David Magee
Bestselling Author, Speaker & Changemaker in Recovery and Student and Family Well-Being
David Magee
Bestselling Author, Speaker & Changemaker in Recovery and Student and Family Well-Being
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Biography
David Magee is an award-winning author, bestselling writer, nationally recognized speaker, podcast host, and changemaker dedicated to advancing recovery, student and family well-being, and meaningful organizational change. Through the power of storytelling, he helps companies, communities, schools, universities, healthcare organizations, churches, and families discover how resilience, connection, and purpose can transform lives.
Throughout his career, Magee has lived in two worlds that rarely meet. As a business journalist and author, he spent decades studying some of the world's most respected companies, interviewing influential leaders, appearing as a business commentator on CNBC, and serving as an on-air expert across multiple History Channel business series. He is the author of acclaimed business books on John Deere, Toyota, and other leading organizations, offering insights into what separates companies that continue to innovate from those that become too protective of past success.
Then his own life changed dramatically.
After losing a career and a marriage, Magee found himself living out of his car while all three of his children faced significant personal struggles. Determined to rebuild his life and his family, he persevered through addiction, recovery, and profound hardship, including the devastating loss of his oldest son, William, to overdose. Rather than allowing tragedy to define his family, David and his loved ones rebuilt their lives with deeper purpose, discovering that healing is possible even in the face of unimaginable loss. Their journey from adversity to recovery now fuels David's mission to help others find strength, meaning, and hope amid the nation's mental health and substance misuse crisis.
Inspired by William's legacy, Magee helped create the William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education, a pioneering model for prevention, recovery support, and student well-being at the University of Mississippi. He also helped establish the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing, advancing research and innovation that supports students, families, and communities.
David is the founder and CEO of The Magee Foundation, which uses storytelling to break stigma and help address the opioid and mental health crisis through education, innovation, and connection. Over the past five years, he has engaged more than 75,000 students, parents, educators, healthcare professionals, and community leaders in conversations about addiction, recovery, resilience, and lasting joy. His story-led, research-informed approach is now being developed and piloted as educational curriculum, extending its impact beyond the stage into schools and communities.
He is the author of the national bestselling memoir Dear William: A Father's Story of Addiction, Recovery, Love, and Loss, which is currently being developed as a major feature film slated for release in 2027. His forthcoming memoir, Walk With Me, will be published in May 2027.
Today, David hosts The David Magee Show podcast and speaks to audiences nationwide, sharing practical strategies and deeply personal stories that challenge people to build stronger organizations, healthier relationships, and more compassionate communities. Having sat with CEOs of some of the world's most recognizable companies as well as students, families, and individuals searching for hope, Magee understands that the distance between those worlds is far smaller than most people realize. He reaches every audience the same way—through authentic storytelling that helps people see themselves, one another, and the possibilities for lasting change.
David Magee's presentations are deeply moving, insightful, and actionable, leaving audiences inspired to lead with compassion, embrace resilience, and create lives and communities rooted in connection, purpose, and hope.
He and his wife, Kent, live in Oxford, Mississippi.
Speaker Videos
TEDx: Road to Wellbeingville
On “Dear William” | CBS Mornings
Family Matters: Meet the Magee’s
Speech Topics
Dear William: Turning Pain Into Recovery & Purpose
Through the lens of his bestselling memoir Dear William and the family story behind it—now becoming a major motion picture—David Magee shares his family’s remarkable journey of recovery and renewal. What began as heartbreak became a blueprint for healing, inspiring a national conversation about hope, connection, and second chances. David helps audiences see that no matter how broken a story may seem, it can be rewritten into one of strength, purpose, and grace.
Revising the Story: Healing the Crisis, Building Connection
In a time of unprecedented mental health and substance misuse challenges, David Magee invites audiences to “revise the story” — in their homes, schools, and organizations. Drawing on lived family experience and years of work in student and family well-being, he shows how open dialogue, compassion, and connection can transform cultures of despair into communities of hope. This talk empowers leaders, educators, and families to move from fear to empathy—and to create real change together.
The Gift: Finding Meaning & Resilience in Recovery
David uses his family's miracle recovery story to explore how faith, courage, and vulnerability can turn our hardest chapters into the foundation for a new life. With authenticity and insight, he reveals how embracing our stories—rather than hiding them—leads to personal renewal and community healing. This talk reminds every listener that hope isn’t something we find; it’s something we build, together.
The Business of Joy
The best companies do more than make money. They make life better.
David Magee did not start studying joy because life was going well.
His family had come apart. Addiction, distance, silence, and loss took more than any of them thought they could lose. Beneath everything they believed they wanted — achievement, success, control — was something simpler.
They wanted their joy back.
Getting it back took more than positive thinking. They had to tell the truth, change the stories they were living by, learn to hear one another, and begin making different choices. Joy was not waiting for them at the end of an easier life. It had to be built in the middle of a hard one.
It started with gratitude, which turned out to be far more than a feeling. Practiced deliberately, gratitude became the most reliable way his family found its footing again, and it is now the foundation of David's work in schools and communities across the country.
That changed his family. It also became his work.
David now helps students, families, communities, and organizations understand what steals joy, what restores it, and how it moves from one person to another. That work has helped people seek treatment, choose recovery, repair relationships, and find a way forward when they were not sure one remained.
The same lessons belong inside companies.
Every organization is producing a human experience, whether it intends to or not. The question is whether people leave that experience with more life or less. That shows up in energy, loyalty, creativity, retention, and eventually in what customers feel on the other end.
This talk is about how joy is created, how it is lost, and how it can be passed along. Joy is not a perk, a slogan, or an escape from hard things. It grows where people are seen, where the work means something, where progress is visible, and where doing the work well makes someone else's life better.
That makes joy a leadership decision, not simply a wellbeing program.
The talk can include a short exercise the room does together. It works with two hundred people in a ballroom or twenty around a table and gives people something they can carry back into their work and their lives.
The Story We're Running On
Every company and every person is operating on a story. Most never consider revising it until something breaks.
Every company has a story about itself — what made it successful, what customers want, what the competition cannot do. Leaders carry their own. So does everyone in the room.
The trouble is that a story can keep driving decisions long after it has stopped being true. And you cannot see it clearly from inside it. That is not a failure of intelligence. It is how stories work.
David spent years inside major companies watching this play out, including a conversation with an NFL owner about why the game itself was never the only thing he was selling.
Then David told himself the wrong story about his own family and nearly lost everything to it. What he had watched happen inside companies was happening in his own house: an old story was still making decisions long after it stopped matching the truth.
This talk is about the story you are running on now — how to recognize when it has gone stale, what it costs to keep living by it, and what it takes to write the next chapter instead of repeating the old one.
The Big Bet
Breakthroughs do not come from playing it safe. They do not come from hunches either.
The breakthroughs that mattered most began the same way: someone looked closely enough to see that the accepted answer was no longer the best one, then placed a calculated bet against it.
A real bet is built on evidence, preparation, timing, and the willingness to question what everyone else has stopped examining. Done well, it can create extraordinary positive change.
David spent a career studying why some companies moved ahead while others defended yesterday’s success, including close study of companies such as John Deere and Toyota.
Then he placed a bet of his own: that the standard approach to student and family wellbeing was not reaching enough people, and that story and connection could open doors that information alone had not.
It challenged a field that had relied on many of the same approaches for decades – and worked.
This talk examines what separates conviction from ego, a calculated risk from a careless one, and genuine insight from the next passing idea. It also asks the harder question: what are you prepared to do when you see the opportunity?
What We Carry to Work
The heaviest thing most people bring to work has nothing to do with work.
A child in trouble. A parent declining. A marriage under strain nobody has mentioned out loud. Money. Grief. Addiction in the family. Fear they have not told anyone.
It walks in at eight in the morning and sits in every meeting.
The details stay private. The weight does not. It shows up in focus, judgment, patience, attendance, safety — and in good people who leave and never say why.
Nobody talks about it because work has a rule about leaving those things at the door. Everyone follows the rule. Nobody can actually obey it.
David has sat with CEOs of major brands and with families who were not sure they could keep going. This talk is about the cost of that silence: what it does to the person holding something alone, what it does to a team that senses something is wrong but does not know how to respond, and what an organization is paying for a rule nobody can follow.
It is not an argument for turning managers into counselors. It is an argument for creating a workplace where people can stop performing long enough to get help before a private struggle becomes an organizational one.
People do better work when they are not spending all their energy pretending they are fine.
Audiences leave this talk lighter than they expect. The subject is heavy. The talk is not.
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