The Person Who Believed In Me with David Begnaud

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.

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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: 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