It was really impactful to interview Brett Rapkin the Emmy-winning producer at Podium Pictures, LLC, to hear about how his own personal experience has driven his groundbreaking work with a variety of top-tier athletes to address how mental health factors into their journeys. His films have captured the humanity, the triumphs, and the struggles of men and women in a variety of different sports including Michael Phelps, Mikaela Shiffrin, and most recently DeMar DeRozan in his Dinners with DeMar series on YouTube.

I'm particularly passionate about how Brett and his team are expanding the depth of media in getting the word out about how men and athletes at even the highest levels suffer and struggle with mental health issues like depression, anxiety, suicide, grief and loss. Not surprisingly, Brett's own story also includes some of these factors, and I encourage you to take a look and learn some more about what Brett has done with his groundbreaking work!

Full Interview Transcript

How Brett Got Into Sports Media

Dr. Dan Singley: All right, Brett. Good to see you this morning, this Monday morning.

Brett Rapkin: Good morning. Good to see you.

Dr. Dan Singley: Yeah, I'm really, really happy to be interviewing you. I want to just sort of begin this with who you are, because I've been super impressed with what you're doing with mental health. That's pretty different with certainly what I do, but then what I see a lot of other folks doing in this space. So if you would just do a quick introduction, talk about Podium Pictures, and then we'll get into some of the meat that you're excited about.

Brett Rapkin: Sure. Yeah, I'm a Los Angeles native, grew up in the San Fernando Valley, playing a lot of baseball. Played with a bunch of guys that ended up, you know, going pro, including Ryan Braun from the Brewers — was my brother's high school teammate. Turned out to be a National League MVP. So I grew up with sports. I'm from a sports family. My dad played baseball in college, and pretty traditional upbringing. Went to the University of Arizona, got to be around some incredible basketball teams, saw them win a national championship my freshman year.

So sports has just always been part of my life. It's in the blood. It's how I connected with people. Most of my best friends were people I met playing baseball. But another part of my life has always been mental health. Whether it's starting therapy at an early age because my mom felt that my little brother and I were kind of fighting too much. And then when I was at the University of Arizona, I lost two of my fraternity brothers. I was in ZBT Arizona. I lost John Goodstein and Jed Satow, whose parents started the Jed Foundation pretty much straight away. So that was pretty heavy. I mean, to be 18, 19, and lose two young men who seemed to have the world ahead of them — from seemingly great families with resources, good-looking guys with beautiful girlfriends. It was a real wake-up call that mental health doesn't discriminate based on anything, really.

So my professional life — I started Podium Pictures after doing a lot of producing for HBO Sports and ESPN and a lot of freelance stuff. I always had some independent projects going as well, but as I look back, and sometimes you can only see the threads in hindsight, the stories have always tended toward the story of men on journeys. I did both a documentary and a scripted film about a guy called the Spaceman, Bill Lee, who was a Red Sox and Expos pitcher. What attracted me to the story enough to do two different films on the guy was that once Major League Baseball was done with him, he figured out a way to keep doing what he loved and enjoyed outside of the system. So I think it was that kind of maverick attitude that he had. He's also an incredibly colorful character.

So yeah, as far as the mental health piece and my producing career intersecting — it was when I interviewed the captain of the Olympic bobsled team, Steven Holcomb. I've got a picture of him over here. It was just supposed to be a short film about how he had survived a suicide attempt and then won a gold medal at the 2010 Olympics, which was quite a story. And he was getting ready for the [2018] Olympics — he came out to LA, we had dinner in Santa Monica, I interviewed him, and shortly after the interview, he passed away from an overdose, which is something his book describes him attempting years before. That ended up leading to partnering with Michael Phelps and making a film called The Weight of Gold, which had a lot of impact.

Michael Phelps, the USOPC, and the "Superhero's Journey"

Dr. Dan Singley: I have to tell you — the fact that you've taken your personal experience, like you said, therapy as a kid, really intense grief and loss when you were in college, along with being there for national champs, coming from a sports family — being able to elevate what some of these men that we look at and lionize... we look at that and think "that's a hero, that's somebody with so much that the rest of us just don't have." And you're able to show the whole spectrum, that they're human. And in a way, you being able to do the same with yourself gives it a real authenticity. I really admire that.

Brett Rapkin: Yeah, no, it's definitely — I'm super grateful. I've been able to combine passions, and yeah, excited to see what's next and what we're doing. Certainly once I got the opportunity to interview Michael Phelps, I ended up interviewing him twice. The first time was when he was giving a keynote at the Kennedy Forum in Chicago, around mental health. I went there and did the first interview. During that first interview, he talked about his own journey — he's open about being suicidal and dealing with not just the post-Olympic depression that pretty much all of them deal with, but he started to talk about how his teammates — not just on the swim team but on the whole Team USA — were dealing with similar stuff, and there had been some suicides, and that's something that he had contemplated at one point. But he also talked about how he didn't feel the resources were sufficient.

So two things there. One, let's talk about Michael Phelps. I mean, the guy is the GOAT — 23 gold medals. I think the second most in history is like six or eight. So the delta there is just mind-blowing. He's done really well financially, he's married — literally married to Miss California, Nicole, his wife — lives in a beautiful house, has four beautiful kids. On paper, he's got it all, but he continues to struggle. So there's a disconnect there, right? And then let's talk about the institution — we've got the USOPC, which has tremendous resources, and they weren't, according to him and the other athletes, providing the mental health resources that were necessary for them to flourish. So that was a big eye-opener as well.

Dr. Dan Singley: Yeah, it's really fascinating to me — that's the thing I hear over and over again. I'm a board-certified psychologist, I specialize in men's issues, and my research is on early fatherhood — dads with postpartum depression, all that. So I hear a lot of different folks' lives and stories. But that thing you said, about "on paper my life should be great, I'm living a superhero's journey — then why do I feel like crap? Why do I feel like an imposter? Why am I depressed? Why am I languishing when I've got the house, the car, the wife, the whole legacy?" What's really meaningful to me about that is it sidesteps that we're all kind of judging everybody else's outside and comparing it to our own inside — it's an apples-to-oranges comparison that people in really visible positions in society often experience.

Dinners with DeMar

So I wanted to segue into the work you've done with Dinners with DeMar, and DeMar DeRozan himself — I'm not trying to fanboy here, I'm just putting this out there — what he's doing, what y'all are doing in that series, is elevating a narrative and a person and an experience that just doesn't get enough play. We don't hear enough about the stories of, again, on-paper superstar, .001-percenter — and all of the struggle and suffering underneath that.

Let me go a little deep here and then pull back. In his experience, there's something that really jumped out at me. He's had depression for years, survivor's guilt, lost a lot of people that he grew up with. But it was during the All-Star Weekend when he was feeling crushing depression, and all he did was drop one tweet. I think he said something like, "Man, this depression is getting to me." And the next day, floodgates wide open — which, to me, on the one hand is lovely, because people rolled up on him like "hey man, are you okay, do you need anything." On the other hand, what jumps out at me is part of why people circled the wagons around him so much is because it was so unusual — it's not the kind of thing we see a lot. So the community responded, yes, but that doesn't mean it's normalized.

Anyhow — I wanted to give it back to you. How did you get into doing this project, and where are you at with it now?

Brett Rapkin: Yeah, with The Weight of Gold having the success it had — we did end up getting it acquired by HBO, which is a filmmaker's dream, the brass ring — but more importantly, it just reached so many people, and it helped catalyze the Olympic Committee to make some changes pretty much right away. And they're a tough organization, so it was like, okay — we can actually make organizational change, we can reach a ton of people, this is something powerful. So I was like, okay, we've got a bit of a formula now. Let's partner with other major athletes. Let's raise the money independently — if it ends up on HBO or Netflix, fantastic, but we're not going to run around town trying to convince them to fund it, because fortunately there are philanthropic families and foundations and brands out there who are most interested in the impact these things can make.

So I did — I went to Bode Miller, the skier, who's an old friend of mine. I traveled Europe with him in 2004 for a project I was hired to do, and we became good buddies and continue to be. He's somebody who's suffered loss himself, including every parent's worst nightmare — he lost his daughter in a drowning accident several years ago. And I had read that the mental health crisis and suicide rate specifically in ski towns, mountain towns, is off the charts. It's a combination of substance abuse, access to firearms, financial reasons having to do with the economics of ski towns. But the statistics are super scary.

So I like the idea that we can't talk to everybody the same way. A lot of the mental health messaging is trying to reach every man, woman, and child in America with "it's okay not to be okay" — and I think it's all positive, but from a marketing perspective, you've got to talk to certain people.

Dr. Dan Singley: Yeah, it lacks nuance, right?

Brett Rapkin: It lacks nuance. And ultimately, what's the call to action, right? And I think with this particular topic that you and I spend a lot of time thinking about — anti-stigmatization is always important, just vulnerability, talking to somebody is a great start, because so many people don't do that. But at some point we've got to actually provide access to resources that can be helpful, and we can talk about tools. I partnered with Bode, and we ended up getting Mikaela Shiffrin, the incredible ski racer, to sit down and do an interview, and we focused the film on how in Vail, Colorado, they've really built a tremendous infrastructure for the community around mental health, and they did it with a lot of private money — they raised over 100 million, and they built a crisis response center and a crisis response team. Previously, if someone was going through a mental health crisis, they had to drive all the way down to Denver to be treated. They made sure they had something in town. That film's called The Paradise Paradox. People can see it on Amazon.

Dr. Dan Singley: It's true — you don't associate Vail with mental health difficulties, right? That's totally... yeah, yeah.

Brett Rapkin: I mean, a lot of people move to those kinds of places to get away, and they think that once they live in paradise, a place that looks as beautiful as that, that everything's just going to be easy. But wherever you go, there you are, right?

Dr. Dan Singley: Yeah, turns out you're still you.

Brett Rapkin: So yeah, we had a lot of success with that. And then I had been aware of DeMar and his story, and reached out to his team. I was in Vegas shooting an interview with Steve Kerr for another project, and DeMar's agent said, "Can you be at the elevator at the Aria Hotel in five minutes, we can get you a meeting." I happened to be at the Aria, and I got my audience with him and his agents in a suite. I said, you know, you've been going on other people's podcasts selectively, and you've really leaned into it — because, as you mentioned, Dan, he could have just sent that original tweet during the All-Star Weekend and then been like "I'm good," and moved on with his life. Culturally, that would have been the thing to do. But he's continued to lean into it.

So I said, I'd really like to help you build your own platform where you can sit down, talk to the people you want to talk to, in the way you want to. I want to call it Dinners with DeMar. I don't want you to interview people with a microphone — I just want you to sit down, have some dinner, and talk. And we ended up, fortunately, getting it going. Thanks to a few families, including the Doughton family in Chicago, who are fantastic, we've been able to do it. This is the fourth summer we've found time during his off-season — he takes time away from his family, gets up at like 4:30 a.m. during the off-season to work out, to stay disciplined. So yeah, it's been fantastic, and we've got four new episodes in the can, ready to be edited and released. I'm super energized to see what we can do with it.

Because — this guy is number 15 all-time in scoring in NBA history. He's from Compton. He's in the Kendrick Lamar "Not Like Us" video. I'm a 47-year-old white dude from the suburbs, but I still listen to a lot of hip-hop, and I think these NBA players are as close to the cultural icons of our time as it gets. When Obama opened his presidential library a few weeks ago in Chicago, he made sure Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson were there to do an All the Smoke interview, because the hip-hop community, the basketball community — that's where it's at, and it transcends. It transcends race, it transcends urban, it's rural — you're as likely to see a kid in rural Tennessee wearing an NBA jersey. So I've just been continuing to lean into it, and I'm excited to see where it can go.

The Mirror Initiative and the Draymond Green Episode

Dr. Dan Singley: So ditto, as I say — what you're doing, and the platform you're elevating, is really inspirational. Not just to me — this is something I bring to a lot of other meetings. I do research and policy, so I'm in the room with a lot of shrinks and legislators, a lot of nerds, basically, who are not going to get invited to President Obama's gatherings.

There's one scene in particular I wanted to go through. As you know, one of the projects I'm working on is called the Mirror Initiative — a project so that men can see themselves more in psychology, both as practitioners, because we're trying to increase the pipeline — it's just 28% males doing the work — and so that men are more likely to engage in mental health help-seeking, which certainly the work you're doing is normalizing and raising up.

So there's one scene — it's the very first episode, I'll put the link in where we post this — the first episode of Dinners with DeMar, with Draymond Green. They've already gone through — they knew each other in high school, they knew each other's families. These aren't just two superstars who came together on the circuit. Draymond asks first — he says, "Hey, whenever the clinical psychologist rolls into the locker room, I'm telling everybody, 'take the card, follow up with them.'" And then he goes, "But I never did. I'm telling people to do this, I think it's important, but I just can't get to it." And then he asks DeMar, "How'd you find your person? How did you make the connection?" And as I recall, DeMar's like, yeah, the first couple of people, I wasn't exactly feeling it, but then when he got in touch with someone who was just open about themselves, the relationship started, and they were able to connect and do the work.

And this speaks so much to psychotherapy in general, but in particular the work with men, because there's this stereotype — "therapy is about feelings, I'm bad at feelings, I'm going to be bad at therapy." And obviously there's so much more to it than that.

Brett Rapkin: No, I appreciate that. And yeah, that scene you just mentioned — that's something that couldn't have been scripted. That was just two men who kind of forgot the cameras were there and were sharing something so personal. In that same sequence, Draymond also talks about some of the barriers to therapy — he was afraid of his privacy being leaked, afraid of losing his edge. And DeMar kind of strikes that down — one of the other powerful things in that scene is DeMar saying, "I was afraid of losing my edge, but once I started therapy, I had the best season I've ever had." I think that's something for men in particular — a lot of us are looking for that edge, we've got the chip on our shoulder that comes from a lot of different things, probably our fathers, for a lot of us — trying to prove something to dad. So the fear of losing that edge is a big deal, and I'm glad they talked about it.

With DeMar — being from Compton, he grew up around mostly gang members, came from the streets of Compton, growing up in significant poverty, poverty nearing homelessness, despite having both parents, which is probably somewhat rare. He's just a tremendous — I don't even want to say "spokesman," because he's not looking to be a spokesman, he just is who he is. I spent some time with him over the last few weeks, we shot three new episodes, and yeah — just incredibly grateful to be working with him, excited to see where we can take it.

Redefining Male Strength

Dr. Dan Singley: So I want to segue into a bit more about you and what you've got going on now. Before we started rolling, you told me you moved, and like everybody else I know, started taking up pickleball, trying to have balance with kids and so forth. This is one of the things I see as kind of a throughline of the confusing state of what it means to be a man, a boy, a teen these days. There's some shifts, some evolution — some people are worried you're turning your back on traditional manhood, other folks are coming from the other side, like all that's happening is rigid traditional masculinity.

The social science angle is actually pretty straightforward — the research shows it's balance and flexibility. It's your ability to be tough and hardcore in a game, in the theater of war, in a contract dispute — do that traditional hardcore-guy thing when that's what the context calls for — and an ability to be tender, empathetic, compassionate, to receive influence from other people, to have emotional insight and awareness and act on it, when that's what the context calls for. From my perspective, that's the call to action: teach and normalize and validate the complexity, the real multidimensionality of what it means to be a man these days, and give these men and boys permission to do it.

So — long-winded way of me teeing this up — that's kind of what I see you doing, right? Filmmaking is a pretty hardcore industry, you've had a lot of success and some challenges. How do you see this coming together for you personally, as a man, as a father, all the above?

Brett Rapkin: I mean, the word that's coming up is purpose. I think fortunately, thanks to my personal history, and some things that happened along the way I couldn't have predicted — like Steven Holcomb, the bobsledder, passing away — I was able to find purpose through my work. Early in my career, I have really talented friends — producers, directors, writers, editors — who are just kind of writing or coming up with whatever the market wants. "You want a Mormon Wives of Salt Lake City reality show? I can make that." I've been that kind of short-order chef before, when I worked at the NFL — "you need a piece about Drew Brees getting ready for game week seven, I'll cook it up." I'd fly to New Orleans, interview Drew — I was a short-order chef, "you want cheese on that, you got it." But I realized that wasn't sustainable for me long term. I needed purpose, because these things take a lot of time, and there are frustrations, dealing with talent and agents and all the things, and risk.

So finding purpose in it has been huge. But also, I saw the impact these things could have, and there's a lot of projects intended to be impactful that aren't really set up to do that. So that's where designing a studio — Podium Pictures being not just a production company but a studio — came in. We're now having other athletes' agents come to us saying, "we've done a project about X" — doesn't necessarily have to be mental health, there's one about maternal health that a big athlete came to us with — "how do we make impact with this?" And we have a process for it.

I've done a lot of studying on what impact means, and the definition I came up with is: something has to change. With The Weight of Gold, if we'd just put it on HBO but nothing changed at the Olympic Committee or in the attitudes of the general public, then is it really impact? If we have a screening at Sundance and you're talking to a room of filmgoers, doing one of these panels — there are too many panels, I'm sure they have a purpose, but—

Dr. Dan Singley: A little awkward, Brett — we're doing one right now, but here we are.

Brett Rapkin: No, no, no — because this is going to reach the masses, because of the power of the internet. But yeah, finding purpose in it, and then finding a business model where we're able to connect with these families who are excited to support these projects. They make it all possible, because it saves us from having to be in the marketplace. I got tired of being the 10th meeting the person from Netflix was going to have that day. The marketplace has really changed and evolved — everybody's a content creator now, including us. So it feels really good to have my personal interests aligned with a way to make a living and help other people.

Dr. Dan Singley: Okay — producer, writer, director, positive change agent, working with an aligned sense of purpose. So there you are. Your magic wand is working — the message, the mission, the outcome you're looking for — boom, if the magic wand turned on, what happens?

Brett Rapkin: Yeah, I think it's really leaning into my vision for Podium being the definitive studio when it comes to impact media. That means I don't necessarily need to direct every project or write every project — I'm good at that stuff and I want to lend a hand, but there are also certain tools and formulas I've found that work. I want to be the place that changemakers — whether philanthropists, athletes, other influential people, actors, musicians, hip-hop stars, whoever — come to, because they know we can get projects funded, get them produced well, and that they're going to create change in the world, because we've got a team and a process for doing that consistently. That's the vision I'm really leaning into, with Dinners with DeMar and this new batch of episodes being kind of the tip of the spear.

A Personal Note on Recovery and Representation

Dr. Dan Singley: So there's a personal element in this for me as well, right? Like — just some shrink — doesn't mean I haven't gotten therapy. In fact, I have, repeatedly, throughout my life. I'm in recovery for alcohol, working that every day. It's up and down the family tree, above me and below me, and it's just part of the journey. The more that word gets out about men and boys and teens and the people who love them being able to know about suffering and struggling and normalizing it — so we can have the "tough guy, yes, and there are some difficulties that go along with it" — the more we can normalize that story and get it out there, the better.

For me, the call to action is: we get more male-identified people into mental health, that's important, representation matters to me. And at the same time, make it so everybody better understands the nuance, the multidimensionality of the struggles — of successful women too, but also just typical people walking around who've been socialized not to talk about it. If nothing else, if the call to action looks like: you go to a boy or a man, you say "hey, how are you doing," you pause, you wait for the platitude — "yeah it's all good, it is what it is" — and then you stop and say, "okay, but how are you really doing" — uncle, son, father, whoever. That's not rocket science. But people don't do it. That, to me, invites the reality and the balance.

Brett Rapkin: Yeah — well, thankfully there's this movement, if that's the right word, that's very recent, and I give Richard Reeves a ton of credit for the work he's done, the data he continues to put out. Obama put "Of Boys and Men" on his summer reading list. So there's this movement, and this needs to be talked about. It wasn't cool to talk about — arguably it wasn't okay to talk about, for cultural reasons, it was just not talked about. But when I started seeing the data — three out of four suicides are men — that stopped me in my tracks. And then the data that one out of four homes has no father present where there are children — it's super scary. I see it in my own life, on all ends of the spectrum. It's not just the kid in Compton who's suffering because he doesn't have a mentor — the mentorship part is, I think, so important, because it serves both the mentor and the mentee.

One of the other data points that stopped me in my tracks: Big Brothers Big Sisters, who I've had the opportunity to connect with at the national level, received over 100 million in funding, I believe from MacKenzie Scott. But they've got 20,000 to 30,000 kids on a waiting list for a mentor — which says to me, there's a recruiting issue, there's a cultural issue.

Dr. Dan Singley: The cultural piece, yeah.

Brett Rapkin: I'm afraid a lot of young men now don't think it's worth getting out of bed. There's the DJ Quik line — well, guess what, there are things worth getting your ass out of bed for that aren't about getting paid. You've got to get paid, but there's also something called being of service, which is its own reward. And you might also meet somebody who leads to a job opportunity, but you've got to get out of the house.

I met somebody recently who lives in my community, 22, 23, started an online business, felt like he didn't need to go to college, didn't need to move out of his parents' house, isn't interested in dating. And I was like, dude — I had so much fun at the University of Arizona, four and a half years, amazing I made it out in four and a half. When I lived in New York in my early 20s for six years, I met so many of my lifelong friends, met girlfriends — how do you not want that opportunity? You've got the rest of your life to work, but you've got to get out of the house. I don't know how sustainable it is to be so solitary with an online business — what kind of life does that lead to? You want a life with community, hopefully people who want to continue to have families. I'm a father of two young kids — nothing's given me anywhere close to the purpose that being a father provides. So yeah, I'm concerned about our young men, with good reason, as I know you are.

Dr. Dan Singley: Yeah, people use the word "crisis," other people say that's an overreaction. But the loneliness, the isolation, the need for community — I realize I start to sound like the boomer my kids tell me I am, with no actual knowledge of what a boomer is — but balancing screen time with green time, getting out there, putting yourself in the path of life outside the virtual space, tends to do, over time, with repetition, all the things you're talking about. And it's tricky — finding ways to balance it within oneself, and not give in to the justifications to avoid it, is tough.

Brett Rapkin: Yeah, I had a therapist tell me once I need to get out there and ride the waves. And it's true — you've got to get on your surfboard and ride the waves, and sometimes they're going to crash on you and you're going to wipe out. But if you don't get out there, you're never going to have that feeling of riding the wave. It's tough — you talk about these "third places" — whether it was church, temple, the workplace, these places outside the house where you could meet friends and mentors and mates — a lot of them have gone away. And COVID literally forced us not to engage with people outside the house, which is crazy. So we need third places, and they can't just be bars either.

Dr. Dan Singley: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Brett, I know you've got a lot going on, and I want to thank you hugely — for weighing in about the role of purpose and what that's playing in your life, and what you just said about the need for community, and really diversity in being involved in different kinds of communities. I think that goes so far when we look at some of the challenges men and teens and boys are facing these days. Hugely appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I'm going to put all the links to Podium and Dinners with DeMar and anything else you want to say, just to round things out.

Brett Rapkin: I just appreciate the work you're doing too, and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Dr. Dan Singley: All right, we'll keep it going.