Aaron Rodgers: Enigma (2024) s01e02 Episode Script

I'm just sitting here reminded about
how nothing in life is coincidence.
Think about the reason why you're here,
the journey that you're here,
it makes no sense
I mean, in the grand scheme of things.
All the things that had to happen
for you to be here, just in this lifetime.
If you think about previous lifetimes,
your ancestors,
the decisions that they made
put you in a position
to be able to sit right here tonight,
and to pass the pipe around,
and to share love with each other.
It's overwhelming.
It can't help
For me it makes me remember,
my life matters.
Your life matters. All of this matters.
We're here for a reason,
to do something special.
And this is
the top of the mountain experience,
we're pushing ourselves to the edge
with various medicines.
Why? Because my life matters,
because I got a host
of ancestors backing me up.
I got the unseen world
and the whispers of the universe
telling me I matter, I'm enough.
The Green Bay Packers
have won the Super Bowl!
When you have a lot of success,
and you have that deep knowing that,
okay, you've reached
like your top bucket list item.
You have this one thing
you just want to do.
"If I can do this,
my life's going to be great."
And then
Okay, now what?
Aaron Rodgers, our MVP!
It was eating at me like,
who am I?
Am I the football player?
Am I the off-the-field guy?
How do people treat you different
now that you're a Super Bowl champion?
A lot of it
is the battle of identity.
I was struggling with who I was,
and who I wanted to be.
Dealing with success
is one of the greatest teachers in life,
because it's going to
knock on your ass a bunch.
Make you question a lot of things,
make you try and figure out who you are.
I was definitely starting to look for
other ways to fill up that hole inside.
That's something
I wrestled with for many, many years.
I had this feeling like, "Is this going to
be the only thing I accomplish in life?"
Can I love myself
if that's all I've ever done?
Tilly.
Usually, you can see
downtown from here.
- Let's do a picture.
- Yeah.
How are you finding it
out on the road?
Well, it's such
an absurd notion to run for president.
And it's it's crazy.
Then I go out on the road,
and so many people come to me every day
and say, "You've given me hope."
It makes me feel like, I've got to
be the person that they think I am.
I have to be a leader.
Then also, you get a kind of stoicism
- from being hammered all the time.
- Yeah.
You have to kind of embrace that.
- It's like you.
- Every day for you. Everyday life for you.
- Yeah.
- But you guys don't care, do you?
- No, you don't.
- Should we head out?
- This way?
- We'll go down and loop back.
Have you thought about
going into politics?
Mm. I got into politics back
when I was a sophomore in high school.
I mean, the idea all around,
honestly, your uncle's death.
And that was my first entrance into
pulling the veil back, as I call it,
on, like, what's actually going on
because I read
the Warren Commission's report about it.
I remember it hit me going,
"This is what they said happened?"
This can't be real.
And then I went to Berkeley,
which is a crazy political environment.
It's super leftist and I grew up
in a really conservative,
small-town environment.
So that was fun to,
like, have my ideologies tested.
But, I mean, it's
I've just been disheartened forever
that there's a two-party system
that's really one party.
The one party that's ruling
is the people with the money.
So I really didn't have
any hope in politics until,
really, until you
announced your candidacy.
Aaron is the most eclectic individual
that I've ever coached.
I don't think there's ever been
a quarterback meeting,
that we didn't start
with a current affairs type,
or what's the latest and greatest,
some of the conspiracies out there,
and things like that.
He's never been afraid to speak his mind
or speak whatever he feels is right.
And sometimes that gets misunderstood.
He's always going to be him.
He's going to be genuine.
He's going to have an opinion,
but it's gonna be gonna be researched.
It's going to have juice behind it, so
And I always loved that about him.
'Cause he's always looking for answers,
education, research,
regardless of the topic.
It's never made sense to me
that so many people in our society
don't question what they believe in.
That we, as a society, don't question
more what we believe in.
And it's almost like, uh, it's heresy
to question what you believe in.
But it's the complete opposite.
That's how it sinks in, or it changes.
I grew up in a very white,
dogmatic church.
And that just didn't really serve me.
It was very rigid in structure.
I'm not a rigid person.
Shame, guilt, judgment.
It was like, we have the truth.
Our way or the highway.
Our way is heaven.
Your way is hell.
Even talking to my parents,
it was very black and white.
Like, somebody has to be wrong.
Somebody has to be right.
I just slowly
uncoupled from that in high school.
I met Aaron in ninth grade.
Where we really deepened our relationship
was in a kind of
a Christian-focused youth group.
And so his family was
very adamant about church.
There was just a lot of expectations
in terms of who he was going to be.
And I think that the little fire inside
of him was always kind of
craving to be able
to express himself authentically.
When I was in college at Cal,
I wasn't going to church on Sundays.
I slept in on Sundays.
It was awesome, you know?
To be able to do
whatever the hell I want to do.
There was always something
going on in Sproul Plaza.
Every time you walk through, there would
always be people handing out flyers
for this rally,
and this thing and this cause.
It was cool.
There's a lot of different opinions.
To be in a different city that challenged
my beliefs, what I grew up around,
definitely helped me
to begin to question more things.
It has been the wildest month
as far as things that have
happened outside of the general.
I got asked
by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
to be his vice president.
Right after the hike we went on.
Retire and go into politics,
or play two or three more years.
I mean, I definitely envisioned a life
without football, and it wasn't scary.
I, you know, felt comfort in
being able to move on at some point.
But I love football.
I want to keep playing.
And I hated the way last year went.
Go, go, go!
Go! Dig!
There's still some
unfinished business in New Jersey.
Time! 24 on the dot, 24.
Before winning the Super Bowl,
success was getting drafted,
becoming a starter,
winning a playoff game, and then
the Super Bowl.
It was great. All great things.
But I'm a perfectionist,
and perfectionists are never satisfied.
Welcome to the start
of the 2011 regular
National Football League season.
The Green Bay Packers, world champions.
2010, obviously,
a great year, great memories.
Life changed for Aaron after that.
For Aaron Rodgers,
he certainly went into those playoffs
an excellent player,
but he came out a superstar.
Everyone knew
before that he was great.
But now you take the next step.
And you take that next step up
when you win a Super Bowl.
throws, back shoulder,
caught. Touchdown, Greg Jennings.
We felt like we picked up
right where we left off.
Fake to the inside
and they go to the end zone.
And another touchdown, Green Bay.
Look at the coverage.
Look at the window.
Green Bay is 4-0.
Aaron absolutely was
already a superstar at that point.
He was really proving what he could do.
Then boom,
he was just off and running after that.
Aaron Rodgers has
been as good as
any quarterback first half of this year.
Throws it out to Nelson.
And there goes Nelson in.
Green Bay touchdown.
I believe Aaron Rodgers to be
the greatest talent at
the quarterback position I have ever seen.
Some of the throws
that we've seen this dude make.
I mean, it's just incredible.
He really is incredible.
He played at a level
week in and week out.
And, uh, we went on
a pretty good run there.
Green Bay, three wins away
from a 16-0 regular season,
and six victories away from perfection.
We won 19 games in a row.
I won the MVP.
But, uh, I never let myself be satisfied
with where I was at or happy.
You know, I think at the time,
I really just desperately wanted
to be more than just a football player.
And so I started my spiritual journey.
I begin with heaven and hell as
states of consciousness
and reflections of the kind of world
that we're creating right now.
I got into Rob Bell's work
with his NOOMA videos after 2011,
and kind of culminating in 2014.
And he was kind of retelling the stories
of the Bible that I grew up on,
in a new and interesting way.
For many people,
their fundamental understanding
of the spiritual life was figuring out
who's got it, who doesn't,
who's in, who's out.
And I I begin with a much
more inclusive love for everybody.
Rob came and spoke in Green Bay,
and I made sure I went to that,
and talked to him,
and started a friendship.
Watching him interact with people,
and talk to people, he loved everybody.
He didn't judge people.
The culture I grew up in
is black and white.
Black and white is you're either this
or you're that. There's no gray area.
He was a big help for me to totally
unravel the religion of my youth.
- Hello.
- Hello.
I started looking into
other ways of thinking and spirituality.
I started reading a lot of
different types of books,
philosophy books, self-help books.
And then I found the courage to
speak my feelings better.
And so I started to
stand up to institutions
of my youth.
And that was everything
from organized religion, my parents,
dogma, ideology
That definitely changed
the dynamics of my family.
Because I was just questioning all of it.
You're healing so well in here.
- Tendon looks so good.
- Really good.
Almost looks normal.
If I didn't know you had surgery,
I'd say you had some inflammation,
which is good.
I've turned the corner
the last two weeks as
my calf strength has gotten better.
When we met Aaron, and I knew
we were going to be treating him,
I was very optimistic and bullish
on his ability to heal
just because I knew how regimented he was.
While you're sitting here,
we'll do your EEG.
Perfect.
Uh
So today we did
a wave neuroscience brain scan with Aaron.
That feels kind of good.
We'll hook your brain up to
an EEG and assess your brain waves,
and where you may be losing
or degradating signal.
There's some rules though.
You want to try
to minimize movement.
- Yeah.
- Like if you can just try to meditate.
This is what we're looking at here.
I'm counting how many peaks
you have in a one-second interval.
And that tells me
how fast your brain's moving.
Okay.
In theory, we can help improve cognition,
recall, decision-making capabilities.
- You ready?
- I need to close my eyes?
Close your eyes.
Get comfortable.
I'll get out of your way too.
The constant goal of a football
player is to find ways to get better.
There's a lot of ways to do that.
To test what you can withstand,
how much adversity you can go through
on the football field, in training.
What this does is it allows us
to find a new edge.
But so much of it is physical.
How much time
do we spend on our mental edge?
What else can we do
to push our mental edge?
Well done, Aaron.
He was joking about his brain being fast,
but I was like 12, 13 consistently.
Oh, yeah?
So yeah, you have a fast brain.
You got any trips planned
during the offseason?
I'm going to go down to Costa Rica
and do some ayahuasca.
Oh, nice.
It's so hard to explain to people, man.
But after doing ayahuasca,
I really just didn't drink anymore.
I was like, "I don't really like it."
You just sound crazy.
How does it compare
to other psychedelics?
It's another world.
It's another world.
I would say that with other psychedelics,
you go in like thinking,
"This is gonna be a good time."
Aya, you hunker down. Like, "Okay"
- Yeah, here it comes.
- "This is gonna be tough."
It's a cool story of mine.
Just a colleague, uh, Jordan Poyer, he saw
a podcast that I did
where we talked about doing aya.
And he was really struggling
with his marriage and his alcoholism.
He's like, "I'm gonna do it." Fuck it.
Came back, got his life in order,
his marriage in order,
stopped drinking cold turkey, and
Now he's bringing his mom down,
and his brother down,
and he's like,
"You're the reason I did this."
"I'd really like you to come."
It was about two years ago.
I remember him on The Pat McAfee Show,
um, speaking about ayahuasca.
I remember telling myself,
he knows something.
He He knows something that I don't.
I was going through a lot at the time,
trying to figure out who I was.
I did my retreat last year,
and the last day of the retreat,
I wrote him a message.
And I said, "Hey, Aaron,
I appreciate you for being a trailblazer,
for opening these doorways to me,
because ayahuasca in particular
has really you know, changed my life."
We're going
to the retreat center.
Tomorrow is night one.
Night one of ayahuasca.
I've done aya nine times.
Four trips, nine ceremonies.
It's a group of ceremonies
that equals a journey.
Each one is important
for the lessons to be learned
at the close of the third ceremony.
But you can't get this far if you don't
trust the whole three-night process.
It's the hardest medicine possible.
That I've tried.
It's a deeply intense spiritual journey.
I want to
get a better understanding
of how did it all just come about for you?
Like, what was the first thing
that really got you on this path?
I was searching, for sure.
You know, my life was through
one lens of organized religion.
So I'm like, "Where are people
in life finding deep peace
and centeredness and presence
outside of what I knew?"
Mm-hm. So it seems like this
was coming from a space of expansion.
Totally, yeah.
I'm just searching, curious.
Inquisitive.
Just, uh, trying to listen.
Listen to the universe.
Hope is a memory of the future.
So to latch on to hope,
hope that I get healthy,
hope that I can play again,
hope that I can return to my form
Trying to remember what that feels like.
I think there's still some mental
gymnastics to get through with the injury.
But being here,
I'm just open to whatever comes through
during this three-night process,
and trusting the medicine.
The cool thing is there's so many guys
who are first-timers.
I sent the group a text
this evening and said,
"The metamorphosis is happening tonight."
"Just trust and let go,
and take that leap of faith."
"And if you can, there's some incredible,
incredible things on the other side."
The reason we do this
is because it's deep healing work.
On the self, on the ego, on past trauma.
But you have to go to some deep places
in the shadow of your own self.
the Green Bay Packers,
please welcome Super Bowl champion
and MVP Aaron Rodgers.
I find it
interesting when people say,
in reference to
the off-the-field attention,
"This is what you signed up for."
State lawmakers voted to make
12-12-12 Aaron Rodgers Day.
I'm not big on
a lot of personal attention.
I deflect it to the team.
I say, fuck that.
I never signed up for that.
I signed up for football
because I love the game.
And I got great at it because
I'm hyper-competitive and super motivated.
But there's this whole other part
that comes with it
that's a lot of great stuff
and a lot of fucking weird stuff.
Aaron Rodgers,
Super Bowl quarterback.
I had never been paparazzi-ed
until I went to Hawaii in 2011.
And there was all these pictures of me
in the water rubbing sand on myself,
exfoliating my skin.
And I was like,
"Fuck, life's different now."
- Aaron, you're all set.
- Great, thanks.
Mike, thanks for doing
that discount double check.
And in
the State Farm commercials,
my whole ability to move around
with relative anonymity changed.
Rodgers, discount double check.
I didn't do myself any favors
with some of the girls I dated after that
that were in the public eye.
I definitely hated it at first.
Like, really despised it.
I enjoyed my private life.
I enjoyed being able to go places.
But from Super Bowl MVP,
MVP, State Farm commercials,
that got a little more difficult.
I'm not going to talk to you
about your Super Bowl win.
I'm not going to talk to you
about your MVP awards.
I want to pump you up
and do a double check for you.
Because he is the winner today.
His charity will receive $50,000.
Mark. Eight-marker.
There was a lot of times,
when I became real famous,
where I heard from people,
including family members,
where it was like, "Your life is too big,
we need you to be smaller."
"Be smaller. Don't talk about your life."
And it always it always hurt me
because I just feel like you don't see me.
Um, this is not something
I ever desired or wanted,
uh, other than playing on Sundays.
It can definitely change
the people around your circle
because it can be intoxicating,
the the, uh, fame and notoriety.
So definitely relationships
changed after that.
Friendships, family.
It wasn't like I was super duper close
with everybody in the family.
I was close with my little brother.
But in actuality,
it goes back to stuff from high school
that kind of made me feel distant.
Stuff in college, stuff post-college.
I was quiet about it.
I thought the best way to do it was
just don't talk about it publicly.
And what do they do?
The Green Bay Packers
quarterback's name
is all over The Bachelorette this season.
His younger brother Jordan
is in the final two,
and Jordan revealed their family
estrangement to millions of viewers.
They go on a bullshit show
and leave two empty chairs.
They all agreed this
was a good thing to do,
to leave two empty chairs
at a stupid dating show
that my brother
just went on to get famous.
His words, not mine.
That he ended up winning.
But a dinner that was during the season,
I was never asked to go to.
Not that I would've gone.
Rodgers' dad, Ed,
answered questions about the feud
during an interview with New York Times
saying, "Fame can change things."
I don't like this at all.
I don't think this is anyone's business.
Nobody from your family should be
speaking publicly about family business.
And then when I started looking
into other religions and plant medicine,
I also found a lot of resistance.
You know, doing things that,
compared to what I grew up in,
would be considered
an alternative lifestyle.
You know, they're living as best they can.
That is still engulfed
in organized religion,
which works for them. That's great.
So as much as
they might not like what they see,
love and respect and gratitude
for how I was raised,
because it wouldn't have
turned me into who I am.
People ask me,
"Is there hope for reconciliation?"
I say, "Yeah, of course. Of course."
I don't want them to fail, to struggle,
to have any strife or issues.
I don't wish any ill will on them at all.
Um, it's more like this.
We're just different steps
on the timeline of our own journeys.
This group is special because
there's some cool connections
that already existed,
and then you got new people.
And I'm one of the new people.
I knew Jordan and I knew Han.
It's always interesting
to see what happens with the group,
and how the dynamics come together.
I think this medicine encourages a lot of
just sweet, tender support for each other.
It wasn't
really modeled growing up,
but I always desired
that ability to go deep.
And so I found people
I could do that with.
There's people that
I haven't seen, uh, in a while,
but when I think about them,
there's always that knowing, like,
"Hey, we've been in ceremony together."
There's a different
different type of bond.
Ooh, wow.
I think part
of the real joy in this work,
is there is such
a feminine spirit to ayahuasca.
You know, we can model
a new way of thinking about masculinity,
or what it means to be a man.
It's It's the balance between the divine
masculine and the divine feminine.
I think I saw my dad cry
when my grandfather passed.
And that might have been it.
There wasn't space for emotions.
So I definitely had some
stunted emotional intelligence
to communicate those emotions, for sure.
So each ceremony
has a different energy,
even though we drink the same medicine.
It's like the most amazing psychologist
that you've ever met.
That's the medicine.
People who
haven't been around me a lot
have this idea of who I am and whatnot.
And in these situations,
you start to peel back
some of those layers
of who they think you are when you start
getting deep and getting emotional.
And I think that's what it means
to be a well-balanced man,
is to be able to tap into
that divine feminine and be vulnerable.
Lambeau Field,
it's the divisional playoff.
Green Bay Packers,
the defending Super Bowl champions.
When you have the season that they had.
Of course, we know
they only lost the one game.
This is Aaron Rodgers' best season yet,
and he's the reigning MVP.
When you're a perfectionist,
you always teeter on self-loathing.
Nothing's ever good enough.
Wide open
but overthrown is Jennings.
And Aaron Rodgers missed one there.
The number one seed
throughout the playoffs
and not be able to do anything with it.
You know the Green Bay Packers,
they're going to look back,
and think of what could have been.
Every season,
the goal is to win the Super Bowl.
The longer you're in this league,
and the more success that you have,
it's, you know, the intensity goes up.
Success was always binary.
It was win-loss matrix.
It was, um, tied to happiness too.
Colin Kaepernick!
What a game!
49ers moving on.
It is good!
San Francisco moves on.
Marshawn Lynch!
Beast Mode! Touchdown!
Seattle's going to the Super Bowl!
The Atlanta Falcons on to Super Bowl LI.
Enough
of Aaron Rodgers, please.
He's been very bad in the postseason
since he won the Super Bowl.
He's only got the one.
The honest truth
is he hasn't delivered
in the way we expect greats
to deliver in the playoffs.
Perfection in the NFL
is winning the Super Bowl.
And it drove me constantly.
Throws. End zone touchdown!
That's a fun one there.
We had a lot of great success, you know,
during the course of the regular season.
And usually if you don't get
that ultimate goal, you're upset.
And, you know, that sticks with you.
He was almost like
a prisoner in his own mind.
He had this idea of, like,
what he wanted to do and accomplish.
No one was going to get in his way.
Clearly he did something
that Aaron did not like.
At times it would erode him,
and it would come out in
probably not the best ways.
Aaron, when I first got in the league,
was definitely just that hard leadership.
Aaron Rodgers,
flat out domination against the Lions.
We're playing in Detroit,
and one of my first snaps,
I'm out on the right side.
We had a thing in our offense where
basically if there's a run one way,
you had a quick
little route to the opposite side.
He gives me a signal.
There's this and then there's this.
He does it quick,
and it just flashes in my head.
I'm like, "Oh my God."
He throws the ball,
and the ball just goes off the ground.
looking for Adams,
the rookie.
He comes chasing me down, cussing me out.
And Rodgers is hot.
He's thinking,
I want to get back to the Super Bowl.
And he was a little more hard-headed,
which I think is good.
He knows what he can do,
and he knows how he wants it done.
Aaron Rodgers took over
this football game.
Now, a lot of that made me who I am.
A perfect throw
by the future Hall of Famer.
Motivated me to wake up earlier,
practice longer, stay longer in the gym.
Rodgers is going to
roll away, throws it up in the air.
- And Janis
- Oh, stop it!
Oh, please!
Oh my, that may be
one of the great throws ever made.
However, at the core
of being a perfectionist,
whether we admit this or not,
at the core,
subliminally,
we know that we are broken.
Because something is missing
and something's off.
Something is wrong with me
because I'm not perfect.
As much as that served me
at times in my sport,
it definitely doesn't serve me
in my in my personal life.
I've been
in temazcal a few times before,
and it's really, really hard.
Anytime you go in the sauna, there's
a lot of great health benefits for it.
It's shedding the toxins,
but I think from an esoteric standpoint,
it's it's putting yourself
in the womb of the medicine.
The knowledge from the rocks.
In that tradition,
the rocks hold the wisdom.
Door!
We're sitting in the womb,
the temazcal.
The water is used to create the steam.
The steam comes out,
and we're able to absorb the medicine
and knowledge, the wisdom of our ancestors
that are stored in the rocks.
Ōmeteōtl,
welcome grandmother of fire.
Welcome, grandmother.
I just wanted to see how long
I could sit directly in front of the heat.
I was spinning a little bit.
I closed my eyes,
I was, you know, seeing visions.
The final grandmother of fire.
This feeling in the temazcal
when I'm like, "I can't sit up anymore,"
and I feel like I'm going to pass out.
This is discomfort. It's temporary.
At some point, that door's going to open.
I'm going to walk out there.
I'm going to go in the little creek,
and I'm going to be so thankful
that I stuck this out.
That's what this work's all about,
it's finding your edge,
what you can deal with,
and making a new one.
When you go through this stuff,
and you see people at their lowest
puking next to you,
hearing the noises, going through it,
it brings you together.
From MVP to VP, maybe Aaron Rodgers? What?
ABC News has confirmed
NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers
is on Kennedy's short list
of potential running mates.
When the news broke
on Aaron Rodgers,
we can allude now from
our source down in Costa Rica.
It's hilarious, because I'm literally
held by this container right now,
just loving being around these people,
and literally pushing myself to the limits
with temazcal and with the medicine.
Then back home, somebody decided to leak
that I was considered for vice president.
Kennedy and Rodgers,
of course, first bonded over
their vaccine skepticism, denialism.
CNN has learned that in
private conversations, Rodgers has shared
wild and unhinged conspiracy theories,
in which he claims that
the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was not real.
I'm supposedly
a Sandy Hook denier now too.
Rodgers is
denying the allegations today.
"What happened in Sandy Hook
was an absolute tragedy."
"I am not
and have never been of the opinion
that the events did not take place."
Misrepresentation is a
is a trigger, for sure.
Trauma, trigger, whatever.
Beaming green and gold,
Packers fans lined
the entryway of Austin Straubel Airport,
hoping to score a John Hancock or two.
It's like when the local news tried to
fuck me in the playoff run that year
by doing this wild angle of me
walking past a woman with cancer.
Diehard fan Jan
came straight from
her radiation treatments to the airport.
I'm still hoping to get Aaron to sign
this hat I'm wearing.
I walked through with, you know,
the two cops who were with me.
There's 200 people at the airport.
He's gotta go and catch a flight.
She didn't get
the QB's autograph.
They literally jump cut to like, boom,
"Aaron," boom, and me walking by.
People are seeing this, saying,
"What a jerk. How could he do that?"
The woman's clearly a survivor.
She's got no hair, in pink,
wants an autograph.
He practically bowled her over.
And I was like, "Hey, motherfuckers,
did you happen to ask that woman
what happened the previous week
when there was
nobody at the airport but her?"
And I stopped, and talked to her for a few
minutes, and signed all of her items.
I was terribly upset this morning
because I did not realize what was online.
Just a week before,
Rodgers did autograph Kavanaugh's
pink jersey bearing the number 12.
Doesn't matter what it actually was.
It only matters what it looks like.
That's how it'll get interpreted.
So there's been some people who've
done some real kind of shady things.
And if you defend yourself,
"You're just so sensitive."
Like, first of all, I am sensitive. Great.
I'm also human, though.
Gotta be sneaky.
Psst. Look at that monkey.
Plant medicine has been
a big teacher for me,
for self-love,
just to learn how to love myself better.
Looking back, night one of an aya trip
a few years back, and
and night one was really, really rough.
So going into the darkest,
deepest secrets,
and parts of you
you don't want to show other people,
and just finding ways to love yourself
in those moments.
It was just face-to-face
with all the worst things
that my anti-me couldn't say about me.
Some of the stuff was true.
They just hammer me. You're this.
You're terrible. You're a bad person.
You're all
these different things.
And it wasn't until the end, the last
20 minutes of ceremony, I said, "Fine."
You win. I'm tired of fighting.
Yes, I am those things.
Um
And it just said, "See, you're unlovable."
"Now I got you. You are all those things."
So I sat with that for a while and said,
"Is there anybody in here that I know
in this room that could love me?"
"Yeah, he could love me.
My buddy's next to me. He could love me."
And the medicine said,
"So why can't you love yourself?"
If you don't believe
you deserve that love,
uh, it's hard for you to give it.
And sure as hell can't receive it.
I felt like the love
that I was modeled growing up,
it's kind of a merit-based spirituality.
At times when
you have some dysfunction
or some separation in your family life,
you have to kind of reparent yourself,
and give yourself what you didn't get
or wanted to hear more of
when you were a kid.
And I think for me,
I just wanted to hear, "I'm proud of you."
"The Mirror Guardian
is a female angel."
"Your life is one big mirror
of how you feel within."
I had to find a way to be my own parent
in those moments and say,
"Hey, let's Fuck being perfect."
"I'm proud of who you are and what
you've accomplished on and off the field."
And forgiveness for all the mistakes
because I was
just trying to do the best I could.
A lot of times it wasn't good enough.
"You are a beautiful being, who is
surrounded with so many challenges."
"Your angels are now guiding you
to take inventory of your life."
If it was intentional,
then you got to make amends.
If it wasn't, damn,
fucked up, made mistakes.
Learn from it, get better,
do it better the next time.
In my opinion,
since he kind of started his work,
he's a completely different person.
He's got the biggest heart
of any man that I know.
And I think that before,
if we think of it as a before and after,
I think the before,
he wasn't able
to access that part of himself.
I think he was just stuck in his head.
Obviously, he has
a very high-pressure career.
Go, A-Rod! Here we go!
- Let's go, Rodgers!
- Here we go, Aaron.
All right, let's go. Let's set the tone.
All the deep self-work
helped me to be a better leader.
Just learning from the work that I did
to try and give the same forgiveness
and compassion and kindness
to others that I was really
trying to give to myself as well.
Because the outburst or the frustration
was never about the player.
It was about my own perfection,
my own frustration with perfection.
Is Aaron Rodgers overrated?
The playoff record for Aaron Rodgers?
Nine and seven.
Is his Super Bowl
drought significant?
Yes, it is.
You haven't won a Super Bowl since 2010.
That's part of the job description
of being a QB in this league.
When it goes good,
you get too much, you know, credit.
When it doesn't go well,
you get too much blame.
You know, it's football.
It's another way to challenge.
And he's always challenging to
not only improve himself,
but improve the team dynamics.
He demands and commands a lot.
But I don't think anything
he has asked from anyone else,
he's not willing to ask of himself.
I think a lot of people sometimes would
crumble underneath that certain pressure.
But the ones that accepted his challenges,
you see them flourish.
Davante was one of
the prime examples of that.
downfield.
He's got Adams! Touchdown!
Davante Adams, his second
touchdown of the game.
He demands greatness
from everybody around him
without even saying anything.
Every quarterback
and every team is different,
but they all kind of take the shape
of the quarterback's personality.
Aaron is very intense on the field,
but he is fun in in the locker room.
He's a team guy.
He definitely evolved as a leader
each and every year.
You could see it in that locker room.
He's gotten older,
he's gotten wiser, he's learned.
He got much softer, much more passionate,
and gentle with his leadership.
You know, every conversation we ever had,
whether we had disagreements or anything,
it always ended with a hug.
"I love you, big guy."
I don't think you get to
where you want to go
if you don't go through those moments
and those conversations.
After a loss, you know,
my old way of dealing with it was like,
I didn't handle it well,
and didn't handle winning well.
Everything was win-loss,
so on top of the mountain,
fucking pissed off.
That doesn't say
that I don't get pissed if we lose now,
but different different framework.
It's more, was I prepared?
Was I ready? How did I lead?
It wasn't
until the last few years
I realized what the main problem
with being a perfectionist is,
and that is that
it's never being satisfied,
never being happy with where you're at,
always thinking, "This is good,
but something else is better."
But at some point
you got to look around and go,
"Man, life's pretty good.
I'm going to enjoy this."
Medicine is a newer area in my life,
and I really want to do the hard work.
So I don't look at it
as being a perfectionist.
I look at it as I'm trying to find
what a new edge is for me,
and just know I'm going to be okay.
Because that's all tied together.
It's that you are loved, and cared for,
and that all this shit matters.
And that's why I love
being around groups like this,
places like this,
where it just opens everybody up to heart.
The feeling you get when you can
be raw and vulnerable with men is special.
People just want
to be seen and understood.
It seems that passed very fast.
We are in the last meeting.
I invite you to
just open yourself to the medicine
for everything that is already here.
On night one at the ceremony,
I got up and danced.
And I did it because I wanted to,
and I love to dance.
I also knew if I did that,
people would be like,
"Oh, okay, if he's dancing, I can dance."
You see him,
you see how he's moving.
And in ceremony, he's dancing.
He's just free.
And seeing that was just so inspiring.
You don't need words to be a leader.
Your actions speak so much louder
than the words that you can say.
I think in order to lead,
you have to serve as well.
The service is just to be available
for conversations, to answer questions,
to alleviate nerves when possible,
and just to give them
a permission slip to just have fun.
It's all about the journey
of the ceremony,
which often involves
some sort of ego death,
which allows the real work to happen,
which is a deeper sense of self-love.
Ain't no stopping us.
Let's get it done tonight.
- Let's go dominate. One, two, three!
- Dominate!
There's a concept that I studied
where we're moving our ego to the side
to allow our observer
to kind of see things clearly,
because the ego can confuse things,
muddle things,
to try and make ourselves feel better.
But the observer can be
an objective viewer of your life.
Whoo!
Yeah!
Ego, we all have it.
It's a really important part of our sport.
Down the middle. Touchdown!
That's cheating.
That's too easy.
I need that ego.
That's what I take on the field.
I need the people that passed on me.
I need the people that doubt me.
I need all of that.
I want that.
But the other side of the ego
is anger, frustration,
misrepresentation, sensitivity.
That's something
you really have to rectify.
So every time that
I've had major growth in my life,
it has been associated with an ego death,
like not getting recruited in high school,
like being a backup at Cal,
like dropping in the draft,
like the frustrations of playoff losses,
frustrations of injuries.
And Rodgers is hurt.
Tough moments.
This is how you get awareness
to be able to change.
Bring it in. This is one step
on the journey right here, right?
Let's have some fun tonight.
Let's make some plays,
do a little dance, score a lot of points.
One heartbeat, one team, one love today.
I want to be friends
between observer and ego.
And so I think we need a death of the ego,
because the ego needs to be like
the phoenix and rise from the ashes,
and take on a new form,
which hopefully is way more
in conjunction with the, uh the observer.
So you're not, uh, strictly living life
through your ego.
Wow.
Whoo.
It's, you know,
a life-changing week.
And I'm kind of stuck on this idea that
that a butterfly is just another term
for the caterpillar.
It's really
the caterpillar the entire time.
And the caterpillar opens his wings
and just cannot fucking believe
this is my life now.
I get to fly around.
I get to smell flowers and eat flowers.
To live like that
Living your wildest dreams
every single day.
Nights like tonight show me, show us
what is possible and what life looks like.
Living it to the fullest.
What time is it?
Twenty-four hours ago, Costa Rica.
Driving around.
Forty-eight hours ago, another planet.
- Yeah!
- Yeah.
Hey buddy, how are you doing?
- How was your retreat?
- Amazing.
- Feeling centered?
- Yeah.
This is the third annual
flag football event
to raise money for charities.
$220,000 for the chance
to select the first pick.
I am curious about that stuff
that you're doing down there.
- The medicine stuff.
- Yeah.
225?
I was just up for 28 hours.
- How many?
- 28 hours.
No shit.
- So, you're feeling good right now.
- Oh man.
Sold. One million dollars for
Thanks, Jeff. Nice. Way to go.
- I'm going right here.
- You're going
Aaron Rodgers, the very first pick.
Set, go.
There's so many great
quarterbacks that are here.
Good job, Josh. Nice ball, Josh.
Nice ball.
Really fun to put on this event.
There's hundreds of people here,
and people just excited to see you again.
You're one of my favorite players.
Thanks, buddy.
When we won the Super Bowl,
I had this mindset that
I didn't want football to be my identity.
I had to be so much
more than a football player.
Fighting against the fame and, like,
everything that came with it.
My son intercepted you last year here.
- Oh, yeah?
- And I just wanted to say thanks.
What I learned through the whole thing is
that I love that my identity is football.
I love that people see me
as a football player.
That's what I always wanted to be.
Look at what football has given me.
Some of the best friends in my life.
A crazy amount of money
that's generational wealth.
The ability to generously give to people
that I really love and care about,
and causes that are interesting to me.
I'm just really comfortable
with that being my identity.
Hey, good luck, guys.
Good luck, all right? Take it easy.
Knowing that at some point
the carousel comes to a stop,
and it's time to do something else.
And then your identity
as a football player kind of dies.
And that's what all the self-work is for.
It's for when that time comes
and that ride comes to a stop,
you've got to get off.
Who are you gonna be?
All will be
redeemed and reformed in miraculous ways.
Trust Trust with love.
I think doing ayahuasca
helps your total healing process.
Mind, body, spirit.
I've been kind of in that ceremony
brain mindset since I got back.
I feel really good. I feel strong,
and haven't had any setbacks.
I feel like the Achilles,
although it's like super thick,
comparatively to the other one,
the healing is in a great spot.
This is normal offseason progression.
In the gym for the first six weeks or so,
then you start to transition
to do more football activities.
This is my first time back
on the practice field in the offseason.
So this is kind of
another progression in the process.
Forty and back. Here we go.
I don't have that burst yet.
That's about as fast
as I can run right now.
For today.
Push. Push. Push.
- There we go.
- Nice, Aaron.
Good job.
The only thing I lack is that
top end speed, whatever it is now for me.
I know what it used to be,
but whatever it is now,
I'm just kind of
working that back into it.
OTAs are kind of in May usually.
So you've got plenty of time
to get to that full confidence.
But with any injury, it's always,
you can be feeling great and then
it's the mental hurdle of like,
"I'm okay."
Confidence-wise,
I'm not going to re-injure myself.
I'm not going to have a setback.
Aaron Rodgers, he's back
and it wouldn't be any surprise to see
the Packers return to the playoffs
after a one-year absence.
2018 was such a year of change.
- Four-man rush.
- Here it comes.
- Down he goes.
- Oh my goodness.
I broke my leg
and tore my, uh, MCL in the first game.
And that's about as bad
a sight as any Packer fan can see.
Football can be a brutal sport.
I've dealt with a lot of injuries
throughout my career
and played through a lot of them.
Here comes Rodgers.
It's just about
dealing with the pain.
Chris,
when's the last time you saw a guy
leave in a cart
and come back into the game?
Rodgers has been
playing through pain a lot here.
Play
after play after play.
This is a pretty heroic showing
for Aaron Rodgers.
He just refused to succumb.
We went on to have
a real up and down season.
Mike got fired.
Matt Lafleur comes in, and so there
was an excitement around it.
These jobs don't come open too often when
you have a quarterback of his caliber.
And it was a little intimidating.
Early on, I think we were
trying to get a feel for for one another.
The offense was new.
The terminology was new.
The coaching staff was a lot of new faces.
I think you can never anticipate
how well he knew the game
and how well he saw the game.
I think that blew my mind.
just watching him execute in two minutes,
watching how he surveys the field,
how he looks at the defense,
takes advantage of the defense.
To watch him work
how intentional he is
about preparing for a game or practice,
I've just never been around a guy
that can absorb as much information
and process it
in such a short period of time.
- Rodgers with the touchdown.
- That's the way.
Good job.
Nice call.
2019, great learning experience,
but I don't think it was until 2020
when I really kind of brought
all the pieces to the table.
2019 off-season, so the beginning of 2020,
Nate, Matt, and myself
went through the entire offense,
and blended some of the old concepts,
adjusted some of the newer stuff.
It was a real collaborative process,
and I feel like that's when
our offense took another step.
And then I went to Peru
and did ayahuasca, did Machu Picchu,
the top of the mountain experience,
literally.
And then came back
to like a whole different world.
To unleash the full power of
the federal government in this effort,
I am officially declaring
a national emergency.
And went on to have
one of the best seasons of my career.
But also one of the most
difficult years of my adult life.
How do you anticipate COVID
affecting these seasons?
The Green Bay Packers select
Jordan Love, quarterback.
Did that really happen?
- David, your team
- Let me tell you all something right now.
Look out.
Rodgers throwing.
Rodgers gonna air it out.
Another touchdown.
MVP!
My contract doesn't say I have
to get Aaron Rodgers ready to play.
The NFL is putting
the pressure on players to get vaccinated.
Four touchdown passes today.
Are you vaccinated?
And what's your stance on vaccinations?