Alex Ferrari 0:00
I remember watching you do interviews with a helmet on back in the day. Now that is not a thing that most people do.

Ricky Williams 0:08
Well, if you're just gonna see me as a football player, I'm just gonna keep my helmet on. You can inspire people when you're young with your courage and and your athletic prowess, but you're too young to really have any real wisdom. You know, it's kind of scary because then I was like, "Well, I've been doing this my whole life. I don't know how to do anything else. This is why I love evolutionary astrology because it can get to the deepest, darkest conflicts you have, and our main technique is understanding past lives. Because the thing about past lives, if we go back in time, the world in many ways was more backwards.

Alex Ferrari 0:40
So you're saying that it creates the mechanisms underneath the person.

Ricky Williams 0:44
This is the key to astrology...

Alex Ferrari 0:55
I like to welcome to the show Ricky Williams, man. How you doing, Ricky?

Ricky Williams 0:59
I'm great, thank you.

Alex Ferrari 1:00
Thank you so much for being here, man. So before we get started, I gotta just automatically let everybody know that I'm a huge fan because I was raised in Miami and I'm a I'm a I'm a depressed Dolphin fan because we had hope in 2002, but that was pretty much the last time we had any real real real real real hope in my opinion. I'm so sorry.

Ricky Williams 1:20
It's probably true.

Alex Ferrari 1:21
I'm so sorry, but you know, but yeah, watching you play in the NFL and and you know having a run game because we hadn't had a run game since Larry Zonka. It's true too. I meant facts. These are facts. So it was. So I'm a big fan of yours as a football player. But then our mutual friend Deborah Silverman told me about you. Like, do you know this guy named Ricky Williams? I go, you talking about the NFL star Ricky Williams? Yeah, yeah. He used to play football, and I'm like, yeah, he did play football. Okay, and she's well, he does astrology. I go, shut up, which I'm sure is the exact is the exact reaction most people when you say, "Hey, NFL star used to be now he's doing astrology. I'm assuming it's a shocking.

Ricky Williams 2:08
It's shocking

Alex Ferrari 2:08
Because there's not. I think you're one of on am I mistaken?

Ricky Williams 2:11
It's it's shocking to the people that knew me as a football player, and it's shocking for people who find me through astrology. Right. It's it's shocking for both both sides.

Alex Ferrari 2:20
So so let's go down the road, brother. You know, I since I was in Miami and I saw what you were going through firsthand because I was like literally watching every game, watching the press, all that stuff. I always like to find out, you know, you you walk the path that not many human beings get to walk, which is a professional athlete in the NFL, and not only a professional athlete, but at the top of the game. I mean, in 2002, you were the leading rusher of all the entire NFL, and had a hell of a hell of a career as an as a running back. So, what was the what is it like to deal with that kind of pressure of not only the pressure of performing, but then the fame, the expectations, because I mean, you won the Heisman, you know, which is a big thing as well. And you can't, you you went to school here at UT, so you already experience. UT football is no joke down here. I mean, exactly. I mean, there's no joke. I mean, the stadium is massive, so it's not like you just came off the you know the backyard into the NFL. So you understood a lot of pressure, a lot of attention, a lot of fame. But what was that like starting in college and then the transition into the NFL? Because you came in fifth round pick, if I'm not mistaken.

Ricky Williams 3:32
I was the number five pick, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 3:33
Yeah, fifth round pick. And then you went to the Saints, and it didn't work out there well. We don't have to get into all that. It just didn't fit. It was a good fit. But then when you got to Miami,

Ricky Williams 3:41
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 3:42
That's when the gate was open. Yeah. So what was that like, bro?

Ricky Williams 3:45
You know, I grew up, I grew up in a very Christian family, and so I had a vision for myself at a young age of doing something in the world. So I was looking for fame, but it was so. I would I would say the first thing was disillusionment, because a young person, and I think when we're young, we have a lot of imagination and visions about how how we would like things to be. Yes, and I think part of maturity is realizing is not the way you thought it was, and then you make the adjustment. We call that growing up. So I, you know, my my first role model was Jesus, and so I saw my I saw myself one day as making a difference in the world, and that's what I was aspiring towards the kind of difference that Jesus made. Those are just the images that really captured me, and when I mapped it onto my life as a young person, the only way I could see myself getting up that ladder was through my athletic ability. But in my mind, the point of becoming famous was so that I could make a difference in the world, and so I won the Heisman Trophy, and that was always in the back of my mind. So I won the Heisman Trophy, and then I went into the NFL, and I tried to share my perspective, and basically they said. Up and run, you know, or they called me Ricky weirdo, or they said you're a football player. You're not supposed to be talking like this. You're not supposed to be philosophical. You're not supposed to be thinking like this. And I thought my fame would give me a platform, but my fame just brought more pressure to keep to stay on the platform without even getting the benefit from it because no one was listening to what I had to say,

Alex Ferrari 5:21
So you wanted fame to make a difference. You didn't want fame to feed your ego.

Ricky Williams 5:25
Yeah, I mean, I didn't really have a big ego. You know, I think again, grow. I think growing up in a in a house full of women and a very strong mom, you know, she made sure I was a good. She made sure my mama made sure I didn't have.

Alex Ferrari 5:38
Listen, I got I got I was raised by a lot of strong women as well, and surrounded by women at all times. So they do tend to ground you,

Ricky Williams 5:45
Yes, for sure, for sure. So I'm fortunate because I never really had to wrestle with having with having a big ego. And and again, I was really impressed by as a kid by the stories in the New Testament, and so I, my little self, as much as I could, I tried to always be a good person. Tried to always say positive things. I tried to always share a positive perspective, even when things were were at their worst.

Alex Ferrari 6:15
Coming up, I remember watching you do interviews with a helmet on back in the day, now that is not a thing that most people do, and it got to a point where, and if I remember, was it? I don't remember it like that in Miami. Was that only in?

Ricky Williams 6:29
It was only in. It was only in New Orleans. It was New Orleans. It was only my rookie year in New Orleans

Alex Ferrari 6:33
Because it was. It was a lot.

Ricky Williams 6:34
It was part of the disillusionment thing. Is I thought again, I thought when I was famous that I would say things and people would listen, and I noticed when I would speak, they would they wouldn't see me or hear the words. They just would see a football player, and so I was saying, "Well, if you're just going to see me as a football player, why I'm just going to keep my helmet on? Because for me, it was like a kind of vulnerable thing to take my helmet off and to share who I really was. And the fact that the media had a difficult time perceiving that, it felt like a protective mechanism of you're not gonna take you're not gonna take something from me you know I'm getting without a fight is if you you're asking me these questions and you want me to be vulnerable but when I answer the questions the way I really feel you don't take them seriously

Alex Ferrari 7:15
Yeah it's not what I want yeah so what were you I don't I'm not privy to those interviews so what were you saying that was so revolutionary that they didn't accept it. It was because they just wanted like standard NFL running back answers.

Ricky Williams 7:26
They wanted they wanted standard and and I'm a thoughtful person. So and I'm the kind of person if someone asks me a question, I don't. It's it's not natural for me to go put it in a box and say what I'm supposed to say. What's natural for me is just to say what comes what's in my mind based on the question, and and to their defense, they just weren't used to it. You know, we have a certain expectations of how we expect people to behave, and when they don't behave that way, it can be unsettling for a lot of people,

Alex Ferrari 7:53
Especially in in the public eye.

Ricky Williams 7:55
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 7:55
And and you were so so when you got to Miami and you started to kind of find yourself, what was different about that experience for you? How did you open up? Because rookie year, there was a lot of pressure on you because you were the fifth round draft pick and you were supposed to be the guy who was going to change that team. Yeah. So there's a lot of pressure. How old were you, man?

Ricky Williams 8:15
I was when I was drafted. I was 22.

Alex Ferrari 8:17
Jeez.

Ricky Williams 8:17
This is the other part of fame of of fame to me to making a difference in the world. You can inspire people when you're young with your courage and and your athletic prowess, but you're too young to really have any real wisdom. So, so fame for young people is really really tricky. I think fame was made for older people, and so when we, as a young athlete, I'm still trying to figure out myself and still try to figure out who I am, and doing it honestly, right? Not trying to pretend I have it figured out. Doing it honestly, and that was for every was published for everyone to see. I got to Miami. A couple things happened. One, three years in New Orleans. I grew up a little bit, and two, Dan Lebitar, good friend of mine, wrote for the Miami Herald. Lived in Miami, was my best friend at the time, and he was in the media, so he was a huge buffer for translating who I was to the public. And I think the biggest issue is I'm the kind of person. If you don't know me personally, all you have is your preconceived notions, and with me, they're probably going to be off at least a little bit, and so it was difficult for the media to try to portray me to the fans accurately when they only get a couple of minutes with me. So I moved to Miami, and Dan, who'd spent hours and hours and hours with me, was really in charge of communicating me to the media, and so there was. I got a much better representation,

Alex Ferrari 9:43
And people accepted you for the most part. Yeah, yeah, of who you were. The philosophical running back-it's not a thing. Generally speaking, is not a thing. So it's a, and you felt, and and you never felt a need to conform. It seemed like you. Or am I wrong?

Ricky Williams 10:01
No, no. Well, I wasn't there for again. I wasn't there for the fame. I wasn't there to fit in that football was was a platform for me. So, so the conforming thing, and I wrestled with it because when you're around a group of people and there's so much pressure, I tried to conform. I tried, but I was really, really bad at it. And so I just decided this is a waste of time to try to conform to something that I'm not even on board with.

Alex Ferrari 10:25
Yeah, got it. So you, I mean, you had a pretty strong sense of self, man. Even at a young age,

Ricky Williams 10:31
had a sense of purpose.

Alex Ferrari 10:33
Is that what was the driving?

Ricky Williams 10:34
I had a sense of purpose, and I think a sense of purpose. I see it like a comet, and as it moves, it gathers experiences that give us a sense of self, but I think that takes time. And I was-I've always been purpose-driven. I didn't necessarily know exactly what it was, but I could sense if something had meaning and purpose, and if it didn't. And regardless of what it looked like, if it didn't have meaning and purpose, it was relatively easy for me to let it go. And regardless of what it looked like, if I did feel like there's something meaningful and purposeful here, I couldn't help but move in that direction.

Alex Ferrari 11:07
So when you were in Miami, obviously you had a lot of success there, and you were you had you had a good run for a few years there, that you had a lot of success. But then there seemed to be a dark night of the soul that you went through publicly, yeah, which is rare and it's hard to watch sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well said. Yeah, and and not only hard to watch from our perspective, I can't imagine. You know, look, I've gone through a version multiple times in my life. I've gone through Dark Knights of the Soul in one way, shape, or form. Yeah, and we all go through something, whether it's something you know, family or money or whatever it is. There's something that just brings us to our knees,

Ricky Williams 11:46
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 11:46
And that's our moment in the storytelling,

Ricky Williams 11:50
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 11:50
To choose where are we going,

Ricky Williams 11:51
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 11:51
And that happened to you,

Ricky Williams 11:54
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 11:54
And I was privy again because of watching you. I was privy to what was going on, and it had to do with. I mean, and we don't have to get into details, but I had to do some.

Ricky Williams 12:03
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 12:03
Back in the day when it was still the devil's.

Ricky Williams 12:07
Yeah, I remember those,

Alex Ferrari 12:08
And now it's it's legal in Florida, you know. So a lot of the things that you were demonized for then would be completely fine now. Yeah, which is upsetting. I don't. Well, it's it's it's for me. It is.

Ricky Williams 12:21
It's a it's upsetting if you don't have an an archetype to connect to or a story, you know. And and people have heard the story of someone being ahead of their time.

Alex Ferrari 12:30
Yes,

Ricky Williams 12:31
You know, and that's a story that I can hold on to that helps resolve some of the tension there. Because if someone is ahead of their time, they're opening doors so that things can happen in the future. So it's easy for me to see that because of my dark night of the soul and the response that I made, you know, that now NFL players are not being punished for doing the same thing that I was doing. So I I like to think that I'm contributing to change because that's the nature of the world is change. If we stay stuck here, we're in trouble. So there are going to be some people that are ahead of their time, and they're hopefully the tough ones because they're going to get roughed up a little bit. But if they can hold on and stay true in the long run, you know, there's gratitude for for those situations.

Alex Ferrari 13:14
Well, the first one through the wall, it gets bloodied. Yeah, you know, first one over the hill gets the arrows in the back. Yeah, kind of thing. Yeah, that's a really beautiful way to frame it. And I'm assuming you've sat and thought philosophically about this part of your life, probably at nauseam in your own mind.

Ricky Williams 13:15
Well, the the beauty of astrology is it's it's great to understand yourself. Yeah, but it's beautiful as a tool to go back and understand your story. How how did I get here? And so, for me, with astrology, I have clarity. I have a crystal, crystal clear about who I am, which allows my story to make perfect sense.

Alex Ferrari 13:52
And that's what brought you towards astrology

Ricky Williams 13:53
100% Because I was looking. I mean, the things that I've been through to and trying to make them make sense. Because I'm a philosopher, and philosophers are always trying to make things make sense, and so I grew up Christian. And soon as I got to football, at least the version of Christianity I was given couldn't make things make sense. And the message in our country is, if you have money and you're in your famous, then everything works out. So I tried that one, and I had the fame and the money, and I was like, no, there's more, right? There's more, and I started traveling and meeting people, and I was like, oh, this is where it's at. This is where it's at.

Alex Ferrari 14:31
So when, so when you had the issues in, I mean, in in the NFL, you went on basically you you retired at how old?

Ricky Williams 14:37
27,

Alex Ferrari 14:38
Because that's when you do that. Yeah, right, right. At the at the top of your yes, yes, of course, yes, of course. And then you come back in your 30s. But that's a whole other conversation because the body is much better at 30 than it was. That's what he said. Right. You know, much like that running back.

Ricky Williams 14:52
You know, in my case, it actually was because of what I did in the time off. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Alex Ferrari 14:59
Yeah, you weren't beating up for. Another three years

Ricky Williams 15:00
Exactly, and I was doing yoga every day and stretching and breathing exercises and body work and cranial. And I I became a healer and a yogi, so I empowered myself to be able to go back to football with the tools to be able to take better care of myself.

Alex Ferrari 15:15
And there and there you go. So when you left, that was the dark night of the soul when you were going, and then you decided to do a walkabout.

Ricky Williams 15:22
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 15:22
You went around the world and started to just travel. Yeah, and it's fascinating that you you would you would go to places and, from what I understood, I saw another interview that you were saying that following.

Ricky Williams 15:35
I call it the wheat fairy.

Alex Ferrari 15:38
They kept wherever you went in the world. You were in Fiji, then you were in Australia, and you were other place, and you're just like India, and they're like people are talking to you. I'm like, listen, I walk around the the world all day. No one ever speaks to me. I hate to tell you, I've never had someone come up to me and go, "Hey, man, do you didn't like you know like not never. It's not an energy that I draw into me. But apparently, no matter where you were in the world, if there was one guy or one gal who knew about it and didn't know who you were, yeah, because you were in places that no one knew who you were, yeah. As far as an NFL star is concerned, so isn't that fascinating how the universe was giving you hints that you're like, no man, you're you're good.

Ricky Williams 16:17
Yeah, that's the one thing about the dark night of the soul, and I think anytime we go through really intense experiences, it it alters our state of consciousness, and we're aware of blessings. You know, like in the Bible, all the blessings come when people are in the most dire situation. Oh, of course, yeah. You know, because it forces you where you're in a either I have to have faith or not, and I think that's to me at the end of the day, the dark night of the soul is you were headed in this path, but the universe has this path for you, and so you have to get to the point where you can perceive this path because we get so busy in our stuff, and until it's taken away and we're like, "What now? then we can see a different path, and so for me, I was on the wrong path, you know. And as a football player, I I'll say it like this: we're on the right path, and and there's not all it's not always obvious when the path is supposed to change. And I think football was necessary for me to a to a certain point, but I think once I realize that this isn't the that I've gotten the platform, and the longer I stay here, I'm just beating myself up. I'm not doing anything with it. When I retired and started to travel and and find Ayurveda and astrology and yoga and all these things that felt like this is so much more me than football, my whole life changed. My whole identity changed.

Alex Ferrari 17:37
How did you how did you deal with because you were raised Christian. I was raised Catholic. I still feel guilty about it as a good Catholic boy should. Yeah, but how did you rationalize or like we all build a foundation of of a story in our mind, and that's why we work with the world because this is a crazy place. This existence is pretty nutty,

Ricky Williams 18:01
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 18:02
And we grab onto a story so we can make sense of this. And Christian and religion has that that that way of doing that. But when that wasn't working for you anymore in the scope of what you were dealing with, you went out and looked for other things, and that's fine. And that's what the show is about. We talk about everything because I think you could find wisdom in all paths. How did you reconcile your Christian background with yogis, and that's the devil's work. You know, in certain circles of the Christian Christian faith, like you're talking about Ayurveda, and you talk about yogis, and you're talking about astrology. Is obviously the devil's work. Yeah, of course. Obviously, obviously, you don't look in the stars. That's craziness. That kind of thing. So, how did you reconcile all that within yourself, or it wasn't even an issue?

Ricky Williams 18:46
It wasn't an issue by the time I was an adult. Again, I'm a philosophical person, so even as a kid listening to the Bible stories, I wasn't taking them literal. I could tell there was something underneath the stories that I was picking up on, and I and it goes directly to the life of Jesus. So in this time when I decided to retire and go my walkabout, I was obsessed. I became obsessed with the life of Jesus, not the myth, but the actual lived experience of Jesus. And you know, because I had the Christian background and all the stories stored in the back of my mind, I started to recognize that the themes that were in the stories in the Bible were also showing up in my life, and that's when everything changed for me. That's when I became attracted to Joseph Campbell, and I became attracted to Carl Jung, and this idea that there are stories, universal stories, that we all live different variations of, and it was so it was so obvious and present in my life right then, and so I could in when I started doing yoga and all these things, I could feel the teaching of Jesus present, not all the other stuff in the Bible, but the things the. Words that actually came out of Jesus's mouth and what he represented, I could feel that present in all of the things that I was learning.

Alex Ferrari 20:07
Interesting, which is one of the reasons why you have them up on the wall meditating next to some gurus and masters from the East, because it's you know I'm a I'm a I'm a huge fan of Jesus, and I obviously chosen this incarnation to come in through Christian through Christianity or Catholicism, so I'm very grateful for my upbringing. I might not particularly be happy with the church and the dogma and the fear, but I'm very grateful for them introducing introducing the concept of one something bigger than yourself, and secondly, introducing me to the teachings of Jesus even might be skewed or fear-based or manipulated for other reasons. But the core things that Jesus says is what I always say to people: I'm like, listen, it's real simple. Do unto others as you want to do unto you. The kingdom of heaven is within you. Everything I can do, you can do, and more. Like these are very core, easy teachings that are so far away from what the Catholic Church and the Bible say in many ways. Yeah, but you got to look in between the lines to his true essence of love and be kind, take care of your neighbor. These really core ideas, and that's what I was very, very, very grateful for.

Ricky Williams 21:17
Yeah, and I believe that deeply. And you talked about the reconciliation of my Christianity. Yeah. Well, there is a book I came across when I was studying yoga by Yogananda about Jesus.

Alex Ferrari 21:30
Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, Jesus. Jesus is it? Jesus and

Ricky Williams 21:33
There's two books. There's two books about Jesus. Basically, Jesus as a yogi. Yeah. And so when I found those books, yeah, it reaffirmed every all the insights I was having on my on my own, and after that, I felt permission that I'm on I'm on to something. And I I say very often what you just said about my gratitude for my Christian upbringing. Yeah, is that it put in me deeply that there is something higher, right? That's more important than me, and that if I can connect to that and live according to what comes through, that my regardless of the up and downs, my life is going to feel meaningful.

Alex Ferrari 22:08
Yeah,

Ricky Williams 22:08
And I've had to have that story just because of the level of intensity at which I live and the kinds of experiences. The only place I could see positive stories related to that were in the Bible, and so I kept coming back to these universal stories that we all live, and recognizing them, and that's really the work that I do now is helping people recognize the universe as it's playing out through their daily lives.

Alex Ferrari 22:32
Yeah, I mean it's it's the hero's journey. It was yeah, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, and you know I just watched The Odyssey a little while ago, and it's like you watch that, and man, that hits hard when you're older. Yeah, like if you're watching that as a teenager, it's not going to hit nearly as hard as when you're the age of Odysseus. Going through all of that and the sirens and all. Oh my God! It's just so it's fascinating how a 3000 year old story still resonates and is resonating with new generations that never really looked at it in the same way. And it's kind of like there's movies and there's stories that you watch or you read or you see, and when you see them, they don't make sense. But 20 years later, you go, "Oh, that's what that meant.

Ricky Williams 23:13
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 23:13
There's and and this is going to be one of those movies for a lot of people who are watching it now. But you know, I wanted to I wanted to go back for a second when you were in that dark night of the soul, and I'm asking this very specifically because I know there's people going through a dark night of the soul, and you have an extreme version of a dark night of the soul. When you turned your essentially just left behind the fame, the money, everything that everybody says you need to have to check all the boxes, this is a very intoxicating reality, and you were living in a very intoxicating reality in your journey. You had fame. You were at the top of your game. You, I mean, you had in Miami, in Miami, in Miami in the early 2000s. You know, things were popping. So you were a young guy. Everything was it was was great, and you decide to go. You know what? I need to I need to change something because this is not working for anymore. That takes first of all a tremendous amount of bravery to do that. To walk to literally, I don't think is there another example of something like that happening in the NFL?

Ricky Williams 24:17
No,

Alex Ferrari 24:18
That I could think of. Like they just like you know what? I'm going to retire at 27 because you people are driving me nuts.

Ricky Williams 24:22
Yeah, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 24:24
Pretty much, right? And I need to go find myself.

Ricky Williams 24:26
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 24:26
Go on a walkabout.

Ricky Williams 24:27
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 24:28
And then come back and kill it again when you came back. And I'm like, that's a very interesting. So what? What? When you decided to make that decision, I'm assuming there was there was repercussions, huge repercussions, financial ones, and fame, and family, and I'm sure, and friends, and you found out who your real friends were, who weren't your real friends. What was that process like? How did you process that process? Because the closest thing I I can compare to your story to is Dave Chappelle.

Ricky Williams 24:58
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 24:59
Dave Chappelle turning. $50 million down, and literally going on a walkabout in South Africa.

Ricky Williams 25:03
Yeah, you know, it happened. It happened right about the same time. Right around the same time. Right around the same time. Yeah, these two guys are crazy. Yeah, it's it was all part of my training. There were so many synchronicities. There were so many clues telling me that it's time for you to do something different. And the truth is, if I would have been more receptive and listened earlier, you know, it would have been a lot less messy. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. So, so, so I think the the main thing is that the the it's like I think the universe first whispers, and if we don't listen to the whispers, it starts to yell. Yes. And so, you know, again, it's like Jonah getting swallowed by the whale or the fish, you know. And he was like, "Okay, I'll do it. So, so there's so much pressure from inside saying this isn't it, this isn't the right path, and all the pressure from the outside. And I remember the day I was sitting in my locker. It was during off season we were practicing, and it was after practice. And I was looking around and listening to the nature of the conversation in the locker room, you know. And I had this the question just came out of nowhere: Is this really what you're supposed to be doing? Is this it? You know, and I asked myself, is this really what I'm supposed to be doing? And it and it was it came up kind of shockingly, and I heard this resounding no, you know.

Alex Ferrari 26:22
So you heard you heard something inside you say

Ricky Williams 26:24
Saying because I first I heard the question come up right just looking around and it just rose naturally. Is this really what I'm supposed to be doing? And what I heard was no, and and I was kind of shocked and it was kind of scary because then I was like, well, I've been doing this my whole life. I don't know how to do anything else, and then and then the question came: Well, what am I supposed to doing? And then the only image I had was helping people, because at this point I had realized that I was in something that I had put so much energy to getting to a certain place that I found was empty, and I had this sense that I bet there's a lot of other people that find themselves in the same situation, and that the way I navigate this situation is going to equip me to be able to help other people navigate it. And so the sense of meaning and purpose that had been devoid in my life since I became a professional football player, and almost came back in a moment, and I saw a door open that I could move towards it, but I also saw I could stay here and keep doing this, or I could move through the door. So there was that plus all of the signs telling me to go through the door. That finally I said it was scary. It was like one of those moments where I saw my whole life flash in front of me. I remember the moment when I picked up the phone to call the NFL to tell them that I quit. Literally, my whole life flashed in front of me, and all of the images were connected to football. And I had this realization that if I'm if I go through with this phone call, my whole life is going to change forever. And I and at that moment, I felt ready for it. I felt ready for it.

Alex Ferrari 27:55
You were 27.

Ricky Williams 27:56
I was 27.

Alex Ferrari 27:57
So you're 27, and now looking back as a non 27 year old, yeah, isn't that pretty remarkable, man? At that age, it is. I mean, but but everything you built up,

Ricky Williams 28:06
It is, it is. But this is the key to astrology. Okay, so the moment where I was a fan of astrology from the first moment I had a reading, because it was giving me information about myself that I had been looking for. But the moment where I was became an astrologer was I was taking a class with with my teacher, and he was doing a class on the moon. And for me, the moon is in the area of the chart that has to do with career. So, at 27 and a half, all of us go through the same experience-a moon experience. And the advice that that we give to someone going through a moon experience is trust your heart that your mind can't help you as much right now as your heart. You have to listen to what you truly need. So my moon in the house of career that's 27 and a half. The advice is ask yourself: Is this really what you're supposed to be doing? And I did that. I did it. And so when I'm reading, I'm years later. I'm learning about the astrology and reflecting on this moment when I was 27 and a half. I had this huge smile because, from an astrological perspective, I got it right. You know, is that my true calling was towards a path of healing, not towards a path of bumping my head against other people, and I was on the wrong path, so this moon event it gave me the opportunity to feel and sense that I was on the wrong path, and there is a good chance that was going to happen for me because the moon is in the 10th house, and which means at 27 and a half for people that have that placement, there's going to be a situation that comes up in your life where you have to ask yourself, is what I'm what I'm doing for a living. Is it truly what I'm supposed to be doing?

Alex Ferrari 29:45
It's it sounds almost like, and I'll go back to the Odyssey because it's such a perfect example of this. When Odysseus is trapped with Calypso,

Ricky Williams 29:54
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 29:55
Right?

Ricky Williams 29:56
Yes, 100%

Alex Ferrari 29:57
You're trapped in you're trapped in an eye. With this woman, but you're not trapped because you can leave whenever you want. But there's mental barriers and there's mental traps, and he was eating the lotus and all that stuff. But it was self-imposed. You were trapped, and that's all of us. We've all been in jobs we don't like or are not the right path for us. We've all been in relationships on that path with us, and you were on the island with Calypso, but you just said, "I'm not going to eat the lotus anymore. I'm going to leave the island. Yeah, right?

Ricky Williams 30:27
It was almost like I've been there, done that.

Alex Ferrari 30:29
Hey guys, I really hope you're enjoying this conversation. And the one thing I've noticed recently is that most of you are not subscribed to our YouTube channel. It's free, and it really helps us out a lot. So if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe, like, and share this content so we can continue to help elevate the consciousness of the planet. Thank you so much, and let's get back to the conversation.

Ricky Williams 30:51
Before, as like I said, like for me, I had this feeling since I was a kid, and I'm sure it's from past life things that I'm not gonna let no matter what comes, I'm not gonna let this life go to waste, you know. And the truth is, if I would have stayed playing football, I'd probably be in the Hall of Fame. You know, I'd I'd be a football legend. But all of the time that I spent playing football and beating up my body was time I could have been learning about myself and having something to offer people. Because all I can offer people as a football player is memories of going back and watching film and getting a feeling from watching me run, and that's fine. But as far as what I truly have to offer, I feel like it would have been a huge waste. And the other thing is, there's something called identity foreclosure, and that's when kids that are young, usually athletes, where they have an identity so young that they don't really get the opportunity to develop an identity because they're told who they are and what they're going to be associated with at such a young age, and and so you know that thing kind of happened to me, and I had this opportunity to say, you know, am I going to go down this path, or even though I have no idea what's down this path, I know that it can't be as bad or off the mark as this path feels to me.

Alex Ferrari 32:06
Yeah, it seems like that's why it's so many professional athletes, actors, people that are famous that their identity is attached to their career. The second the career doesn't go well, they they they crash out.

Ricky Williams 32:17
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 32:18
Either with drugs or with you know whatever, they literally crash out because they they can't have it. And I had a version of that when I was a young man as a director. When I wasn't getting my directing jobs, oh my god, I'm a horrible like no man, you're more than that. You're more than what you do. My God, you are an anomaly in the NFL. Like there, you are one or one. You are a unicorn because to most professional athletes don't think this way. You're a philosopher running back.

Ricky Williams 32:43
Yeah, I'm a philosopher running back. Yeah, yeah. But the hardest part, really, and the journey was me learning that and coming to terms with that. Because when there's not, we live in stories, but also stories that are handed down. And when the stories that are handed down don't give us room to live our life because the story is limited, and we have to create our own stories. And one of the best compliments I've ever had is a professor, African American professor from Stanford, little younger than me, said, "You know, we were talking, and he said, 'I admire you because growing up, you gave African Americans the vision that there's many ways to show up. There's many ways to be, and so I found the. I looked for stories that I could map onto and live my life, and I couldn't find any. And I decided, I guess I have to create my own

Alex Ferrari 33:32
From one troublemaker to another. Yeah, we could smell. We could smell our own. It takes a certain level of courage to step out of line, and to step out of the tribe. In the sense, like you're in a tribe, and if like that's why public speaking is the most feared thing more than death for people, because if you get ridiculed, you get thrown out of the tribe, and then you die. Yeah, essentially that's old programming from back in the day. But what you did, man, it's not only just stepping out of the line because you just walked away from what everybody's looking for. I'm sure there were millions of of people looking like, can you believe? Great, he's got everything, and he's just walking away to the bravery, man. I just want to commend you, man. You know, because I've again smaller version of what you did.

Ricky Williams 34:20
You know

Alex Ferrari 34:20
That takes bravery, man.

Ricky Williams 34:21
It it does, but honestly, I being thrown into astrology, I don't think I don't think we really get to choose who we are. No, we get to choose to do it consciously or not. And if you have a life where you're going to draw experiences where you have to have courage, you're either going to be courageous, or you're going to be a coward. There's no, there's no in between. There's no in between. Yeah. So, being a football player, it's obvious that I'm attracting experiences, and I would even say all of my football training was preparing me to have the courage to live the life that I that I need to live.

Alex Ferrari 34:57
Well, it's perfect.

Ricky Williams 34:58
Yeah. So again, I don't think we can. Choose the life. We can choose to live it more consciously by paying attention. That worked. That didn't work. That felt good. That didn't feel good, and that's how I've navigated my life. Not so much based on what other people tell me, but what what feels right to me.

Alex Ferrari 35:15
Before we get to astrology, because I'm dying to get into that with you, you started to learn other disciplines. So you know, you became a yogi and worked in yoga, Ayurvedic as well.

Ricky Williams 35:26
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 35:26
What was what were you drawn to in Ayurveda and yogi and all these other and where did like you traveled a bunch of places? Yeah. In the how long how long did you travel for?

Ricky Williams 35:36
I traveled about two years

Alex Ferrari 35:38
For two years. Yeah. We were on a walkabout, like a long walkabout, so you visited a ton of different countries and experiences and stuff. So you were basically just tasting. You were going to the buffet of the world and going, "Let's see what works.

Ricky Williams 35:51
Well, kind of, but it was it was strange. So when I started traveling and I wasn't on the football schedule, I started to allow myself to tune into another kind of schedule, and I was free. So it's like I woke up in the morning, and whatever moved me, whatever I wanted to explore, and I had enough money. I just I would just explore it. So when I was traveling through Australia for the first time, I bought a tent and I was like camping, and and at the at the at the at the hostel we were at, they had a campground, and there was a certain kind of person. And I've been a football player, so now I was a back international backpacker. So I was meeting people that I'd never met in the football world, and these were worldly people from all around the world. And I found I had more in common with them than I had with my football,

Alex Ferrari 36:41
Of course,

Ricky Williams 36:41
Teammates makes sense, and that kind of shocked me. And one of the guys, I remember a conversation I was having with this guy, and I was sharing my perspective, and I remember he like stopped and he said, "You know, I never thought about it that way, but that makes a lot of sense. And just him saying that is like I didn't realize how hungry I was for someone to appreciate

Alex Ferrari 37:02
Who you were,

Ricky Williams 37:03
My perspective exactly.

Alex Ferrari 37:04
He saw you. Oh, he saw you for the first time. You felt seen.

Ricky Williams 37:08
I felt seen, and it was like shocking. And I was like, "Whoa! And then he gave me a book on Ayurveda, and so I started flipping through the book. And growing up Christian, and that was my only world view. Once I was introduced to another worldview, it was like it made sense to me first. Living according to the seasons, it's like duh, you know, and and so the book really stuck with me. Just the idea, because I was recognizing in my life the question I was wrestling with is why did I get to the height and then all of a sudden I changed, and I was wrestling with that, and the only thing that made it make sense was seasons change, and the season of my life was changing. That clicked to me so deeply, and so when I got this book on Ayurveda, and the first chapter was about living according to the seasons, I was like, "Hmm, there's something here. Fast forward a little bit, I I was so in love with Australia that I decided I'm going to move here, and I'm never coming back to the states. So I I found this beautiful piece of property, and I was like, I'm going to buy this property and just set up here. So I went to the immigration attorney, and we started doing the paperwork. And I got to a page that basically said, if you're going to become a citizen, what are you going to do? You know, what's your job? And so there's there's like 100 and there was I didn't even know that yet there's like 150 jobs, and I started going down the list and I got to the bottom and I realized I don't have a skill. I don't know how to do anything, and then and then and it hit me like okay if I'm gonna like be a you know a regular person I got to find develop a skill, and so I started thinking. Well, what am I going to do? And I start. What are the things that make me feel the most fulfilled? And I thought, you know, talking to a friend and sharing an interesting perspective that helps them. And so I got healer, and then I thought about that Ayurveda book, and I looked online, and I said, Are there any places to study Ayurveda? And there's a place in Northern California, and of course the semester was starting in two weeks.

Alex Ferrari 39:05
Of course,

Ricky Williams 39:06
So I enrolled in school and I started studying Ayurveda, and it was the first time in my life that I was studying something that I could feel other than football that I could feel in my bones, and I felt so at home in that classroom learning about a it felt like church as a kid learning learning about a new way to perceive the world because at the heart of Ayurveda is yogic science so we had to go through like all of the yogic stuff in the very beginning and on my philosopher mind is just sitting there being fed and the different perspectives I was giving how to look at life was making my life make more sense, and to me, once something helps, something make more sense. I'm on it. I'm on it. So part of the Ayurveda course is we had a yoga teacher come in and teach a class twice a week. Down the street from the school was a yoga ashram, and one of the swamis from the ashram came to teach. Class and so we did breathing exercises for the first time, and then after final relaxation, I got up and I went to and I was like, I have never felt that still and peaceful in my life. Where can I get more of this? I need some more. And he said, he said we have a retreat 20 minutes down the road, and so that next Saturday, right, I woke up in the morning for that early morning yoga class. I went there after the class. Someone had told the head swami there that a football player was was at the retreat, and so she came up to me and she looked at me and she said, "She's from Vietnam. She said, "She said you're a football player. She said, "Where's your Mars? And I said, "Mars? I said, "I don't know what you're talking about. She said, "Do you know what time you were born? I said, "Yeah. She said, "Come to my office when you're done. So after I ate brunch, I went up to her office and she put my information in her computer, and we had the most mind-blowing three-hour conversation where I felt so seen. And the one thing she pointed out to me that blew my mind was that I had a habit of creating and running headfirst towards stressful situations, not just on the football field, but in my life, and it's like when she said it, it was like this moment where I was-it was so obvious to me in the moment, but I was so blind to it before she showed it to me, and then she gave me a sledgehammer and she said, "We have goat sheds down at the bottom of the hill that we need to demolish, and so this is your first karma yoga. This is your first job, and spending time with her, I started to realize that there was a path out of my karma. There was a path out of my past life. Very interesting. And and the yogic path set me. It set me there. And she also connected me to the idea of dharma, and that's what got me back to the NFL because I realized, in order for me to make the change in the world that I really wanted to make, I had to go back to the NFL and clear my name. So she helped me get my mind right, gave me the tools to be able to go back with with a different as a different person. And I say the biggest change was before I was saying, "What do I have to do to fit into the NFL? And that second time, it was, "How can the NFL support my goals and the things that I want to accomplish in life? And that change changed everything for me.

Alex Ferrari 42:13
Yeah, you you basically returned with the elixir.

Ricky Williams 42:16
I did. I sure did. You returned with your elixir, man.

Alex Ferrari 42:19
And that's the thing. And a lot of a lot of people now in in the spiritual space is talking about like, yeah, you could. It's great, David, go into the Himalayas and meditate for 40 years in cave, but that's not what this is about.

Ricky Williams 42:34
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 42:34
You got to come down from the cave and go into the world.

Ricky Williams 42:39
Yeah, and share what

Alex Ferrari 42:40
And share what you find. You have to return with the elixir for the for the village that you left on your big journey.

Ricky Williams 42:45
Goosebumps. I mean, that's that's so because, but in reality, I got the elixir, but it took years to get the formulation right. Oh no no, you know. So it was, and every year after I came back, it was like another step towards integration, towards integration, and it wasn't until probably the last two years where the elixir I finally got the mix right.

Alex Ferrari 43:09
They like okay, I got it. Yeah, but you were, but you were. That's what happens on a journey. You and this one you defeat this this monster and you grab a sword. Yes, and you go down that one and you're like, I got a shield now, and this one I got the potions, and you were slowly putting all that together to the point where, like, now I'm ready to come back, and that's it. So you come back to the NFL, you're now the walking running back monk.

Ricky Williams 43:32
Yeah, basically, basically my first year, especially, I wear white every day, and that was it.

Alex Ferrari 43:37
Yeah, I mean, you were close to a Santero. I don't know if you know what a Santero is. I was very close. For everyone, that's a Cuban witch doctor, essentially. Yeah, I mean, you wear white, you're white magic. If you wear black, you have black magic. I have Santeros in my family.

Ricky Williams 43:51
When I came, when I came back, when I came back to Miami, Nick Saban was the head coach, and I literally flew from India straight to Florida to start training because I remember I was in India with my teacher, and I was on the phone with Nick. Nick's like, season starts in about a month and a half. I think it's time for you to get back, and so went straight from India to start training.

Alex Ferrari 44:11
And you know, and this is on a side note, man, because you've been vegetarian what most of your life?

Ricky Williams 44:16
I started. I started when I retired.

Alex Ferrari 44:19
Oh, so you were. So yeah, after you retired is when you started becoming.

Ricky Williams 44:22
When I was in Australia, I met this guy in the bush, as one does. I mean, my story, yeah. And and every day we would walk into town, and he would go to the organic bakery and get fresh whole grains. And he had this little hand mill that he would.

Alex Ferrari 44:37
Yeah, he grind the grains,

Ricky Williams 44:37
And he would just he would just grind it himself, and then make pan bread. Oh, fresh fresh bread like that. And after that, I was like, I don't need. For some reason, I just turned off to meat because I had a better alternative. And

Alex Ferrari 44:49
So you were able to go back to the NFL, and but you're so different, man.

Ricky Williams 44:54
So different,

Alex Ferrari 44:55
Physically, mentally, and spiritually. Yes. Yes. So you. Went back with the elixir, back to kind of clear your name, but also, is it something that you needed to prove to yourself when you went back? Because you,

Ricky Williams 45:08
You know, at the time I didn't think about it that way, but but think as you ask the question, 100% because you can go to the Himalayas and find the elixir, but again, to in order to bring it back, you have to bring it back to the world and see how that because the elixir works in the Himalayas. But how do you get it to work in the world? And so I did need to prove that I could get the elixir to work and turn into success on the football field. Because here's the biggest thing: when I came back before I retired, the the football part-it was automatic. It was like a button, but I-but sometimes you could turn it on, and you-it just was there. And when I came back, that raw rage-it wasn't there anymore. I had to consciously get myself into the zone. So I did have to-I did have to apply the elixir. Everything I learned, I did have to apply it to myself as a football player in order to manifest success, because the success I manifested early in life was just raw from the past. What I did when after I came back was generated from my own consciousness.

Alex Ferrari 46:13
Yeah, that's what I find fascinating because, like, when you think football, and I played Pee-wee, I play little football, as you can tell. Was not built as the wide receiver. I wanted to be. I wanted to be one of the Marx brothers. And and with Dan throwing me, Danny throwing me a ball. That's what I wanted. I know you wanted Danny throw you a ball as well.

Ricky Williams 46:35
That would have been nice. Exactly. Would have been nice.

Alex Ferrari 46:37
But that didn't work out. Yeah. You know, my dad and I always talk about that. Like I could have been a triple threat. Like no, you couldn't. So, but so I I understand the kind of aggression is needed to play football, especially at the level that you're talking about is astronomical. To be a running back, you have to be so much more. So you're coming back from this peaceful yogic Ayurvedic kind of like oh, these stars are like everything is all kumbaya. Yeah, and you come back into the most testosterone-ridden environment.

Ricky Williams 47:09
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 47:10
And you have to perform at a high level, and there's a target on you now. Yeah, because you're like, oh, he came back. Who the hell did he think he is? He could take two years of all that kind of, you know. I'm sure that was a bunch of that as well. Not from your team, but from yeah the league yeah itself. Yeah, what was that like?

Ricky Williams 47:26
There's big question marks. You know, I was so grounded in my because when the time I spent off, I was doing sadhana, I was doing spiritual practice all day, all day, every day. Just amazing. So I was I was still in that mindset, and I made sure when I came back to keep up my meditation practice, and so I started to be able to consciously enter a zone through my meditation practice. And so, before I would just go on the field and something would snap. I had to learn now. 15 minutes before practice, I had to go into the little side room and get in my zone to get ready. And so, after I came back, my routine for pre-practice and pre-game shifted dramatically to more of getting myself into a meditative state so that I could perform.

Alex Ferrari 48:08
Well, it's kind of like when you're a kid, when you're 22, you don't think, you just do

Ricky Williams 48:14
Exactly.

Alex Ferrari 48:15
And the body is at a place where it can just do because you've been training it all your life, right? Yeah. But as you get older, you become more conscious. On as if you're such a professional athlete, you have to be conscious about everything you do.

Ricky Williams 48:27
Yes.

Alex Ferrari 48:27
And now you're like, I got to stretch. Yeah. You didn't stretch at 22.

Ricky Williams 48:30
I got to stretch. I got to meditate. I got to get. I got to get myself ready, or it's not going to work

Alex Ferrari 48:35
Mentally. Yes. Where before it was just like, I just go.

Ricky Williams 48:37
I just go.

Alex Ferrari 48:38
That's that's really interesting. So and then, so now you're you're a meditating running back monk, yeah. You know, doing that, and you're performing, and you came back and you performed at a high level. Yeah, I mean, you you weren't messing around, yeah. And you played for how many more years? So I

Ricky Williams 48:54
So I came back. I came back, and I played for another five years, six years, six years. Play another six,

Alex Ferrari 48:59
Which is basically dog years. Yeah, like 40 years, essentially for a human being.

Ricky Williams 49:02
Yeah, that's a lot of years in the in the NFL, and so also when I retired, I I started I became a massage therapist so that I could practice cranial sacral therapy. So that's one of the things that came across, and it's like this beautiful body mind connection, especially for people that have done a lot of trauma to their body, realizing how much emotional stuff is trapped into the trauma, especially when those injuries are directly tied to your livelihood. So, getting a lot of that body work helped me get a lot of the trauma out, and then I started to practice the body work, and then I got really involved in something called pranic healing, it's an energy healing system, and it has like a meditation, deep meditation system. And I got really deeply involved with this in the last several years of my career. So, I the biggest shift between before and after is my off time. My second time back in my off time, I was always. Bettering myself. I went back to school. I went to massage therapy school. I was learning cranial sacral. I was learning energy healing. I was doing meditation retreats on all my off time. So I was constantly. That's how I was mixing the elixir because I would go into the football world and then I would go into the spiritual world. And I kept going back and forth. And so my last years, I had a group of healers that were constantly working on me, so I really, I really, the last half of my NFL career, the success was built on my spiritual practice. It was built all on my spiritual practice.

Alex Ferrari 50:33
I have to ask, man, at any point, did any of your teammates just go, dude, tell me the secret? What are you doing? Like, did you get? Because I have people do that to me.

Ricky Williams 50:42
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 50:43
From the filmmaking world, they're like, "All right, man, seriously, I'm having a little bit prompt. But they won't say it out loud.

Ricky Williams 50:47
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 50:47
They'll say it quietly to you. Did that happen?

Ricky Williams 50:50
It was cool because the biggest difference was when I came back, I didn't get hurt anymore. You know that I you were healthy. I was healthy as big as one of the biggest differences, and and now and I didn't spend time in the training room, so the players could see that I was the way I play, and that I was never in the training room, and that I was always 100% at practice. If they had injuries, that's when they would come. And I had um had a little poster in my healing room, and I would take a picture of the player's head, and I would put it on the poster, and I would do my healing technique, and then I go back and I, you know, I would call, I would text him, and I say, "I'm about to do the healing, so just get in a relaxed place. I would do the healing, and then we, I would go to practice the next day, and I'd be watching, and they say, "Yeah, I feel my knees feel better. Thank you. So I had probably seven guys kind of come to me on the down low and ask for ask for healing for some healings.

Alex Ferrari 51:39
Really, that's awesome, dude. That's that's amazing. So you know, you were talking a little bit about past lives. So obviously, that's not something that's in the Christian, in the in the the canon. When you first heard that concept, I know when I first heard it, it blew my mind away. I learned it through Edgar Cayce when I first started reading Edgar Cayce's work back in the day when I was in my 20s, starting my journey and my spiritual practice, it blew my mind. Like, wait a minute! But it made sense. Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 52:09
It made much more sense.

Ricky Williams 52:10
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 52:10
What? How did it?

Ricky Williams 52:11
Same thing. Same thing. When I was studying yoga and Ayurveda, it's a big part of the yogic philosophy. And I'm the kind of person I learned this from football. Is like when you are learning something, take it all in, and then see what works. So I took it all in and I started thinking about these things. And like you said, it made more sense. It made more sense than you know toasting champagne with Jesus and the angels.

Alex Ferrari 52:37
You know, first of all, it's wine. Jesus does not drink champagne,

Ricky Williams 52:43
And the streets and the streets are gold. You know that. Yes, so so it started it started to make sense, and then the type of astrology that I really gravitated to is called evolutionary astrology, and our main technique is understanding past lives. It's understanding the chart underneath the chart, right? It's it's yeah, because you see, when a baby is born, and especially you've been around kids, they're not blank slates. Oh no, the babies have come from somewhere

Alex Ferrari 53:10
Pre-programmed at the factory.

Ricky Williams 53:11
Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so the the chart can give hints about that pre programming and the effect of that pre programming, especially the first half of life.

Alex Ferrari 53:21
So, with the concept of past lives, do you believe that you like? Why do you believe that your soul chose this path in this life? Because we all choose our our journey. Yeah. Sometimes it's hard to hear that from people, depending on where they are in their life. But we choose our learning to learn certain lessons. Our soul needs to learn certain lessons. That's what my understanding of it is. Yeah. So you chose a pretty interesting path.

Ricky Williams 53:45
Well, I have a slightly different understanding. So, you know, in the same way, like in the NFL, we are drafted. You know, right? Is for a reason that typically a team says this is a need that we have, and these are the available players. Who's the best available player to fit the need that we have? Beautifully said. And so I think that the universe needs us, and we're all going through the training we need to prepare ourselves to deliver what we're we're here to deliver. The mission, yeah. So I do think we have a choice to like. There's something greater than us. We do have a choice to acknowledge that and to be curious about what is that greater thing. What is its plan for me? And we talk about God's plan. So I think our our incarnation is the curriculum of where we are for God's plan. Because what we see, what I see in the in the astrological symbolism of past lives is there is a trajectory. We're all being trained to be something. You know, I use the analogy of a red blood cell because I think of humans as cells in the body of humanity. You know, yeah. And the nature of why why we can sit here and have this conversation is because. There's hundreds of billions of cells that cooperate, and also they know exactly what they are supposed to be doing. And if they stop doing it, the body gets rid of them. And so I feel like deep down inside of us is a knowing of exactly what kind of cell we are. And the thing about a blood cell is it puts 100% of what it does into being a blood cell. We're still not there yet, right? We're still super inefficient. We still haven't figured out who we are yet. But I think that the process of this incarnation is a further step to figure out who we are, so that we have the ability to do it on purpose.

Alex Ferrari 55:37
I think we both said the same thing in two different perspectives. Yeah, it's it's it's and it's. I actually love that idea that the universe is like. All right, we're gonna need. You know, we're we're trying to raise the consciousness of humanity. Where can we affect? Where's an area that we haven't affected? Okay, the NFL has billions of people. All right, all right, we need somebody. Anyone here? We need somebody to go down. You're gonna be given fame. You're gonna be given money. You're going to be given a physical body that's going to be able be capable of doing the work that you need to be doing. Now, with that said, it sounds good, but I'm going to give you some caveats. Now, you're going to be ridiculed. You're going to be the outsider. You're going to have to quit. You're going to have to do this and that. And in the soul land, you're you're told a whole basically lot. Yeah. This is the this is the script of the story. You could play,

Ricky Williams 56:21
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 56:22
But this is the script, yeah. And then you, on the other side, soul Ricky said, "I'll do it.

Ricky Williams 56:27
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 56:27
That sounds real interesting. And I got, oh, and from my past lives, I could fix this, and I can fix that, and I can do this, and oh, and I can bring back some of my soul family too. Like my mom will be, oh yeah, that would be great. All that came in, and like, oh, we're gonna bring you through Christianity. Perfect, they're great. In Jesus, right next to you, like that'll be good, and you toast your champagne. Yeah, perfect. Is that is that similar?

Ricky Williams 56:47
It's very similar, you know. But but I do believe the universe. Like I think it's like a seed. So in in astrology, for example, the planet Uranus, and so Deborah's strongest planet is the planet Uranus? Yes, and so she mentions that a lot. So Uranus, Uranus is the planet of breaking the rules. It's the planet of being ahead of your time. So encased in the potential of this planet are all of those experience that you just put on the table. Because if you even talked about it earlier, there's part of us that is super sensitive to being kicked out of the group, Uranus is the part of us that gets us kicked out of the group, and if it does it in a healthy way, it's because we were with the wrong group. So Uranus is the part; it's the urge to be a to be unique, you know. And our uniqueness is out there to be appreciated by a specific group, and if we're in the wrong group, that uniqueness is not going to be appreciated. But also, Uranus is the planet that brings things that are ahead of their time. It opens doors. It's a planet of innovation. It's the planet of technology, and for me, that planet very much affects my my career, my reputation, what I'm meant to be. And so, the universe said, "Is you are going to be someone that's ahead of your time, and then it might have said, if you look at the record, a historical record of what's happened to other people that have been ahead of their time, be ready for these same things to happen to you.

Alex Ferrari 58:11
And have you gone back just out of fun and like looked at certain people's charts that passed

Ricky Williams 58:16
All the time! That's what I. That's what I. That's what in classes that I teach. That's what we do. We look at because to me you can't learn astrology from a book. You can learn what other people have found, but the way to learn astrology is to see how it's actually showing up in people's lives. I don't do book astrology. I do what I've seen show up in my life and other people's lives consistently.

Alex Ferrari 58:38
So all right. So when you are so let's get into evolutionary astrology because that's something I have not heard.

Ricky Williams 58:43
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 58:43
I mean, and I was we were joking about it earlier. Like I just I learned from Deborah because we just did a course together. I'm like I'm a triple water with a double Scorpio rising, if I'm mistaken. I might be rising. Yeah, that's the right word. Yeah, it's a rising. And then was it your not your? Is it Uranus? No, Saturn is in my sun. Yeah, Saturn with your sun. Saturn is with my sun, but I have a lot of fire as well. No Earth, yeah, whatsoever, and a little bit of air. Yeah. So see, I I know a lot of that conceptually, but I haven't heard about evolutionary astrology yet. So can you explain to people what evolutionary astrology is, and how it different because there's. I mean, I've had Vedic astrologers, I've had Chinese astrologers, I've had many different kinds of astrology. Yeah, they all say the same thing, just different flavors.

Ricky Williams 59:29
Yeah, sorta, sorta, sorta, sorta. Yeah, tell me. So, if you were an astrologer, you would be an evolutionary astrologer. Period. Just the way, just the way you've talked about past lives and how that-that's evolutionary astrology. Makes sense. Evolutionary astrology says every everything that shows up in your life is for your evolution. So our perspective when we look at the astrological symbols, we are asking what is what is trying to evolve through this experience. That's basically what we how what is trying. To evolve, which part of you is trying to evolve through this experience? And I love it because it's similar to the football mindset: is that there's no accidents. You know, we know we're going to play the Ravens, and and Ray Lewis is going to blitz through the A gap. Like we, you know, we we know we know that's going to happen. Can we prepare ourselves and and do what it takes? So again, the reason I love evolutionary astrology because it puts everything in an evolutionary perspective. That if an event is showing up in your life, it's showing up because you've reached a point in your life where it's time to evolve, where it's time to change. And as a starting point, to me, the symbols will tell us the timing of it. But then we can sit back and look at our lives and see, okay, what's showing up? How is this showing up in my life?

Alex Ferrari 1:00:46
So, I've I heard and Deborah told me this that at 27,26, 27, some there was a it's a big transitional change. Yeah, it happened to me. You obviously

Ricky Williams 1:00:59
Yes, happened to me. Yes,

Alex Ferrari 1:01:00
You retired. I almost made a movie with the mafia. Yeah. So yes, it was two very different. Like it was game changing. Yes. Something had to shift, and then she also said at 59 or 60.

Ricky Williams 1:01:12
So there's

Alex Ferrari 1:01:12
Is that is that for everybody or just some?

Ricky Williams 1:01:14
So I'll give a little bit more specificity. Tell me. It's my teacher calls it the biopsychic script. So meaning there's certain things that we all experience about the same time. The example is puberty, right? Okay, and because and most of these in the chart are based on cycles. So, for instance, a Saturn cycle is about 29 years. So we know that about 29 years, Saturn returns to where it was when you were born, and Saturn is the planet of maturity. So it's an astrological way of describing that feeling of about to turn 30. I'm not a kid anymore. Okay, it's pure maturity cycle, but Saturn is about following the rules. You know, part of to get Saturn right, we have to put how we feel aside. Saturn rules winter, you know, and I imagine someone in the winter in Canada with no central heating. I don't feel like chopping wood. I don't feel right. You're gonna freeze to death, so you got to put your feelings aside and chop the wood so you can survive. That's Saturn. The moon rules summertime. You got to be in touch with how you feel. So if you're following the rules, but you've taken how you feel out. Probably those rules aren't going to work for you. So right before the Saturn return, so right before we turn 30, the lunar return happens, and that's at 27 and a half. It prepares us for the Saturn return. You could look at them as being one event, or you could break them up. Is the Moon says you have to be in touch with your heart because in a couple of years you're going to have to make a decision about what you're going to do as an adult. Yeah, and so for me, when I started traveling, when I two years later when I got to my Saturn return, that's when I knew that this is what I wanted to do. But if I hadn't gone on the walkabout, I wouldn't have had the clarity to commit to taking the path that's got me here today.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:02
Yeah, because if not, if you would have stayed in the NFL for those two years, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Ricky Williams 1:03:06
Or if we were, I'd be in a wheelchair, you know.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:08
Right, because yeah, and and you were you heading in that direction?

Ricky Williams 1:03:11
I was when I retired. I couldn't lift my arms past here, and so the magic of the Ayurveda and the yoga and the meditation is when I came back, my body was younger, much younger, much more fit than it was when I left because of the the way that I utilized the time off.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:27
That's fascinating. All right, so that so that's evolutionary astrology. So, how do you look into someone's past lives with astrology? Yeah, how does that work?

Ricky Williams 1:03:37
There's a there's a whole technique. Tell me, man. So it's it's um it's a symbol in the chart called the South Node of the Moon, and my the first astrology I studied was Vedic astrology in India. Okay, and so this technique actually comes from India, where reincarnation is a thing, and so you look at the sign in the house of the South Node and the planet that's associated with it, and it tells a story, so we we turn a configuration into. It's we're not saying this is exactly what happened in the past life, but we're telling a metaphorical story that is going to mirror a very similar theme that occurred in someone's past life.

Alex Ferrari 1:04:15
So, in other words, these are lessons that we haven't learned between lives.

Ricky Williams 1:04:19
I'll give you an example. All right. So I'll use my wife. Right. So she has the South Node of the Moon, which is the symbol in Aries. So Aries is the the god of war. So if someone South Node is in Aries, we know that the past experience was extremely stressful, like a kind of warlike environment, and for her, there's also a configuration connected to children. So the story for her and my my wife is Caucasian. The story for my wife is that we'll say in slavery times she had a child from a slave, right? Um. And you can imagine how stressful of a situation that would be in, and things that happen, and the way it's shown up in this life is: I met my wife, and we got married, and she got pregnant once, had a miscarriage, got pregnant twice, had a miscarriage, got pregnant the third time, and while she was pregnant the third time, I looked at her chart and I said, "This issue is a past life issue, right? This idea of that in the past having a child made your life horrible,

Alex Ferrari 1:05:31
So your body was rejected.

Ricky Williams 1:05:32
So your body is rejecting it. And we watched a movie. There's one of the Candyman movies, you know. Of course, this is one of the Candyman movies where there's a Candyman. There's a Candyman movie where the main actor was African American, and he got the he was hired to paint a white guy's daughter, and they fell in love, and she had a child, and they like tarred and feathered him.

Alex Ferrari 1:05:58
Yeah, that's that's the that's the origin story.

Ricky Williams 1:06:00
Yeah, so we watched we watched that movie, you know, and then after the movie, my wife got in the bath. She was taking a bath, and we were sitting there talking, and it was this moment where I said, because what I found with the past, this is the way the past works, is that although we're living in this world and this is around us, we're not seeing it. We're seeing the scene from the past, and sometimes we just need someone to like wake us up, so we can look around and realize that things are different. So we had this moment in the bathtub after the movie where it was up, you know, and she could acknowledge how afraid she was, and she had this really big cry, you know, and after that, you know everything was easy, and the pregnancy came to fruition, and we have we have our child.

Alex Ferrari 1:06:47
So she kind of worked it out.

Ricky Williams 1:06:48
She worked because to me, the working out is really the acknowledgement of I was in this situation in the past, and it didn't go well. But look around, and I said to her, you know, white people and black people are allowed to have children now. It's a different time, and she had this visible sigh. And again, she just bawled for like 20 minutes, and after that, it was it was smooth. The the South Node and past lives, the way they affect us, is memories. Because the thing about past lives, if we go back in time, the world in many ways was more backwards. There were things back then that you couldn't do, of course, that you can do now. Sure. And so for me, the that that's been the biggest significance between past lives and current lives is people recognizing the memory and how it had an impact on them, and realizing now things are different.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:37
And that's all they have to do is acknowledge it consciously.

Ricky Williams 1:07:40
That's the that's the first part because if you don't acknowledge it, it just keeps eating you up. So to be honest, the first thing you do have to acknowledge, but the second part is it does take effort because the power of karma or the power of past lives is habitual, habitual attitudes and habitual ways of seeing things that are rooted in the past that we still keep we still keep running on when it's times are different, and so the technique to to do this is always up opposite the south node is the north node, and in astrology two signs are always opposite. They're opposite qualities. Yeah. So the opposite of Aries, which is the god of war, is Libra, which is this the balance scales, and it's about harmony, and it's about peace, and so both of us, because my South Node is in Aries too, both me and my wife come from a place of basically right super stressful time, and so both of us have a tendency to to be adversarial, even when it's not necessarily the case. It's in your program. It's in our programming.

Alex Ferrari 1:08:41
Even though that wasn't something that you picked up in this life.

Ricky Williams 1:08:43
Even though I didn't pick it up in this life, but I created in this life because I was running off of the steam in the past. That's why. That's why. Again, when I was a kid, the fastest kid, the the athlete, because my past life story. I wasn't. I was a warrior. I was a gladiator, and so

Alex Ferrari 1:09:00
Of course,

Ricky Williams 1:09:00
You know, I wake up here, and the situation around me that feels closest to the past is going to be the one I most naturally gravitate towards. So one of the things, even though this symbol isn't one that a lot of astrologers use, we call it the chart underneath the chart. It's it often describes the most important experiences in someone's early life because it's running off the momentum of the past.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:22
So when you're working with a client and you see something like, let's say, miscarriages happening again and again, you'll go, "There's something here. There's something. There's something going on here that's causing this, and it's not something here. There's something that you're carrying

Ricky Williams 1:09:34
always.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:34
You know, or if you if you keep attracting the same loser boyfriend or loser girlfriend into your world, they're like, okay, there's something that you you got to let this go.

Ricky Williams 1:09:43
Yeah, you have to understand it because we we can let go of a pattern, but not really. We can reorganize it. We can reorganize it because there's certain. What the chart says is there's certain experiences that you are destined to have because they are prepared. You for what you're meant to do, and so the fifth house is the house of love affairs. It's the people that we're gonna, the experiences we're gonna have when we fall in love, and if we're clear about those experiences, then it's easier to say no, not you, not you, not you. We can recognize because every every every symbol in a chart has a higher expression and has a shadow expression. That's how we orient ourselves. Is we're always aiming for the highest expression. We recognize the shadow because it's telling us that we're getting off track a little bit. Not even a bad thing, because there's an aim here. And so let's say the planet Pluto. Okay, and the planet Pluto is the planet that forces us to deal with our woundedness. Okay, it that so if someone has Pluto in the fifth house, right? When they fall in love, they are gonna fall in love with people who will bring up their wounds. Okay, so if someone is doing that unconsciously, those wounds are gonna be triggered unconsciously. If someone knows I need depth in love affairs, as they're looking about people to spend time with and hook up with, might they're going to be more attracted to the person that feels deep, not wounded, you know? And that's both right-the higher side of Pluto, someone who's been wounded but has the depth to process it and sit in it. The dark side of Pluto, someone who's wounded and has no idea, so they keep acting out on the wound.

Alex Ferrari 1:11:21
Interesting. This is fascinating. It is. It's endless. Yeah.

Ricky Williams 1:11:25
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 1:11:26
It's all endless. So you're so evolutionary astrology. It has has a Vedic background.

Ricky Williams 1:11:31
Well, the this specific technique of the South Node is Vedic, but that technique, 100% And I think a spiritual astrology is Vedic, you know, and evolutionary astrology is spiritual astrology.

Alex Ferrari 1:11:45
Have you studied other forms?

Ricky Williams 1:11:47
I have. I started. I started studying Vedic. I've studied Chinese. I've studied. I've studied all types of astrologies. Before I, I chose my type of astrology. I dabbled in a bunch, but there is something about evolutionary astrology that I loved because it talked about real life experiences. So I'll give a real life example, please. Is and I know you can relate to this. So my wife and I we do the startup thing, and so we started astrology app, and we didn't know anything about apps, you know. But for me, I'm like, I feel like this is a meaningful path, so we're just gonna go all in, and so I mean all in, you know, all in.

Alex Ferrari 1:12:26
Yeah, it doesn't sound like you do anything happening.

Ricky Williams 1:12:27
Yeah, exactly. And at the time, my wife, she just had a baby, so she wasn't conscious of how all in we were in in the business. Okay, and as she's baby started to get a little bigger, and she started to like kind of

Alex Ferrari 1:12:42
Come out of the haze.

Ricky Williams 1:12:43
Yes, she did like a complete audit. You know, man,

Alex Ferrari 1:12:49
When you hear audit and your wife, it's not a good.

Ricky Williams 1:12:52
Yeah, yes, 100% She she did a complete audit, and she got 98% clear of what our actual situation was. Sure, there was 2% She wasn't clear. Okay, and I knew that 2% Sure, the finances you made. Yeah, the finances. Yeah, she didn't. Yeah, how how leveraged we were. Oh god. And and then she so she had the reality of it, and she was like, she was hot. She was like, she was pissed, and and there was one credit card, another credit card that she didn't know about, you know. All right, and so I'm sitting there, and I'm like, she's already. So I'm like, I feel like I'm in trouble. I'm done. I'm done. Yes, yes. So, so there was one credit card she didn't know about, and I'm and I'm sitting there thinking, she's pissed already. Do I do I just tell her? Do I? Oh, I mean, do I wait? And so I built an app, Lila, and so I that night I just happened to pull up the app and I like scroll, and it's a South Node thing, a past life thing, and I start reading what we wrote, and what occurred to me is I have to say something. It's not going to be easy. I'm going to be shaking, but I have, but I have to say something because it was one of those moments where it was a a vital moment in our relationship where I had an opportunity to build trust or destroy it. You know, in in long term relationships, there's those moments that you can't come back from. Oh yeah, it takes a long time to you may it takes a long time to heal. So it's kind of inefficient if you can in the moment, make the right, and it was that moment. So the next morning, you know, I said, "I said we got to have a talk, you know, and and I told her, and you know, she was upset, but she appreciated the honesty, and it helped us build bridges to get past it, you know, and we decided after that to be on the same page, you know, and and we were able to come out of it and and progress through it. But that moment, it was one of those. This is why I love evolutionary astrology because it can get to the deepest, darkest conflicts you have, and and give you some clarity there

Alex Ferrari 1:14:57
Is does evolutionary astrology deal. Ancestral trauma, ancestral karma.

Ricky Williams 1:15:03
So we would see that if someone, the fourth house is where the ancestors live, and if we see the planet Pluto, a planet of the wound associated with that house, we can go there right away.

Alex Ferrari 1:15:14
Also, you you can you can figure if it's in their chart, like oh, this is ancestral.

Ricky Williams 1:15:18
Yeah, because in the fourth house, anything in the fourth house is in the fourth and the 10th house is going to be things we inherit from our parents.

Alex Ferrari 1:15:24
Before we continue, what are the houses, bro? Oh, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. Tell me what these because I hear like Scorpio is in the fourth house and Saturn. I'm like, dude, what the hell are you talking?

Ricky Williams 1:15:32
Perfect. So houses, there's 12 houses in a chart. Okay, and what the the the simple translation is houses relate to areas of life.

Alex Ferrari 1:15:40
Okay,

Ricky Williams 1:15:41
So as an example, the first house is our body and our personality. Okay. Someone who has a lot of planets in the first house, they have big a big personality because the houses tell us where in our lives the planets are going to make themselves felt.

Alex Ferrari 1:15:55
Okay.

Ricky Williams 1:15:56
Right. The seventh house is an example is the house of partnership. So, if someone has Mars in the seventh, it means that they are going to attract fiery, passionate, probably angry partners. Is that in their partnerships? The main theme of their partnership is how do we deal with aggression? Do we fight each other? Do we find something that we can fight? Fight 100% That's the main theme of. So the houses show where the planets will show up, where the events, because planets are parts of us, but they're the parts of us that attract meaningful events. So you'll see if we looked at the chart of your marriage date, we're gonna see activations to the seventh house, 100% of the time. People,

Alex Ferrari 1:16:38
If I tell you my date of my marriage,

Ricky Williams 1:16:40
We can look, and we'll see. I promise you. Without even looking, I already know someone doesn't get married unless the seventh house is receiving stimulus. Because if the seventh house is receiving stimulus, what it means is we're thinking about partnership. If the fourth house is is active, or we're thinking about our home, our family, or our father. If the 11th house is being active, we're thinking about our friends,

Alex Ferrari 1:17:01
And how do you activate it? How is it active?

Ricky Williams 1:17:03
So, and by something we call transits and progressions, the moving planets.

Alex Ferrari 1:17:07
Sure.

Ricky Williams 1:17:07
So when we're born, the planets are at a certain degree. Let's say when I was born, the sun was at zero degrees Aries. So now, any time any planet gets to zero degrees, it's activating my sun.

Alex Ferrari 1:17:19
It's starting to send energy.

Ricky Williams 1:17:20
It's 100. That's how it. That's exactly what it is. It's starting to send. It's like radio dials. As soon as two planets align, right? This energy is sending this planet energy, and it and energy doesn't do nothing. It starts to active, and the starts to activate. And the way we know is we'll notice the change in our thoughts, in our feelings, in things that are showing up in our lives. So what I teach my students is to notice. Notice when you're feeling something that you're not normally feeling. Notice when you have a different thought. Notice when certain synchronicities keep happening. Notice when you slice your finger and look at your chart to understand what was the shift, what was the change. And that's how, to me, that's how you learn astrology to see how it actually shows up in the world when something is activated.

Alex Ferrari 1:18:03
So if so, a lot of times I know that astrologers need like their computer to check things out. If I gave you my birthday, could you just give me something

Ricky Williams 1:18:12
Right now?

Alex Ferrari 1:18:13
Yeah, just out of curiosity. So how does it work? I'm just curious.

Ricky Williams 1:18:16
So so the the bigger broad stroke. Yeah the the birth chart is we need the time, the date, and the place. Got it. Right. So I can know where the sun was. I can know what season you were born. So where the sun is, but the year, my memory's not good because the moon moves a sign every two and a half days. So each of the planets, they're like hands on a clock, and they all move at different speeds. The sun is easy because it's the same every year. Yeah. So, so if if you give me your, I can know where the sun is. I can also know where the the outer planets are because they move so slowly. So Pluto takes anywhere from 11 to 30 years to move through a sign. Saturn, I mean, Uranus takes seven years to move through a sign. Neptune takes 14, so I could identify what sign they were in. But the houses are directly based on what time you were born, so I could guess where the sun was because we know where the sun is in the sky at any given time, usually. So I could probably guess the sun sign in the sun house, but other than that, I wouldn't be able to do much

Alex Ferrari 1:19:20
Because you need the you need

Ricky Williams 1:19:22
Because the computer can do all of that because the computer basically we call it an ephemeris it tells me where the planets were on all of the planets were on a specific day

Alex Ferrari 1:19:31
And time

Ricky Williams 1:19:32
And well the time is where you need the computer for

Alex Ferrari 1:19:34
and what's the location part

Ricky Williams 1:19:36
Because let's say if you were born in Alaska, okay, is that the length of the days are different, and so like the angle, the angle of the sun at a certain time of day is going to be different no matter where you are on the country and where you are on the globe.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:53
God, of course, yeah, because if you're born in Australia at six a.m. exactly, it's different than New York, right?

Ricky Williams 1:19:58
Exactly, so it's a. Coordinate system, essentially.

Alex Ferrari 1:20:01
It's fascinating.

Ricky Williams 1:20:02
Yeah, that's what that's what we're reading a chart is a coordinate system.

Alex Ferrari 1:20:04
How old is astrology?

Ricky Williams 1:20:07
So, all we know is the first history we have of any written records come out of Mesopotamia on clay tablets.

Alex Ferrari 1:20:16
Astrology.

Ricky Williams 1:20:16
Yeah. Well, any any history.

Alex Ferrari 1:20:18
Well, yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Of course.

Ricky Williams 1:20:20
But but so when they found all the clay tablets, that's where they found astrology. It was already there. So the first astrolog, the first astrologers that we know in Mesopotamia, they were hired by the king because the king wanted to know what the gods willed. People don't realize this. Astrology is the first religion. If you ask most religious people where does God live? They still will look up instinctively, and if you think about the names of the gods, is they have, and the planets they have the name of Roman gods, and before they were Roman gods, they were named after Greek gods, and before they were named after Greek gods, they were named after Mesopotamian gods. So from the beginning of written history, we have copious notes of what was going on in the sky, what was going on in the kingdom? That's how astrology started. Astrologers would look at these 900 tablets that had correlations of what when Venus was here. This was what was going on in the kingdom, so that they could answer the king that the stars or the gods are saying, if you attack now, you will be vict. You will be victorious.

Alex Ferrari 1:21:22
I know of many actors and and like professionals who are they have their own private astrologer, yeah, to let them know and business people

Ricky Williams 1:21:31
Yeah

Alex Ferrari 1:21:32
To like when to invest, when not to invest, all that kind of stuff. But they keep it on the DL.

Ricky Williams 1:21:37
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:21:37
They don't because people think they're they're a little off. Yeah, if they like have an astrologer that just goes with me everywhere.

Ricky Williams 1:21:43
Yeah, you know, I'm I'm again ahead of my time. So I I see a future where people don't need astrologers, but people are because to me I'm talking to someone about their chart. I'm they know themselves in their life better than I do. Yes, I know the astrological language. So for me, I when I'm doing a reading, I'm essentially teaching the person how to do it themselves because you know more about yourself than I do. I can give you the language and put you on the wavelength, but I think eventually, that's my hope, is that especially with AI, is that people aren't going to need astrologers because the thing, my issue with astrologers is astrologers have their own opinions,

Alex Ferrari 1:22:24
Of course,

Ricky Williams 1:22:25
And so they're they're putting they're putting their own opinions about the way they see the world on the people who don't necessarily can't don't really have a defense against it

Alex Ferrari 1:22:34
Because they don't understand

Ricky Williams 1:22:35
Because they don't understand. So to me, I could be way off, but I I see I call what I do astrologic, and I think there is a logic. There's a logic behind astrology, but no one teaches it. They just teach all the complex stuff. But to me, it's really rooted in common sense. Once you understand the basic alphabet, it's common sense.

Alex Ferrari 1:22:55
And when you say alphabet, you mean just like the basics

Ricky Williams 1:22:57
The planet, signs, houses, and aspects.

Alex Ferrari 1:22:59
Exactly. That's dude, because it. from what I've from my experience with astrology, it's math. It's literally it's science. Yes, it's a science. It's not spiritual.

Ricky Williams 1:23:10
It's spiritual science, right? Because the science is the math. Is not external things. It's internal factors. Because to me, a chart of a math. If I'm talking to a purely psychological person, I'll say the chart perfectly maps our unconscious at birth. This is the thing that people don't people forget about a birth chart. It's called a birth chart. So the thing that people read adults charts the way they do it bothers me because the birth chart is marking the moment of birth, and when I'm talking to an adult, a lot has happened between birth and them showing up to have a conversation with me. So I'm not reading the chart. I'm curious about how those unconscious drives have been conditioned by the environment to manifest as who this person is right now. So for me, I'm trying to understand how the chart has manifested to this point, not telling the person how it should or how it even describes them, because it doesn't describe a person. It describes the internal mechanisms that create the person. And if you understand those deeper mechanisms, you can work with what's underneath. You're not having to deal with the finished product and fix yourself.

Alex Ferrari 1:24:20
So you're saying that it creates the mechanisms underneath the person, which is that pre-programming from the factory.

Ricky Williams 1:24:27
100% Yeah, that's what a chart is. Is the pre-programming from the factory? That is a beautiful way to put it.

Alex Ferrari 1:24:32
So it's not what they've been dealing with in the world for the last 30 or 40 years.

Ricky Williams 1:24:37
It's the pre-programming that they've been dealing with the world with,

Alex Ferrari 1:24:40
Right? So the okay, okay, so it's basically you've you've come in, and I've said this like anyone who's had kids.

Ricky Williams 1:24:46
Yeah, you see it, you see it.

Alex Ferrari 1:24:48
You can look at a baby and go. They start acting like you know I have I have I have kids and they're very different.

Ricky Williams 1:24:55
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 1:24:56
Very very different, and they're walking different paths. I'm like we didn't they. Both were. It's interesting when you have kids together in the same family. You're both being raised by the same parents in the same environment with similar experiences.

Ricky Williams 1:25:08
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 1:25:09
And yet they're walking at life completely different.

Ricky Williams 1:25:11
So twins, twins are and twins in astrology are are a very rich area of study.

Alex Ferrari 1:25:18
Right, because if you have identical twins,

Ricky Williams 1:25:19
They have the same chart.

Alex Ferrari 1:25:20
They have the same chart, but they're different. Okay. So how does that work?

Ricky Williams 1:25:22
Okay, perfect. So I because I have a twin, it's a little bit.

Alex Ferrari 1:25:26
You have a twin.

Ricky Williams 1:25:27
It's yeah, I have a twin. It's so we have the same chart. It's a little bit different because, just again, the chart is is what's on the inside, the unconscious. So two things. One, the my specific example: My twin is a is a female,

Alex Ferrari 1:25:42
So she did not play in the NFL.

Ricky Williams 1:25:44
So she did not play in that exactly. But if you see that a little boy and a little girl are treated differently by the environment, different expectations. Of course. So the chart is also like epigenetics; it's potential. But in order for the potential in the chart to to flourish, it has to have stimulus from the external environment, and little boys and little girls are stimulated differently

Alex Ferrari 1:26:04
In different times and different countries.

Ricky Williams 1:26:07
So that's that's part of the boy girl twin. But twins that are the same sex is because the twins share the chart and they're super close. What I've seen is one twin will play out part of the chart, and the other twin will play out other parts of the chart, because what happens even if they're not twins? If I look at your chart, a chart doesn't describe a person. I don't think it describes a person's life. So you can locate the individual in the chart, but I can also locate your wife, your kids, your friends. I can locate all of the meaningful people in your chart because they're playing meaningful roles in your in your life. Because again, the chart describes the life, so you can look at if someone has relationship issues. I don't even need the other person's chart. I can look at your chart and see what are the relationship issues that this chart is likely to attract, and then I can help someone navigate what these issues, the evolutionary intention behind navigating or facing these issues, because there is something there.

Alex Ferrari 1:27:10
Dude, that's it's like it's insane. All right, so with do you do when you're doing astrological readings? Do you ever look at and obviously you work with individuals,

Ricky Williams 1:27:20
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:27:20
But do you look at families, countries, humanity's consciousness in general? Yes, because I don't know if you've noticed, stuff's crazy out there nowadays. It's getting a little nutty.

Ricky Williams 1:27:32
Well, I think part of it is in. It's my opinion. I I believe humanity is like 11 or 12, right?

Alex Ferrari 1:27:40
That's fair. Yeah, fair.

Ricky Williams 1:27:41
Right. So, and if you go back to being 11 or 12, how crazy things were. You know, you kind of knew enough to get yourself in trouble, but you don't really know. You know. So I feel like humanity. That's one point. Humanity is humanity is there, and there's a branch of astrology called mundane astrology, and it looks at the astrology of groups. Okay. So a corporation, a country, even a family. Yeah, and it's interesting how I said that we're all cells in the body of humanity. It's the same way. If we look at the chart of the United States, all of its citizens are the cells in the body of that chart. So even if we see something going on in the chart of the U.S. it's being manifested through the citizens. Interesting. Even same thing with the corporation. You know, any any group we're looking at a large group, but that group is looking at how a group of people of individuals, when they come together, how they create an entity. Similarly, when we look at relationship astrology, there's a chart we look at called a composite chart, and it's the chart of two people. So you're looking at the chart of the relationship. It's and to realize that you know, imagine two people that are that are very introverted, but some something about when they get together that they become more extroverted. Right. You'll see. You'll see in both of their individual charts they have symbols of introversion, but if you look at the composite chart, it's extroverted. So it's cool just to to think about that. There's me and there's you, but there's also a third entity of the relationship, and that has a chart.

Alex Ferrari 1:29:18
Okay, so with from what I understood, the last time there are certain planets that were in play. This is again Deborah's my my guru. She's taught me a lot about this stuff. Yeah. So from what I understand, 250 years ago, when the U.S. was created, yeah, there was an alignment for revolution that created the revolution and the Revolutionary War, and they needed freedom and everything that happened made the U.S. what it was in 1776. Yeah, was astrologically aligned. Yeah, then you can go back, and then there was one for the French Revolution, and then you can go back, and there was so. But now this year, there's another. Version of that, or this this era, yeah, is another version of that, like another kind of revolution, yeah. That's how, and we can see stuffs happening around, yeah. What's your take on that?

Ricky Williams 1:30:11
So I I have a decent idea what Deborah is referring to, and this is this is I come back to what I said about I think eventually people will have a basic understanding of the astrological symbols, so that they can make their own assessment. So, the planet Uranus I talked about earlier is the planet of revolution, and the reason we know that, or the reason from an astrological perspective, it was discovered in 1781. Okay. So, when a planet is discovered. The synchronicity is that humanity is ready to make start to make conscious something that's in our unconscious, and so 1781, right before, right at the very end of the American Revolution, right before the French Revolution, right, and this idea of we don't need no stinking kings, we can govern ourselves. That's a Uranus expression, and Uranus is always moving. Uranus is always doing things. So if we look closely, it's not it's time for a revolution. It's more of what time, what's being revolutionized right now, and there will be certain times, like in the mid '90s, when Uranus came together with the planet Neptune, yes, and we got and it brought the internet,

Alex Ferrari 1:31:27
Huge.

Ricky Williams 1:31:27
Yes, that that so certain things as Uranus goes around and touches something, whatever Uranus touches needs to be from an evolutionary perspective needs to be revolutionized. There's going to be certain times where Uranus is doing a lot of things, and then that's when you're going to see larger revolutions. But these things, the clock is always moving; it's always going. Sometimes, in general, it's going to be louder and have more of an impact. But if we look on our own individual levels, you know, there might not be a revolution going on. But if you have Uranus on top of your Venus, something about your relationships need to be revolutionized.

Alex Ferrari 1:32:06
So, we just recently had an eclipse. What are the significances of eclipses in astrology?

Ricky Williams 1:32:13
If you ask a bunch of astrologers, you're going to get different answers, and my answer is going to be different than theirs. So, to me, the astrologic of something, first of all, is the significance is based on how often does it occur, right? If it occurs every day, it's not really that significant. If it occurs once every 2000 years, it's probably going to be significant. Okay, so eclipses based on that, eclipses occur two about two two or three times two or three times a year,

Alex Ferrari 1:32:44
But certain eclipses at certain places yes doesn't all the time

Ricky Williams 1:32:48
Exactly 100% there you go so so my understanding of eclipses is I don't I don't put a lot of weight into them because there are so many other things going on that are much more significant on a personal level, where eclipses seem to have the most effect is on a collective level. So I use eclipses in mundane astrology, and like you said, I use them from the area that could actually see the eclipse, because if we go back in the history of eclipses, and the reason they have they capture our imagination because it's something that we can see, but also in early astrology, the way an astrologer proved he was a good astrologer is he could predict an eclipse.

Alex Ferrari 1:33:30
Sure,

Ricky Williams 1:33:30
Right, and that to me that's more of the math of it of just knowing where the nodes are exactly where the nodes are, and when the when there's a lunation within nine degrees of the nodes, we get an eclipse, so I I think people way overblow the significance of eclipses when there's much more valuable information that they could be paying attention to. So for me, eclipses are something that distract us and capture our imagination first. Secondarily, they can give us information about world events.

Alex Ferrari 1:33:59
So it was it's fascinating because in my studies I found that like the Mayan culture was so mathematical and so astrological. I mean, they studied the stars in a way that we a lot of it got lost because of the Spanish burning all the stuff that they did from the Mayan literature, if you will. But from my understanding, is like the priests who got this information about astrology, astronomy, all that stuff? They could predict when a thing was coming,

Ricky Williams 1:34:27
And they typically used it to control the people.

Alex Ferrari 1:34:29
That's what I was about to say. They're like, if you do not pay homage to me, three days from now, I will block out the sun. Yes, and of course, everyone sees that. They're like, oh my god, there must be a hide.

Ricky Williams 1:34:39
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 1:34:40
So it was a way of controlling people.

Ricky Williams 1:34:42
That's why I feel like that's the hangover. Because when I see people talking about eclipses, rarely have I heard someone use it in a way that makes practical sense. It's just, and that's the that's the the travesty for me with astrology is is people that don't take it seriously they can make it safe. Anything. That's why I think it's important to have a rooted logic. Yeah, you know, because like I can have debates with people because we're speaking the same language about the basic principles of how these symbols tend to express in real life.

Alex Ferrari 1:35:18
So, oh, so another area of astrology that I'm interested in is you know I was young enough and so were you I think you were young you're young a bit younger than me when Halley's came by Halley's comet comes out every every 75 years that's a significant thing in you know if you can see it twice in a lifetime that's you know it's pretty amazing but do they have any any like someone like something like Halley's comet, which is essentially a mini planet that is doing a rotation every 75 years. Does that have any significance?

Ricky Williams 1:35:48
It does. So we we have to say as astrologers that everything going on in the sky has significance. Our ability to measure that significance that takes time. So, for at least from my perspective, I can't deny that it has a significance. But you'd have to study it in multiple people's charts to see what effect is it having on the life,

Alex Ferrari 1:36:14
Or the last time it ran through.

Ricky Williams 1:36:15
That's why you would need 70. You need 75 every because you wouldn't know unless you lived long enough and had records passed on to take notes of what actually occurred,

Alex Ferrari 1:36:24
So we don't know if if when next time Haley comes by,

Ricky Williams 1:36:27
We can track it, but we'd have to say okay because if if anything is in the sky, we can locate it. What sign is it in? What house is it in? So if we know that you know that Haley's went over Halley's comet conjunct was went over your son, and if it moves at 75 years around, it means it probably was over the sun for two months, and then we'll say what significant happened in your life in this area of life of where the house that your son is in when Halley's comet went over it, and we have to take copious notes of every time Halley's comet touched a planet, what showed up in the life to be able to, with confidence, say this is the this is the general influence of this object.

Alex Ferrari 1:37:11
So I've asked this question of other astrologers. I want to hear your perspective on it. So everything we're talking about is within our solar system, essentially. Yeah. There are other aspects of like farther away, like Orion's bell, like those kind of things, they do play a part in this, right? Yeah. Okay. So let's say I'm going to just play devil's advocate that you and I are now in Sirius Seven. I don't know, in another galaxy somewhere, and there's another set of planets, and there's another sun, and there's a whole other thing. How does it work from an astrological standpoint in another part of the universe? Is it the same or not?

Ricky Williams 1:37:48
So another part of the universe, we'd have to do what I just said. We'd have to start from the very beginning because it is a science, and science is based. So would work, but observable data. You know, 100 will work. I even say, right? What you point out we're in the solar system. When we leave this world and we go to the next place, it's not the same solar system, but there is an astrology that works on that level too. So the idea of astrology, I believe, is universal, meaning that there are signs and symbols that are indicating information about what's going on, and we can see, like you said, the Mayans. But all early people that navigated life or the seas recognized that they could navigate based on the stars. It's a general insight, and it's just when we use astrology, it's just an extension of that. Is that there's that the universe left us some map or some guide to be able to figure this out,

Alex Ferrari 1:38:41
And how the hell did the the ancients figure this out is the question. Like they didn't have our technology, they didn't have any. Like how did they figure out this science essentially?

Ricky Williams 1:38:52
Well, the first thing the first thing is that they were motivated to

Alex Ferrari 1:38:55
They had yeah yeah they had no Netflix

Ricky Williams 1:38:57
Yeah but but it's that but also the motivation of they had an instinct that there was information there. Again, the first kings, the first astrologers hired by the kings, they already knew, right, that in order for things to go well, they had to be blessed by the gods, and we see that through all religions. Yes, you know, and it's time, right? It's we make astrology fancy, but astrology uses the science of appreciating the quality of time. You know, simple thing that blows a lot of people's minds is, right? Timing is everything. Nothing can happen until it's the time for it to happen. By definition, nothing can happen until it's the right time for it to happen. That's what astrology is based off of. Even to the point you can't be born until everything is right for the to your parents. You need, but not even from a universal perspective, because the birth chart is the moment of your incarnation. So you can't actually come into incarnation until the atmosphere is right for your path.

Alex Ferrari 1:39:59
So if you. Feel like you were born in the wrong time, which I know many people do.

Ricky Williams 1:40:03
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:40:03
And and you're feeling that this is not this is not the right time for me. I was born to the wrong family. All this stuff. You're saying that

Ricky Williams 1:40:13
It's a misunderstanding.

Alex Ferrari 1:40:14
It's a misunderstanding because you wouldn't have come into incarnation.

Ricky Williams 1:40:17
You can't. You literally nothing can happen unless it's time for it to happen, by definition. So if something comes, this is why our birth, but also when we look at what's going on right now, we can see that we can see the imprint in the chart. We can see we can start to we can gather the data to start to be able to answer the question: Why is this happening now, that's the question that evolutionary astrology asks. Why is this happening in this moment? Why is this happening in this lifetime? Why are these things showing up for me right now?

Alex Ferrari 1:40:50
Yeah, because you couldn't have been born as an NFL player unless there was an NFL.

Ricky Williams 1:40:55
100% 100%

Alex Ferrari 1:40:56
And the time you came in, the specific year that you were born that aligned the time and the place, which arguably I think it was a mistake. I would have liked you in the 80s, but that's just me.

Ricky Williams 1:41:07
See, right? If that if it was the right time, I would have been.

Alex Ferrari 1:41:10
We would have had a few more Super Bowls spread out. John Offerdahl's shirt, exactly. No, we could. We we should have had Taylor with us, Don and and Zach as well. That would have been nice. That defense. Okay, I want to go down that road.

Ricky Williams 1:41:22
Well, maybe what, maybe one day in the future when we really understand astrology on a deeper level, yeah, you know that we can, and I think this is interesting. We can, in a general sense, because we can't predict the exact day, but in the way of creating children, we can create children at the right time.

Alex Ferrari 1:41:40
But we have no control of that, though.

Ricky Williams 1:41:42
Well, we we do have a control over. I mean, we can induce labor, but we do have control over. Is it a good time to try to create a child? So, for instance, like animals know when they're they can feel when a famine is coming, and they won't pre they won't procreate. So I think if we're if what I found what I found, like, because I've had a bunch of kids, and I found that my last child, I'm most mature, the best relationship I've had in my entire life, and the nature of the child, he fits us, and we can't separate the connection between mom and dad and the quality of what is produced, and I see it over and over again. Sometimes you see two parents come together, and the kids' chart is there's so much discord between just naturally between the child and both parents that it's going to be hard no matter how they do. They can do it well, but it's not going to be easy. The the thing with my chart and my wife's chart and my kids' chart, we still have to parent him, but us being our natural selves, he has a place to receive that. And sometimes us being our natural selves doesn't fit well with the kid, and we have to navigate that.

Alex Ferrari 1:42:50
If you had a chance, man, to go back and talk to that that 20 year old, 21 year old that won the Heisman,

Ricky Williams 1:42:56
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:42:56
What what would you tell him, man?

Ricky Williams 1:43:00
Well, I would like I I would go back to when I first entered college, and I would say study religion.

Alex Ferrari 1:43:06
Oh, then

Ricky Williams 1:43:07
Yeah, and I would even say if I was talking to to most football players, I would tell them to study religion

Alex Ferrari 1:43:14
And spirituality and religion. You mean

Ricky Williams 1:43:15
In school. I mean, in school seriously, because to me the

Alex Ferrari 1:43:19
All religions

Ricky Williams 1:43:20
Yes, 100% all religions. Because to me, in in a in a in college, especially if you're going to be an athlete, a lot of the stuff that we learned in school, especially if you're going to be a professional athlete, accounting all that stuff is important. But I think if someone understood how to look at the world, to me that would have been so much more valuable to me, and because I know my path now, so if I went back knowing my path, I just would have dropped clues to say, "Hey, you know, this is what you're going to face later, so you can do things to prepare yourself for those things later. There's always time to catch up later, but if we're going back, I'm always thinking about efficiency.

Alex Ferrari 1:43:58
And is there anything that you've been seeing in your your studies in regards to where we're heading, and as as as as a consciousness.

Ricky Williams 1:44:08
Yeah, so I'm I'm very much handle your own stuff, being the best thing you can do. Because again, if we're all cells in the body of humanity and we're all thinking about everyone else, and we're not handling us. That's a problem. So for me, I think the more because so much of the world that's things are going out inside the world, I believe is just our stuff projected outwards. And if we were dealing with our stuff, we would there'd be less stuff we were projecting outwards. Or if we were dealing with our stuff, what we we'd be projecting outwards is the elixir and what we found from dealing with our stuff.

Alex Ferrari 1:44:45
So we need to cleanse our blood cells. We need we are the blood cells.

Ricky Williams 1:44:48
We need to. When I when I first went to the yoga ashram, the word that I saw the words that I saw everywhere, and I didn't know what they meant, was purify, purify, purify, purify, purify, purify, purify. Everywhere, purify, and I finally asked my teacher, "What does that mean? And basically said, "Just working on your stuff, you know, because we all we've all grown up in this world, so we've all taken on the stuff of this world that's not really us. And for each of us to take personal responsibility and to say, 'What's really me? Because if we listen, we can hear, and what's not. And I think if we start to do that work, we're cleaning up the environment.

Alex Ferrari 1:45:24
Ricky, is there a danger? And I've seen this happen, and it happened to me when I was coming up. The danger of giving too much power to not only like astrology, but to a psychic reading, or to anything that's that shows you who you are or who you can be, giving the power away. How would you prevent? Because I, if you're coming into an astrology reading out of fear, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? You can be like, "Oh, that worked. I want to give it more power and more power. You know what I'm saying? It's a slippery slope.

Ricky Williams 1:45:56
Yeah, that's again. That's why I go back to people being their own astrologers, because to me, astrology isn't gonna isn't supposed to tell you what's going to happen. It's supposed to tell you about yourself, because preach because what happens it comes from us, and if we're always looking, so I think it's not about giving too much power to astrology. It's giving too much power to things outside of us, and that whether it's an astrologer or psychic reading, if it doesn't empower you to know what you know and trust yourself, it's no good in my perspective. You know, because I had a coach, and he would say, "Know and know you know, know and know you know. And I think about that how I use astrology in my everyday life because I know who I am. I know how to respond in situations

Alex Ferrari 1:46:48
Because you have a clear idea of of who you truly are.

Ricky Williams 1:46:50
Who I am, what what I've been, what how I've been shaped, who I was at birth, how it's been shaped by experiences, which gives me a sense of the trajectory. So it's like in football, we spend all this time preparing for a play that might happen once or twice in a game. Yeah. But if it happens, it can change the trajectory of the game. So when all of that, the moment happens, and our training is to be ready for that moment. And I think of life the same way. We go through life, and then there's moments where things get intense, and how we handle this intense moment determines what happens next. And if we're ready for those moments because we know who we are and we understand why those moments are happening and what's what's at stake, oh, we're in the best place to make a play.

Alex Ferrari 1:47:34
Well, that's that's what I say. That's analogy of football, a football game.

Ricky Williams 1:47:37
Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:47:37
You know, there's so many different variables that happen, and it's it tests. Now we've seen teams that got tested and they didn't rise to the occasion.

Ricky Williams 1:47:45
Yes.

Alex Ferrari 1:47:46
And then there's teams that you you watch and you're like, oh man, they were down by four touchdowns in the Super Bowl and they come back and all that stuff. It's because they were able to overcome that. Yeah. But that's our analogy for life. Yeah.

Ricky Williams 1:47:59
And but life doesn't have, that people don't know about at least that we have in football, is the tape review. So the teams that blow it right the next day, they're all sitting in a big meeting room watching the film, and the coach says, "You and you see you didn't do your job right in the moment. The person didn't realize that their job was to have outside containment. You know, they dipped inside. They weren't doing. They didn't know who they were doing their job. The play goes around and scores a touchdown. You're going to see it every single time. Is that all of football is trying to get us clear in the scheme of things? Each of us has a role, and if you do your role in the great grand scheme of things, it's gonna win. We're gonna win, 100% And I, because that's my training, and I've lived life that way. I believe it. I truly believe

Alex Ferrari 1:48:49
Everyone has their place, and they have to play their role. Yes, and it's the the moment that Jason Taylor tries to run the ball. There's a problem. There's a problem because right,

Ricky Williams 1:48:59
His role is not going to be played 100% and this is why we call we called our app Leela. Leela is a word I found in India when I was studying yoga, and it means the divine play. And most people aren't most people aren't viewing their lives as a divine play. But whether you realize it or not, a play

Alex Ferrari 1:49:17
Play as in like a a play where you watch a show or play as in like you're playing a game or play as like have fun.

Ricky Williams 1:49:23
Both it's all it checks all of those boxes. Meaning, right? If we're because players, right? That's actors. If we're watching people play a part in a movie, we get we get pulled into it, and we're experiencing it with them. And even on the show, bad things happen. We we know it's a play that there's something playing out in front of us, and we stay and watch it. We don't start, but in our lives, when that happens, we start freaking out. We don't have that ability to appreciate everything that's going on in our lives is part of a divine play, and the only difference is really that shift of seeing it that way. And that's why I love astrology because astrology it it reaffirms that shift and it allows you to see your life as a divine play.

Alex Ferrari 1:50:08
And it's interesting looking at this. I mean, of course, it makes sense to thinking thinking about as you were talking, is that you know actors in a movie are players, players on a play are called players or actors. Yes, but then there's the actors or the players in a football game or any sporting event. Yes, where they're now becoming they are the actors in the play that we're watching. Because when you watch a great NFL game or a great, we just watched the World Cup, like a great soccer game. They these characters and they are characters, you know. That there's some characters are in the background. You never know, but they do their job.

Ricky Williams 1:50:45
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 1:50:46
Offensive line. Yes, rarely do you hear that offensive line guy does it. No, they just do their job. Yeah, but then there are guys like yourself that everyone says, "Oh, there's Ricky, there's Ricky doing that thing, or there's Tom Brady doing that thing, there's Marina doing that thing. But we're we're watching the game and the drama of the game, and you're a player in that. But the way you react to the to the obstacles that get thrown at you is what we're watching. We're interested in how you deal with it.

Ricky Williams 1:51:12
Yes. Right. Yes. And that's the way I view life. And I and I'm encouraging people to view their lives the same way because there are sometimes where your life is, you're kind of in the background, the line, and you have to do your job. You're not going to get appreciated for it.

Alex Ferrari 1:51:26
But they will know when you don't.

Ricky Williams 1:51:27
But they will,and there's going to be times where it's your time to get to get the ball. And if you're ready for it, right? If you're ready for those things, the same way when I was ready for them, they got me the Heisman Trophy and winning the NFL rushing title. I go back to the image of Jesus. If you're ready for those experiences in life, you win the Heisman of life. Right, that wherever we go next, we're we're better prepared to be able to meet what's coming up for us.

Alex Ferrari 1:51:54
Oh, dude, that's so beautiful, man. Bro, where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing, Ricky?

Ricky Williams 1:51:59
So I have a website, rickywilliams.ife, and most of what most of the work that I'm doing now is taking the elixir and trying to make it available to as many people who want it as possible. And so I build apps. I mean, I've spent pretty much all my time writing writing code, teaching really, yeah, teaching AI, teaching AI how to do evolutionary astrology.

Alex Ferrari 1:52:22
Interesting. Yeah. What's your What do you think AI is going to be doing with astrology? Because it is

Ricky Williams 1:52:27
Whatever the astrologers teach it to.

Alex Ferrari 1:52:30
Okay.

Ricky Williams 1:52:30
Or not. And so AI knows kind of the basics, but it doesn't know what to do with it because there's so many philosophies about how to do astrology, even if it read all the books, it's going to be confused. So I'm specifically teaching it evolutionary astrology, and the the main thing that that I'm having fun and it's a challenge is people are at all different levels in their astrology. So the first thing the AI has to be able to do is recognize what the person is actually asking, and then see what astrological data do I need to be able to give a response. And then there's and then there's working on making sure the response captures the nuance of evolutionary astrology. So it's mixing all the things we've learned in our studies of spirituality with all the things it's learned about astrology, with all of the things that I've learned about how it actually shows up in real people's lives,

Alex Ferrari 1:53:29
Ricky, it has been mind blowing talking to you, brother, on multiple levels. It's it's been beautiful talking to you. I'm, you know, and I say this with all the love in the world, man. I'm proud of of what you've done, man, and how you've done it, and and and how the the path that you've walked, man, because it's not been an easy path. Yeah. So I appreciate you and everything you're doing to help awaken the planet, brother. So thank you.

Ricky Williams 1:53:51
Yeah. Well, and I appreciate you. Like you said, troublemakers that are doing right. That it does take troublemakers doing good work.

Alex Ferrari 1:53:59
Yeah.

Ricky Williams 1:53:59
But it also takes time to see the rewards, so I just want to applaud you for your perseverance and sticking with it, and you know, just the the light that you shine for so many people. You know, my wife is a huge fan, so it's is this is a cool moment for me to to be able to share this space.

Alex Ferrari 1:55:30
Appreciate you, bro.

Ricky Williams 1:55:40
Yeah,