Aaron Rodgers Fully Trips Out in a Mind-Bending New Ayahuasca ...
NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers has long advocated for the use of psychedelic drugs, and now a new docuseries has captured the athlete on an ayahuasca trip.
Rodgers, most recently of the New York Jets, is the subject of a new Netflix docuseries premiering Tuesday, Aaron Rodgers: Enigma. He does the usual football player stuff: Some running around, some jersey-wearing, some physical therapy (be prepared for way more looks at this man's toenails than you ever thought your life would hold). There's also some not-so-typical football player stuff: While filming the project during the NFL’s 2024 offseason, the 41-year-old travels to Costa Rica, where he attends an ayahuasca retreat with Miami Dolphins’ Jordan Poyer, the Chicago Bears’ Adrian Colbert, and the Buffalo Bills’ Von Miller.
“You have to go to some deep places in the shadow of your own self,” Rodgers said of his ayahuasca use, sharing that he had done ayahuasca nine times on four different trips. He credits the drug with both helping him process his feelings about a childhood spent in the rigidity of “a very white, dogmatic church,” as well as with helping him throw a football very well.
In 2022, Rodgers spoke on a podcast of an ayahuasca experience that helped him find “unconditional self-love,” and connected his use of the drug with his back-to-back league MVP titles. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” he said. “I really don’t. I don’t really believe in coincidences at this point. It’s the universe bringing things to happen when they’re supposed to happen.”
In the docuseries, Rodgers says he hopes his latest round of ayahuasca rituals will help him heal from the torn Achilles tendon that took him down during his first possession as a New York Jet on September 11, 2023, an injury that he said in interviews he worried would be the death of his career. (He returned to the field in September 2024.)
“I would say that with other psychedelics you go in thinking this is going to be a good time. I hunker down, like, ‘OK this is going to be tough,'” he said. “It’s the hardest medicine possible that I’ve tried.”
Courtesy of Netflix
One medicine that he famously hasn’t tried is the COVID-19 vaccine. In 2021, Rodgers told NFL officials that he was “immunized” against the virus. When he tested positive for the virus that November, the truth came out: He hadn’t gotten the shots, explaining that he was allergic to an ingredient in the Moderna and Pfizer formulations, and that he wasn’t comfortable with what he perceived as possible risks associated with the Johnson & Johnson shot. He was benched for 10 days and fined $14,650 by the league. The NFL also fined the Green Bay Packers, Rodgers’ team at the time, $300,000 after an investigation into the program’s COVID-19 protocols.
Rodgers told Ian O'Connor, who in August 2024 published the unauthorized biography Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers, that he regretted his wording. “If there's one thing I wish could have gone different, it's that, because that's the only thing [critics] could hit me with,” Rodgers is quoted as saying in O'Connor's book.
“He told me, I should have told the truth,” O'Connor said in an interview with Vanity Fair around the time of the book's publication. “That’s the first time he’s ever said that.”
In the doc, Rodgers claims that he submitted a roughly 500-page appeal to the league to avoid the mandatory protocol for non-vaccinated players, which included masking and daily testing, which Rodgers called “wild.” He revealed that he didn't get the flu vaccine when he was young either, because his father was suspicious of it. Discussing the “I'm immunized” comment he shared with the press, Rodgers placed the blame on the media for not asking follow-up questions that would have made it clear that he had not gotten the shot. He called the ensuing coverage of the issue a “smear campaign.”
In the Netflix series’ second episode, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine naysayer, enters the picture. Rodgers and Kennedy are shown in a clip labeled February 2024 enjoying a hike together. “Have you thought about going into politics?” Kennedy asked Rodgers on camera. Later, Rodgers reveals, “I got asked by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his vice president right after the hike we went on."
Though Jets owner Woody Johnson, in an interview with ESPN, insisted that Rodgers is “back 100 percent” to football, never say never: Kennedy is president-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, with a directive to “go wild”, so maybe there’s a chance yet for Rodgers to reconnect with his old pal.
At the same time that news of Rodgers’ potential political alliance with Kennedy made headlines in the U.S., Rodgers was in Costa Rica on the ayahuasca retreat.
Of course, Rodgers is far from the first celebrity to speak up about their experiences with ayahuasca. In his 2021 autobiography Will, Will Smith said he’d taken ayahuasca 14 times and called it “the unparalleled greatest feeling I’ve ever had.”
“If I’m this beautiful, I don’t need No. 1 movies to feel good about myself,” Smith wrote of his revelations during the experience. “If I’m this beautiful, I don’t need hit records to feel worthy of love. If I’m this beautiful, I don’t need Jada [Pinkett Smith] or anyone else to validate me.”
Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox have spoken about their experiences on the drug together, with Fox telling Arsenio Hall (filling in for host Jimmy Kimmel) that it was like “going to hell for eternity.” Kelly seemed to see their Costa Rican jaunt differently, telling Kimmel later in an interview of his own that “it was one of the most important things that happened to me in my life.” Chelsea Handler described her own experience as “a lot of chanting and vomiting on camera for me, which of course I was very excited to do,” Lindsay Lohan said she was “reborn,” and Miley Cyrus sang its praises as “definitely one of my favorite drugs I’ve ever done.”
Then there’s Tori Amos, who said that during ayahuasca rituals, she’s “been in a room with a woman who was literally trying to bite her own arm off. And this lasted for 15 hours,” and Josh Radnor, who said that he took the drug 100 times over 10 years and spoke of a 2009 experience in which he had a vision of himself witnessing Jesus’s crucifixion.
That said, maybe Rodgers claiming that it made him better at football isn’t so surprising.
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