Mitch Albom: The Little Liar

Guess who's finally in studio? Mitch Albom, best-selling author, as you know, host of Tuesday People Podcast. His latest book is called The Little Liar. It is fantastic. And sadly, it's timely.

Good for sales, not for life. But Mitch, it always gets you thinking. And Mitch, I think you've done it again with The Little Liar. First off, great to see you in person. Brian, I always enjoy seeing you. We go back a long way, back to when we were both doing sports. Right.

But you are always way above, and I always appreciate getting a chance to talk to you about life and sports. And I'd like to talk about both. First, the premise of The Little Liar.

It's actually the opposite. This little kid that doesn't lie is being taken advantage of. Can you set the scene for us?

Sure. It's during World War II. This little boy named Niko lives in a town in Greece. The Germans invade the Nazis, and they find out that he's never told a lie before his whole village believes him. So they kidnap him.

They decide to use him as a weapon. And they say, listen, you can go back to your family. All you have to do is stand on the train platform for a few days and tell people who are getting on the trains that they're going to new jobs and new homes and everything is going to be fine.

And then you can go back to your family. So he does this thinking he's telling the truth. And then on the last day, he sees his own family being shoved into a boxcar. And he finds out that these trains are actually going to the concentration camps. And he's held back and his family disappears and he never sees them again. And it follows him from through the war, all the years have passed 40 years later, and how he deals with the consequences of this lie that he was forced to tell. And he actually loses the ability to speak the truth ever again. He becomes kind of he changes his name, changes his identity, all because he's ashamed of what happened. And his family, meanwhile, tries to find him for all those decades to tell him that they understand that, you know, it wasn't his fault. And it follows all that story through. It's a big parable about truth and lying, which happens to be, as you say, somewhat timely right now.

When did you get the idea? It's a true based on a true story, not about the boy, but the Germans actually did that. They would use Jewish people on these train platforms. Because you figure if you if you see a bunch of German guards and people say, where are we going? They say we're taking their concentration camps to kill you. People aren't going to get on the trains.

You know, they're going to say, well, I'll die right here. So they they had to come up with deceptions. And Nazis, Brian, they didn't succeed because they have bigger guns. They succeed because they have bigger lies and people fell for them. Their own people fell for it at the beginning. That's how Hitler rose to power. And then the world fell for it for a while because they lied about everything that they were doing.

And certainly they lied to every one of their victims of the millions of people that they killed. They even used to tell the Jewish passengers, give us all your money. And the people in Greece, give us all your drachmas because they're not going to be good where we're going in Poland. He will give you this receipt. And when you get in Poland, you take this receipt and you turn it in and you'll get all your money. And they did it. You know, they literally took the money from the people they were about to kill.

That's how far their lives, their lives went. And I just think that that's something we always have to be on the lookout for. And when you read this book, it's about to come out in a couple of weeks and then October 7th, a month, October 7th happens. What are you thinking? I'm thinking like, oh, uh, I bet I'm going to get a lot of questions about, you know, did you write this book at this time? I didn't, but it has great resonance to what's going on in this time. In fact, Brian, I thought like I invented this holy original kind of concept, a little boy honesty being used against him. And then a war correspondent I was talking to over the weekend, just got back from Israel, told me when he read about my book, he said, did you hear the story about this kid named Tomer?

I said, no. He said he was one of the kids living in one of those villages on the border with Gaza. And when Hamas terrorists came over, they, they kidnapped him and they said that they were going to kill his family unless he went door to door in the village and knocked on the doors and they heard his voice cause they knew him and say, it's safe to come out. You can come out.

There's there, they're gone. And when the people came out, they shot them. And they, he did this door to door thinking, well, this is the only way I can say my family.

This is on the 7th of October? Yeah. And, and in the end they killed him.

So even the things that the evil that you can imagine in writing a novel is exceeded by the evils of the real world. Mitch Albins here, The Little Liar is his, his latest thought provoking book that's out of fiction, but based on real life. It was also brought to my attention that Joe Rogan was on his podcast and he was talking about George Soros in a 60 minutes interview.

If you want to put the headsets on, Mitch, I know you're used to doing that from your radio show and listen to this story. Uh, this is really striking. You're a Hungarian Jew who escaped the Holocaust by posing as a Christian. Right. And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps. That was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made. My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were, uh, his adopted God's son, went out in fact and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

That's right. I mean, that's, that sounds, uh, like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult? Not at all. Not at all.

Maybe as a child, you don't, you don't see the connection. Uh, but it was, it created no, no problem at all. No feeling of guilt. No, that if I weren't there, of course I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. That's pretty much, you know, so Steve Croft talking to him in 1998 on 60 minutes, that's not exactly like you're talking about, but using a kid to get to confiscate and knowing he's Jewish.

Right. And having to keep quiet about it and, you know, forcing people to lie about their own identity to survive. You know, it was Goebbels, sadly, who said a very prophetic thing. A lie told once is always easily seen as a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth. And that's, that's the premise that the Nazis, you just keep telling the same thing over and over again and people will believe that it's the truth. So when you write these characters, you may get them up of a consolidation of your thoughts and people.

I get it. I have never written fiction before, but do you get close to this character that doesn't exist? Do you feel sadness and emotions of that person? You have to, if you don't, if you don't kind of cry when they cry or smile when they smile or, or, you know, when the girl who's been in love with them since she was 11 years old finally finds him decades later and he's, and she has to say to him, I know who you are, you know, it's okay to tell me who you are. You have to feel that in your heart.

Otherwise you can't create it on the page. I'm Dana Perino. Join me for my brand new podcast, Perino on Politics, as we analyze the 2024 election cycle.

Make sure you subscribe to this series on foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts and leave me a rating and review. So how is it when you write something like this and you expose it and you first begin talking about it, you just started talking about it just this week. Is it good? Do you like talking about it? I mean, does it, is it almost therapeutic to go through it again?

Well, forget the sales. It's just because I think this story means so much to you. Well, it is. You know this because you do the same. You're doing it right now with your book. You have to sum up something that's taken you years to create in about 12 seconds and you always want to say, but also there's this and there's this other part and there's this other part, but you realize, you know, people can't absorb it. That's not, you know, you have to, they have to read it in order to absorb like that.

So I like talking about it in a conversation like this because I get a few minutes to spread out over it, but the ones that are, the whole interview is three minutes long, you know, it's tough because you want to sum it up, but you, you know, there's more, it took more than three minutes to make. See, you're like me in that I want people to get it, but I don't want to force you. Yeah. Right?

If you don't, so we said Ted Cruz on, he's a little different. Every nine seconds in my book, you got to buy the book and I'm like, and I'm not sitting down anybody. I just can't get myself to do that because I want you to choose it. Right. Right. And that's what you want people to be inspired.

Now you and I are blessed. I've written more than one book. So, you know, people here, Tuesdays with Maury or the five people you meet in heaven, they say, oh, I read that guy, like that guy. I can, I'll go get his books.

Yeah. But if I suppose if it was my only book, I would, every 12 seconds would say, why is I saying my book? And as I say in my book, and as I say, because you feel like there's the only chance you're going to get. I want to talk to you on, on One Nation on the weekend, Saturday at nine o'clock Eastern time, I'll talk to you more about this, but just, um, it's almost that you try to evolve as a person through your books. And if I asked you Tuesday with Maury where the foundation was late, you're already famous as a sports guy and then a sports writer, and then you write that book and it goes unbelievable off the charts to make a movie about it. But does he change you at all?

A hundred percent. And I'll tell you exactly how, cause you'll appreciate this before that book. And I was on the sports supporters ESPN, you know, people would stop me in airports and they would say, Hey, sports guy, you know, who's going to win the super bowl. And I'd say Patriots and go up the escalator, you know, after Tuesdays with Maury, people will recognize me and they'd say, my mother died of cancer. And the last thing we did was read your book together. Can I talk to you?

And you can't get on the escalator and go Patriots. And you have to stop and you have to talk. And I had to stop and talk not to one or 10 or a hundred or thousands, but tens of thousands of people over the years about this. And it changed me because it showed me how many people are grieving and how many people are walking around with holes in their heart and how many people yearn for a mentor and all the lessons from Tuesdays with Maury. And it's not an accident that I never wrote another sports book after Tuesdays with Maury. I've written 10 books since then. And none of them have been about sports and all of them have been about themes that Tuesdays with Maury kind of touched on.

I'm a little bit, you're much deeper than I did, but I was doing sports and I just got hired here as a sports guy and I was allowed to do news and years go by. So then 9-11 happens and I was so thankful that I wasn't locked into sports. Number one, I couldn't have stayed here.

Number two is to be able to go deep into the people and find out they lost their loved ones. They had the pictures up and they're walking around and I'm thinking to myself, thank goodness if I'm going to cover the Yankees and Mets, it's going to be how they're helping other people. Right. So, but I never diminish people in sports. In fact, I see it as a relief.

No. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, what do you think about with that and how do you research that? Well, The Five People You Meet in Heaven was a novel and it was based on an old uncle of mine who actually told me a story that he died a couple of seconds on one of those near death experiences. And while he was on the operating table, he lifted above his bed and he looked down and he saw all of his dead relatives waiting for him at the edge of his bed. Now, he was a kind of salty old sailor guy and I said to him, what did you do, Uncle Ed? And he said, what'd I do? I told him, get the hell out of here.

I'm not ready for you yet. And he went back into his body and he lived another 10 years. But I always thought, well, what a cool concept like people waiting for you. What if people are waiting for you, but they're not necessarily your relatives? What if they're just people who you interacted with like for five minutes on earth, but you changed their life forever and they changed yours just because of something you did? And so I created a story about a guy who doesn't think he matters, but he dies and goes to heaven and he meets these five people whose lives he changed and shows that everybody matters.

Everybody touches somebody in some way. Lastly, lesser known, totally different. I watch sports now and I'm watching the people that used to deliver the sports and they're talking about point spreads and they're talking about the bets and the parlays and I'm watching other sports. I can't believe it. It's right before an NFL game. So obviously it's getting ratings. Go ahead, laugh at me, but I just think it's in the big picture. It's bringing revenue and it's bringing maybe additional interests, but I think it's ruining the games.

It changes. Look, sports should be about we want to root for our team to win. We want to beat the other guys.

That's it. When it starts getting in about the over under is 48. You know, the over under is 48. Why are they kicking a field goal? That's got nothing to do with the game. But if that's where your money is, that's suddenly you're going to be rooting about that and not caring about the necessarily outcome of the game. And you and I were talking before about athletes start getting all this abuse because I had I had you guys, you know, winning this game.

I had you guys plus 10 and you dropped that that pass in the end zone. You cost me getting angry. They might have even won the game, but they didn't win it by enough and they get angry. The sports should be enough by itself. And the fact that not only has the gambling dominated, but look at every commercial now in a football game. And it's Jamie Foxx or somebody else talking about ways that you can gamble on sports.

It's totally different. I'm old enough to remember when that was totally taboo, when guys got thrown out of sports, if they worked in a casino or had any kind of, you know, dealings with gambling. And now they're in bed with one another. And now they're saying analysts at ESPN can no longer, they can't bet, period. So they made that mandate. Disney made that mandate. First they didn't want to do gambling. Now they're doing it. Now they're telling these analysts, you can't gamble on these games. Right. So we can just take commercials that show you how you do it, but you can't do it. Right.

So, okay. And my last point on this is the players getting suspended. I mean, they would keep it low profile because it's so tempting. They have one in Detroit, Jameson Williams, missed the first six games of the year because he was betting on some other sport. You know, it's like, well, wait a minute. And he's a kid, but it's like, hold on.

The commercials when we go to commercial break are all about betting on us, but I'm not allowed to go bet on anything else. You're feeling about Pete Rose now? I think time will change his perspective on that for sure. You know, because certainly look at it now.

I mean, it doesn't mean the same thing, does it? Let's bring back Sports Report. If we just need four people, we'll audition them. We'll see what they do. How about on Fox on Sunday mornings at 830?

What else are you guys doing? Absolutely. Great. That hurts Fox and Friends, but you mean Fox Sports. Mitch Adams got a brand new book out. It's certain to be as big a seller as all the others.

It's called The Little Liar. Thanks so much, Mitch, for joining us. I appreciate it. Great to see you, Brian.