NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - The Drink with Kate Snow: Mitch Albom

Episode Date: October 31, 2021

Mitch Albom talks with Kate Snow about how his failed music career led him to accidentally become a best-selling author.

Hi everyone, this is Kate Snow and I'm so happy to share with you a conversation I had with author Mitch Albom as part of my series The Drink. Mitch is of course known for his best-selling books, but did you know that he spent years traveling the world trying to break into the music business? He was known as Michos in Greece, where he lived for a while. He says he became a world-renowned author by total accident. Mitch has a new book out called The Stranger in the Lifeboat. It asks the question, what would you do if you asked the universe for help and it actually came to you? You can hear many more stories of success from top artists, entrepreneurs, visionaries, all kinds of people. That's at www.nbcnews.com slash the drink. The big question is, how did you get here? Oh, well, that's an easy question to answer by accident.

Mitch Albom, what's your drink? What have you got? I have got peppermint tea, which I drink because it doesn't interfere with anything so here's uh that's my favorite mug because it's got a little picture of me and our little girl chica from haiti thank you uh i've got peppermint tea as well right here look at that even though we're far apart thank you for that almost every other drink carries some kind of ramification either you drink soda then you're burping. Drink alcohol, you're falling asleep.

You drink caffeine, you know, or coffee, you're popping up. Most neutral drink there is if you're writing and you don't want to be affected one way or the other. You are a bestselling author. You've sold like 40 million copies of your books in 47 countries. The big question is, how did you get here? Oh, well, that's an easy question to answer by accident. Almost every step of my journey to get to this moment talking to you was total accident, not prepared, not planned for.

I was a musician, first of all, when I was young. You were in a band in high school. Is this right? Called the Lucky Tiger Grease Stick? Yeah. I'm wondering if I have any photos of them around here. Yeah. It was like a Sha Na Na band, you know. I remember Sha Na Na. We all greased our hair back when we did 50s rock and roll. It was the most fun I ever had in my life. You want to talk about like stories that nobody knows. I was the featured singer and piano player at a luxury resort on the island of Crete in Greece. And every day, every night I would sing like about a half an hour's worth of Elvis songs and Ray Charles songs and stuff. I was like the only American entertainment. And I could walk

to the village and people would roll down their car windows and say, Michos, come here. Elvis, come here. Come, we go. They called you Michos? Yeah, Michos was my Greek nickname. I just don't think most people know this about Mitch Elwood. They think of you as the Tuesdays with Maury guy.

I took like a sharp left turn when I was 37 years old. Did you intentionally think, I want to write a book? No, no, no. Again, Kate, this is the accident thing keeps going on. You know, so I accidentally got into journalism out of music. And then I kept going, kept going. I ended up going to graduate school. Then I got into sports writing as an accident. This leads to the final accident, which is the one you're asking me about. So at 37 years of age, after 16 years, having graduated from college and

never having contacted my beloved professor, Maury Schwartz, for all that time, because I was so busy pursuing my own ambition and my own career. And one night, 16 years later, I flip on the television set and there's Ted Koppel talking to my old professor, who's now white haired and very sickly looking. And he's talking about what it's like to die from Lou Gehrig's disease. And that was an accident of just flipping the remote control happening, happening upon it, or else he would have died without my even probably being aware. So I called him, you know,

I thought I would just call him once and ease my conscience. I ended up going to visit him once, once turned to twice, twice turned to et cetera, et cetera. And I ended up going every Tuesday and all the Tuesdays that he had left in his life about four or five sessions into our visits, he told me that he was very in debt for his medical bills and he didn't have a way to pay them. So that, Kate, was when I had the idea, well, how can I raise money for him? And the only thing I knew how to do was write. And the only way I could think of to raise the kind of money that he needed was write a book. I went around to different

publishers in New York and I told them what was going on. Everybody said no. Nope. Boring. You're a sports writer. It's depressing. One guy said, you don't even know what a memoir is. Come back in 20 years, maybe you'll know. Why didn didn't you give up I didn't give up because it was for him if it was for me I would have given up when something is for somebody else you need to try a little bit harder and that's what I kind of learned from that and uh and I did and eventually I found a publisher a few weeks before Maury died they agreed to do it we they gave us exactly the amount of money needed for his medical bills. It was supposed to be a tiny book. You know, they printed 20,000 copies.

They thought I thought I'd have them in the trunk of my car for the rest of my life. And I'd be one of those guys. Seven, 17 million. Somewhere around there. More than that. More than that now. Yeah. So and my life took a major, major turn after that.

Do you I mean, you've had so many books. I can't even, please have some tea. Yeah. Well, this is drink with hate, isn't it? I mean, it is the drink. That's right. When you put out a book, do you worry still? Like you have a new book out right now. Are you concerned that maybe nobody will like it or are you, no, I'm Mitch Albom, of course. No, I would never say that. That's not the kind of sentence that comes out of my mouth. I think when I came out of college and I went into music and I was a flop, you know, I mean, I just did not succeed at all.

That sense always stayed with me, you know, and you always think like that's right around the corner. The new book is The Stranger in the Lifeboat. Yeah, I couldn't put it down. Thank you. I want to give it all away. But but your books, fair to say your books really a lot of times deal with life and death and faith and hope and inner strength and kind of all these, I don't know, themes of humanity. Are you Are you just drawn to that? It seems like that's your niche. Yeah, I'm drawn to that.

A lot of people ask you, you know, like, how do you come up with your plots? And I say, I don't come up with a plot ever. I come up with an idea that I want to explore or a lesson that I learned that I think, you know, I've learned it well enough that I want to try to pass it on. And then I make a story around it. So this one, The Stranger in the Lightboat was, there are a lot of times where, you know, you find yourself kind of on your knees saying, you know, please, please help me, you know, and whatever that is for people, whether it's God, whether it's the universe, whether it's fate, ghosts, whatever, there's all moments where we call out for help.

And I said, that's an interesting idea. Like what happens if you call out for help and you've got an answer? Like, you know, instead of just hoping you get an answer, someone came down and said, okay, how can I help? You know, okay, I'm here. I'm God, I can help. And it's basically an exploration of, you know, would we accept help if it came to us? In your spare time, you have nine charities in Detroit and you're running an orphanage in Haiti. I mean, at this point, you get to a certain age, you're not worried about so much about, you know, am I getting ahead? Am I

falling behind? Am I keeping up with everybody? You want to share the things that you have had, the blessings you've had, the knowledge you have. The orphanage, I'm there every month. It's what gives me balance. Can we do a lightning round? Okay. Weirdest thing about you? I do an Elvis impersonation. Let's hear it. No. Okay. Your favorite, Mitch Albom's favorite book? Oh, there's a book called Gilead by Marilyn Robinson that I'm just crazy about. Love it. I've never read that. Excellent. What gives you faith? Children. What advice would you give to your younger self? Don't be in such a hurry. Take time to realize how many people are being kind to you and that

you need to be kind back to. This has been fantastic i could sit here for hours well thank you it's been a pleasure to talk this was great and cheers thanks so much for the cheers for you and uh yeah we're better off having drank our peppermint tea our stomach is nice and calm we can get on with our writing and our work and i sure did enjoy spending some time with you i did too thank you so much you're welcome