Full Interview- Charlie & Geoff Schwartz

so so jeff thanks so much for being on the show we really appreciate it yeah glad to be here thanks for having me it's an honor to have you on you know this is super bowl weekend you know the show is the shabbat show so basically the show is the weekly show that we we broadcast all over the world um just to sort of mark the times thursday nights to prepare ourselves for shabbat and this weekend it's a special weekend because it's super bowl sunday so you know super sunday is a holiday as far as i'm concerned so it's it's a holiday weekend they need to give us monday off it needs to be a federal holiday they need to give us monday off or do it president's day weekend back up a little bit so you know you have that monday off because you're right the game is at 6 40 eastern by time it's over you get a long half time dollar commercials you know it's like 11 o'clock you're fired up you're ready to go it was up till 4 a.m last year celebrating the the chief's victory and like the next day i wake up and go to work no no we should have monday off i'm with you i'm with you we'll work on it i'm trying to work from the jewish angle see if we can get the rabbits to make it a jewish holiday as well we'll just make the food we eat like mitzvah it'll do a whole thing for us i think if you worked at federer angle and i worked at jewish angle it's gonna be really a good weekend i agree let's do it amazing and and i what and it's so great to have you on and and you know as a football player it's so it's so a lot of the show that we're talking about is really the depth of the game right it's not just a ball uh there's so much that sports in general but football in particular brings to lessons in life and you know someone who's played the sport you've played it professionally your career is amazing to really be able to speak to someone who's on the inside and talk about the lessons you've learned about being a football player so share with us a couple of things and in particular you know you you yourself you're a professional player which didn't just come out of nowhere you worked your your hardest to get there you were around people that had done the same that reached the professional level what do you think are are the the ingredients if you will of greatness that you see that takes place on the field that maybe we're not watching because we just think people to show up and play that you've been able to see because of of your path so my high school football coach had a saying he would say this to us before game time who will rise above adversity he said before every game and that's often the difference in winning and losing right especially in life a lot of us are dealt kind of the same hand obviously i had naturally gifted body i was able to do that but plenty of other people in my shoes have the same body i do but just didn't work as hard right did not know how to overcome adversity did not know how to overcome hardship you don't know how to overcome when things didn't go well for you don't know how to overcome just the mental blocks you have when you play sports and games look we're gonna see a game on sunday that's won or lost in two or three plays right two or three plays here and there and it's how do you you know if you're the tampa bay buccaneers defense and pat mahoney and you call great defense and pamela holmes still beats you anyways how do you overcome that do you fall in the tank do you bow back up what do you do how do you overcame adversity i think those moments and part of that is how you train parts how you how you mentally talk to yourself all that is part of how you overcome adversity but again i'm telling you like i was i i was a seventh-round draft pick i was drafting lower than i thought i'd be then i got hurt a bunch i got hurt seven times the nfl six surgeries plus another injury a guy in my position should not play eight years because a guy in my position in the seventh round doesn't get the benefit of the doubt that the first rounder gets yeah and first hurt as i got to continue to play throughout all those years over four and really five four and a half sort of teams um in my opinion all comes to how i handled the downs i'll have the surgery my rehabs my mindset um and really with help with family and faith and be able to kind of use those as a back as a kind of a backboard for me as well to me it was how i overcame adversity so let's delve into that because you know not only did you play you were you know you were as i said you're an all-star you were you were you were highly regarded you were considered to be really one of the best at your position and so take us if you can to the field and i i want you like because you're you're in the game right you they're they're fans you you make a move maybe maybe they call a penalty on you and as a result of your move that 20-yard positive play gets pulled back right someone gets around you what do you use live yeah to enable you to get over adversity in the moment yeah it's a good question i think a lot of it has to do with with trusting your abilities so you know i was a the way i kind of approached life in general this i think helps with sports and this takes time right it's not just i'm 34 now it's not maybe some it's not really the way i thought at 22 but definitely the way i think now is that if you do the right things okay and this is very much i think in the jewish background of mine uh in all of ours i should say like if if we do the right thing in life i believe that helps you in the in the bad times right so for example let's say that i've done all the training i have to do for that week right i'm prepared i'm focused and yeah you're gonna get physically beat one time it's gonna happen in a game but i know that i have still put in the work to overcome that if if i did not put in the work for that week right i didn't prepare like i was supposed to i'm not physically ready i'm not mentally ready but yeah one bad experience could ruin that for us it can ruin for all of us if we go to if we do something in life and we're not fully prepared for and adversity happens and it happens earlier than you think you don't have anything to fall back on well guess what if i get beat for a sack i have all my training i have all my confidence i can still play the game because hey i'm ready to play right and prepared and so i think that when you are when you kind of do what you're supposed to do to prepare for things in life when there are those hardships you're able to fall back on your preparation to get you through it and the more confident you are and your ability to do any sort of task any adversity that happens you should be able to power through it and so that's the way i looked at if i got beat first sack it was you know i curse myself out i walk back to the sidelines my coach might yell at me then i forget about it i get ready for the next play because i know i can still play in this league yeah you know it's an amazing point that you bring up um and this applies in so many aspects in life there's a famous rabbi named rabbi nachman who said that one of the greatest aspects of the most negative part of a sin is it convinces you that you're a sinner right which is the the hanging on i i'd love to just for a minute discuss this because people don't believe it and and i i think professional athletes own this trait more than any other and tell me if i'm right you guys have an incredible ability to move on yes you make a play you're in front of millions of people are watching your move right you mess up yeah and you don't just mess up like a regular person you mess up in front of everybody and everyone watching and then for three seconds in life everyone's and somehow you go back you come back on yeah how do you get trained for that like what how do you get to a place where you get to like i messed up yeah it's another play it's funny you mentioned the fans because when i played i didn't even think i didn't hear him like i i i still can visually remember like in practice i wasn't very good practice bars much better in games like i think that the fans and the big stadiums like really honed in my focus on game day i didn't really pay attention that and i think that's partly why like we're so used to playing in the spotlight we're so used to to making mistakes because look you're not there's no sport where you're going to be perfect even the best are going to have failures and so while you might be mf in me i'm just like all right well i made a mistake like let's not have you know look you know let's not have it happen again our pride and our confidence takes over to not let us have more mistakes i think that's that's what it is we're just kind of used to failure and again it's it's a game though right so it's not a failure of life it's not a life and death failure it's a failure in a game when you approach it as a game it is a business of course but when you approach it as a game and hey we're gonna have errors i know a lot of a lot of players don't have that clarity a lot of players do not understand that you're gonna make air it's just a matter of limiting as many as you can then it kind of frees you it frees you right it frees who you can be as a player and it's really hard to figure out it's much tougher when you're a younger player to kind of get over those failures but when you understand it's going to happen and you should do everything possible to limit those and you're able to to just make it work and there are times when you when you doubt yourself still right everyone has has that self-doubt when you when you continually make errors but again i think it goes back to your preparation if you're prepared to play an error is not in your mind is not as big of a deal as when you're not prepared to play because then you think oh shoot again like i wasn't ready to play i gave up a sack here we go again where you know if you're prepared you get beat and you just get beat but you you know our luckily in our sport we have 30 or really 40 seconds between plays it feels more like 30 by the time you get in the huddle like you don't have time to think about the play you just screwed up right you don't you're so we're we're trained from an early age to not really worry about the last play anyway so all those factors i think help us forget when bad things happen yeah you know you know it's it's so interesting that when you're you're playing at this level there's so many lessons and this clearly is one of them and i think if we all live this way i think if we lived this way and we saw ourselves as really being a work in progress right and you get the next moment and the next moment we become greater one of the things that i find to be fascinating about football in particular i'm sure it happens in every sport but it's something interesting about football that people everyone knows about it it's film like even fans i know even you on your youtube channel i i checked out that you had put in uh um film you were showing yeah film for those who are watching that aren't following film is this obsession that football has with watching the game and everyone you're looking at a field there's 40 cameras and they have film sessions and film rooms and how much time and and the reason why this is so critical in life is because introspection's important yeah and as a football player someone who doesn't send sports like you just get on and play but someone who understands says every move has been thought thought thought about analyzed reviewed how much time as someone who's been on the field and in the game how much time do you think goes into either prep or review of the game vis-a-vis the actual game itself yeah it's it's so funny you mentioned that because i do sports media now the one thing that is so still i've been doing it for three years it's so um i still can't get over is we don't get feedback right like like you mentioned film we practiced 30 minutes later i'm in the meeting and the coaches tell me if i did it right or wrong right media you know i might go a year and my boss you know i talk to my bosses but they're not like good job jeffer you suck like then you know they're not you don't get any feedback i've learned that no feedback actually is pretty a good thing in sports media um so yeah look i think that that the mental part of the game is more important the physical part we can all by time especially now by the super bowl i mean you're you're not even practicing really like you're you're you're you know what to do your body knows what to do it's a matter of your mind and so like for an athlete like me and even for someone like my brother we're not the most athletic football players right we're never going to find us winning the combine and so for us watching what's around us can help us move quicker so if i know that i have a defender in front of me and i see the safety kind of cheat on down that my defender is gonna go inside well that makes me play faster right because i know where my guy's gonna go and so that's all what's with what the film is it's reviewing your technique obviously and of course if you do anything in life and you film it and you go back and watch it you can improve it's much easier because your mind will play tricks on you right your mind will tell you something that happened and there's a saying that we use the eye and the sky never lies right because you might think you did something you watch the film and it's never as good or never as bad typically but you see exactly what happened and so you're able to make those changes and then you're able to anticipate you're able to watch the defense or watch the offense and kind of get a game plan together to go and execute because it is it's way more mental than physical by time you get the nfl yeah what a great concept behind the sky never lies i can see a lot of divine connections there yes so you know let's speak a little about you said you mentioned your faith i know that you're a proud jew i know that you've uh you've spoken about before you listen you're you're you you're one of the few man like you made it they're out there do you even have a minion do you have i mean i know that you were in nfl there's uh so mitch allie marpette who's playing this weekend for the bucks he's their left guard he's jewish julian edelman uh not there's not not many of us anymore it depends if we want to be liberal with like the mother father thing you know depends right that makes it maybe there's more in that way so yeah not many of us so you're really the few the proud the marines of your presenting our people on the field exactly yeah so tell us a little bit about how judaism and how your faith has shaped you and what impact has had on you well so i think i mentioned earlier about doing the right thing like i've talked to many of my teammates about their religions religion is is a big part of the locker room you know we and i say this all the time you know people ask me why that is and here's why i think it is it's because when you play sports right they're physical right and you have to kind of get your mind in a way that you might not want to do regularly and a lot of people use religion for that right they're able to kind of get their wrap their head around the physicality of the game the kind of the hardship of the game just through religion and i think that a lot of players that's their backbone i love it i think that we can all talk about different religions and we we did i did i talked to a lot of my teammates about religion a lot of us um uh a lot of them i should say did not really know about judaism and we had some some fun conversations i'm sure but i think for me and kind of gathering how you know i grew up in the faith and other people did is i just think the concept of doing the right thing like i know that it's easier said than done but i just feel like judaism like that's the backbone right it's like you just be a good person because you're supposed to be a good person not because of of punishments right don't don't do good because you might be punished later in life do good because you're supposed to do good that's that's what we are supposed to be as humans and you know my wife always says to me that she her number one thing she appreciates about me is that i always do the right thing even when it's hard to do it's what my dad taught me to do and that comes down to just doing things that are tough in life like you my dad early in life in high school i remember i had a problem with the coach let's say he didn't talk to the coach let me talk to the coach 15 years old going to talk to a 45 year old basketball coach about why i'm not playing enough hard to do right like but that was the right thing i have to fight my own battles he's not fighting my battles for me in life and so little things like that along the way and i think that's where the juicing part came in it's just kind of growing up in the synagogue obviously bar mitzvah and i went to a little bit of post uh school after my my bar mitzvah as well my kids are now uh in in the synagogue my kids went to you know still go to jewish preschool in charlotte and i just think like the the the idea of doing right because you're supposed to do it you're supposed to be a good person i think it's been really helpful for me in life oh amazing that's really amazing one more question i know that we have a couple you have one more question uh and then then we'll just yeah we're good we'll pause i want to talk about about your brother right is we gotta we had a big game coming up this weekend yeah yeah and you know your brother is uh we're all you know we know that jpp is gonna be a big problem for us for the chiefs and without your brother maybe very hard give us a two minute as to how's your brother doing and what what's his uh status yeah i mean he's been out obviously for for three months now um i would not expect him to play i'm not i don't think i'm breaking much news now um but um you know it's been tough you know because he was so good for so long he was four-time all-pro and his super bowl last year was incredible he was amazing the super bowl and it was really fun to watch him you know blossom the playoffs um and it's tough right i mean it's anytime that that your team wins without you like there's you know you everyone hates to admit this but i think it's definitely true i've been injured a bunch i know the feeling like when someone takes your place and you have a value that you assigned to yourself right you assign okay i'm this valuable to the team and if someone takes your place and you and the team just continues to win you're like ah i kind of like it's an ego shot right and so it i think it's a little bit i haven't talked about that but i have to imagine that that's part of this as well right it's tough to not be out there um when you're winning super bowls when you're wiggling super bowl again and so um i imagine it's been tough for him to not play this year um and obviously you know not play this weekend but it's fun to watch the chiefs play man they're so good they're so good so thank you so much for being on the show and uh really we appreciate who you are and what you mean to us and thanks for shining your light on this world yeah glad to be here thanks for having me go chiefs thanks so much for watching for more content like and subscribe and be sure to tune in live every thursday at 8 pm eastern at the shabbato.com or right here on youtube