
What does faith in action mean to you?
Mitch Albom:
So, nobody just wants to know who's going to win the NBA championship, or anything?
Carrie Fox:
There is one. There is one about the Lions.
Mitch Albom:
Some deep, deep questions here.
Carrie Fox:
There is one. How do you feel about the Lions losing to the Commanders?
Mitch Albom:
The Lions broke our hearts. We finally, finally have a football team, and then they stumbled. And now we're wondering, "Did we miss our chance?" For 30 something years, we didn't even think we had a chance, and now we're wondering if we missed our chance, which is just the irony of being a Lions fan. But, as far as what does faith in action mean? When I tried to talk to our kids in Haiti, and they asked me, "Mr. Mitch, what's the most important thing?" It's such a hard question to answer, because every time you think, if you're going to pick one thing, you feel like you're saying to them, "Well, the other things aren't so important." So the one that I have come to settle on is humility, because I think that you have to be humble in order to really have faith. And the opposite of faith comes into play when you lose your humility, when you think that you are in charge of everything, you alone can make it better, and you're going to fix everything.
That's a certain sense of hubris. And it's funny how those words are so close, hubris, humility, and that's a sense of hubris that starts to block God out. The more you think you're in charge, the less room you give to God. The more humble you are about what you've done, or where you fit in the world or whatever, the more room there is for God. It takes a certain humility to look at the sky and say, "I'm nothing. I'm nothing." I mean, look at this place. I'm nothing. When you're on an airplane, and you look out the window and you say, "Look how small I am, and I didn't create this, and somebody did, or something did." And that enables you to be faithful, I think. So, I think it begins with a smaller sense of ourselves, and that song, "How small we are, how little we know." And from there, you begin to say, "Well then, who's bigger than us?" And that's where you find God.
And then if you're humble, then you take actions based on humility, which means that you're not here to get the bigger car. You're not here to get the biggest house. I said in Finding Chika, the book about our previous little girl that we adopted, who died of a brain tumor, from Haiti, and I told this story about how when Chika, she had this brain tumor, and she lost the ability to walk towards the end of her life, so I had to carry her around from place to place, which was fine by her, as long as she got a ride, she was good. And we were coloring at a table one time, and I looked at my watch, I realized I was late for a radio show that I do, and I popped up, I said, "Chika, I got to go." And she said, "No, Mr. Mitch, stay and color with me." I said, "Chika, I have to work." And she said, "Mr. Mitch, I have to play."
And I said, "Yeah, okay, but it's not the same thing, because this is my job." And she crossed her arms the way kids do, and pouted, and she said, "No, it isn't. Your job is carrying me." And I laughed, obviously. But then, I had one of those moments, those epiphanies where I was like, "Man, that was God talking there." Because of course, my job is to carry her. All of our jobs is to carry our children, through thick, and thin, and sickness, and health. And then if you are blessed to have some success, or some ability, as I certainly have been, then it is our job to carry the children of the world. The forgotten children, the abandoned children. They don't have a choice. And if you fill your arms with a child, and I wrote in a book, for so much of my life, my arms were filled with my career, my work, my awards, my money, whatever it was, I was walking around with all that.
And then I had to drop all that, because I suddenly had a five, and six, and 7-year-old with a brain tumor, and I had to carry her, literally. And what we carry is who we are. What we carry is what defines us. And you can either carry all your own stuff, or you can carry something for somebody else. And that's humility. And that, to me, is faith in action. I mean, there's faith in like, "Please God, please God, just God, God, you're great. God, you're amazing, God, you're the..." But, action involves others. And humility is the beginning of how we help others. So, I mean, I've never been asked that question before, and I kind of like it, because it's making me think. But, I think that will be my answer. I hope I don't come back in five minutes and say, "Wait, wait, wait. I just thought of something." But that's how I would answer it for now.
Carrie Fox:
Thank you. Well, Mr. Mitch, thank you for reminding us the best of humanity in all of your books, and in everything you shared with us today.
Mitch Albom:
Happy to do it. Thank you all for having me here.
Carrie Fox:
And that brings us to the end of this short form episode of Mission Forward. If you heard something that's going to stick with you, drop me a line at carrie@mission.partners, and let me know what's got you thinking. And definitely check out some of our longer form shows on the power of communications. Mission Forward is produced with the support of Sadie Lockhart in association with TruStory FM. Engineering by Pete Wright. If your podcast app allows for ratings and reviews, I hope you will consider doing just that for this show. But the best thing you can do to support Mission Forward is simply to share the show with a friend or a colleague. Thanks for your support, and we'll see you next time.
