- When I was going through everything
people thought I was crazy
and I don't think they thought I was crazy
because I was consuming cannabis,
they thought I was crazy
because I'd rather consume cannabis than play football.
But when I did the math
cannabis did a lot more for me
than football did.
[upbeat music]
Hey, I'm Ricky Williams
and these are my, "10 Essentials".
[upbeat music]
So this is my favorite
ginger beer but I'm a huge ginger beer fan,
and I found ginger on my first trip to Thailand.
A woman asked if I wanted some ginger tea,
and I said, "Sure".
I remember drinking it and feeling that burn
in the back of my mouth and thinking,
"Ah, this is awesome".
And after I started studying more about herbs
I found out that ginger is great for the tummy.
It's good for digestion, and it's a diaphoretic,
which means it makes you sweat.
If you're checking out ginger beer for the first time
be careful because you might wake up in a pile of sweat.
[ginger beer hissing]
And I like Bundaberg
just 'cause it's the coolest
packaging, it's the coolest bottle.
You kind of feel like you're really drinking beer.
[upbeat music]
I mentioned earlier that I
studied herbalism and this is one of my favorite formulas.
Also has a little bit of ginger in it.
It's called Bao He Wan.
It's a Chinese formula.
The translation in English is, "Preserve the harmony" pill
and it's preserving the harmony of the stomach.
In western medicine,
we don't really think of food stagnation,
but it's that feeling when you eat too much
and you feel the food is stuck
and this actually supports your body's
natural digestive processes, so love this stuff.
To me, the main point about herbalism is
it's really about working with the body
and treating the body before you get sick.
You know, the Chinese say,
if you give someone medicine after they've gotten sick,
it's like forging weapons when the battle's already begun,
you're a little bit late.
[upbeat music]
Rolling papers.
Now there's a bunch of different types of rolling papers,
these are Highsman papers,
so I'm especially partial to them.
I talked about herbs earlier,
you can dry any herb really,
that's healthy for you,
and crumble it up and put it in this paper
and roll it up and then you have something to combust.
And so my first involvement with cannabis came
growing up in San Diego,
it was pretty much everywhere.
I also grew up in the eighties and nineties
and so I learned to say no to drugs.
[sharp chuckling]
And then I got into college,
I had a couple of really bad games,
and just was going through a lot of personal stuff
and my roommate suggested that I
hit his bong a couple times.
You know, when you're really desperate
you're willing to try anything
and so I said, "Sure".
Surprisingly,
I experienced really positive effects.
The first thing that I noticed
was I wasn't obsessing about my bad games
or my personal problems
and in that clear mind space,
I started to think about the upcoming games.
Next two games, after that experience,
I had back to back 300 yard rushing games,
ended up winning the Heisman Trophy
and breaking the all time rushing record.
The power of that experience,
it overrode all of the conditioning about
saying no to cannabis
and it showed me that I was lied to
and there was something else going on
than what we were taught.
There were more parts to me
than just being a football player
and so I took advantage of the opportunity
and I retired from the NFL
and got a chance to travel the world
and study herbalism.
And so starting this brand
was really motivated by the fact that
when I was going through everything with cannabis,
there was no one,
I couldn't find anyone telling uplifting
or positive stories about cannabis
and I wanted to make sure that
the next generation, there is at least one person.
Another thing is, everyone needs papers,
especially if they smoke joints.
Part of my training
and what's called as a Ganjier,
connoisseur of cannabis,
in general is how to appreciate quality.
The first stage to appreciate in quality
is you have to know what to look for.
And so this is a jewelry loop.
Keep my loop wherever I go,
when I look at flower,
I look to see how well was this flower grown
and how well was this flower taken care of?
[upbeat music]
Handy dandy iPhone,
the essential here
is my app.
It's an app called LILA.
LILA is a Sanskrit word that means, "Divine play".
One of my other jobs is I'm a professional astrologer
and as I've learned more and more about astrology,
it's like the planets are playing all the time.
I think the main aim for astrology for me
is to help people feel seen.
Typically people only see the parts of ourselves
we're comfortable showing them,
but astrology helps us look underneath the hood
and see what's really there.
And I think when we appreciate the inner parts of ourselves,
we usually feel better about sharing them with other people,
consciously, because typically the parts we don't like
we share them unconsciously
and people close to us have to deal with them.
And so I created LILA to help people deal with themselves
and deal with the people they love.
[upbeat music]
I love
technology.
A lot of people think they have too much screen time,
my screen time is really all about books.
I love to read and my Kindle app,
I think I have 3000 books or something,
it's pretty insane.
It's just books,
books,
books.
And no, I haven't read all the books,
I've opened all the books.
I use them more as reference material.
There's really only probably three genres
and they're all kind of under one,
I'd say the overarching genre is self-help,
but inside that there's like
spirituality, yoga, meditation.
Probably the most books are on astrology,
yeah, a lot of esoteric woo woo kind of stuff.
[upbeat music]
I spend a lot of time on my laptop,
two reasons, one is I do a lot of Zoom calls
because I am a professional astrologer and I do about
50 to 60 readings each month.
And I love it,
I actually prefer Zoom because
I can take the cursor and I can show people
what the chart actually looks like
and I can show them what I'm talking about.
And then the other thing I do on my computer
is because when I first launched LILA
I knew nothing about apps,
I just knew it was something that I wanted to create.
And so as we started working with the dev team,
who knew nothing about astrology,
there's a big language barrier,
and I figured it's going to be much harder
for them to learn astrology
than it is for me to learn a little bit of coding.
And if you learn the basics,
you can actually start to create your own app.
I'll do
like future work and try to play with different things
so that I can hand them over to the dev team and say,
this is what I've been working on,
can you guys clean up the code and make it work?
But also
to help me learn things in the books that I'm reading,
I'll just create little apps for myself.
Like I'm learning tarot
and I created a tarot app to help me
learn the meanings of the cards.
I created a meditation app.
I created an app to help my son
keep track of his football cards.
My whole life, I've always wanted to be a creative
but I never really had any artistic ability.
I'm a creator now and almost like an inventor.
And it's cool when I'm on the airplane coding
and people look at me and they see a big football player
and they're like, "What are you...
Are you coding?".
"Yep, I sure am."
[upbeat music]
I've had these for a while, my Gucci Slides
and they're just classic.
My style of dress is
shabby chic.
I like to dress simply,
and you can do them with socks or without socks.
You can wear them with jeans,
you can wear them with sweats,
you can even wear them with nice pants.
And even though they're old and they're creased,
they still got
the Gucci tag on the back
and so people leave me alone.
And they're comfortable.
And people assume they're vans
and they look, "Ah".
I love these.
And I typically replace them about every five years,
I think I have another year or two on these.
[upbeat music]
Doesn't get too cold in Southern California
but we launched in Massachusetts last year
and so I've been making trips over there and so
beanie comes in handy.
I grew up being a big fan of Nike,
I was a big Bo Jackson fan
and, "Bo Knows", those, "Bo Knows", commercials,
I love them.
'Cause they were for his cross trainer
and whenever I could
afford to get a pair of cross trainers
and I put them on my feet, I felt like I ran faster.
And we just came out with these beanies
a couple of months ago and I love them.
You can keep the top on if you like,
but for me, I tend to
rip it off, 'cause when you rip it off
you can wear it like a regular beanie.
Or sometimes I'll put all my hair up in it
in the back, well,
kind of tuck it in.
And this is why I take the top off you,
then it becomes like a little Rasta hat.
[upbeat music]
I like to keep it simple with the peril.
So as you see, I'm wearing the long sleeve T right now.
It's got the Highsman logo.
I think it's comfortable,
cotton,
high quality.
And got the reminder on the back
to spark greatness,
you know?
And as a football player,
we spent our whole day thinking about how to get better,
how to get better, how to get better, how to be great.
When I went home and consumed cannabis,
it didn't just stop, I just got deeper.
I asked on a deeper level, how can I be great?
That was my experience with cannabis
and that's what I'm here to share with people.
[upbeat music]
[loud rolling]
All right. This is definitely an essential
for a couple of reasons.
One, because I travel a lot,
climate changes depending on where you are
and I have predilection for dry lips.
When I was a kid, they used to make fun of me
and call me, "Ring around the lips",
'cause I would lick my lips
and so my mom would always yell at me,
"Where's your Chapstick boy?",
and so I think it finally stuck.
Thanks for watching.
I'm Ricky Williams.
Peace out.
[upbeat music]