The Person Who Believed In Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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

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.

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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: 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

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

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

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.

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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: 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

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.

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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: 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

A torn ACL ended Harvey Mason Jr.'s basketball career the way it ends for most people — mid-jump, awkward landing, done. He'd been a Final Four player at Arizona, recruited by seventy schools, and he'd spent his entire life pointed at the NBA. What followed was a year of depression and daytime soap operas in a dorm room, and a small keyboard, which was the only thing that made him feel all right. His girlfriend at the time mentioned that the ad agency she worked at needed music for a brake shop. They paid him seven hundred dollars, and he started driving around Tucson selling jingles to buffets and gyms.

Roughly a decade later he played a song for Clive Davis in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel — the same man who had once talked his drummer father into becoming a recording artist. Davis said yes, and eventually put him in a room with Aretha Franklin, who was so annoyed at how hard he pushed her that she wrote Davis a letter saying he was the wrong producer. Then she listened to the mix and sent him flowers.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, Mason talks about coaching Whitney Houston from fifteen minutes into seven hours, and recording her last vocal the day before she died. About Lute Olson, who rode him so hard at Arizona that he took it as proof of disbelief and spent twenty years understanding otherwise. About a father whose faith in him was absolute and whose expectations were heavy enough that the two didn't always feel like different things. And about what he says to his own kids at every game, on purpose: I love watching you play.

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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: Harvey Mason Jr.

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)

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

Sebastian Maniscalco did three minutes at a potluck night at the Comedy Store and Mitzi Shore stopped him on his way out to say come back for ten. That was more or less the extent of their conversation. She skipped him past the six-minute stage entirely, and by Monday he was a paid regular, which some people there thought he hadn't earned. She'd hand him a 9:15 spot one week and a 1:30 a.m. spot the next, four people in the room, two of them asleep. He didn't understand the design until years later.

Their whole relationship was that. He never spoke to her on the phone more than once. She said essentially one sentence to him. She died in 2018 and he never thanked her directly — he's put her name in the credits of every special instead.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about the first time he ever did stand-up, in college, where an almost entirely Black audience yelled "Sandman" at him for ten minutes and he walked off having had the worst night of his life and thinking only that he couldn't wait to do it again. About selling satellite dishes from a kiosk in a South LA mall on September 11th. About performing in a boxing ring in Manteca with blood still on the canvas from the night before, while behind him someone picked up a spare. About a 79-year-old hairdresser father who told him he had to rent the lawnmower. And about the photograph that catches him off guard mid-interview — the one where they were still a unit.

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. In each episode, David asks one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? David is also a CBS News contributor and host of Beg Knows America, airing every Monday morning.

Host: David Begnaud

Guest: Sebastian Maniscalco

Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Jonah Johnson

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

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

Social: Mariah Maull, Maxim Trofimenko, Kylee Anderson

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

A machine-shop laborer in rural Pennsylvania took a day off swing shift and drove an hour to his daughter's elementary school, where the principal explained that Sharon was writing cursive during printing lessons, doing multiplication during addition, and teaching two other girls to do the same. Joe Stone thought about it, put her on his lap, asked if it was true, and turned back to the principal: here's what's going to happen. It's not going to stop. Then he took her out for ice cream.

He was also a hitter, until she came down the stairs at 14, walked up to his face, and asked whether he needed to hit her more to feel like a man — and told him that if so, she'd never love him again. He cried. He never hit anyone again. They became close after that, close enough that when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and given a 3% chance, he asked his Buddhist daughter — whose beliefs he'd been mocking for years — what he should do. She gave him a meditation. Ten days later the inoperable tumor had moved.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, Stone talks about the nine-day misdiagnosed brain hemorrhage that left her with a 1% chance of survival, and the vanilla milkshake her father made by hand and carried to the ICU in a mason jar packed in ice. About learning a decade later, from an X-ray, what had actually happened to her body that day — and why she chose not to press charges. About losing custody of her son to a man who edited the only newspaper in the town where judges get elected. About a mother who she thinks never said the words. And about doing a Playboy shoot on her own terms because it was the only way she could get Hollywood to see her as sexy enough for a part she was the thirteenth choice for.

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: Sharon Stone

Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

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

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

Arthur Brooks was 34, older than everyone else in his PhD program, and his dissertation defense went badly. He knew it. The room included two Nobel laureates in economics and James Q. Wilson, arguably the most consequential social scientist of the twentieth century. Wilson came up afterward and said there was something special here, and if he could ever help, to let him know. Brooks had no idea how to cash that check.

He'd dropped out of college at 19 — kicked out, he says, splitting hairs — to play French horn professionally. He toured with Charlie Byrd, moved to Barcelona at 25 mostly to chase a woman who spoke no English, joined the orchestra there as a pretext, and married her. He finished his bachelor's by correspondence for ten thousand dollars without meeting a single classmate. Years later, teaching at Georgia State and attempting a first book, he got an email from Wilson asking to read it. Wilson wrote the foreword. Later, Wilson called again and said Brooks should run the American Enterprise Institute — a man who had never managed anyone or raised a dollar.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, Brooks talks about what makes a marriage, a faith, or a human being complex rather than complicated — one you live with rather than solve. About his father, who died at 66, and the years Brooks assumed he'd have to get to know his parents as adults and never got. About moving his entire adult family to one town in Virginia so he doesn't make that mistake twice. And about a homeless man in New York he asked for a favor.

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: Arthur Brooks

Executive Producers: Ellen Rocamora, Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Griffin Hamilton

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

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

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

They weren't friends. Joel Kim Booster sang baritone; Sarah Casey sang alto and was a state champion pole vaulter who ran with an entirely different crowd. She turned around at the end of choir one day and said if he ever needed a place to stay, he could stay with her family. He doesn't think she meant it literally. Three days later he showed up at her door and said he was there to cash in.

He'd been homeschooled until junior year, come out at 16, and been given an ultimatum by his parents after they read his journal: live the way they wanted, or move out. He called the bluff and had no idea how long he'd last. He ended up in the Caseys' basement for the rest of his senior year — lunches packed, car started for him in the winter, student loans co-signed, a car bought for graduation by their church. Sarah's father, Tim, a Methodist pastor, sat him down after hearing that Joel had resigned himself to going to hell and told him there is no biblical basis for hell, and that God does not care who he loves. Joel says plainly that it saved his life.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about being diagnosed bipolar II at 33 and what that framework explained about the kid he'd been. About a father he couldn't speak the same language as, who came to every play anyway, and a mother who has never watched anything he's made — which he says is fine, and means it. About why a no from a casting director cuts deeper now than any rejection from his family. And about Sarah, who is a Methodist pastor herself now, and who he'd like people to understand is doing the more important work.

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: Joel Kim Booster

Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Jonah Johnson

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

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

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

Carly Pearce was 25, cleaning Airbnbs in Nashville, when she heard a song on the radio that had once been on hold for her. Another woman was singing it. She'd been in town eight years by then, done countless showcases, lost a development deal via Facebook message, and she was looking at apartments back in Kentucky. Then a publisher named Daniel Lee asked her to coffee and said he knew her story, knew what the industry thought, and believed otherwise. She didn't believe him.

A manager later heard five of her songs — one of them "Every Little Thing" — and told her to her face, in front of a room, that none of them would get her across the finish line. When SiriusXM's The Highway picked that exact song as their find of the week, she cried to Daniel that she couldn't afford another misstep. It was a heartbreak ballad, and heartbreak ballads by unsigned women were not what country radio was doing in 2016. Twelve hours after it aired she was number one on iTunes with a DM from a label head that read: call me in the morning, you found your three minutes.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, Pearce talks about dropping out of high school at 14 to do six shows a day at Dollywood, and about hearing Dolly Parton's heels come down a hallway years later. About a marriage that lasted eight months and the album it produced. About recurrent pericarditis, dismissed as anxiety until she fainted. And about the thing Daniel keeps telling her, which she still needs to hear: stop chasing other people.

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: Carly Pearce

Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Jonah Johnson

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

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

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

It was two in the morning, three days before South by Southwest, and the printer was clogged with bad concrete. Jason Ballard and his co-founders were on the ground, done. Jenny Ballard pulled a window screen off the house they were building, set it over a five-gallon bucket, and started sifting rocks out of the concrete by hand. Someone pointed out they were talking about ten tons. She said: what else are we going to do? They sifted all night and finished the first permitted 3D-printed house in the world.

She was the one who told him to start over. They'd spent seven years building Treehouse into a three-store, multi-million-dollar business, and it was finally about to pay, and she said they had to try this instead — because it was the better idea, and that was reason enough. Before that, she'd suggested they move into her parents' basement so he could quit his job and raise money. Every investor said no. He maxed out three credit cards. Today Icon has built hundreds of homes and holds the NASA contract to develop a lunar construction system.

Jenny was diagnosed with breast cancer at 28, with no family history and no genetic markers, and lived with it for thirteen years — long enough that all four of their children have never known a mother who didn't have it. Every ninety days, a scan. In this conversation with David Begnaud, Ballard talks about what that does to how you live, and about the last of those scans in October 2024. About sitting in his truck afterward and telling each other they had no regrets and would do it all again. About a priest arriving between services on Christmas Eve, fully vested, to say mass in their living room. And about the night before she died, when he carried her outside and told her stories about their adventures, and thought she'd fallen asleep until she laughed at the funny parts.

Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: 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: Jason Ballard

Executive Producers: Ellen Rocamora, Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Griffin Hamilton

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

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

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

The first psychiatrist Sherry Lansing saw told her that when he was finished with her, she wouldn't want to work anymore — she'd want to bake pies. She was 24, newly divorced, substitute teaching, and broke enough that it took her a year and a half to work up the strength to leave. Years later a date who happened to be a psychiatrist heard the story, picked up the phone in her tiny kitchen, and started the chain that led her to Joshua Hoffs. She knew inside the first hour it was different. He wasn't critical. He wasn't judgmental. She worked three or four jobs to pay for it, and went three days a week for five years.

The moment that changed her career came when the head of Columbia left and she told Hoffs she was worried about who she'd have to report to. He asked why she couldn't do it. She told him there would never be a woman running a studio in her lifetime. She didn't get that job. She went on to run two of them.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about her mother, who fled Nazi Germany, was widowed at 32, told two men who offered to take over her husband's business that they would teach her to run it instead — and then told her daughter that a career would make her unmarriageable. She talks about Glenn Close arriving in a black dress and wild hair to read for a part everyone had already decided she was wrong for. About Fatal Attraction, turned down by every studio twice. About the one phone call in her whole career where she didn't have to beg. And about Billy Friedkin, whom she married at 47, who never once asked her to be anything other than what she was.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.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: Sherry Lansing

Executive Producers: Ellen Rocamora, Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Griffin Hamilton

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

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

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

Rhonda Ford Truman cooked dinner most weeks for musicians in Nashville who didn't have family there. That's how David Archuleta met her at 18, on tour and wanting a home-cooked meal and a load of laundry. Years later, back from two years as a Mormon missionary in Chile and struggling in LA, he moved into her daughter's old bedroom and stayed a year. She lent him a car. He kept waiting to find out what she wanted in return, and the answer was nothing; she said she was paying it forward. She called him her buddy. She got him working out. Late at night she'd ask how his goals were going.

She was Mormon too, but with close friends who were gay, and she never pushed him on the thing he wasn't ready to name. Someone once asked her when she thought David would accept himself. She said he'd figure it out.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, Archuleta talks about a father who was banned from the Idol set, about a childhood accusation he was made to carry at nine years old, and about the vocal cord paralysis that producers turned into his origin story. He talks about the night he had written his will, and the prayer that followed — asking to be changed one last time, and getting an answer he did not expect. He talks about his mother's first response, and the one she arrived at a year later. And about Rhonda, who died in 2020, whose hand he was holding when the machine went quiet.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.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: David Archuleta

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)

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

Outside Holloway Road tube station in North London, a former teacher stopped David Oyelowo and told him something she said she wouldn't say to any of her other students: that he could act professionally, and that she wanted to help. Jill Foster had taught him theatre studies at sixth form, back when he was a shy kid struggling to reintegrate into British life after seven years in Nigeria. She had already pointed him toward a youth theatre he'd never heard of, and toward the Prince's Trust, which paid the fee his parents wouldn't. Now she was explaining that drama school existed. He hadn't known. She helped with the applications and the auditions, and he got a scholarship to LAMDA. He also met his wife, Jessica, at that youth theatre.

Years later he became the first Black actor to play an English king at the Royal Shakespeare Company. An Oxford don said the country opened itself to ridicule. Hate mail came to the stage door and had to be screened; one letter got through, and he stopped reading a line in. What he took from it was an idea he can articulate now and couldn't then: the objection was not to a Black man onstage but to a Black man occupying the top of the hierarchy.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about the sense that came to him during prayer and fasting in 2007 that he would play Martin Luther King — and the seven years, four directors, and one flat rejection between that and Selma. About shooting it while his mother lay in a vegetative state. About his father, who used to tell his sons the tribal marks on his face came from fighting a tiger, and who insisted his son go to Canada to shoot Nyad — dying the first morning of the shoot, in a house his son wasn't in. And about the three people he credits with everything: Jill, Jessica, and Oprah, all of whom stood together in one photograph on his opening night.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.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: David Oyelowo

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)

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

John Etheridge was a coach and a teacher in Leavenworth, Kansas, and when his daughter was 13 and playing in bands with grown men in bars, he drove her — an hour there, an hour back, every rehearsal and every weekend gig. He wasn't effusive about it. He never told her she could do it. He just liked her music, asked her to play "Me and Bobby McGee" whenever family came over, and showed up. He also taught her metaphor without knowing the word for it, playing her a Randy Newman song and explaining that what the man is saying isn't what he means.

When Melissa Etheridge told him in 1980 that she was gay, he said: is that it. Then he said he didn't understand it, but she should be happy, and be self-sufficient. She came out publicly thirteen years later, at the first gay inaugural ball, after a magazine changed every pronoun in her interview to "he." By then her father had been dead for three years.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, recorded two days after her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nomination — the first thing she wanted to do was call him — she talks about singing "Piece of My Heart" bald at the 2005 Grammys, mid-radiation, afraid people would laugh. About being in the room when her father's spirit left his body, and what that did to her fear of dying. And about her son Beckett, who broke his ankle snowboarding, was handed a prescription, and was gone by 21. She now raises money for psychedelic research into opioid addiction, trying to make his death mean something.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.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: Melissa Etheridge

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)

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

In 1986, a five-year-old in a low-income San Diego neighborhood walked into a storefront studio and heard yelling, and chopping, and bricks breaking. The man running it was James Wilson — a Taekwondo and Hapkido grandmaster who was also an assistant U.S. attorney, a minister, and had done work as a judge. He was stern to the point of intimidating, and Nick Cannon, a hyperactive kid who joked constantly, mostly wanted to quit. His father made him go.

Wilson had been his father's instructor too. He became something larger than that in the neighborhood — people brought him their legal trouble, he preached at the church, and in a community where you didn't see doctors or lawyers, he was the one who did it all. He also put a word on the wall that Cannon didn't understand until someone explained it: integrity, doing the right thing when nobody's watching. He passes it to his own twelve children now.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, Cannon talks about being diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder — and why he sought out the testing after being called one so many times — along with ADHD, insomnia, and the lupus nephritis he's lived with since 2012. He explains why he refuses to slow down, though every doctor tells him to, and why he feels worse lying still than working. He talks about being performative by nature, something therapy named for him, and about the only place he can turn it off. And about the distinction he's arrived at: his children are his lineage. His legacy is something else entirely.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.com

Recorded January 28, 2026

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: Nick Cannon

Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

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

Associate Producer: Jonah Johnson

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

Charlie Puth asked for incense before this interview started. He hears everything — the air conditioning, the school bell down the block, a note going slightly flat in a crowd of thousands — and a smell is the one thing he can't hear. He's been diagnosed with OCD, which he believes is inseparable from why he can make a record. It also means he circles the block before walking into a hotel lobby, and that a wrong sound can put him physically in his gut.

He didn't sing in front of anyone until he was 18. His father took a day off from construction work and sat in line with him for twelve hours to audition for America's Got Talent, where he told the judges he couldn't do it a cappella — he'd beatbox, he'd play piano, but not that. His mother, a Jewish woman teaching music in a Catholic school, wheeled a piano cart into rooms and quieted them with the Beatles. She's the reason he explains chord theory on the internet, a connection he makes out loud for the first time in this conversation, mid-sentence, and seems surprised by.

He talks with David Begnaud about the classical teachers who told him to stop using his ear, the early advice to manufacture feuds with people he'd never met, and the years he spent putting maybe forty-five percent of himself into his music. He's now released a song called "I Used to Be Cringe" that he found too embarrassing to finish for a year. The album arrives the same day his first child is due.
Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: www.thedogoodcrew.com

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.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: Charlie Puth

Executive Producers: Ellen Rocamora, Olivier Delfosse

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Theme Music: Slipstream

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

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

There's a photograph of a girl outside the Shrine Auditorium giving a thumbs up next to Roger Ebert, who is giving one back. She was around eight, brought there from Compton by her aunt Denise, who had figured out that the public could watch Oscar presenters rehearse the day before the show. Twenty-some years later, Ava DuVernay was working as a film publicist, and Ebert was one of the few critics who still booked himself — you wanted him to see a movie, you emailed him directly. She'd been doing it for years, all business.

So when she finished her first film, made for $50,000 and rejected by Sundance, she pitched it to him exactly the way she pitched everything else, without mentioning it was hers. He said yes. She spent her own money renting the screening room he liked. Then a one-line reply: your movie. I'll be in touch. Nothing else, until the tweet.

The film, I Will Follow, is about the day she moved out of the beach house she'd shared with her aunt, who died of breast cancer. Ebert, by then without his voice and near the end of his own illness, wrote that every emotion in it was one he'd experienced himself. In this conversation with David Begnaud, DuVernay talks about what that review unlocked — the other critics who suddenly said yes, the Sundance acceptance on her eighth try, the road to a Best Picture nomination for Selma — and about the thing underneath all of it, which wasn't a favor. It was being taken seriously. She has since built an entire organization around handing that forward, and she is very clear about what she expects from people who come asking.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.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: Ava DuVernay

Executive Producers: Ellen Rocamora, Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Griffin Hamilton

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

Barry Diller was 23, a junior executive at ABC, when he was called into the chairman's office to meet the Austrian industrialist who had just bought Paramount. Charles Bluhdorn wanted to sell ABC a package of Paramount films. Diller told him the movies were no good and ABC wasn't buying. He had never stood up to anyone before and has no idea where it came from. Bluhdorn was impressed enough to keep calling for the next eight years.

Then, when Diller was 32, Bluhdorn told him he was going to run Paramount. Diller's response was that he was out of his mind — he'd never made a movie, only television. Bluhdorn's counter was that the only thing left to do was say yes, you dope. Paramount finished dead last among the six studios for the first two years. Diller offered to go. Bluhdorn refused, and then Saturday Night Fever came out, and the studio stayed in first place for seven straight years.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, Diller talks about that faith and what it buys a person — the room to fail without the rug being pulled. He also talks about the mother who wouldn't come get him from camp when he was seven, and what he calls cementing himself shut. About learning to fly a Cessna to cure a phobia, and losing the fear the moment he was airborne. About the guilt he still carries for not being louder during the AIDS crisis while he was running a studio. About being written up by People as a man failing upward, and now owning the magazine. And about Bluhdorn, who kept his leukemia secret for three years, crying in a helicopter over the Dominican Republic two months before he died.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.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: Barry Diller

Executive Producers: Ellen Rocamora, Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Griffin Hamilton

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

CONNECT WITH US:

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

Six letters went to the Clayton County school board on behalf of a senior facing expulsion under a zero-tolerance drug policy. One of them came from his college prep geometry teacher, whose actual last name was Love, and it made the argument plainly: don't throw this child's life away, give him a second chance. The student was Tauheed Epps. He'd been arrested at fifteen with cocaine and again at seventeen for selling five-dollar bags of weed at school. He was also carrying A's, perfect attendance, and basketball scholarship offers.

They let him stay. He lost Memphis and went to Alabama State instead, where a coaching staff that recruited him got fired almost immediately and he lost his love for the game — and where he met the woman he married. In this conversation with David Begnaud, 2 Chainz talks about why he wouldn't change any of it, about his mother noticing him bagging up the night before the arrest and asking twice whether he was sure, and about the four generations of hustle behind him — bootleg liquor at his great-grandparents' house, then his grandparents, then a mother who married a drug dealer — that stopped with him.

Then Begnaud asks whether they can call Ms. Love right now, on camera, without warning. He hadn't planned to. She picks up.

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.

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

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.com

Host: David Begnaud

Guest: 2 Chainz

Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

Associate Producer: Jonah Johnson

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Social: Mariah Maull

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

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

Post-Production: Longwave Digital

Theme Music: Slipstream

CONNECT WITH US:

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

"Nobody but nobody can make it out here alone." In this powerful conversation, Oprah Winfrey shares how one teacher's attention saved her life during her darkest years and why being "seen" is the greatest gift one human can give another.

Most people know Oprah as a voice of wisdom, but she wasn't always the woman we see today. In this premiere episode of "The Person Who Believed In Me," she sits down with Emmy-winning journalist David Begnaud to share the origin of her resilience - the lonely, introverted 13-year-old sitting in a chaotic cafeteria with a book, and the teacher named Mr. Abrams who saw something in her that she hadn't yet seen in herself.

The conversation gets honest about the gap between who the world says you are and who you know you can be. Oprah opens up about overcoming the trauma of her youth and the moment she realized her past didn't have to define her future. If you've ever felt invisible or questioned whether you belonged, this conversation will remind you that one person's belief can change everything. It's a reminder that nobody makes it out here alone - and that you might be that person for someone else.

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: Oprah Winfrey
Executive Producers: Ellen Rocamora, Olivier Delfosse
Associate Producers: Griffen Hamilton, Jonah Johnson
Booker: Sully Bloch
Director of Social: Mariah Maull
Director of Photography: Foster Parks
Theme Music: Slipstream

Get more stories that remind you the world is still good: www.thedogoodcrew.com

Thank you to Canva for believing in the power of storytelling and helping us bring this podcast to life: https://canva.com

CONNECT WITH US:

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

David Begnaud:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidbegnaud/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@davidbegnaud
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DavidBegnaud/
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@davidbegnaud
X: https://x.com/davidbegnaud

Do Good Crew:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dogood/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dogoodstory
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dogoodstory

Oprah Winfrey:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oprah/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@oprah
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah

The Person Who Believed In Me is a heartfelt podcast that celebrates the unsung heroes behind some of the world's biggest names. Hosted by Emmy Award-winning journalist David Begnaud, this series shines a spotlight on the everyday people who saw potential, offered unwavering support, and changed the trajectory of extraordinary lives.

In this trailer, you'll hear from an incredible lineup of guests including Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Puth, Nick Cannon, Barry Diller, Sherry Lansing, Jason Ballard, and 2 Chainz - each sharing powerful glimpses into the people who believed in them before the world knew their names. These weren't just words of encouragement from afar.

This was presence. Sacrifice. Dedication. From the music teacher who recognized raw talent, to the parent who refused to let their child settle, to the mentor who saw past society's limitations - these believers changed everything. Every episode features a big-name guest, but the true star is always the ordinary person who saw something extraordinary and chose to nurture it. Join David Begnaud as he explores the profound impact one person's belief can have on another's destiny. Get ready for intimate conversations, emotional revelations, and inspiring stories that remind us all of the power of believing in someone.

Host: David Begnaud
Created By: David Begnaud
A Do Good Crew Production
Executive Producer: Ellen Rocamora
For Do Good Crew: Executive Producers Olivier Delfosse, David Begnaud, Associate Producer Griffen Hamilton, Editor Jonah Johnson, Booker Sully Bloch
Director Of Photography: Foster Parks
Music Composed By: Slipstream
Post-Production: Longwave Digital