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