Origin Stories

Mitch Albom is a journalist, playwright, and the author, most famously, of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." Before scoring his breakout hit with "Tuesdays With Morrie," Mitch was a longtime sports reporter for The Detroit Free Press, where his column still appears every week.

In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his new novel, Twice, and the importance of putting theme first. "The ideas always come before the characters and even the plot," he says of his creative process. "So I always start with, 'What theme do I want to write about?' Never what plot, or what's the story, or an idea for a character. It's, 'What do I want to tackle?' Because I know I'm going to have to live with that theme for a long time. Plots come and go. Characters can come and go. But if I'm not happy about what it is that I'm writing about, or what I'm trying to sail towards –– my North Star as I'm writing –– I can't live with it for that long." Mitch says he writes every day, for no more than three hours. "You need to fill your heart back up again. It's a regenerating thing, like blood. Like Red Smith said about sports writing: 'It's easy. You just sit down and open up a vein and bleed out a story.' But if you close the vein, you put a bandage on it, the blood eventually comes back in and you get back what you lost. I think it's the same thing with ideas and words." 

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Steve Burns is best known as the first host of the groundbreaking kids TV show Blue's Clues, which debuted nearly three decades ago, in 1996. After leaving Blue's Clues, Steve worked as a voiceover actor and a musician; his song "Mighty Little Man" became the theme song for "Young Sheldon." In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the creation of his new hit podcast, "Alive With Steve Burns," and the learning curve involved in experimenting with a new medium.  "I watched like 40 hours of Dick Cavett and then I realized that was not useful to this forum in any way," he says. "And that I'd probably be better off taking some improv classes and understanding what journalism is. Right now, it seems like it's improvisational journalism if it's anything. But I'm still flailing around in a sea of fear when I'm here."

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Debora Cahn is a television writer, producer, and showrunner. Debora launched her career as a scribe on The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy; later, she served as a writer and executive producer on Homeland. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about The Diplomat, the hit drama series she created for Netflix.

“The game that we're trying to win is to stay in a viewer's life for years,” she says of The Diplomat, which is now entering its third season. “Make this story interesting to people for years. And to do that, you plant all of these things in the garden, to use a simple metaphor. And some of them grow and some of them don't. And some of them are just sort of sitting there waiting for you to take advantage of them somewhere down the line.”

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Max Minghella is an actor, writer, and director. Born in London, Max has acted in projects as varied as The Social Network, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Ides of March. He also wrote and directed Teen Spirit, a coming-of-age drama set in the world of pop stardom.

In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his latest directorial effort, Shell, a body-horror satire about beauty, technology, and transformation. His interest in this kind of material sprang, in part, from a previous acting gig on a Saw spin-off called Spiral. “When we were focus testing Spiral,” he says, “I discovered quite a lot of things watching a movie with audiences that I didn't expect. And one of them was how much glee people took from watching something that made them squeamish. I thought it would just make people turned off or uncomfortable. Actually, it made them laugh. And it made them laugh a lot in a wonderful way –– a really joyous way.”

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Brian Goldstone is a journalist and anthropologist whose reporting focuses on inequality, housing, and the fragile architecture of the American dream. In this episode of Origin Stories, Goldstone talks to Matthew about There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, his critically-acclaimed new nonfiction book.

"In the last five or six months of writing, where I was just in that sort of fever dream phase, I had started waking up at 4 AM," Goldstone says. "Because with kids, that's the only way I was going to finish this. So I would be at my desk at four in the morning. And what allowed me to keep moving forward was having an outline in front of me that had already been so heavily edited and revised. I could be confident that even if I can't see the forest for the trees right now, I know that if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, I'm going in the right direction."

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Stephanie Foo is a veteran radio producer and longtime staffer at shows like Snap Judgment and This American Life. She joins Matthew to talk about the creation of her NYT best-selling memoir, “What My Bones Know,” which explores her early childhood trauma and her more recent diagnosis of complex PTSD.

Foo discusses fart jokes, mining old journals for content, her husband’s editing skills, and how she deals with feedback. “Everything we make––everything we do our whole lives, including the way we live––should be a collaborative process,” she says. “Everything from taking edits in a Google Doc to dealing with your husband when he’s telling you to stop leaving out food. How are you going to help other people have their needs met? How are you looking out for the audience? Maybe some artists think about this differently and they make art for themselves, and they think, ‘My audience will come along for the ride.’ But for me, I was thinking very intently about my audience in every single sentence of this book.”

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Actor, writer, and producer John Hoffman talks to Matthew about co-creating and showrunning the hit television show "Only Murders in the Building,” which is now in its fifth season on Hulu. Hoffman addresses writing lines for comedic greats like Martin Short and Steve Martin, his writing schedule (start early!) and how he deals with studio notes. He also describes the wonder of having a series snap together: “For me, it’s like an internal turn of the dial that says, ‘OK, I understand it all now. I understand how the whole thing holds together thematically and emotionally and how it can be funny and all of that. I can see it.’ And once it clicks in that way, then everything's fun. Getting there is the work.”

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Palestinian filmmaker Yousef Srouji is the creator of the critically-acclaimed documentary "Three Promises," which uses his mother’s old home video footage to tell an intimate story of life during the Second Intifada. Srouji talks to Matthew about coming to documentary film as a newbie and learning the tools of the trade on the job. He also discusses the difficulty of finding distribution for “Three Promises,” despite the project being largely apolitical.

As for his next project, Srouji, a successful entrepreneur, is content to wait for it to arrive: “I don't like to depend on the creative process for my income. Well, let's put it that way: when it becomes a need for me to create, it's not from the heart anymore.”

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Mimi Leder is a producer, director, and two-time Emmy winner. Among her credits are films like Deep Impact and On the Basis of Sex and television programs like The Morning Show, a critically-acclaimed drama now entering its fourth season on Apple TV.

In this episode of Origin Stories, she talks to Matthew about the establishing the tone of The Morning Show, the importance of creative synergy with actors and staff, and learning to honor both her experience and her gut instinct. “It’s really a process,” she says, “because something that may work on set doesn't always work editorially. Or maybe a sequence becomes something completely different than what you imagined it to be. Or it becomes even better than you thought it would be. It's very interesting: You make a movie three times. You write it, you direct it, and then you edit it. And you're remaking it every single time.”

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New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of several books, including “Empire of Pain” and “The Snakehead.” He talks with Matthew about “Say Nothing,” an award-winning book that was later adapted into a TV series on FX.

On the agenda: The importance of outlining, the joys of research, and learning how and when to trust your gut. To Keefe, great reporting in 2025 must be accessible:” Personally, I want people to read what I'm writing,” he says. There's a point beyond which I'm not gonna dumb it down. But I will take no satisfaction from having like preserved, like, my belletristic integrity and insisted on the two paragraph description of what the landscape looks like,” he adds.”I do think that if you don't consider your audience, it just feels sort of self-indulgent.”

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