Michael Smoak

I mean, apart from the cocaine.

completely sober is a crazy thing to say when you were really completely cocaine yeah but like not you know it's it's I'm coke sober yeah sure um and I I didn't trust myself to hand my dissertation in I didn't trust myself to drive it in so I walked it into town um

I walked to town from my house because I wouldn't drive, obviously, because I was completely... But I was like, you did just dedicate a year of your life and kind of the crowning achievement of your academic career to this thing.

So you were prepared to roll the dice with this.

And it came back and I got one of the highest marks of my entire module was around that dissertation.

So cocaine's a hell of a drug.

My point being...

When I decided I'm going to try and do something that's just for me, I looked back at my degrees and realized I should have done philosophy or psychology.

I wasn't fired up about business.

I didn't want to do business.

But I...

I couldn't work out what job a philosopher would get.

I didn't know.

I didn't know what job a psychologist would get.

Psychology was interesting to me.

So I suppressed what I was interested in and did it in service of a thing that I thought would be functional.

And then, you know, 15 years later, I can't remember anything that I learned.

So it was completely pointless.

And I got the opportunity to run it back and basically create my own university course.

And the one thing that I knew that I did want, like the one goal that I did have was to be respected by people that I respected.