Joe Williams told me that looking honestly at yourself can be a brutal thing, and then in the same breath he called it the best mirror we can ever hold, because that’s where generational change actually starts.

Joe and I were on the road together for nearly a month touring the doco ‘Seen’, so I got to watch him sit in front of audiences again and again and tell the truth about being a dad. There’s a line of his in the film that gets me every time: that he has to put his hand up, that it haunts him, that there are many years he can’t get back.

What I’ve watched him do with that grief is not turn away from it. He gave his kids full permission to say whatever they needed to say in their own interviews, then listened to the whole recording alone in a hotel room in upstate New York the night before a keynote, because he knew he couldn’t carry it onto a stage.

We talk about the stories we think define us and who actually gets to define them, about getting sober twenty-one years ago and why he says culture keeps him sober.

We explore:

• Who gets to define us, and how differently Joe defines himself now compared with almost everyone he’s ever met
• Sitting in lockdown and realising he’d been a father to five kids without being a dad to any of them
• Why he now believes a stack of his success came from a place of screaming to be noticed
• Country as medicine, the drives out the road not knowing whether he would come back
• Dreaming stories as instructions for living rather than pretty picture books on a shelf

About Joe Williams:

Joe is a Wiradjuri and Wolgalu man, born in Cowra and raised in Wagga Wagga. He played in the National Rugby League for South Sydney, Penrith and Canterbury before switching to professional boxing in 2009, where he became a two-time WBF World Junior Welterweight champion and won a WBC Asia continental title. After a suicide attempt in 2012 and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Joe founded ‘The Enemy Within’ and has since taken his workshops on adversity, addiction, connection and healing trauma into schools, communities, correctional services, sporting clubs and workplaces in over 200 communities here and overseas.

He is the author of ‘Defying the Enemy Within’, a father to five, is currently completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne, and appeared alongside Lael in the 2025 documentary Seen.

Connect with Joe:

• Website: joewilliams.com.au
• Instagram: @joewilliams_tew
• The Enemy Within
• Book – Defying the Enemy Within