The Person Who Believed In Me with David Begnaud

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Marlee Matlin | Nobody Stood Up at the Oscars Sep 28, 2026

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.
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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: 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

Chris Olsen | "I Think My Therapist Hates Me" Sep 21, 2026

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

Thomasin McKenzie | Anxiety and Jojo Rabbit Sep 14, 2026

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

Chelsea Handler | He Said He Was Coming Back Sep 07, 2026

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.
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: 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 | Always the Outsider Aug 31, 2026

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.
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: 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 | The Internet Made Her a Star Aug 24, 2026

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

Gary Vaynerchuk | A Studio Apartment for Eight Aug 17, 2026

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.
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: 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 | My Kidnapper, My Best Friend Aug 10, 2026

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.
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: 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

Brian Grazer | Straight F's, But a Gift for Gab Aug 03, 2026

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.
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: 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 | "You Deserve a Seat at the Table" Jul 27, 2026

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

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