Podcast

The Person Who Believed In Me with David Begnaud

Business, Entrepreneurship, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

Who saw something in you before anyone else did?

On “The Person Who Believed In Me” podcast, host David Begnaud asks artists, athletes, founders, and advocates this one powerful question. Their answers reveal the untold story behind success — the teacher, parent, or coach who changed everything for them.

Often called “America’s Storyteller,” David is an award-winning journalist known for compassionate, human-first reporting. He shines a light on everyday people and quiet acts of kindness.

Do Good Crew is the community behind the show — podcasts, live events, and weekly uplifting stories. New video episodes every Monday.

Subscribe, and send an episode to the person who believed in you.

Personal Journals chart
#5
Episodes
38
Releases
Weekly
Typical length
1 hr 12 min
On air since
2026
Latest episode
1 day ago

Episodes

38 episodes, newest first

  1. Ezra Frech | Dancing on a Blade

    Episode 37

    Show notes

    Ezra Frech was eleven, sitting on the couch watching the Rio Paralympics, when he decided what he was going to do with his life. He went and found his mother and asked whether she thought he could make the Tokyo 2020 team. He was unranked. The odds were close to nothing. She said yes. He started getting up at six to jump in the backyard, watching technique videos after school, building a team around himself. Five years later — the pandemic added one — he made it.

    The athlete he’d been watching on television that day was Roderick Townsend, the greatest Paralympic high jumper who has ever competed, who went a decade without losing. Years later Townsend became his coach. In practice he ran something called continuous makes: Ezra would drive ninety minutes to Orange County, warm up for an hour, and if he missed the first bar, practice was over and he drove home. Before competition the instruction was to not look at his parents in the stands, because seeing them would drop his shoulders. You can hug later. Three months after that, Ezra won his first world title and broke the world record. A year after that, two Paralympic golds in the same week.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, Ezra talks about losing that world title three months before Paris, and the coach who flew from Arizona to Los Angeles every week until the Games to make sure it didn’t happen again. About the four-year-old on a preschool playground who kept apologizing to him for his leg. About dancing on a running blade he balances on by a couple of centimeters, because the safer prosthetic would have meant playing it safe. And about the pressure he puts on himself to look fine — which is the one thing in the hour he hesitates before answering.

    Ezra Frech is a two time Paralympic gold medalist and currently competing on ABC's Dancing with the Stars.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    Chapters

    • 00:00:00 Intro: The Paralympic Athlete Who Saw a Boatload of Potential
    • 00:02:43 The Living Room Epiphany: I Can Do That
    • 00:06:27 The Four-Year-Old on the Playground: You Don't Got to Be Sorry
    • 00:20:55 The Script: Are You Curious About Ezra's Leg?
    • 00:23:41 Everybody Stares at Everybody: Choosing Curiosity Over Judgment
    • 00:25:36 The Zoo Animal Years: Feeling Like an Outsider
    • 00:37:34 Footloose and Dancing on a Blade: Why He Shows His Prosthetic
    • 00:40:08 Angel City Sports: Why LA Didn't Have What Oklahoma Did
    • 00:45:46 Continuous Makes: You Miss, Practice Is Over
    • 00:50:54 The World Title Lost Three Months Before Paris
    • 01:07:28 Lean Into the Extreme: A Man of Extremes
    • 01:15:32 Wisdom Comes From Hardship: The Nine-Year-Old on Ellen

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Ezra Frech

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Supervising Editor: Joey Izzo

    Social: Allison Childers

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 19 min
  2. Joe Manganiello | This Chihuahua Saved My Life

    Episode 36

    Show notes

    Joe Manganiello was 25, newly sober, broke, and showing up to AA meetings as they started so he could leave the second they ended. A 78-year-old man in a tweed coat took him by the arm one day and said he'd like to take him to lunch. They went to an English tea house in Santa Monica. John Edward Robinson III ordered everything — the full afternoon tea, every dessert on the menu — then explained he was diabetic and would be watching Joe eat them. He knew Tennessee Williams. He knew Elizabeth Taylor. Joe went back to the next meeting so he could take John to lunch.

    Months later Joe picked him up at his house and found a collection of mug shots on the wall. They were John's: a San Francisco shooting-gallery heroin addict, two DUIs in a single day. Joe says that without the hand on his arm he doesn't stay in the rooms, and without the rooms he has none of the life that followed. John lived long enough to watch him go from working off the back of a construction truck to True Blood, and had people bring him Joe's magazines when he was bedridden.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, Joe talks about the seven years his body tried to kill him — the rashes, the bleeding, the misdiagnosis, the month on his side, and the night Sofia Vergara had to authorize surgeons to remove his entire large intestine while he was unconscious. He talks about the avatar he built and then resented people for believing. About giving away his gun. About Finding Your Roots discovering that his father's father wasn't his father, and that he descends from a man named Plato Turner who fought in the American Revolution. About a Santeria ceremony in Ecuador and a week-long ritual in Cuba, and realizing only later whose gods those were. And about a sick chihuahua nobody would keep, who made him a caretaker again at the exact moment he'd stopped being one.

    Joe Manganiello's memoir Bloodlines is available now wherever books are sold.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    Chapters

    • 00:00:00 Intro: The Sweet Little Old Man Who Grabbed His Arm
    • 00:02:40 The Mug Shots and the Power of Change
    • 00:04:15 Twenty-Five and Angry: Early Sobriety Struggles
    • 00:10:07 Mount Lebanon and the FBI Dream
    • 00:11:53 Misunderstood: The Avatar He Built
    • 00:20:28 Upstream Swimming: Lessons From Dad
    • 00:23:46 Finding Your Roots: The DNA Revelation
    • 00:30:33 Thirteen Years of Silence
    • 00:40:17 The Wedding and the Bleeding
    • 00:44:15 Shutting Down Production: The Ambulance Call
    • 00:46:09 The Night He Thought He'd Die
    • 00:57:11 Deathstroke and the Will to Fight
    • 00:59:09 Ecuador and the Cuban Shaman
    • 01:09:20 Baited and Switched: The Marriage Unravels
    • 01:11:25 The Gun and the Dog Who Saved Him
    • 01:15:18 Big Man, Little Dog: Defending Bubbles
    • 01:17:18 Meeting Caitlin: The Pittsburgh Connection
    • 01:19:46 The Storm Is Over

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Joe Manganiello

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Supervising Editor: Joey Izzo

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Allison Childers

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    YouTube Strategy & Packaging: David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 24 min
  3. Heather McMahan | A Million Dollar Check to Her Dad

    Episode 35

    Show notes

    Heather McMahan used to stalk Joan Rivers' shows. She bartended across the street from a basement comedy club in Hell's Kitchen, so she knew where the unmarked back entrance was, and one Fat Tuesday she got off early and waited outside it. When Joan came out, the first thing she said was: oh my God, you're gorgeous. Then she handed her a string of Mardi Gras beads and gave her ten minutes she didn't owe her. Over the next few years, in book-signing lines and outside theaters, Joan kept telling her the same thing — keep going, you have a commercial look, go to LA.

    So she went. Within her first 24 hours in Los Angeles she'd been in a car accident and had an allergic reaction to a bad spray tan, which she read as the universe telling her to go home. Two weeks in, a bartender friend called to say Joan had just walked into a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Heather drove over, went to the table, said she'd taken the advice and moved, and declined the photo the assistant offered. On her way out, Joan came looking for her across the room: you've got chutzpah, you listened, you're going to make it. Heather got to the valet, called her father, and dry-heaved into the phone.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about the father who mailed her sorority a list of ten reasons she should quit theater and join the Air Force, and who died of pancreatic cancer seven days after his diagnosis at 57. About writing him a million-dollar check she couldn't cover, and cashing it two years later. About self-financing all three of her specials rather than wait for permission, and getting the Netflix call from a wine cellar in Florence. About the Ryder Cup, and the death threats, and what Joan would have told her to do about it. And about the bee that keeps turning up — her father's sign, and, she discovered years later, Joan's emblem too.

    Heather McMahan's new special By a Thread premieres on Hulu on October 16, 2026.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    Chapters

    • 00:00:00 Intro: The Woman Who Said You're Going to Make It
    • 00:06:45 The Restaurant in Beverly Hills: Joan's Blessing
    • 00:09:25 You Did the Work: Dropping Business Cards and Hustling
    • 00:12:46 Wasted Potential: The Biggest Pet Peeve
    • 00:15:12 Bouncing Back: Joan's Book and Life Lessons
    • 00:17:47 Seven Days: When Dad Got His Diagnosis
    • 00:21:44 The Son I Never Had: Turning Grief Into Comedy
    • 00:28:12 Self-Financing Dreams: The Risk That Paid Off
    • 00:31:28 Change Your Attitude: Dad's Life Lesson
    • 00:46:28 The Ryder Cup Controversy: Growing Balls
    • 00:53:39 Boston Robin: The Mom Who Reads Lines
    • 00:56:50 IVF Journey: What Nobody Tells You
    • 01:04:37 Madison Square Garden Dreams: What's Next
    • 01:06:54 The Bee Connection: Dad and Joan's Shared Symbol
    • 01:07:45 Get Up and Get Moving: The Joan Rivers Takeaway

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Heather McMahan

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Allison Childers, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 20 min
  4. James Brown | "Kids Like You Don't Do Math and Science"

    Episode 34

    Show notes

    James Brown was in fourth grade when a teacher saw him reading a book called So You Want to Be a Doctor and told him he should consider another career. “Kids like you, she said, do not do well in math and science.” He never told his mother. He carried it alone, and it held him back for years. Then two middle school teachers in Washington, D.C., pulled him aside with a different message: honey, you can do this. Simple as that. Deep Southern care wrapped in belief he hadn't heard before. He started to think maybe he could.

    At 14 he was cut from one basketball team and kept by another coach who saw him miss an undefended layup in front of the whole school. The students laughed. The coach, Don Fugle, kept him anyway because he paid attention. A year later Morgan Wooten recruited him to DeMatha, handed him three sheets of fundamentals, and told him to pick one: all county, all state, or all America. James took the third sheet and worked it religiously. He became one of the best high school players in the country. He was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks in 1973 and cut at the end of training camp. He went home and didn't leave his bedroom for two weeks.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about the lie he told Morgan Wooten at basketball camp that spiraled into a Friday afternoon confrontation about integrity. About his mother calling the gym to say practice ran too late and if it happened again, JB couldn't play. About Senator Ted Kennedy flying him to Capitol Hill to pitch Harvard. And about leaving Fox for CBS on a handshake, turning down a counter offer because his mother taught him your word is your bond.

    James Brown is a three time Emmy Award winner, Pro Football Hall of Famer, and host of CBS's The NFL Today. He has hosted more Super Bowls than anyone in television history.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    Chapters

    • 00:00:00 Intro: The Coach Who Called Out the Lies
    • 00:05:04 The Ray Rice Commentary and Speaking Truth
    • 00:08:43 The Fourth Grade Teacher Who Said Kids Like You Don't Succeed
    • 00:14:37 The Two Teachers Who Said You Can Do This
    • 00:15:55 The White Shadow: The Coach Who Kept the Kid Who Couldn't Play
    • 00:20:49 Morgan Wooten and the Three Sheets: The Roadmap to Excellence
    • 00:37:40 Cut Twice: The NBA Dreams That Didn't Come True
    • 00:47:49 The Lime Green Suit and the IBM Interview
    • 00:52:10 The Answer Can Be Found in Love
    • 00:53:49 Katrina, Alfreda, and Unconditional Love
    • 01:00:22 The Bank Is Closed: Leaving Fox for CBS
    • 01:17:52 We Got Them Right Where We Want Them: Down Six with 30 Seconds Left
    • 01:20:53 Come Back in 10 Years: How Morgan Wooten Measured Success

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: James Brown

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Allison Childers, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 23 min
  5. Howie Mandel | "You Were Hysterical, Young Man"

    Episode 33

    Show notes

    Howie Mandel got expelled from high school in Toronto for calling a contractor out of the Yellow Pages and asking for a 25-foot addition to the school library. He scheduled the appointment during math, because that classroom's window looked out on the field, and then — this is the part he finds most revealing about himself — he didn't tell a single other person. He sat alone watching a man with a clipboard and a tape measure, waiting for a joke nobody else knew was happening. He was thrown out of a different school for retrieving a bent Snickers bar from the swimming pool with his mouth. He has no diploma.

    By the early eighties he was a working comedian in Los Angeles, and the Tonight Show booker had told him flatly he'd never be on: not Johnny's cup of tea. So when he heard Joan Rivers — then guest-hosting for Carson and out-rating him — would be working out her monologue at the Comedy Store, he called Mitzi Shore and asked for the 9:55 spot, the five minutes directly before her. He woke up that day with a high fever. He went anyway, and the adrenaline carried him, and she passed him on the stairs and said he was so funny. Then she talked to Mitzi for forty-five minutes while he slid down the wall outside and lay on the steps waiting. When she finally came out, she gave him a phone number. He did the Tonight Show that week. McCauley called the next morning. He went on twenty-two more times with Johnny.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about being diagnosed with OCD in his forties only because his wife gave him an ultimatum, and about accidentally disclosing it live on Howard Stern's show — convinced in the elevator down that his career was finished, until a stranger on the street whispered me too. He talks about the half hour he spent punching a locked doorknob in Malibu. About why he believes no one should ever apologize for a joke, and why he made an apology video anyway. And about what Joan gave him beyond the booking, which was permission not to care what the room thought.

    Howie Mandel is the longest running judge on America’s Got Talent, available to watch on NBC and Peacock now.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    Chapters

    • 00:00:00 "The majority of the world does not have a sense of humor"
    • 00:03:18 The Johnny Carson litmus test
    • 00:04:40 Toronto, 1977: stand-up on a dare
    • 00:06:42 The contractor and the school library
    • 00:12:02 The Snickers bar in the pool
    • 00:13:26 "I just wanted to have a group laugh"
    • 00:17:02 Kelly Ripa and the apology video
    • 00:20:38 Addicted to social media
    • 00:26:30 The 9:55 PM spot and the fever
    • 00:31:57 Lying on the stairs, waiting for Joan
    • 00:33:00 The Tonight Show, twice in two weeks
    • 00:36:30 Joan's last show and Chris Rock's 62 seconds
    • 00:43:00 Nothing is too soon: laughing at his father's funeral
    • 00:58:28 The Howard Stern disclosure, and a stranger who says "me too"

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Howie Mandel

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 24 min
  6. Marlee Matlin | Nobody Stood Up at the Oscars

    Episode 32

    Show notes

    Marlee Matlin was twelve, performing at a children's theater for the deaf in Chicago, when Henry Winkler accepted an invitation to stop by on his day off. She performed the whole show at him. Afterward she walked up and asked whether she could be an actor in Hollywood, like he was. Before he could answer, her mother pulled him aside and asked him to dampen his enthusiasm — tell her to go to college, get an education, dream other dreams, because Hollywood was not going to be kind to a deaf girl. Winkler looked at her and said she was talking to the wrong man. Marlee didn't learn about that exchange for years. When she did, she says it broke her heart for her mother, who wanted what most mothers want. She also says Winkler rescued her from not believing in herself.

    They became pen pals, and every letter she sent, he answered — which is how she knew the friendship was real, and, she says, how she came to know she was worthy. A few years after that first meeting she won the Academy Award for Children of a Lesser God, at 21, the youngest woman ever to win Best Actress and the first deaf performer to win at all. She had learned about the nomination from a phone at a rehab center, where her counselor congratulated her and then told her to go clean her room. When the relationship that followed the Oscar collapsed, she turned up at Winkler's door with the statuette in her hand and told him she had this, but no boyfriend and nowhere to live. He and his wife Stacey said stay the weekend. She stayed two years.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, Marlee talks about the year she presented the next Best Actor award and chose to speak the nominees' names aloud — a decision she made alone, to show producers she could, and one the deaf community read as a betrayal. She shut them out for fifteen years and says she still carries something like PTSD from it. She talks about what her parents never knew, and what she never told them. And about the tough love from Winkler that she resented at the time and now says was right, including the morning he told her that no, she could not skip an hour of work for her son's first day of kindergarten.

    Marlee Matlin is executive producer of the feature documentary, Siren: The Voices of Shelley Beattie, available now on HBO.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Marlee Matlin

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 23 min
  7. Chris Olsen | "I Think My Therapist Hates Me"

    Episode 31

    Show notes

    Chris Olsen has more than 14 million followers on TikTok. At 19 he spent close to a year in a rehab in Boca Raton — six months inpatient with three group sessions a day, then nine months of treatment while bussing tables at a restaurant next to the mall. The first assignment every new arrival got was to write down their ten most shameful secrets. He read his aloud, and the therapist turned to the room and asked whether anyone thought he'd been honest. He had to keep reading them, day after day, until he cried.

    Her name isn't Lizzie, and she didn't want her photo shown. She was the person he was most afraid of in the building, and he later named his memoir I Think My Therapist Hates Me after what he assumed she thought of him. What she told him years later was that she can usually tell from the start how a patient will do, that she didn't see it for him, and that she was harder on him than on others because she believed he could start over.

    She's since left that center and opened a private practice, and the two of them now spend a good deal of time undoing what she taught him. It got him sober. It also locked in the idea that he owed the world a lifetime of making other people feel better — a complicated foundation for a career built on strangers' approval.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about being 14 at a family weekend at his mother's rehab, told by a therapist to make her feel better while she cried in front of the room, and deciding in that chair to “stop feeling.” About scrolling past a thousand kind comments to find the cruel one, because that's the one that matches the story he was told about himself. And he arrives, mid-conversation, at something he hadn't put together before: that he and his mother each had a harder time with the other sober than drunk.

    Chris Olson's memoir, I Think My Therapist Hates Me, is available now.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Chris Olson

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 6 min
  8. Thomasin McKenzie | Anxiety and Jojo Rabbit

    Episode 30

    Show notes

    Thomasin McKenzie grew up in a house in Wellington where everyone acted — her parents coached it, and her grandmother is one of New Zealand's most beloved actors. She'd watched her parents leave for work overseas often enough to know what the job cost, and when she graduated high school her grandmother was relieved she hadn't gone to drama school.

    Then at 13 she overheard her mother coaching other girls through an audition for a film called Consent, about a New Zealand woman who was raped by police officers as a teenager and not believed in court. Thomasin asked if she could try out. She got the role, and it changed what she thought acting was for.

    She chose her father, Stuart, as the person who believed in her — not for a piece of advice but for showing up. He was on set with her from the time she was six. What he said before auditions and exams alike was the same thing: enjoy the process. No pressure to win. He was living with her in Prague during Jojo Rabbit when a role she'd already seen herself in went to someone else, and he was there through years of anxiety severe enough that at 21 she couldn't attend her own film's premiere. He never made her feel bad about it.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about what a panic attack actually feels like from the inside, and why it's nearly impossible to describe once it passes — like trying to define a temperature. She' also talks about walking away from Top Gun: Maverick for a smaller film about an unsolved murder case that has since been solved… about being told by a director to stop finding the hardship in every character and find the joy instead… and about moving to London at 22 specifically to stop leaning on her father so hard — which is how she came to see him as a person rather than someone who's supposed to have the answers.

    Thomasin McKenzie stars in THE UPRISING, directed by Paul Greengrass, now in theaters.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Thomasin McKenzie

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 10 min
  9. Chelsea Handler | He Said He Was Coming Back

    Episode 29

    Show notes

    Chelsea Handler was nine when her oldest brother Chet died — July 10th, in a hiking accident — and she came back to school in the fall to a town full of people asking if she was okay. She hated it. So she told everyone she'd been cast in a movie with Goldie Hawn. Kids started asking for autographs. She doubled down. She wrote to Goldie Hawn asking for a signed photo, and Goldie Hawn sent one. The lie eventually collapsed on its own, because there was no movie, and she says the humiliation of being found out was worse than the pity she'd been trying to escape.

    Her third-grade teacher, Carol Schectman, watched all of it happen. She could see that a family that had lost its firstborn had scattered into its own separate corners of grief, and that nobody was checking on the youngest of six. She'd drop by the house on a Tuesday night for no clear reason — Chelsea understood decades later that she was taking the temperature of the household. And she'd pull her aside and tell her she was special, without specifying what for.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, Chelsea talks about the brother who carried her up the driveway pretending not to know she was faking sleep, and opened her bedroom window in winter because she liked the cold. About her father, who responded to the death by suing the friends Chet was hiking with, and who in her nine-year-old accounting disappeared along with him. About going to therapy at 40 and learning that what she'd felt at nine wasn't grief so much as betrayal because he'd said he was coming back.

    Thirty years passed and she assumed she'd never get to say thank you. Then a brief mention on Chelsea’s Netflix show led them to reconnect, giving them eight more years together.

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    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Chelsea Handler

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 25 min
  10. Bozoma Saint John | Always the Outsider

    Episode 28

    Show notes

    Bozoma Saint John was 12 when her family landed in Colorado Springs, where her classmates already had a picture of Africa: the child on the UNICEF magnet, flies and a distended belly, worth a penny a day. Her father held two PhDs. Her mother was a fashion designer. Nobody in that house took an American name. Bozoma was strong in math and science and Latin and was going to be a doctor — decided at 12, though she says she couldn't tell you where her parents' plan ended and her own wanting began.

    Then an eleventh-grade English teacher named Martha Wood assigned a creative writing exercise: describe yourself somewhere else, in the third person. Bozoma wrote it, and Mrs. Wood held the pages up and read them aloud — in a room of native speakers, some of whom had mocked her accent. The room went quiet. It was the first time anyone suggested she could be something other than what had been planned. She starts crying about it thirty seconds into this conversation.

    Two more people did that for her later. Spike Lee, whose phones she was answering at 23 when she gave him notes on the Bamboozled script — bad notes, she says now — and he slammed his door, and came out to say: you made some good notes, you can stay. And Ari Emanuel, the first boss who ever really saw her, who told her she wasn't Bose at Apple or Bose at Uber. She was just Bose. Did she have an agent?

    She also talks with David about her husband, Peter. They were separated, after the death of their daughter Eve and the blame they'd started looking for in each other, when his cancer turned terminal. He asked her to set the divorce aside, then proposed again — sixty pounds lighter, in a jacket that no longer fit, with a Hostess cupcake instead of a wedding cake. She says that “yes” is still the best one she's ever given.

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    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Bozoma Saint John

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 3 min
  11. Tori Kelly | The Internet Made Her a Star

    Episode 27

    Show notes

    Tori Kelly signed her first record contract at 12. The executive who signed her, Polly Anthony, was the first woman to run a major label, and she brought Tori into Geffen after two televised talent-show losses had gone nowhere. Anthony put her in the studio with established producers and had her record a Mariah Carey cover, a way of making an argument about what the voice could do. She never suggested Tori be more outgoing, which nearly everyone else did. None of the music was released. A year later Anthony moved to another position, a new executive took over her roster, and the plan changed: wait until she's 16, when she'll be easier to market. Tori asked her parents to get her out of the deal. She was 13.

    For years after that, labels asked her the same question — what was her platform? She had never understood it. "I'm 12. I don't have a platform. Isn't that what you guys are supposed to give me?" She eventually built one herself, teaching herself guitar and posting covers from her bedroom, and by the time she signed again she told the executives across the table that she didn't feel she needed them. In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about being cut from "American Idol" after Simon Cowell called her voice almost annoying, about the 50-seat coffeehouse show that led to a Grammy nomination, about the gospel album that won two more, and about collapsing at dinner in downtown Los Angeles with blood clots in her legs and lungs. She is signed to Epic Records now. It was Polly Anthony's label, which she only recently realized.

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Tori Kelly

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 6 min
  12. Gary Vaynerchuk | A Studio Apartment for Eight

    Episode 26

    Show notes

    Eight family members rotated through a studio apartment in Queens when Gary Vaynerchuk's family arrived from the Soviet Union — a country he compares to present-day North Korea. Getting out meant giving up everything they owned. His mother hid a piece of jewelry in his stockings to smuggle it past customs. He was three. They landed with a couple hundred dollars, eventually settled in New Jersey, and his father, Sasha, took a job as a stock boy in a liquor store, the business he would later build from $3 million in revenue to $60 million.

    The son was selling lemonade at seven and trading baseball cards at 14, well enough to outsell adults. He was also a terrible student, by his own account, grounded after every report card. What kept the grades from touching him was his mother, Tamara, who praised him for being kind rather than for anything he accomplished. In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about her, about what it took to leave the Soviet Union, and about the knitted Jets jersey she made him when the family couldn't afford a real one. He intends to hang it in the stadium when he buys the New York Jets, with a plaque underneath: from a boy that couldn't afford a jersey to buying the whole damn team.

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    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Gary Vaynerchuk

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 30 min
  13. Atsuko Okatsuka | My Kidnapper, My Best Friend

    Episode 25

    Show notes

    Atsuko Okatsuka was five when her grandmother took her on a walk and never brought her back. Her father had full custody — unusual in Japan, granted because her mother's psychosis had turned violent — and her grandmother had already flown in from Taiwan, talked a stranger into co-signing a lease, and rented an apartment a five-minute walk from his door. She enrolled Atsuko in the school across the street. Her father knew where they were. He would come stand at the gate and watch her play, then go back to work. He never called the police. Years later he told her why: he was already raising two teenagers alone, working around the clock, and he knew he needed the help.

    Three years after that they were in Los Angeles, undocumented, living in an uncle's garage. What preceded it was a night in Chiba when Atsuko slid open a paper door and saw her mother holding a kitchen knife to her own arm. Her grandmother's response was to take Atsuko out to the bicycle and ride around the city until two in the morning. In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about a game she invented called Ward Off the Demons, in which she waved a toy wand around the room to try to clear it. About the thrifted guitar a former gang member at her Taiwanese church bought her unasked, which she named Happiness. About making a living off strangers laughing and never once getting her mother to. About taking all forty of her mother's daily calls, from a woman who has never come to a show, a graduation, or her wedding. And about her grandmother, 92, now in the hospital, planning to return to Taiwan for good — the person who believed in her, and, as Atsuko learned from a journalist decades later, the person who kidnapped her.

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    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Atsuko Okatsuka

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 15 min
  14. Brian Grazer | Straight F's, But a Gift for Gab

    Episode 24

    Show notes

    In fifth grade, a teacher took Brian Grazer outside, screamed at him for being unable to read, and hit him in the face with a board. He was getting straight F's. Nobody had a word for what was wrong with him — the dyslexia would go undiagnosed for years — so he assumed he was simply dumb and built a system around hiding it, tracking the rhythm of the teacher's questions and asking to go to the bathroom before one could land on him. He would not read with any real comprehension until his junior year of high school.

    His grandmother, Sonia Schwartz, told him he was a genius. She said he had a gift for gab, that not knowing an answer only meant he was more interested. Every weekend she drove over the hill from Beverly Hills and took him somewhere new — the racetrack, where she taught him to gamble; Dodger games, where she talked her way down to meet Tommy Lasorda; restaurants, where she introduced him to the chef. She always found the person in charge. He built a career on the habit. In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about the meeting with Lew Wasserman that ended before it started, with a pencil, a legal pad, and an instruction to come back with something of value. About the coach who cut him from high school football with one word, and the phone call he made years later. About standing up at the Oscars for Apollo 13 before the wrong name was read. And about his son Riley, whose Instagram bio he had never seen.

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    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Brian Grazer

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 12 min
  15. Vivian Tu | "You Deserve a Seat at the Table"

    Episode 23

    Show notes

    Vivian Tu was 22 and sitting on a filing cabinet at JP Morgan, in a room where the senior traders had chairs. Her manager, Jean Mah, told her to stop — she deserved a seat at the table and shouldn't perch there like a lackey. Jean was the first rich Asian woman Vivian had ever met, and she came to work in limited-edition Chanel and Gucci stilettos. What she taught her, over drinks at a dive bar in the meatpacking district, was that life is not a meritocracy, and that the rules Vivian thought she was obligated to follow were not the rules everyone else was playing by.

    A different manager later reassigned her, said she was too girly for finance, and called her cardigan a kimono. She is, in hindsight, thankful he was such a jerk — it's what pushed her out of the bank and toward the audience she has now. In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about leaving a $600,000 job at BuzzFeed to work for herself, the $100,000 safety net she built and never touched, and what it means to buy cars and vacations for parents who immigrated from China so she could be here. She also talks about a woman at the University of Delaware who used one of her videos to negotiate $5,000 off a hospital bill. And about the fact that some of the drive is plain spite — the man who doubted her can't walk past a bookstore without seeing her face in the window.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Vivian Tu

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 22 min
  16. Nirav Tolia | The Only Indian Kid in Odessa, TX

    Episode 22

    Show notes

    At 28, three weeks from shutting down a startup during the dot-com crash, Nirav Tolia had Bill Campbell walk into his office. Campbell — the coach behind Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the founders of Google — didn't want the pitch. He wanted to know about the business, and he wanted it plain. He called Tolia "boy." He swore constantly. And he told him that his title was not CEO but coach.

    Tolia grew up in Odessa, Texas, one of the only Indian kids there, in a place he describes as genuinely happy because everyone had each other — the beginning, in retrospect, of a career spent building neighborhoods online. He got to Stanford and found he wasn't prepared for it. What pulled him toward tech was an Ethernet connection in his dorm room and an obsession with the Dallas Cowboys; what pulled him away from medicine was an a cappella group. In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about running Nextdoor to a billion-dollar valuation and then leaving it in 2019 because he felt like a shell of a man, unable to be the best CEO and the best father at once. He moved his family to Italy for a sabbatical that turned into years. Then they asked him to come back.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Nirav Tolia

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Social: Kylee Anderson, Maxim Trofimenko, Gracie Pekrul

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 6 min
  17. Adam Lambert | Done Being Polite

    Episode 21

    Show notes

    Adam Lambert was 13, a theater kid in conservative North County San Diego, trying on his mother's makeup after school, when he started working with a voice teacher named Lynne Broyles. She had fierce energy and impeccable taste. She introduced him to Sondheim, to cabaret, to an entire gay cultural lexicon — without ever naming it as such — and gave him a room where he didn't have to explain himself.

    Years later he quit a job in Wicked to audition for American Idol with no guarantee of anything. Then came the 2009 AMAs, where he kissed a man on live television the night before his first single dropped, got pulled from Good Morning America after ABC threatened to sue, and understood for the first time that his career was going to be about more than the music. In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about the shame that arrived only after the fame did — about spending a decade in an LA bubble and then meeting mainstream American homophobia head-on. About fronting Queen for ten years, playing Rock in Rio and the steps of Buckingham Palace, and what proximity to Brian May and Roger Taylor teaches you by osmosis. About six months on Broadway as the Emcee in Cabaret, and bringing Lynne to see it. And about why, seventeen years in, he's finished being polite about what he wants.

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    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Adam Lambert

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Maxim Trofimenko, Kylee Anderson, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital, David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 25 min
  18. Ian V. Rowe | The Question He Asked at Twelve

    Episode 20

    Show notes

    The school board in Laurelton, Queens had a plan for the racial tension at Junior High School 231: open an annex a few miles away, in a town that hadn't integrated yet. Every white family transferred. Ian Rowe's parents — Jamaican immigrants who came to America in 1968, his father one of the first Black engineers at IBM — assumed that wherever the white kids went was where the better education would be, and told him he was going too.

    He was twelve, and he had never once challenged them. What gave him the nerve was his sixth-grade teacher, Linda Talish, who had put him in the school play and who talked about her own Jewish heritage with a reverence he couldn't name at the time but knew he wanted. She never told him what to do. He watched how she carried her community and drew his own conclusion. The night before the transfer papers were due, he stood in the living room — his father in the recliner, his mother on the sofa — and begged, and cried, and asked why, if everyone left was Black, that had to mean it was bad. They said yes.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about that night, about the schools he now runs in the South Bronx and the four virtues his students recite every morning, about the teachers union that sued to stop him from opening, and about the argument that has made him one of the most contested figures in American education — that systemic barriers are real, and that telling a twelve-year-old the system has already decided his life is its own kind of harm.

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    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Ian Rowe

    Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Maxim Trofimenko, Kylee Anderson, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital, David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    1 hr 22 min
  19. Margaret Cho | Ten Years Sober, Still Counting

    Episode 19

    Show notes

    An hour before Margaret Cho arrived to tape this episode, David Begnaud's team found something in court documents neither of them had known. She had come to talk about Mr. Jackson, her high school English teacher in San Francisco — a man with a Barbara Walters voice, a motorcycle, cigarettes rolled in his sleeve, who wrote encouragement in the margins of her composition book at a point when her own parents had given up on her future. He was murdered while she was still in school. What the filings showed was that his killer, a homeless teenager Jackson had taken in, told a probation officer he had been groomed and abused by him. The claim has never been tested by a jury. Begnaud told her before the cameras rolled and offered to call the whole thing off. She stayed.

    What follows is a conversation about how to hold both of those things at once. Cho talks about being expelled for truancy and transferring to the arts school, about the first A+ that reminded her she had once been a good student, and about the day the jocks in her classroom joked that the teacher had gotten what he deserved — after which she and her best friend Jerry walked out of the building and never went back. She never got a diploma.

    She also talks with unusual directness about her own history of sexual abuse, which began around age five and involved, by her count, a lot of people. About the ABC sitcom that told her she was too fat to play herself, and the diet drug that cost her a working kidney. About a year and nine months in an institution, ten years sober, and the friend who didn't make it. And about the encouragement she now gives away freely to younger comics, because she knows exactly what it's worth.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Margaret Cho

    Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social: Maxim Trofimenko, Kylee Anderson, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    Photo Credits:
    Margaret Cho, Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts Yearbook

    56 min
  20. Tom Daley | "He'll Never Be a Diver"

    Episode 18

    Show notes

    The first time Andy Banks laid eyes on Tom Daley, Daley was standing at the end of a diving board in Plymouth, sobbing, refusing to go in. He'd hit his head on that dive the week before. Banks, who ran the club and whose attention every kid there wanted, said the boy would never make a diver as long as he lived. Daley was eight. He found out what Banks had said years later.

    Banks coached him anyway. By twelve he was pulling Daley aside to ask whether he wanted to go to the Olympics — not London 2012, which was the dream Daley had drawn in a notebook, but Beijing, two years out, for which he had already written a plan that had Daley qualifying at thirteen and turning fourteen with eighty-one days to spare. It worked. What followed was five Olympics, five medals, and a gold in Tokyo that Banks greeted with: it's about bloody time.

    In this conversation with David Begnaud, Daley talks about coming home from Beijing at fourteen to be tackled and threatened at school until his parents pulled him out. About losing his father — his loudest supporter, dead of a brain tumor at forty — the year before the London Games. About being warned by his own management that falling for Dustin Lance Black would be bad for his image. About finishing 18th in Rio, and what his dad had told him years earlier about finishing 18th. About knitting, which he thinks is the reason he won in Tokyo. And about what Banks taught him about fear: the day you stand on that board and aren't afraid is the day something goes wrong.

    Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com

    Chapters ☀️

    ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
    The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

    David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

    Host: David Begnaud

    Guest: Tom Daley

    Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

    Associate Producer: Jonah Johnson

    Booker: Sully Bloch

    Director of Photography: Foster Parks

    Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

    Social Media: Maxim Trofimenko, Kylee Anderson, Gracie Pekrul

    Theme Music: Slipstream

    Post-Production: Longwave Digital, David & Luana Co.

    CONNECT WITH US:

    The Person Who Believed In Me:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

    57 min

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