The Person Who Believed In Me with David Begnaud

Howie Mandel got expelled from high school in Toronto for calling a contractor out of the Yellow Pages and asking for a 25-foot addition to the school library. He scheduled the appointment during math, because that classroom's window looked out on the field, and then — this is the part he finds most revealing about himself — he didn't tell a single other person. He sat alone watching a man with a clipboard and a tape measure, waiting for a joke nobody else knew was happening. He was thrown out of a different school for retrieving a bent Snickers bar from the swimming pool with his mouth. He has no diploma. By the early eighties he was a working comedian in Los Angeles, and the Tonight Show booker had told him flatly he'd never be on: not Johnny's cup of tea. So when he heard Joan Rivers — then guest-hosting for Carson and out-rating him — would be working out her monologue at the Comedy Store, he called Mitzi Shore and asked for the 9:55 spot, the five minutes directly before her. He woke up that day with a high fever. He went anyway, and the adrenaline carried him, and she passed him on the stairs and said he was so funny. Then she talked to Mitzi for forty-five minutes while he slid down the wall outside and lay on the steps waiting. When she finally came out, she gave him a phone number. He did the Tonight Show that week. McCauley called the next morning. He went on twenty-two more times with Johnny. In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about being diagnosed with OCD in his forties only because his wife gave him an ultimatum, and about accidentally disclosing it live on Howard Stern's show — convinced in the elevator down that his career was finished, until a stranger on the street whispered me too. He talks about the half hour he spent punching a locked doorknob in Malibu. About why he believes no one should ever apologize for a joke, and why he made an apology video anyway. And about what Joan gave him beyond the booking, which was permission not to care what the room thought. Howie Mandel is the longest running judge on America’s Got Talent, available to watch on NBC and Peacock now. Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com Chapters ☀️ Chapters 00:00:00 "The majority of the world does not have a sense of humor" 00:03:18 The Johnny Carson litmus test 00:04:40 Toronto, 1977: stand-up on a dare 00:06:42 The contractor and the school library 00:12:02 The Snickers bar in the pool 00:13:26 "I just wanted to have a group laugh" 00:17:02 Kelly Ripa and the apology video 00:20:38 Addicted to social media 00:26:30 The 9:55 PM spot and the fever 00:31:57 Lying on the stairs, waiting for Joan 00:33:00 The Tonight Show, twice in two weeks 00:36:30 Joan's last show and Chris Rock's 62 seconds 00:43:00 Nothing is too soon: laughing at his father's funeral 00:58:28 The Howard Stern disclosure, and a stranger who says "me too" ABOUT THIS PODCAST: The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning. Host: David Begnaud Guest: Howie Mandel Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick Booker: Sully Bloch Director of Photography: Foster Parks Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative) Social: Gracie Pekrul Theme Music: Slipstream Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co. CONNECT WITH US: The Person Who Believed In Me: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

Marlee Matlin was twelve, performing at a children's theater for the deaf in Chicago, when Henry Winkler accepted an invitation to stop by on his day off. She performed the whole show at him. Afterward she walked up and asked whether she could be an actor in Hollywood, like he was. Before he could answer, her mother pulled him aside and asked him to dampen his enthusiasm — tell her to go to college, get an education, dream other dreams, because Hollywood was not going to be kind to a deaf girl. Winkler looked at her and said she was talking to the wrong man. Marlee didn't learn about that exchange for years. When she did, she says it broke her heart for her mother, who wanted what most mothers want. She also says Winkler rescued her from not believing in herself. They became pen pals, and every letter she sent, he answered — which is how she knew the friendship was real, and, she says, how she came to know she was worthy. A few years after that first meeting she won the Academy Award for Children of a Lesser God, at 21, the youngest woman ever to win Best Actress and the first deaf performer to win at all. She had learned about the nomination from a phone at a rehab center, where her counselor congratulated her and then told her to go clean her room. When the relationship that followed the Oscar collapsed, she turned up at Winkler's door with the statuette in her hand and told him she had this, but no boyfriend and nowhere to live. He and his wife Stacey said stay the weekend. She stayed two years. In this conversation with David Begnaud, Marlee talks about the year she presented the next Best Actor award and chose to speak the nominees' names aloud — a decision she made alone, to show producers she could, and one the deaf community read as a betrayal. She shut them out for fifteen years and says she still carries something like PTSD from it. She talks about what her parents never knew, and what she never told them. And about the tough love from Winkler that she resented at the time and now says was right, including the morning he told her that no, she could not skip an hour of work for her son's first day of kindergarten. Marlee Matlin is executive producer of the feature documentary, Siren: The Voices of Shelley Beattie, available now on HBO. Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com Chapters ☀️ ABOUT THIS PODCAST: The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning. Host: David Begnaud Guest: Marlee Matlin Executive Producer: David Begnaud, Olivier Delfosse, Justin McGoldrick Booker: Sully Bloch Director of Photography: Foster Parks Live Production Technician: Will Whitley (Statik Creative) Social: Gracie Pekrul Theme Music: Slipstream Post-Production: Longwave Digital & David & Luana Co. CONNECT WITH US: The Person Who Believed In Me: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believedpodcast

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. He's still her patient. He only recently learned she was 26 at the time, following a philosophy her own elders insisted was the only thing standing between her patients and death. 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 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. 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 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