Nirav Tolia | The Only Indian Kid in Odessa, TX

Heather McMahan used to stalk Joan Rivers' shows. She bartended across the street from a basement comedy club in Hell's Kitchen, so she knew where the unmarked back entrance was, and one Fat Tuesday she got off early and waited outside it. When Joan came out, the first thing she said was: oh my God, you're gorgeous. Then she handed her a string of Mardi Gras beads and gave her ten minutes she didn't owe her. Over the next few years, in book-signing lines and outside theaters, Joan kept telling her the same thing — keep going, you have a commercial look, go to LA. So she went. Within her first 24 hours in Los Angeles she'd been in a car accident and had an allergic reaction to a bad spray tan, which she read as the universe telling her to go home. Two weeks in, a bartender friend called to say Joan had just walked into a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Heather drove over, went to the table, said she'd taken the advice and moved, and declined the photo the assistant offered. On her way out, Joan came looking for her across the room: you've got chutzpah, you listened, you're going to make it. Heather got to the valet, called her father, and dry-heaved into the phone. In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about the father who mailed her sorority a list of ten reasons she should quit theater and join the Air Force, and who died of pancreatic cancer seven days after his diagnosis at 57. About writing him a million-dollar check she couldn't cover, and cashing it two years later. About self-financing all three of her specials rather than wait for permission, and getting the Netflix call from a wine cellar in Florence. About the Ryder Cup, and the death threats, and what Joan would have told her to do about it. And about the bee that keeps turning up — her father's sign, and, she discovered years later, Joan's emblem too. Heather McMahan's new special By a Thread premieres on Hulu on October 16, 2026. Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com Chapters ☀️ Chapters

James Brown was in fourth grade when a teacher saw him reading a book called So You Want to Be a Doctor and told him he should consider another career. “Kids like you, she said, do not do well in math and science.” He never told his mother. He carried it alone, and it held him back for years. Then two middle school teachers in Washington, D.C., pulled him aside with a different message: honey, you can do this. Simple as that. Deep Southern care wrapped in belief he hadn't heard before. He started to think maybe he could. At 14 he was cut from one basketball team and kept by another coach who saw him miss an undefended layup in front of the whole school. The students laughed. The coach, Don Fugle, kept him anyway because he paid attention. A year later Morgan Wooten recruited him to DeMatha, handed him three sheets of fundamentals, and told him to pick one: all county, all state, or all America. James took the third sheet and worked it religiously. He became one of the best high school players in the country. He was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks in 1973 and cut at the end of training camp. He went home and didn't leave his bedroom for two weeks. In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about the lie he told Morgan Wooten at basketball camp that spiraled into a Friday afternoon confrontation about integrity. About his mother calling the gym to say practice ran too late and if it happened again, JB couldn't play. About Senator Ted Kennedy flying him to Capitol Hill to pitch Harvard. And about leaving Fox for CBS on a handshake, turning down a counter offer because his mother taught him your word is your bond. James Brown is a three time Emmy Award winner, Pro Football Hall of Famer, and host of CBS's The NFL Today. He has hosted more Super Bowls than anyone in television history. Get more stories that remind you the world is still good. Sign up for our free newsletter: https://www.thedogoodcrew.com Chapters ☀️ Chapters

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

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 ☀️

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 ☀️