The Telepathy Tapes - S2E47: Chani Nicholas: Astrology Beyond the Horoscope | Talk Tracks

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Astrology is often reduced to sun signs and daily horoscopes, but its history and practice go far deeper.In this episode, Ky sits down with New York Times bestselling author and astrologer Chani Nicholas for a wide-ranging exploration of what astrology actually is, where it comes from, and how it has been used across centuries. Chani breaks down the basics of a birth chart, rising signs, houses, planets, and timing techniques, while tracing astrology back to ancient systems of observing patterns between the sky and life on Earth.Together they explore fate versus free will, astrology as a tool for self-understanding and purpose, and the idea that the movements of the cosmos may reflect patterns unfolding within a larger, interconnected reality. Chani explains the major astrological shifts happening now and what previous cycles might suggest about the moment we’re living through.Whether you’re deeply versed in astrology or have never looked beyond your sun sign, this conversation offers a fascinating introduction to the history, philosophy, and practice behind one of humanity’s oldest systems for making meaning of the sky._______Explore Chani's book, You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance. And enjoy a 30-day all access pass to the Chani app with code TELEPATHYTAPES30 _______Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com._______Thank you to our sponsors!Alloy - Try the original estrogen-powered M4 skincare from Alloy. Visit myalloy.com and use code TAPES for $20 off your first order! BiOptimizers - Make this the year you finally get your sleep, your energy, and yourself back. Get 15% off at bioptimizers.com/tapes when you use my code, TAPES.Honeylove Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Save 20% off Honeylove at honeylove.com/TAPES.Ka'Chava - Go to kachava.com and use code TAPES for 15% off your first order.Luminara - If you’re curious about energy healing and ready to experience it for yourself, Luminara is offering 20% off your first session for listeners of The Telepathy Tapes. Just go to luminara.care and use code TAPES20.Quince - Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to Quince.com/tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens, and welcome to the Talk Tracks, brought to you weekly by TTT Media. In this series, we explore the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, consciousness, and even unexplained phenomena. Because every era has ideas once dismissed as impossible until someone was willing to investigate them seriously. And on this show, we do just that. If you want to see our incredible guests in person, we have a video version of this episode on the Telepathy Day YouTube page. Today we're talking to Chani Nicholas, the New York Times bestselling author of You Are Born for this, astrology for radical self-acceptance. She's also the world-renowned astrologer behind the Chani app. And she also served as the resident astrologer for Oprah Daly. It's going to be a

fascinating conversation around something I know very little about, which is astrology, its roots, and how it can best serve and inform us today. So Chani, welcome to the talk tracks. It's great to have you here. Introduce yourself who you are, what you do. My name is Cheney Nicholas. I am a professional astrologer. I have a tech company. We have an app called the Chani app, regretfully named my own name. And it is an astrology app that provides people with weekly readings and there's meditations and there's a whole explanation about your chart. And my main goal with it all with our business and with everything we do is to help people access. the potential of their creative power. And I think that we give people the blueprint of their potential and the palm of their hands. And I want you to take that and go be of service in the world.

I love that. Because I think that when we know what our gifts are, it's like a little bit of a shortcut to being of service. Because we need to be embedded in our purpose because that embeds us in our joy and in our development and in an appropriate struggle, like the struggle that is meant for us. And when we're engaged in that, I think we feel alive. And I believe that that is always connected to being of service.

So I want to give you insight into your being, but I don't want you to stop at navel-gazing. I hope that that swiftly moves you into taking part in creating the world. that we desperately need to create together. Love that. Yeah. And so a lot of our listeners are like really scientific and come to this kind of everything skeptically. And some people are like bought in super woo-woo.

We have in a, and I say that all both sides with love. Yeah. Yeah. And I love trying to meet them both. Yeah. So I think for the most basic, like from the most basic point of view, can you just define the different, what is astrology and how is it different from astronomy? Well, they used to be the same thing, right?

Like historically, when you look at the longest running scientific document, it was, it's a series of kineoform tablets that are documenting the movement of the planets. And that was someone watching the sky and watching the planets and also taking note if anything happened on Earth when that thing in the sky happened. And so in the beginning, astronomy was astrology. they were not separate. I'm fine that they're separate now. They're also not separate to me. So I have no qualms with people not, quote, unquote, believing in astrology. I don't think we should all believe the same thing.

I think that is a cult. That's right. Less cults in the world, especially in this country. And I think believing, not believing, using, not using whatever. Your thing is, I just want you to move speedily towards it. But it is a pattern recognition system. And that 700-year document is the beginning of writing that down. Of course, astrology and a kind of cosmology has existed way, it predates that, like, massively.

We can look at like the drawings in the caves. of Lasseau in France, and they were drawing bowls, and they were drawing what we think are probably the Palaeities, the stars rising up over the eastern horizon around the spring equinox, most likely, because that would have been a signal to them that life was coming back and that things are going to start to grow

in the way that they only do in spring and summer. Interesting. So all of our origin stories, since the beginning of time, come out of our relationship with the earth and the sky. There is no culture on earth that was not in its origin paying attention to the living world around it, including the sky. You had to.

You had to know when the sun was going to be bright and when it was going to be minimal. Because your food source depended on it. So if you look at the major religious festivals and holidays of all religions, all major religions, they will happen around the solstices and the equinoxes. Not only that, they'll happen around the full moon or the new moon around the solstices and the equinoxes or there within. I mean, these constellations rose and fell in a certain pattern year after year, after year after year. And then we realized that people who menstruated, menstruated in the same time period as the lunar cycle.

Like, that's just something we emerged into. And so there's really good reason to think that the moon and the menstruation cycle taught us math. We're counting, right? The sun will teach us math. That sun will teach us rhythms. The moon will teach us math. The moon will teach us rhythms. Of course, we know, like, the moon will teach us rhythms.

affects the tides. And there's also that for people who lived along the shoreline of any place in the world. And so the idea of a culture being separate from the sky, take astrology out of it. But the idea of a culture being separate from the sky and separate from the earth and separate from the ways in which those things are in conversation is, to me, a purely settler colonialist framework. To not think that we would be in relation with everything in the living world around us is one of the great losses of settler colonialism. Absolutely. You know, and this is—

That's my rant. I love it. Well, you brought up something interesting because I was talking to my producer, Selena, about how even the most skeptical person around astrology can understand the moon affects you, right? Like, that's the most—it affects the water. This is the thing. You can go, we can go down that path. Sorry to cut you off. Well, I was going to say, but then I think the next branch is, okay, but it's not too far of a leap done. It would be like every astral body could affect us in some way if the moon is. But then it's like, how do you start dividing it into sun signs and like what people I think most think of around astrology, right?

It's like, I'm a tourist. Yeah, okay. So let's unpack some of what you just said. We're all in this like unified experience. Like we're all connected. Everything is connected. we are all a part of each other. And that includes space and Earth and all of it. Right. So there is that.

I'm not disqualifying that. But that's not how I look at astrology. I look at astrology as a reflection. So I don't think the planets are doing something to me. I think that there's a pattern that unfolds in the sky. And that is a reflection of living inside of an intelligent universe that is speaking to itself. I'm a part of it,

you're a part of it, we're all a part of it. And you can say that's ridiculous and superstitious or whatever. But again, astrology comes out of, for me, at least,

it comes out of this idea of we're living inside of a conscious body that is alive. And it is trying to be in conversation again, with us, but it's with itself.

Like we're all part of an intelligent system. And again, I think like patriarchy and colonialism has just tried to strip us of that and to deduce it. Yeah. And I know that scientists will listen to me and scoff at me, and that's also fine. Yeah. But I also think the deeper you go into a scientific journey, the more in awe you're going to be of how everything operates. Well, this is such, it leads me into a question that, so a lot of times at the telepathy tips we talk, about the paradigm that we live in, and there have been many paradigms. Yeah. And that in order for something like telepathy to be true, it can't work in our current materialist paradigm. It can't. So what a lot of scientists, they're called post-materialist scientists, and they've started like even, you know, new academies to look at each other's work

and improve each other's work and, you know, beyond this new frontier, they talk about, well, the new paradigm we can move into will be that consciousness is fundamental. It's not the thing, you know, created by your brain and then it dies. when our brain dies, it is the baseline. And if it's the baseline, then it can do things that even physics can't account for. Right. And so that's a paradigm in which these things are possible. So it sounds like with astrology, you're really talking about something, a bigger paradigm for it to be informing us and in conversation with us. Like, what is the paradigm in which we have to be in? Yeah. I work within a very structured astrological paradigm where there's correlations between everything. So there's correlations. So there's correlations between a planet and metals and gemstones and colors and the day of the week that it belongs to and in the hour of a specific day and places in your home or in the world and occupations and mannerisms and also like temperaments in the body and physical conditions. And so to me, like I can look around this room and be like, oh, Venus, oh, Jupiter, oh, you know, and like pick things out in terms of the color and the shapes and the textures and the.

qualities of things. And so I'm operating inside of a paradigm where there's, it's kind of like a prism of like each planet has like all of these ways that it iterates down into and manifests itself on the physical plane. And so that when it does something, then I'm looking for that correlation. So cool. It's really wonderful and very helpful to look at astrology in retrospect because either the thing happened or it didn't. Either the astrology works or it doesn't. Yeah. And so if an astrologer from 1,200 years ago can say and speak to the specifics of this moment just because of what the planets are doing, what does that say? Wow. Does that mean anything to you? And if it doesn't, great. It means something to me.

That's, has there been a lot of research, like, on old astrologers that might have people looked back and been like, wow, this man or woman was absolutely correct around XYZ. I mean, yeah, that's what we do. I mean, okay, that's fascinating. Literally our job. So, like, but looking back into, like, who are some of the famed astrologers? Oh my God, do you want me to give you a list? I mean.

Yeah, kind. I'm just so curious. Because at something I don't think people realized was, like, kind of an art form. write a gift to people to read these and bring it down. It takes a lot of intelligence, right? And observation and probably time and dedication to like constant patterns and understanding them. And just like anything, there's going to be people who are probably great at that. It's natural for them. And then others who aren't. And then looking back at history, there's going to be superstars. Well, yes. And it's kind of like looking at the authors of any ancient text. You're like, is this a conglomeration of people? Is this a conglomeration of people? Is this? this, some people say it's like a divine, you know, like offering, that it's from a kind of, you know, more like mythic figure in a way. And then there are the texts that survive because certain cultures were able to preserve them and hide them depending on who was conquering who. So I'd

remember I'm coming from what we call Western astrology, but it's really from, you know, the land we would call like Iraq, Iran, Egypt, like, we're looking at ancient stuff. And in the ancient times, when you would take over a certain population, when you would conquer them, the first thing they would do is go for the astrology and all the knowledge systems that they have. So when you conquer a certain town or city or peoples, you're like, where are your books? We're your scholars. What do you know? And so we're left cobbling. together as system, but we have like a good amount of documents and there's still a lot to be translated.

Yeah. Like I think most people don't understand that a lot of astrologers, especially that go into these kind of vaults, are mythologists, they're historians, they're cosmologists, they're interpreting, they're translating, they know ancient languages in order to to translate. like this stuff. Like, it's not the horoscope that you read in the magazine. That's a gateway

into what astrology really is. And then there's, you know, modern astrology, which is a whole other different thing. And so it's got this really rich, deep, historic tapestry, which I think is interesting whether you believe in astrology or not, whether you think it works or not.

Yeah. Because it is part of astronomy and it is part of the medical our understanding of medicine its origins are astrological. How so? Well, the planets rule different parts of the body.

And so in the most ancient schools, the oldest schools, like say in southern Europe, that taught medicine were teaching it astrologically. They were teaching, like, there's different qualities to each one.

There's different humors. There's different ways in which the planet will manifest and like you'll have this ailment because, oh, yeah, well, this is happening. There's a whole practice of medical astrology, and it has ancient roots. It's not something, it's not new age. None of the stuff I'm talking about or I practice is new age at all.

Well, I'm just so glad that you're adding this texture and richness, because I do think, people think astrology and they think of a horoscope. Yeah. That's it. And not this rich, deep history. No. And I'm curious, because you talked about your practice. And what are some of the, like, maybe ancient practices? How do they differ? Like, what are the ones that have survived today and which is the one that you lean on or conglomeration of ones you lean on? Well, there's, you know, a longstanding evolution of it and then shifts in terms of how people used it. And then there's like this really short period of time where it kind of like explodes into this really, like, high functioning,

full complete system. And that's where we were like, who wrote that, who did that, how did they get there that quickly. And there's, you know, like legends about who did it, how it came to be. There's not a lot of proof to, you know, back things up.

But we have this system from a kind of seemingly, like a conglomeration of all those things coming together. I love a good legend. Do you remember any of the legends or like what the tenets of the legend were? Some people say it's this person or this deity or this spirit Hermes Trismogistus, but that means like three of something. Hermes is another word for Mercury. It's the scribe. It's the, so there's like there's people point like ancient astrologers will point to that person, deity, man, I don't know, and say that that's what it's from. But there's no like ability to source him or that person. Yeah. Fascinating. What I need from a bra has definitely changed.

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You won't find this on Amazon, in stores, or anywhere else. That's bioptimizers.com slash tapes. When it comes to the, like, astrological signs that a lot of us know of today, that kind of evolved in Greece, right? Wasn't that like a more Hellenistic? Well, like a lot of what we refer to, you know, obviously all of the planets are given those, like a Greco-Roman kind of like, you know, glaze. But there's deeper roots. to all of that. So the the zodiac, like the ways in which we see it now has been, again, like, put through different iterations. Like, the

Egyptians had, the ancient Egyptians had that full system of Deccans. Yeah. Okay. So when did modern astrology, and I say this, knowing that I might be qualifying it wrong, but what we now understand to be looking at a chart and here's your sun sign,

like, why did the sun sign become such a big deal that everyone knows. Because it's at the access point. Okay. So what does that mean? It's the gateway drug. Okay. Because you know pretty much, you know the day you're born. Right. So it's the lowest common denominator. It's the easiest access point. But before that, astrologers mostly were like, your rising sign was who you were. And what does that mean? Well, when you're born, we look at the sign, we look at the place that you're born in, like the exact location. And then we look to the eastern horizon. And we see the exact piece of sky that was coming up over it because the rising is the ascension. So that is the marker of life. And the western horizon is where things go down. So that's the marker of death.

When the sun rises up over the eastern horizon at daybreak, the many ancient cultures thought, especially the Egyptians thought the sun was being reborn. And so that's, and then all the planets, all the stars, everything comes up over the eastern horizon. So that's the point of like coming from the underworld to the upper world, right? And so when you're born, we look to that point of sky because that is the marker of your life. Interesting. So that's you saying, this is me at this specific moment in this specific location. The sun is in the same sign for 30 days.

Right. That marker changes every moment, every, you know, minute or two. It's shifting. Right. And every, depending on what sign we're talking about, but every hour or two, every couple hours, it changes sign. And so that's really hard to know. Yeah. Where you were born, what time you were born, you know, did you get the marker of that?

Yeah. What's really easy to know is like basically what day you were born. Right. So sun sign. And then we always have to match astrology with technology and to know the times in which it will have a burst. And so we have around the time of the printing press an astrologer, namely Alan Leo, but there was a group of them, being like, oh, well, if I wrote a horoscope for, I think, the king, the queen, some royal. And then there's astrologers that are like, oh, well, if we give everybody their own personal reading, because that was so popular, we give them their own personal reading, we'll just tell them. about their sun sign, and then everyone can experience this.

And so it was really the creation of the whole kind of new thing. And the printing press then proliferated that. Interesting. So if we think of like social media over the last 15 years, giving astrology a massive boost, it's the same as back then when those sun sign horoscopes. It's just a different iteration of it. Yeah. And it is a much wider spread.

kind of situation. So where, tell me if these are valid or not, and I just want to really reach the whole audience. So when you think of like, I'm a tourist, and, you know, that comes with certain characteristics, right? You're very loyal, you're dependable, you. Depending on your chart. I am. I mean, but like. She's like, no, me. But where does that come from? These, like, ideas that your personality traits are influenced by your sun sign. That's modern. It's modern. It's modern, like, what would the ancient astrologers think about that? The ancient astrologers didn't care about your personality. They wanted to know if you were going to live or die. Yeah. They wanted to know if your brother was going to steal your inheritance. They wanted to know if

hyenas were going to come and eat you in the night. Like, it was totally, like, they were like, girl, I don't care about your personality. Yeah. It was all about your lot in life. Yeah. It was about your fate. That's so interesting. So there's, you know, there's astrology's being used for a lot of different things, but it was never about your personality. So this came up way later. Like when we're, okay. Yeah, that's like the last 150 years, 100, 150 years-ish, you know. Isn't that interesting?

Because that's what people I think think of, like the average person now. Well, you know, we're way more narcissistic now. Yeah. Right. Totally. And capitalism. Capitalism demands that we be so, that we be hyper-fixated on our individualism. Yep.

And all of our personality traits. Now we can optimize it all. Yeah. so that it can siphon everything it can from us. Right. Yeah. And look, it's not that understanding your personality via astrology isn't, couldn't be deeply healing.

I think it is. It was for me. Like when someone read my chart for the first time, I was like, I am like that. Oh, my God. And I also thought I was so bad or wrong or, you know, ill put together because of that. But you're just telling me that I am that. And so that is a way to self-accept. I think.

Yeah. Based on what you just said, it can be extremely healing to know that your destiny is written in the stars, but can also be terrifying? Because can you have agency to change it? A couple of things. The chart is a snapshot of the sky the moment you were first born, the moment you're like pronounced here. But in a way, the chart also keeps moving, right?

So it's not a stuck, stagnant thing. There's, you can think of it like a living organism. As you unfold, so too does your chart. As you grow, so too does your chart. That's all you, babe. Yeah. You know, like no one can do that growth for you. No one's going to make the choices for you.

There's that piece of it. Yeah. And then there's also, you know, the ancient astrologers were always like, you do this in context. Like you don't pretend that if you're giving a reading to someone, who is living in a certain set of conditions that they're not in those conditions. Don't pretend like the systems we're living with

and don't impact us. You give a reading to somebody in context. And that is explicitly set by a lot of ancient astrologers. So they even thought that, you know. It's not like everyone's starting from the same place. Yeah. When you first stumbled into astrology, well, how did that happen?

And what were your views on it? And how have they changed? Oh, I mean, I was 12, so Wow. Well, really? I hope my views have changed a lot. But you were really young when you first had an interest in it. Yeah.

Well, not an interest. I had a reading. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, someone gave me. So you walked me into the reading. You just were like.

I don't know what the hell it was. Yeah. I had a reading. And I really, it really changed my life. Wow. Yeah. If you go back and look at that original chart, like, have you gleaned at any information from it? Like, does that chart still hold up?

That's my chart. It's just your chart. That's my chart. Like, they were right. I mean, it's hard to get a chart wrong. No, I mean, it's my chart. Okay. It's like, that's a curtain.

Yeah. That's my chart. Okay. Got it. It's a literal just writing. Yeah. Well, it's not writing, but it's the planet. That's just what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. So I've had a million different astrologers, you know, give me a different reading, but they're all basically saying the same thing. The different way of looking at the chart, but that's where the planet was. If people want to get their chart read and they don't remember the exact minute they were born. Yeah. Does that, is that, like, really going to throw it off?

or if you're like, within the hour, Does it? A minute can change things. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But you work with what you've got. So if there's no, if you can't contact the hospital, if they didn't keep the records, if there's nobody in your family that remembers anything. If you're adopted, if you were born in a place where, you know, it was just like not even thought of to remember. A lot of my Persian friends have been like, we had a different calendar. So it doesn't even like translate my dad things. It's this day or this day. And it's, I'd, So there's, you know, a lot of people don't know. Right. And that's what makes the barrier to entry really great. Mm-hmm. So astrology is not a fair system. Yeah.

Because it doesn't care if you don't know. Yeah. But there's astrologers that do something called rectification, and they'll go through your entire life, and they'll look at all of the major moments of your life, and they'll deduce what time you were born. That's cool. Yeah. Wow. It's like reverse engineering.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So for someone who's never seen a chart, can you explain what's on it and like what houses are and, you know, what does everything signify? The planets and all that stuff. It's a snapshot of the sky. So it tells you where everything was when you were born. So every planet, every planetary body that we take into consideration and exactly where the earth and sky met. Then there's just a lot of astrologers arguing about how to chop up the sky after that. And there's like a million different house systems, which is figuring out where everything goes. But everything is there. And then you look at like everything's in a sign. Every planet or planetary point is in a sign. And there's no right or wrong way to do it. There's just different paradigms to work in.

There's different practices. The practice I use is something called whole sign houses, which sees the sign as the house itself. It's way closer to what Indian. or Joytish or Vedic astrology uses. Okay. Houses are domains of life. So there's 12 houses. There's 12 signs.

There's seven traditional planetary bodies. And then there's things that we've added on, like the modern planets. And then there's the nodes, the places where eclipses happen. There's minor planets like Chiron. There's all these asteroids. And then there's like tons of stuff that you can add. Yeah. There's also calculations that came through like Islamic traditions that are calculations of the sun, moon, and the ascendant.

And those will give you things like the part of fortune or, sorry, the lot of fortune or the lot of spirit or the lot of marriage or the lot of doom and gloom. I'm kidding. But like, you can, there's these mathematical equations that will calculate kind of any specific thing you want, the lot of love. of all of it. And so those are used for timing techniques and those are used for understanding like when something will unfold. Houses, there's 12 houses. The first house is the self because it's related to the eastern horizon. And so it talks about the moment you came into this world. And so it's the only part of the chart that's you. That's why the rising sign is so potent. It tells us the moment that your soul arrived in body as separate from the body that

gave it birth. And so like, okay, now I'm here on my own. Then every other house in the chart is dealing with an aspect of your life. So the second house is about money, assets, resources, third house is communications, siblings, extended family, fourth house is endings and history and roots and lineage and it goes on and not children and then work and illness and partnerships and marriage and death and inheritances and resources other people's resources and then religion and travel and career and friends and communities and sorrow and self-unddoing and loss and longing and so anything that you want to look at in life is held within those 12 spaces okay and so if you ask me a question, I'm going to go into that realm of the chart and see, is there any planets there?

If not, there's a planet that governs that part. And then I'm going to look for it. And I'm going to see what it's telling me. Where is it? What planet is it? What sign is it in? What is it talking to? What qualities? Is it telling me? Is this a successful thing? Is this a hard thing for the person? What does that mean? Is there one planet when you see the planet? You're like, oh, this is not good. Do they have Really? Yeah, I come from an astrological tradition where it's like, that's not good. Yeah. There are bad things.

I come from a tradition that's like, that is hard. That will fuck you up. This is great. That will help you a lot. Yeah. And so I think it's really helpful to have that distinguishing factor. Yeah. I like cold, hard facts.

I do too. I would rather know, like, this bad planet's than this house. Well, this is, it's not even bad planet. It's like all planets are in all of our houses. And there is going to be one planet in particular that's rough for everyone. Which one? Well, if you're born at night, it's going to be Saturn. If you're born in the daytime, it's going to be Mars. It doesn't mean that the other one can't give you a hard time. But that will be the one that, like every chart, that's the first thing I look at. And then there's also one planet that's going to be especially good for you. And so that's that. That is also going to tell you a lot. If you're born in the night, it's going to be Venus. If you're born in the day, it's going to be Jupiter. Okay. And so right away, I'm clocking, where are those?

Where are Mars and Saturn? Where is Venus and Jupiter? What's the ascendant? Where's the ascendant? Where is the sun and moon? An ascendant ruler is the like... Is the planet that rules the sign that is rising up over the eastern horizon when you're born? That's the planet that's steering the direction of your life.

And then I'm kind of like, that's what I'll glean like it just like immediately. It also doesn't mean that if you have like a really good setup that it will be good for you. Spiritually speaking or psychologically speaking. You can see people waste a lot of good luck. You can see people also not have to like evolve or stretch themselves or again, you're kind of like looking at a type of privilege, right? like, oh, this just comes easy to you. You don't even know how hard most people struggle with this thing. It just is a gift for you.

Yeah, it's fascinating. How is technology? I mean, now you can still go to astrologist and have your chart read, which has to be a very meaningful, like, intimate experience, I'd imagine. Hopefully. Hopefully. But it seems like you could obviously put in all this stuff into an app. I mean, and is that just as effective?

You might not get all the interpretation, but. it's different. You know, an app, you know, like we made our app so that you could have a tool to be more empowered when you're engaged with astrology. It's not going to be as in depth as if you go to an astrologer, but I'm going over how the movements of the planets are impacting you week to week in a general kind of way. And what an astrologer is going to do is they're going to give you their interpretation of it. But once you leave that reading, you're going to forget like 80% of why they said what they said. Right. There's the experience of it that's healing and really important. But if you want to actually use it as a tool, it's really good to have somewhere to go to be like, wait, where is my moon? And what does that mean again? Yeah.

And so the app is just dare to be like, oh, it means this. And it also tells you about this. And by the way, this thing is also happening. Yeah. Is there a place where you find, like if someone wants to have a great, you know, meeting with an astrologer where you can find kind of vetted astrologers or people who, okay. So it's really like you just have to. Word of mouth. Word of mouth. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there could be. I'm sure people will comment below. If there is. Please do comment below. But I think maybe Chris Brennan has a list. He might have a list. The astrology podcast might have a list on their website. Well, if someone wants to learn or train, I mean, it's just, Oh, yeah, you can learn and train places. And they will have, like, an education that you go through just like... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, you can study with my teacher, Demetre George, and take her different levels and work your way through her incredible books. Or you can take Chris Brennan's course. Austin Copic has a course. Like, there's a lot of really incredible astrologers that do, like, these full courses that you can go through all their different levels and all their different classes, yeah. So what's happening right now astrologically? Like this year, I mean, the world seems like a dumpster fire, I think, to a lot of us.

Yeah. Can we glean anything from the charts? Well, do you want to hear what this astrologer said, 1200 years ago? I would love that, yeah. There's one from 1,200 years ago, and there's one from 400 years ago. Okay. I've read this at an event I did for Mumdani because he was elected on one of the best days of the year in 2025. Wow.

Because it was Jupiter and the sun coming together, and Jupiter had just entered cancer. And Jupiter and cancer is a special condition. It's like a once-and-12-year blessing. And so it was a seed, a beginning of something that pretended, to me, something very fortuitous and generative and abundant. And so when I was looking into the astrology and of the year before he was elected, I found this, again, the astrologer and the scholar Ali A. Alomi, he translates. And so he translated this text from an astrologer called Abu Mashar. He's a famous 9th century Persian academic and astrologer. And this is his translation. It indicates a time where there is an emergence of a powerful

and commanding leader. This is a moment that demonstrates the growing power of the local. That is Jupiter and cancer, and this is why. Jupiter is the planet of the greater benefic, but in cancer, cancer is a sign that's ruled by the moon. The moon is our local planetary body. The moon is close to us. Yeah. Everything else is really far away.

The moon is right there. And so anything that the moon governs, anything in cancer, what we want to focus on is what is right here. How can we nurture and nourish and care for what is right around us? It's interesting because you really have to be, up on current events to try to interpret all this, right? I should hope so. If you're an astrologer, you're talking about time.

So if you don't know what's going on in the world, I don't know what you're talking about. Right. Yeah, I mean, you really have to be zoned in. I hope so. I mean, that is hope. Right. You know, it's a choice. You can either be like, what are we living in?

How do we get here? Right. What are the ancients saying about it? Yeah. What did they live through? Right. This is not the first time we've done this. No.

But we knew that nothing. was going to remain business as usual as of 2025. So, 2025, Pluto changed signs, Saturn changed signs, Uranus changed signs, and Neptune changed signs. They went in and out of their new signs. But that's a huge thing to happen because some of those planets take about 20 years, some take 15, some take 7, some take 3 to change signs. Those things happening all at the same time is like, oh, whatever we were doing before, it's done as of 2025 and we are living in a new reality.

And it gets entrenched in 26. The new reality does. Yeah. Oh, no. But the Jupiter part of it reminds us that it's up to us. No one's coming to save us. We have to do the power of the local. That is the place we have to lean all the way into.

And that is where everything changes. Yeah. The last time Pluto was an Aquarius was the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, and the American Revolution. Really? And the Industrial Revolution. Robots. If you haven't seen France in the news a million times over. Yeah.

But it's also like an eat the rich kind of vibe. Yeah. And so what are we living in? Yeah. We are living in oligarchs trying to consume everything, trying to see. trying to speed us into realms of disaster so that they can buy up more. Chaos is good for them. So they're trying to, you know.

And so, again, it's time for the masses to remember the leverage that we have. Okay. So that's Pluto. Okay. The last time. I know. I need a drink. Yeah. The last time Neptune was in Ares was a civil war.

So we have a revolutionary period, civil war here. And then the last time you. Uranus was in Gemini, also during the Civil War, but it has an 84-year cycle. So the last time Uranus was in Gemini was World War II. Wow. Was the creation of NATO. It was the creation of a new world order. And then, add to that, the last time that Neptune and Saturn made a conjunction was during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was another time of redrawing the lines. And these two made a conjunction in late February. seven days before Trump started bombing Iran. Wow. Wow. Every time that Uranus has been in Gemini, this country has been involved in a war. And so as soon as Uranus went back into Gemini, I was like, here we are. Wow.

Everything is at play right now. Yeah. The world is reordering itself. Wow. We don't have to stay here, though. Right. We are either going to ban together and find solidarity. in it or be taken out by it.

And that part is our choice. Yeah. This is the landscape. This is maybe you want to call it part of our fate. What if we don't have to live through a war? Right. What if we could just get to reconstruction? Right.

And protect it. Yeah. And shift this narrative because we know where it goes. Right. One thing I've been trying to do lately is buy fewer things, but by better things. I'd much rather have a handful of people. that I wear over and over again, then a closet full of clothes I never reach for. That's exactly why I've become such a fan of quince.

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Download the Quince app for app exclusive. offers or go to quince.com slash tapes. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash tapes. Is there anything of astrology that still has you just like in a state of wonderment or mystery or magic? Yes, all of the time. I mean, it's, I'm constantly in awe of like, wow, that's happening and this is what's

happening in the sky. we'd all be like, can you believe it? This happened on the day that we said and it is the mark of it. But that must be what keeps people in conversation with it. Right? Because it's adding up. Like if it didn't, you'd walk away. Right.

Exactly. So is there anything like, you know, that I haven't covered that you want to touch on or anything that maybe when you talk about it and you really want to spark the interest in someone else? Well, I guess my invitation, if you're curious about astrology and about your chart, is that I want you. to think about it as a map of your soul's journey in this lifetime. And that if you experiment with going in the direction that your chart says to go in, how do you feel? What happens? What opens up? And I say that because that's what happened to me. Like, I got a reading when I was 12 years old and I was, you know, enthralled with astrology and I learned about it and I gave readings in my 20s. And then it was kind of, of overwhelming for me and I left it and I came back to it in my 30s and then I started to really take it seriously and I started to study with my teacher, Demetre George. And she, when she gave me a reading, she was like, oh, well, of course you would do this. And of course you would also write. Do you want to write? And I was like, well, I do, but I can't write.

Like I'm not smart enough to write. And she was like, well, okay, whatever. You can dwell on yourself down if you want to you, but it's in your chart. Yeah. And that gave me permission to write. And writing changed my life. That's so cool. Because you know what I think about, you said something about the chart just recently. And it made me think about, you know, especially in the new agey world, it's like, oh, you're living in flow. You're living in flow. And when you're in flow, everything works for you. It's like the whole world unfolds as it should for you. It feels like that at least. But it feels like if you kind of are moving. God forbid to struggle. Yeah. But if you're moving and flow with your chart and you know what it is and kind of what your obstacles might be and what you're called to do

or what your strengths are, it might be like a tip off to how to live and flow and kind of find your your way. That's what gave me access to success. That's what I, that's how I connected with people. Like I used to write horoscopes and that's how I was known. And so that was my gateway to this whole other life. Like there's there's me before I started writing horoscopes and then there's me after. And it's a specific demarcation in my life. Yeah. I didn't make any money for a long time, for years and I struggled and it was hard and whatever. But it was when I started doing that, it changed everything.

Yeah. And now you're a New York Times bestselling author. You know, like that is in my chart. Yeah. It is. Yeah. But I didn't give myself permission to do it for a long time. time. If someone, if she could have said that to me 10 years earlier, maybe, you know,

everything would have been different. But I didn't think I was smart enough or, or I didn't think I was good enough to write. I put it on this really high pedestal. And I kept myself from it for a long time. And then once I started doing it, it did. And then I met my wife and then everything changed. Yeah. It was literally a 180 for me. Yeah. And that's so wild. So wild. So wild. If someone wants to have like a deep dive and start to learn about this and figure out what which maybe branch they want to study, are there any books that you could recommend? Yeah. I mean, my book is a is an entry point. My book is called You Were Born for This, the Astrology of Radical Self-acceptance. It is a really good like primer on like an introduction to your chart and what it means and how to rethink things. Then there's like super hefty astrology books. that are incredible and well worth the time it takes to get through them and just loaded with so much astrological data. Demetra George has two books, Volume 1 and Volume 2, about traditional astrology that are exceptional and they are like an incredible standard, like bearer of traditional

astrology. Chris Brennan has an incredible book as well that is like an encyclopedia of everything. Nicholas Campion wrote the history of astrology, Volume 1 and Volume 2, which takes you through, it's not about how to be an astrologer or how to do astrology, but it is an incredible compilation of astrology through the, like, the different epochs of time and tells you about, like, the deep history of it and how it kind of came to be. What do you think would change if people spent more time looking at their charts and understanding their charts? I don't know. I have no idea. So it's not something that you're like on a crusade to be like, oh my God, no, no. Please no. I'm like good. I don't like astrology. You know what I mean? Like there's a certain point to which its popularity makes things weird. Right. Okay. It's like, it's like it's a mystery tradition in some ways. Like there's some very, there's some very hard and fast rules that I love and go by. And then there's this point at which you're like, I don't know. I think it's good if we're not.

all doing this thing. Because there's also like really good astrological times and you don't want everyone to do the same thing on the same time. Like where I want, you know, I want people obviously to know about my app and the things that we're doing and I think it's really helpful. And then I always have to feel like this is just for us though. Yeah. Like this is like a secret thing that we're all doing together.

Like they can maybe I feel very like do not perceive me about it. Let's end on this question said. What do you think a healthy relationship with a strong? looks like. That's a great question. I think a healthy astrology, a healthy relationship with astrology looks like forgetting about it, you know, and then remembering it. And then being with it really obsessively for a little while and then not. Like there's times where I'm looking at my own app all the time and reading my own horoscope and being like, oh my God, that's so true. And then there's times where I just forget all about it. Yeah. I mean, I'm never fully forgetting about it because

It's my work, so I'm always having, but I'm forgetting about how it is for me personally. And I'm looking at how it is landing in the world. So I am always thinking about how it's going on around me or what it's meaning from what's happening around me and how it's like being lived out by us collectively. That's always just, I'm always so gobsmacked by that. But for me personally, I like to forget about my own personal astrology. I just like go live my life. I love that you read your own app though. Do you read any other astrologers?

or consult with another astrologer every once in a lot? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have an astrology reading from a friend of mine who I love. Because Demetra stopped. She fired me. She would, you know, like I would keep going to her until the end of time, but she stopped giving personal readings. And I go to other astrologers. Any, like, there's, astrologers are so fascinating.

And everyone has like a slightly, they're all, we're all like working in like a different timing technique or we're like, oh, I just pick this timing thing up again. Yeah. There's so many tools out there that you can't actually use them all at the same time. And so, like, I'll go get a reading from my astrologer and she'll be like, oh, yeah, I'm back into this thing. And I'll be like, oh, fascinating. Like, give me the read on that. Yeah. And it will always give you, like, this phenomenal little take on the moment and what's happening. I love that. And then I'll, like, remember it for a while and then I'll forget about it again. And I'll maybe see my notes a couple months later and be like, oh, yeah, that did happen. Yes. There's no such thing in believing astrology or believing. in astrology, it either works as a tool or it doesn't. So which is it? Right. Right. To me, I think the evidence is clear, but if it doesn't work for you, great, go find a tool that does. Right.

Yeah. That's my feeling. That's great. Yeah. Well, very awesome to have you here. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Yeah, such a great education.

I think our listeners are going to love it. Great. That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks. But new episodes will be released every Wednesday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together are reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our backstage pass by visiting our website.

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Technical directing audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole. Opening and closing music by Elizabeth P.W. And original logo and cover art by Ben Kandora Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.