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Cowherd on Rodgers, Psychedelics, Fear of Death

During his weekly appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show,” Aaron Rodgers discussed his reason for taking psychedelics, which was to relieve a “major fear of death.”
Bill Huber|
Cowherd on Rodgers, Psychedelics, Fear of Death
Cowherd on Rodgers, Psychedelics, Fear of Death

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Green Bay Packers

GREEN BAY, Wis. – During Aaron Rodgers’ latest appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, co-host and former teammate threw Rodgers a curveball.

Are you afraid of dying?

“It’s actually a great question,” Rodgers said. “I had a major fear of death. I don’t know if any of you felt this way, kind of our age group, maybe it’s just the way I grew up, but there was a lot of weird sentiment around Y2K. Remember that? The world was going to end.

“For me, personally, since I was like a young kid, teenager, I was like, ‘Man, if the world ends and I’m 16, I’m not going to be able to accomplish anything I want to accomplish. I’m not going to go to the NFL. I’m not going to go to college. I’m not going to meet a woman, fall in love, have kids, all those things.

“I think there was this weird, ingrained fear of 2000, fear of the world ending and death. And I think we all struggle with the idea of mortality.”

Rodgers said his much-discussed use of psychedelics helped conquer that fear.

“I definitely had a fear of death, and ayahuasca and psilocybin actually really helped me with that and [alleviated] a lot of the stress around the idea of needing to accomplish things before I actually die, and taking away some of that fear,” Rodgers said. “I think when you’ve seen the other side it makes the idea of death more of a passage and less of an ending. More of kind of the next chapter of life.”

By “the other side,” Rodgers meant, “I’m not talking about life and death. I’m talking about the veil between the seen world and the unseen world.”

In the accompanying video, Colin Cowherd breaks down how Rodgers’ uniqueness has impacted his brand on and off the field.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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