I guess this game has been a tradition going on for over 35 years. I came into that environment and that group of men in 1999/2000. So for the first 5 years we didn’t really talk about what we did personally. Then debates started to break out on the court and of course I’m outspoken and articulate so I went after the white men that were on the court historically. Marcus, Greg, and Niles said “you know this guy has something. We don’t know what it is, but he has something.” Greg Shelton asked me to be on the television show called “Black Men Revealed.” I did episode 4 of the first season entitled “Why he won’t go to church.” They had me on with a Reverend, a young brother named Trey, and a Catholic brother.

About the Voice of Reason show

1. What inspired you to pursue relationship counseling/services as a career path? It sounds like it kind of found you, but did you always have that inkling that you wanted to go that way?
   It kind of found me. And it’s not really counseling because I am not a clinician, it’s more like I’ve committed so many heinous relationship crimes; I always tell people. People always ask me: What makes you qualified, why are you giving out relationship advice. I say 1:  the speaker is not important. It is the info and 2: I think everybody could be a relationship guru if they kept better account of themselves when relationships go bad. So what I have done, I have allowed failure to be my professor. And I have chronicled the lessons that failures have taught me, and when I see it in human behavior, I’m able to say, ok I know what you are doing.  Come here and let me point you in the right direction. Look at these key things. Unfortunately, when I originally got the radio show, I wanted to do more than just relationships. For years I was an A&R person in the music industry. I was in AR at Loud Records, I was in AR at Maverick records with Madonna. So I wanted to talk about music, my culture (which is hip hop), and just being black in America. I wanted to talk about a lot of things: politics, culture, etc. But the people that gave me the show were like you have a special gift with regards to mediation, pulling people back, diplomacy, and I have been studying everything under the sun since I was 17. When I say everything under the sun, I mean everything from theoretical physics to “judu Krishnamurti” to religion. God has blessed me with the ability to retain a lot of that information and apply it to practical life situations. So when they gave me the radio show, they said “dude, focus on relationships so we can create a brand around you.” And that is how it happened.
2. Since it is kind of unique for a man to host a radio show focusing on relationships and other matters of the heart, how were you initially received by your audience?
   I didn’t know how they received me. I went on my MySpace page and a brother, [you see I act like I know these people, but I really don’t know them] contacted me named Michael Vaden out of VA. He goes Zo, you have a whole group on Facebook. You should join Facebook.” I am thinking wow, who are you? “All your shows are up there, dude. Check out your shows.” And I am thinking to myself, because before then, I wasn’t able to hear my own shows after they were over because I didn’t have Sirius satellite radio. I go to the Facebook page and all the shows are there. People are responding and commenting. There was a brother, I don’t know if he is a brother or not as he didn’t have a profile picture, but there is a guy that says “I have been getting inundated for the last three weeks [this is when my show was on a month] about Zo Williams how the voice of reason, people asking [because he bootlegs the shows] for Zo William’s show, Ok here is last week’s show, but I can’t keep giving you guys this for free. Someone is going to have to get a subscription.” I am thinking who is this guy?And it has burgeoned since then.
3. You just recently celebrated your 1 year anniversary on the air, how do you think your show has evolved since it first started?
   The show has evolved a lot. When I first started, I was flanked by two co-hosts. A beautiful woman named Robin Theedy and Jeff Brown, a great comedian. We were all three very dominant personalities. And after maybe 3 – 5 months, the “higher ups” (Jamie Foxx even) suggested “I think you should do the show by yourself because people want to hear what you have to say.” Not to say what they contributed wasn’t valuable or accurate in any way, but they said “YOU are the voice of reason.” So I started doing the show by myself.
   The show has also evolved in the sense that in the early shows, I had a final thought. The newer shows I do an introduction and a final thought. So now, every aspect of my show is set up and geared to bring the listener into the world. Before I just said the topic and started talking. Now there is an intro, where I explain the topic in great detail. My writing team and I, put together no less than 35 – 40 questions so we can throw those out into the atmosphere and people respond to those questions. Because maybe the question is a scenario that someone is going through. So the show has evolved a lot in that sense.
4. How do you keep your topics fresh? Do you just kind of hit your friends up and say you know what what’s been spinning in your brain right now or do you just drive down the road and think hmm or do you?
   Well relationship topics are finite anyway; it’s a finite amount of information to talk about. But what I stress with my team is we have to be creative in how we reintroduce the familiar. For instance next week’s show is called “Interfacial Dating” basically, is it true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Interfacial means dating somebody that’s considered very handsome and or pretty and that person has maybe, somebody that’s considered not so pretty, i.e., Janet Jackson and Jermaine Dupri. What do people think when you see somebody with a beautiful woman and he’s ugly? Automatically we think oh god he must have money (he’s rich) right so like interfacial dating we try to be creative with.  We have some like crazy cooties need love too (giggles) that was a show basically talking about how there is a burgeoning underground internet communal type movement of people with HPV, Herpes, and all types of different sexually transmitted diseases that they can’t get rid of, so they date each other; their like online MySpace, you know match.com type communities (okay) and when I tell you we diversify the angle we take we also diversify the audience. Like I said it’s a finite amount of information but it’s how you position it, it’s how you label it that will spark more interest (right) are you dating a fat person is he or she worth the weight. We had people call from all over the country, then there was another one “ Are You Someone’s Soul Mate Or Their Cell Mate” and we talked about how a thought process is  tantamount to being a prison  and if you have a rigid and inflexible thought process you  can easily become someone’s cell mate [cell mate yeah because then you know what to expect everyday] exactly [it's also good for lazy people too] hysterical (laughter).
5. What have been your relationship struggles and have those experiences helped you relate to your audience's problems?
   Well that is the new book. It is called Your Life as a Mirror. I have been a poor communicator. Termed as insensitive. Not from a mean standpoint, but more from an empathetic standpoint.  I think I have been a controller. Not in the sense that everything has to be my way. More so in the sense that I will not conform to you. So in not conforming, or resisting conforming to someone else’s plan, I invariably become a controlling. So I have learned and that is basically what the book is about. I am going to get real life experience. This is what happened in this relationship and I am going to tell the story of the relationship. The next chapter will be the jewel that I received from the relationship. So I have been a victim of disrespect, dishonor, and deceit. And I have been a villain in that same role. And that is why I was just having a meeting with my manager yesterday and they were asking me how would you define or describe yourself. I said Tupac meets Deepak. [Je: A peaceful man with a little bit of gangster?] Now on the radio show… I have to keep that edge because that is what our culture is. Our culture is on the edge. Hip hop is on the edge. Well it was anyway. In the beginning, hip hop was about descent and anger and what’s going on in the hood, and this is whack. The problem with the black man and woman in America is that even out of that descent all we have to do is make a little money and then we conform back to where . All we have to do is find a little comfort and then the truth about what we really desire manifests itself. My homeboy Kool Moe Dee (old school rapper) told me the gangster dude is just the invert of the corporate executive. The gangster dude desires the life of the corporate executive. Then we see Jay-Z blow up on all gangster rhymes and hood tales and then  turns into what he has always desired, corporate America. An executive, a businessman. So I think we should aspire for more. Personal freedom, not just financial freedom. Spiritual freedom, not just assimilation because that is what has happened to the black family in America, we assimilate. Now there is a difference between integration and assimilation. When you integrate into something you become a part of it , but you can also still extrapolate yourself, you can also still identify what exactly you are in it, you see. When you assimilate, you become in essence, what the thing is that you have assimilated into. In other words, you as a singular identify, lose yourself and that is what Black Americans do.  All we have to do is get a little money and next thing you know we are living in a different neighborhood, think a certain way, talk different, we are acting different. And it’s like no, that’s not the purpose of financial freedom. I always say Money is a lubricant. You look up the word affluency in Latin, the root word is flow. So it should flow like an artist’s hand on the canvas. What is your original painting? What is your original tapestry? We are living an American dream that has been programmed into us to reduplicate a dream that really wasn’t meant for us in the first place. That has proven itself to be a nightmare on some levels, unless we assimilate. 
6. So do you use your own experiences to determine the show topics or do you just freeform/throw them out at a team and then shape up a topic from there?
   We do a little of both. I used twitter and Facebook a lot. I go crazy. Yo, we need some topics, what do you guys want to talk about?And people just inundate me with stuff. And I pick and choose. Like the topic of “Are You Dating a Fat Person and Is He/She Worth the “Weight?” I got it from a guy out of Milwaukee; I think his name is Charles Hubbard. He was like Zo, this is a great one. I just cried laughing, like, we have to do it. But again, my overall mission on the radio show is to entertain, but the entertainment is the backdrop for the enlightenment. And that is what makes it Tupac meets Deepak.
7. Have you had to deal with any type of censorship with your show?
   Sirius/XM Satellite has no censors. We can go crazy. Now there is a pro and con to that.Because when you go crazy and there is no censorship, you scare off sponsorship. But if you reign it in a little bit, you become attractive to sponsors, right. But to answer your question, not too much. No holds barred.
8. What is the message that you are trying to promote through your radio show and why?
   Life is a relationship. Whether it is intimate or otherwise. And relationships require management. Management is another word for coping. And it’s like if we could be more objective, more self reflective, if we could be more accountable, our relationships in every walk of life whether it be work, family, children, or friends it would be better. A philosopher that I like, Robert Anton Wilson, well I don’t know if he is a philosopher, but he writes pretty heavy books. He said if humanity replaced the words “I know what I’m talking about/I know” with “maybe” we would wake up and find out the world is much saner. If we simply say that we don’t know. A lot of times our agenda takes first priority in any relationship we are in. Our personal agenda. And that is why I started to liken relationships to corporations. A corporation is a fictitious person that has all the rights of a real person. But it’s not real. And in corporations, every corporation is legally bound to protect the bottom line.  Well the bottom line in corporations is tantamount to the personal agenda in intimate relationships. So we engage each other like it’s a business deal. Marriage is a business deal. Everything is business, everything is commerce. It’s an external accumulation thing again. Real relationships are about the recognition of divinity in each other. We don’t even look for it. We might go to school for 12, 15, 18 years and we might be skilled like an insect. “I’m a doctor, I specialize in…. “ The insect world is about specialists “I’m a drone”.. .I’m a this, I’m a that. The education system does not teach us to be fully integrated and self aware human beings. So what happens is we wind up crashing into each other in relationships, which I call a “reflective environment”. It is a school, a classroom. And you get into this classroom and all of your flaws are heightened and reflected back at you. So whether you want to learn that lesson or not you learn it through relationships. So why not be more self objective, more self aware? Why not be more accountable. Why not use “I know” less and “maybe” more. That is the ultimate goal that I am trying to push to people.
9. To get people to be more flexible, thinking human beings?
   More flexible, more pliable, but also more objective. More open to receive. Not just more open to acquire.
10. For comfort, not simply for grief...
    You feel me? Come on man.
11. Communal comfort…
    Let’s do this! [Zo laughs]

Zo’s Influences

What are some of the positive influences that you keep in your life, have around you?

Psychologically, I love J Krishnamurti. A lot of people are not really familiar with him. He is a world renowned philosopher that was raised by the theosophical society to be Jesus or a reincarnation of a Christ type figure then when he became of age and he went through a maturation he renounced all of it; And told them to kick rocks and when he did that he became more powerful and even more of his followers from the theosophical society was crushed. I mean they started secret societies after this guy!

How did you get hip to J. Krishnamurti?

I’ve always been an avid reader and researcher of spirituality and I was studying a Hindu guru (an Indian) by the name of [Sai Baba] everybody buys his incense, but I was studying this guy and I found a book written by a catholic priest about [Sai Baba]. I think the book was called A Catholic Priest meets Sai Baba. The priest gets kicked out of the mother church. Catholicism, right. He’s kicked out of the Vatican I guess and because he positioned that maybe Sai Baba was the reincarnation, the return of something, they reacted like “are you kidding me? Get out of here.” He posed the question does the reincarnation of Jesus or god or whatever we think is suppose to come back does it have to be Caucasian, European, and Italian, catholic Christian does it have to, couldn’t it be a little man in India somewhere and he got booted for that and I was reading his book and his journey and he was talking about all these people and he spoke highly of J. Krishnamurti and when I studied J. Krishnamurti I find that so many people today are carbon copy of what he was the first at doing. Bruce Lee studied J. Krishnamurti and formed Jeet Kune Do off of his philosophy. Which Jeet Kune Do at its time was considered the most advanced form of martial arts in the world.

Studying Sai Baba lead me to discovering J. Krishnamurti and I saw that as a gift from the universe. That’s one of my favorites another one of my favorites is Malcolm X. I try to blend the two of those guys; they were both kind of fiery. I often think that if J. Krishnamurti’s words were coming out of Malcolm’s mouth black people would be in a totally different space (a different spiritual place - Christian) oh no he renounced all religion, all authority, and all belief systems. He did a famous speech. I think it was in the late 20’s. I think it was called Truth is a Pathless Land where he just disavowed all that stuff I mean those people gave him, I think it wasa castle in Holland. Him and his brother, he gave it all away and said no you won’t have any power over me I can’t tell you how spiritual or not you are I can’t envalue in you what no one can. I was really moved by that philosophy. That’s some of the positive influence I keep around. I believe that the people that are your friends are a reflection of your thought process. So you can tell the character and quality of a man or a woman by the company they keep. (indeed) I also like what the brother wrote in confession or conversations with god when he said you can tell how intelligent or unintelligent a society is based off of what entertains them. So you can tell the character and quality of a person by what entertains them, by their group of friends because it’s all reflective of the thought process.

Zo’s Health and Fitness Routine

1. What do you keep as part of your fitness routine?
   Basketball is my religion. I just turned 38, let’s see, not even a whole month ago the 23rd of May. And I just can’t see myself not playing so that’s pretty much what I do. I just hired a personal trainer so now we’re working out, muscle training, calisthenics, and cardio.
2. Other than your readings and teachings what other else do you do that are outlets for you just to keep yourself together and centered and focused?
   Kids will do that (laugh). My children do that. They keep me focused because I use a lot of my weaknesses as a motivational tool when teaching my oldest son. I tell him watch me as intently as you can. When I make a mistake capture that and say this is a blueprint for what not to do. That is a positive outlook to see my sons and my daughter and see them grow and maturate the breakout, you blossom the flower and their doing that and that’s a great source of peace and happiness. My oldest is 12, my daughter is 9 and my youngest is 7.
3. Can you do the cardio, because you do all cardio not a lot of agility?
   Well we do the cardio for sure we have to blend the cardio or it will bother my limberness.
4. Are you just running down the street or something crazy like running up the sand dunes in 5 seconds to the top?
   I love the sand dunes but I can’t do the sand dunes (laughter). What we do is we burn at least 500 calories before we start working out. So we do the treadmill or the stationary bike. We do these things in tandem and we work up a really good sweat. A nice lather before we start lifting weights.

The Rebirth of Seeds

1. Tell us about your book, "The Rebirth of Seeds."
   I finished it in 2005. Kool Moe Dee and I have been doing relationship roundtables around the country for years. He sits on one end and I sit on the other end and we would just tag team back and forth and just make very interesting conversation. So Moe once told me, “Zo, you should write a book. You have a lot of interesting things to say. The book will lead to financial independence.” And of course its America so guess what happens, If Zo writes a book on relationships, Zo is an expert on relationships because he wrote a book. Commerce precedes everything. It made money; it sold; so he must know what he is talking about. So Moe is like “write the book”. I am a right-brained kind of person. So I wrote a book that wasn’t even about that. It was about some internal stuff, feelings. So I started writing the book. The book was poetry. It was kind of cathartic because there was a poem called “Big Mama Speaks Without Words” and it reenacted the last three weeks of my great grandmother’s life. Where I was sitting in my bookstore in Alta Dena and I just heard her call me. You know I called her and she was like “I’m alright baby, I’m good.” I asked her “What’s going on?” She said “I just need you to come down here and put this blanket on me.” And when she said that, I knew something was wrong. That little fiery fire cracker needs me to put a blanket on her. Something was wrong. So I went there and checked on her and it was a bad situation, a very bad situation. She didn’t live another three weeks after that. The whole poem outlines this. So when I wrote the rebirth of seeds, a lot of stuff was being pushed out and worked out through the rebirth of seeds. A lot of my frustration and anger.
   There are 15 poems. Nine of those have commentaries and then there is another 100 -200 words in the glossary that have their actual definition, but they also have the definition of how I used them for the Rebirth of Seeds. On the cover is a picture of me when I was 3 and it is basically a metaphor for “I wish I knew then what I know now.”
2. How can readers get copies of the book?
   We are currently transitioning away from PayPal, so the book is not available right now, but it will be.My manager and a group of others are saying we should put it on Amazon because I have this major platform and if I spit it out and tell people where to go get it, they will. I get a lot of emails from people saying I can’t get the book.
3. Do you have any plans to write more books?
   I am writing the second book now. A lot of the new book will be personal experience in tandem with my final thoughts from the radio show.Sometimes I give pointers of what one should or should not do. It is going to be a very insightful, very personal book.

Bringing it All Home

• What impact have your struggles as a youth had on your life and how have you overcome those obstacles?
  Wow. I was just talking to a young man today and I told him “your prevailing thought process works in the same way that a black hole does. Nothing can escape the magnetic gravitational pull of a black hole, not even light. So I say your thought process works the same way. Whatever is, as Karl Jung would say, unresolved on an internal level manifests itself in your life as fate. [laughs] You see. So I told him, whatever the thinker thinks, the prover proves. So a lot of people who don’t resolve life challenges and life issues are creating this huge magnetic gravitational pull of more experiences that are in alignment with that thought process, right. So for me, I learned to be objective through my struggles. I told the brother, challenge is the conduit to growth. Now if you don’t allow challenge to raise you up, you don’t allow challenge to motivate you, what happens is challenge will mold you in the image of itself. So all of your experiences will be the same experiences because you  have never really resolved the ones that are there in your life for that moment. Like for, instance, I say it on the radio all the time. The word experience, it means to go through something. In one side and out the other, right. Most people get caught in the middle somewhere of the experience and in doing so, carry it to every new moment of their lives and contaminate. I have learned that when the challenge for the struggle comes, invite it in, sit it down, offer it something to drink and see what gift it has to offer you by engaging it. And from a vulnerable space. Don’t engage it from a protective space. Engage it open arms, “you are here for something, so give it to me.”
• So why do you think people get stuck in these experiences instead of pushing through it. Why do you think people take the easy way out?
  Fear and pain. Most people don’t understand that the pursuit of pleasure is the pursuit of pain because everything is polarized. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every north there is a south. For every right there is a wrong. And that goes back to my definition of perfection. Most people believe that no one is perfect. No everyone is perfect. Exactly as you are in that moment. Perfection, we have been taught is an imbalance type of thought process because its either all good (which indicates that if there is an all good, there must be an all bad). So the  way we were conditioned to look at perfection is extreme and unrealistic. So in saying that, for me, I have been able to just say to myself: balance, moderation, and the middle path is the best way to proceed in life. Most people are so afraid (fear) and so in search of/addicted to pleasure, that they don’t understand that they are creating the negative experiences in their life. They are in pursuit of an imbalanced ideology. I always tell people this: most people who dream to have a house, they don’t dream to have termites, they don’t dream to have a broken pipe, a  mortgage that is about to be foreclosed. They don’t dream bout foreclosure. So the dream is imbalanced. And I try to tell people, life is about ambiguity. It’s yes and it’s no… every single second.  So the reason why people get stuck in experience is because “I’m afraid to proceed because that’s the unknown.” Predictability, tradition, culture. All of these are mechanism of what? TRUST, COMFORT. Comfort and trust go hand in hand.
• But if you keep a certain level of ambiguity about you, doesn’t that make you sleep walk and make you indifferent towards everything to where you don’t really feel any passion or zeal towards anything?
  No, because it is about attentiveness to the moment. Attention is meditation. Most people sleepwalk through their lives with a plan, with a template. And then they wake up one day and go “nothing in this template or plan really fulfilled me”. You know why? You know that euphemism, “You want to make God laugh, show him your plans for your life?” Again, sometimes life calls you to be the best that you have never been in the moment. And guess what? A lot of times there are no tools to deal with a situation in that moment. Sometimes the moment IS the tool. It forms you. But you can’t let it form you if you already have a form and a structure that is rigid, it’s not flexible. And you say “it is supposed to be like this.” You see. So that is why I say fear and pain prevent a lot of people from getting to where they need to be. I don’t want to deal with anything that is uncomfortable. I also tell people this: just because it feels good to you, doesn’t mean it is good for you.  And just because it doesn’t feel good to you, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t good for you.  Most people don’t have the ability of objective spiritual internal discernment.  We are an external society that is predicated on accumulation. Once we have accumulated the things that mean something to people, now we are validated through that accumulation. But there is no measure for an internal flowering, an internal maturation.
• What are your long term goals?
  International billionaire philanthropist. Free world citizen. Eternal life student. You know. On top of the greatest radio show ever. That is what I want. I am going to fulfill my authoring. I am writing my second book. And TV personality. So what we are doing now is trying to transition the radio show to TV.
• Do you have any last words for our readers?
  Stay in touch with me. Stay focused. I’m pushing the envelope and I like dialogue. I like people to reach out, connect. Let’s talk, let’s get into it. I like the conversation. I can be reached at:
• Twitter: ZoWilliams
• Facebook: Zo Williams (Los Angeles)
• MySpace: VoiceofReason106
• Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it